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Chapter Text

A great many cats were aligned on the windowsills, standing and sitting in no particular pattern, some relaxed and leaning, others tense and alert. Their eyes were jointly fixated on the torrential downpour just on the other side of the broad glass panes, dusty and frosted in the corners from entropic neglect. Thunder and lightning intermittently punctuated the sounds of pitter-patter , a grandiose percussion. When the dim room was illuminated in infrequent pure-white flashes, the felinoid formations looked like ghostly statues. 

Munkustrap was not a part of the ensemble of Jellicles rapt by the weather; rather, he sat in a far corner, his back leaning against the wooden siding of a short stage. He relished in the symphonic amalgamation of scents that always lingered in the forsaken theater. This particular room was popular because of the large windows and the open layout — the seats had been gutted, leaving the oaken floorboards unobstructed.. But cats lurked in every cranny of the derelict edifice, many of whom were not Jellicles of the Junkyard. 

This theater, one of a surfeit of buildings abandoned in the wake of the human war, was part of a matrix of favorite haunts for the Jellicles. In particular, it was a place of refuge for days like this—when the shelters and dens of the Junkyard just weren’t equipped to withstand such climatic overwhelm. The Protector sighed at the thought; when it was over, there would be a big mess waiting for them at what constituted their primary territory. Waterlogged textiles, lights strewn about, makeshift walls toppled, nooks flooded.

The storm had come on suddenly, making it difficult for the cats to traverse the metropolis so as to seek refuge with their humans in time. To say nothing of whichever cats, like Alonzo, who had no house to go to. 

The maudlin foresight sent Munkustrap’s line of vision in Jennyanydots’s direction. She was almost certainly going to fret over the state of the Junkyard more than anybody. But, as it was late afternoon, the Gumbie Cat didn’t appear to be perturbed by this impending scenario yet. She was sitting, like he was, on the floor. Her and Jellyorum were lazily cross-stitching, shoulder-to-shoulder, murmuring a dialogue back and forth that was too distant for Munkustrap to make out. 

His eyes roved elsewhere, examining the gestalt. He recognized every cat in this particular room. Most of the kittens were amidst the chorus line perched along the panes, more easily enamored by inclement weather than anyone. Victoria was the only exception, lying on the floor several feet below. She wasn’t sleeping, but her eyes were kept closed. Every few minutes she’d stretch beyond the realm of utility’s sake, as if she were practicing balletic contortions…and she’d hold that position for a prolonged moment, and then curl up again. 

Then there were Asparagus and George, laying side-by-side away from the wall, both asleep. Plato was lazing about in another random spot, on his back, somnolently examining his claws. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer were snoozing away elsewhere, entangled. Cassandra was stretched out longways, her svelte frame snakelike, with her own talons intermittently retracting as she casually scarred the floor with scratch after scratch. Munkustrap searched for his errant brother, only then realizing that The Rum Tum Tugger was nowhere in sight. That undoubtedly meant that he was off in some other part of the building, gallivanting with every stranger whose admirations he could cultivate.

That led Munksutrap to think of another Jellicle, whose absence was notable. Although in this case, just because he wasn’t seen or heard, didn’t mean he wasn’t around. The silver tabby’s eyes lifted up to the rafters, a geometric labyrinth of beams and perpetually deactivated house lights. At first, he didn’t see anything remarkable. But, after his green eyes persisted for an extended moment, something seemed to shift just barely in his periphery. An amorphous shape, black and shadowed, fast and soundless. His gaze quickly darted to where it had come from, but there were only more beams and more darkness.

But then it happened again, out of the corner of his other eye. Munkustrap hurriedly looked over in that direction too — and again, there was nothing. Feeling challenged, he rose to his feet and squinted, canvassing the entirety of the ceiling. Another flicker of shadow, and then another, and every time he tried to zone in on it, it flitted away just in time. Munkustrap thought he heard a chuckle, or something adjacent to it — light, and reverberating, and phantomish, almost inaudible, but assuredly mischievous. The other cats had either been too distracted or too asleep to notice, except for Cassandra and Victoria, both of whom had cracked open their eyes and were now looking vaguely ceilingward. This corroborated for the tabby, at least, that he wasn’t imagining things. 

Another ring of distant, ghostly laughter. A game, then. The shadow form had ceased to present itself enticingly to Munkustrap, who was now in on the lark. Admittedly vexed, his eyes happened to fall and land where Cassandra had been laying, and he could see that her eyes were now fixed statically on something directly above the Jellicle leader.

Munkustrap had anticipated what he would find when he followed her line of sight, and yet still he startled. In the furthest reaches of the rafters, where the black fixtures faded indistinguishably into shadow, there was a pair of reflective — or glowing yellow eyes — floating ominously above his head. They were pupilless and wide and staring fixedly at their quarry, and even the stolid Protector found himself unsettled by the haunting sight of them. 

Unfortunately, his response was poorly concealed, at least to the apparition. There was another, more tangible peal of coquettish laughter, and then the eyes darted away along with the barely-seeable silhouette of a small, inexplicably swift felinoid shape. The silver tabby exhaled and shook his head fondly. Mistoffelees was accounted for, then.   

Just then, a blinding flash of lightning was succeeded instantaneously by a deafening crack of thunder. The bolt had been audibly close, close enough to shake the foundations of the old brick-and-mortar building. A handful of hackles were raised, ears flattened, and at least half the spectators jumped down from the sill to skitter away into the further reaches of the auditorium. 

Munkustrap’s next thought was aborted by a sudden disturbance, a feeling that affected him viscerally before he intelligently knew what was wrong. It was a twitch of his ear, a flick of his whiskers, a sudden tensing of his muscles. His arms spread and wrenched back, his chest out, his feet spread wide apart. He had turned himself toward the windows, and, surely enough, every cat was identically alarmed. Those who had been sitting were now standing. The cats that had been on the floor were now alert and looking in that general direction. Tails flicked disconsolately. 

“Munkustrap,” a deep, commanding voice called — Alonzo. “Come look at this.” 

But the Jellicle Leader was leaping gracefully onto the sill hardly before his right-hand cat was done beckoning him.  

Looking down at the London street below, the cobblestones awash with murky rushing water, the tabby could see through the curtain of rain just enough to distinguish the anomaly that had everyone rapt.  There was a pile-up of nondescript debris — what, to Munkustrap, looked like a mixture of branches and inorganic scraps, things like metallic pipes, broken wood planks, indistinguishable trash, industrial bones of human-made structures. The rushing floodwaters circles around it in an increasingly foreceful current, rushing towards a gaping sinkhole that had been at the end of the block before the storm had begun. The humans had partitioned it meagerly to discourage motorists, but work to repair it seemed to lag — perhaps because so many of them, who’d work on such a project, have seemingly vacated the area as of late.

It was all held in place by a small tree, wrenched from its roots at the base from where it had been planted on the sidewalk. It was bared of its leaves due to the season, and its trunk had been rendered hollowed, ablaze with an orange, flickering fire. Munkustrap grimaced at the sight of it; it must have gotten struck by the lightning.

It was an ugly display; but it wasn’t the fire, nor dam of debris that had everybody excited; it was the small furry shape encased between two particularly encumbering pieces of junk, struggling wildly to attain freedom. Through the veil of torrential rain, it was clear that the entrapped creature was a cat, although it wasn’t a cat that Munkustrap recognized. The flames insistently crawled about, licking fitfully at various items in the pile, persisting against the downpour. And they were getting closer to the poor creature.

Another flash and clap of thunder, this one also stiflingly loud, but more distant. Traffic began to pile up. Car horns contributed to the din.

“Everlasting,” Jennyanydots had been the first one to breach the stricken silence. “Somebody needs to help that poor cat!” 

“Alonzo,” Munkustrap said immediately, already on it. He jumped down from the windowsill and the other followed suit. The Jellicle leader looked about the room, making rapidfire calculations. Dozens of pairs of eyes stared at him expectantly. “Cassandra. The rest of you stay here.”

The two who were beckoned soundlessly obeyed, running to join their leader. 

That was, except for Tumblebrutus. The adolescent stalked forward in wide strides and reached, his stance looking an awful lot like one that Munkustrap himself was known to display. There were no words to accompany it, but the meaning was obvious. 

Munkustrap’s face was severe, but he drew his lips into a line and nodded. “Come — but you will wait at the door. I’ll call to you to retrieve more help if it’s needed.” 

Tumblebrutus was visibly dissatisfied, but he knew better than to stall by arguing. Before he could have, in any case, Munkustrap turned and lifted his chin upward, keen green eyes roving across the industrious surface. 

“Mistoffelees,” he called. For a moment, there was seemingly no acknowledgement. The silver tabby lowered his line of vision and looked about the room.

He had turned to look over his shoulder, only to be surprised by the illusionist in question appearing right behind him, seemingly out of nowhere . It was nothing unusual for him, and yet somehow he successfully startled many a Jellicle — even the steadfast Munkustrap — all the time with his tricks.

He still had that impish smile on his face; the only one seemingly not comporting himself to the dour circumstances. But his eccentric demeanor was nothing that the Jellicle Leader had the luxury of time to dwell on. 

Instead he gave a single nod, and Mistoffelees reciprocated the gesture with a knowing wink.

With that, the silver tabby, in several long and graceful strides, hurried out with his helpers in tow.

Getting over to the ensnared animal had been the easy part. Thankfully, Tumblebrutus hadn’t complicated anything by disobeying Munkustrap’s parameters and remained near the theater door, where it was perpetually propped open a crack with an-looking ancient brick. The overhang kept that area somewhat dry, but as soon as the silver tabby and his fellow Jellicles stepped out from under it, they were smacked by a steady, harsh downpour of freezing water.

Bounding over to the felled tree was a bit difficult with the rushing floodwaters wanting to knock the four of them over; but the Jellicle gift of grace and strength spared them from any such vicissitudes. Mistoffelees, far and away the smallest of the quartet, had the most difficulty—but Alonzo grabbed onto his arm and tugged him along for good measure. 

The cats could feel the heat of fire creeping outward from the dam when they drew near, the noncommittal flames still closing in on the ensnared cat. Close now to get a good look at him, Munkustrap could see the stranger in thorough detail; a male, probably around Alonzo’s age, sporting a splotchy orange tabby coat and a collar to show that he was domesticated. That last detail put Munk at ease a little bit; domesticated cats were less likely to violently resist the approach of others, especially in a situation where Jellicle social mores had to be foregone. 

This cat, however…didn’t seem to be too happy to see them. He drew back, his neck retracting into his shoulders, and hissed wide-eyed, at the sudden appearance of four felines he’d never seen before. If he hadn’t been drenched, surely his hackles would be up as well. 

“We’re here to help you,” Munkustrap assured. Other than that, communication was minimal as he and his cohorts quickly set about the task of freeing the stranger, maneuvering with commendable grace through the surging rainfall. There was no need to wait for permission; there wasn’t much the unknown cat could do to object anyway.

Mistoffelees, now free of Alonzo’s iron grasp, moved about the perimeter of the pileup and got himself atop the felled tree, standing daringly close to the fire. Nonplussed, he had taken a giant breath, held it for a few seconds, and then leaned forward and blew out the entire inferno in one quick woosh , as one would do to extinguish a mere candle flame. Just like that—the most imminent hazard was gone.

It was Alonzo, Cassandra, and Munkustrap who were teaming up to lift and move the obstructions that had the orange tabby pinned down at the waist. The latter would sometimes protest the procedure with a yowl when an errant shift in the pile caused more pressure to come down on his comparatively small body. 

Mistoffelees took a moment; both to recover from the spell, and to contemplate what course of action he could take to be the most useful. The moon still wasn’t out — and even if it were, it’d only be a half-moon — so he knew he had to take care to economize his powers. Too many times he had learned the hard way not to overestimate his reserves especially without the Jellicle Moon aglow to augment his magic. 

It didn’t take him terribly long to reach a conclusion about how to proceed. Standing off to the side, outside of the stranger’s peripheral, he put out one paw palm-up and looked almost as if he were pantomiming lifting something heavy; but, in reality, any who knew of him would understand that this seemingly ineffectual motion was lightening the load of trash, slowly allowing the pile to defy gravity and come apart. Levitation was relatively easy, basic—and once he halved the weights of several clusters of objects, it became far easier for his friends to cast them aside. The over all unburdening of pressure assuredly relieved the orange tabby, although he seemed more puzzled by it than appreciative.

Mistoffelees would have loved to simply disappear everything in one swift motion…but that’d be both alarmingly conspicuous; and more importantly, he was sure he didn’t have the wherewithal or the required amount of power to make an attempt. Conjuration and Vanishment were among the more difficult stylings of magic in his experience. Vanishment was easier, but he’d be lucky if he could smartly control where everything went. And he’d have to know what everything in the pile was , which he couldn’t possibly.

Levitation worked for now; despite being pelted still by freezing-cold rain, the other three were making quick work of the items as they steadily began to float. As soon as he seemed to be able, the encumbered cat dashed out from beneath the remnants of the pile, allowing Mistoffelees to dispell the magic --- along with a breath that he hadn’t known he was holding. Whatever items were still affected went crashing back down to the flooded cobblestone, some of it disappearing down the block and into the sinkhole. The Conjuring Cat bent over, propping himself up on his knees, feeling as if he had actually lifted countless kilos of raw materials with his muscles instead of his powers.

In the meantime, Munkustrap took a cautious step towards the tabby, who had backed away and was staring at each Jellicle in turn with flattened ears. The silver Jellicle wanted to appear congenial, but he stayed visibly tense, protective instincts undisguised. The other three stood behind and watched.

“Are you all right?” Munkustrap asked, breaking the tense silence.

He hazarded one half-step forward; but that had been a mistake. The orange tabby, soaked to the bone and looking pathetic, unleashed a hiss and took off running — or, tried to run, although it was more like trudging through the steadily deepening water rapids — in the opposite direction of the flood current, weaving between the cars that were stopped up ahead. 

“What an amiable fellow,” Alonzo deadpanned, coming up beside Munk. 

Cassandra took a few bounds forward. She locked eyes with Tumblebrutus in the distance, waiting patiently by the theater door like a sentinel. There was no need for prompting; the three other Jellicles followed her lead, although this time it was Munkustrap in the rear, reaching back to take Mistoffelees’s arm as Alonzo had done earlier. If the Conjuring Cat took exception to this, he didn’t bother making an indication.

The relief the quartet felt at completing their task with minimal difficulty was short-lived. None of them made it more than halfway across the street before a disastrous interruption.                     

In the annals of Munkustrap’s memories, he would never be able to make sense of it. He’d recall key events in increments. A blinding-white light that made the lowly London Street appear awash in pearl-colored paint and pitch-black shadows. The sound of a crack so cacophonous that it left a ringing in his ears. Another set of strange, obliterative noises, the sounds of splintering wood, of crackling and fizzling, of some cat—or, perhaps multiple cats—shouting. At some point, he had let go of Mistoffelees; or, Mistoffelees wrenched himself free. Munkustrap looked up in time to witness the strange phenomenon of a medley of thick, black wires surging at him, huge writhing snakes in the air alight with blueish-white sparks, attached to a towering wooden beam tipping from its base like a gigantic lever. 

None of the Jellicles could have known what to anticipate — none of them could have even made sense of all that was happening. But the subsequent turn of events was still perhaps the most unforeseeable. 

Munkustrap had lunged away just in time to avoid being crushed by the wooden pole.  He looked back over in time to see a bevy of electricity — a spidery, blinding, surging abundance of light and white sound—all converging into one isolated spot on the cobblestone. The pure-white spindles crawled off the wires and shot towards some kind of central hub as if magnetized to it. This went on for a protracted moment; probably only a few seconds, but it felt longer. The light was so bright that Munkustrap could hardly look at it…and the sound, so inundating that he could hear nothing else above it, not even his own thoughts. 

The electricity dissipated, the felled power lines drained, and the immediate area was plunged into nearly perfect darkness.  In that one spot into which all of the volts of power had funneled…stood Mistoffelees.

None of his three companions knew what to make of the image. The diminutive tuxedo stood still, shoulders hunched, posture rigid, his sleek fur covered richly in pulsating sparkles. Little snakes of electrical spurts materialized here and there, then vanished across the dark fibers of hair, every strand like a conduit. His eyes were evacuated of pigment, white and glowing, wide and unseeing. 

Munkustrap had a mere fleeting moment to make these observations. There was an increasingly noisome din of panicked human voices and car horns, hapless in the dark. Such unadaptable creatures.

 Tumblebrutus started running towards them, his eyes as wide as saucers, but Cassandra was quick to halt him. In that same moment, Mistoffelees seemed to take a long breath in, his chest expanding, chin tilted up, as if gasping greedily for oxygen. Seemingly in response, the electrical pulses dancing across his frame became quicker, more intense. Then, his large white eyes shut—and down to the cobblestone he went, like a puppet whose strings were cut. 

Munkustrap wasn’t sure who reacted first; he heard Alonzo shout the Conjuring Cat’s name, and both of the older toms were racing towards where he had collapsed. Almost his entire form submerged in the murky rain water, including his head . The current was interrupted where he lay, but it was surely a mere moment before the strength of it would sweep him down the block—

En route, another succession of events occurred that the silver tabby would never understand well enough to commit exactly to memory. This time it was worse than when the utility pole had been struck and felled. As he drew closer to Mistoffelees, struggling against the water that had risen to his knees, the otherwise dark street became awash in the yellow light of gas powered headlamps. There had been a flash of black and white, a powerful voice hollering in his direction, and the sensation of an unprotesting dead weight in his possession. There was a car horn, a squealing of tires, and multiple ear-shattering bangs. There were more flashes of light — lightning and headlamps became indistinguishable. 

Munkustrap had vaulted to the side, encumbered by the weight of an inert Mistoffelees, and lost his footing when the water suddenly surged. He couldn’t have known how long it was that he felt overcome by brown, murky rainwater, tumbling in the direction of the rapid current, with only brief flashes of the sky and buildings along the roadway when he managed to breach the surface in a desperate crusade for air. The rain was coming down so hard that it felt almost as if the atmosphere was as thick and suffocating as the floodwaters. 

At some point, he had lost his hold on Mistoffelees. Something unfamiliar, something akin to panic, germinated in the center of the Protector’s chest, accelerating his heart and clouding his brain. He looked around senselessly, but the floodwaters’ powerful current all but eradicated control of his own person, sending him tumbling gracelessly through the murk, unable to decipher anything.

Three quarters down the block, he snagged, for just a moment, on some severed car part that got caught near the curb. He clung to it for dear life, sputtering and coughing up the rancid fluid he had inhaled. He looked around frantically and could barely make out, through the curtain of downpour, a black smudge somewhere in his periphery, flitting by in a tauntingly familiar fashion. 

“Mistoffelees!” he called out, trying to turn toward where thought he had seen the shadowed form—but in so doing, his claws lost their precarious grip on the smooth metal car part. Another surge of water sent him tumbling head-over-tail through a haze of freezing brown cataracts.

It stopped only when the Jellicle Protector felt the bizarre sensation of freefall. He saw the sky and the lips of a few rooftops rapidly shrinking above him, framed by some jagged and dark ellipsis, and that was the last thing he saw before something hard and merciless raced up to meet him.

Chapter Text

Munkustrap woke up abruptly to the sensation of pain and an involuntary contraction of his muscles somewhere around his ribs. He tried to sit up at an inadvisably quicksilver speed, but then aborted that attempt when the world seesawed around him. He fell back into his original supine position with a wet plop, which rudely reminded him that he was soaked, and covered in mud…and absolutely freezing.

The first voice he heard was his own, in the form of a rather undignified groan wrenching its way out of his throat. The second came in the form of an actual, intelligible word, in a voice that, despite the fog between his ears, he was certain wasn’t his own.

“Sorry.” 

Munkustrap was more prepared for the ramifications of moving than he had been before; and, in any case, he felt as though the mental detritus left in the aftermath of his rude awakening were slowly abating. At least enough for him to think straight and sort out the myriad of stimuli assaulting his senses. 

He turned his head towards the source of the apology, and there sat a cat-shaped shadow, sat on its haunches, posture hunched and yellow eyes aglow in the dark. The silver tabby wrenched himself up on his elbows, hardly giving his systems ample time to reboot. Suddenly his memories of what just happened washed over him, reinvigorating a sense of urgency that cut through the bleariness like a knife. 

“Mistoffelees?” he said, squinting at the shadow through the darkness. His keen eyes adjusted swiftly, corroborating the answer to his own question. The magical cat’s white chest and face disrupted the low lighting, but not with nearly as much of its trademark intensity; the contrast was dulled by a layer of mud and sedimentary deposits from the murky floodwaters. 

Mistoffelees continued staring at him, but didn’t reply. Munkustrap found it a little odd that he seemed to be keeping his distance. His eyes were wide and his frame taut as if frightened. But before he could address any of that, he instinctively looked down at himself and found that he was in a similar state as far as appearances went. His dark stripes were almost entirely obfuscated by the brownish tint of murk and mud.

He felt a sharp pain in his side, but ignored it. His eyes found their way, again, to the other cat nearby, still statuesquely still, watchful. 

“Are you all right?” 

“Yes.” 

The answer came almost suspiciously quick. Munkustrap quirked an eyebrow and tentatively moved a little more, wanting to get to his feet. His side protested and a hand flew up to probe at the area around the lower section of his ribs, the bone and muscle tender beneath his touch. He held back a hiss during the brief examination; he may well have fractured something upon landing at worst. He hoped for a less encumbering scenario, like a really bad bruise. When he looked over again, he saw that Mistoffelees was still in the same spot, frozen in the same position, still wide-eyed. Munkustrap didn’t want or need him to hover, per se, but found it odd that he was hanging back so insistently, as if in fear of approaching. 

“Are you all right?” 

The tabby gave pause; for a moment, he was surprised to hear the magician speak. And then he took another few seconds to contemplate his answer in earnest. “Just sore,” he settled on. “But I’ll be fine.” 

With some difficulty, he fought around the protest of his muscles and his offended ribs to get himself on his feet. The ground beneath him was smooth and solid, and a long steady stream of water accumulated beneath his paws, lightly splashing with every movement. He gave his surroundings an inquisitive scan for the first time, and found himself in a broad, evidently manmade tunnel constructed of brick and seemingly ancient mortar that had been seeping between the seams, creating long, patternless, darkened streaks. He took a few steps forward, further into the seemingly endless cylinder, almost mystified by the apparent vastness. 

“Where are we?” he spoke, mostly to himself. His voice was quiet, but even still it reverberated, bouncing off the poreless surfaces surrounding him. 

“The sewers.” 

Again, Munkustrap hadn’t expected the answer when it came; he turned back to where Mistoffelees had been sitting, and found him unchanged—still knelt down, hunched over, tense—but staring at Munkustrap with luminescent yellow irises that cut through the darkness. 

Mistoffelees continued. “...I think. We must have fallen down the sinkhole and got washed into a pipe.” 

The subjunctive tense had Munkustrap blinking owlishly for a moment. As the tuxedo finished speaking, he seemed to shrink in on himself suddenly, in a way that looked almost like a flinch, an involuntary clench of his muscles. The tabby’s eyebrows pinched together, and the water beneath him sloshed around his ankles as he closed some of the distance between himself and the younger cat. The imagery of the conjurer seeming to be a conduit of nature’s most violent forces flashed behind his eyes. 

“Yes—we fell down the sink hole,” he corroborated, sounding a bit contemplative as he banished away his brain fog in favor of collecting his most immediate memories. 

They came in erratic, disjointed flashes; the lightning, the cacophonous crack, the spindly bolts of electricity, and… Mistoffelees's haltingly vacant eyes just before collapsing.

He paused a couple feet away from his companion, whose eyes were following him with quixotic precision. “What’s the last thing you remember?” the leader asked him, gently. 

Mistoffelees took a protracted moment to think, gaze unwavering. “I remember an explosion, and the pole falling,” he began, his voice quiet and irresolute. “I remember a flash of light. Then nothing.” 

Munkustrap bit his lower lip, weighing the answer. He found himself becoming more disconcerted regarding the condition of his younger friend with every passing moment. “Are you sure you’re all right? Here, let me look at you—” 

The tabby wouldn’t make it one full step. Mistoffelees leapt to his feet in a motion that was so quick it was almost missable. His hands, palms-forward, were aloft immediately, halting the Protector in his tracks. 

“No! Don’t touch me,” Mistoffelees insisted. His voice was at its usual low volume, but no less effective than ever at conveying a dire sense of urgency. 

Munkustrap recoiled only somewhat, his features furrowing even more. “Mistoffelees, what’s—” 

It was then that he saw it; tiny pinpricks of white light, materializing and then vanishing with quick little zips down the fibers of his fur. The conjurer hugged himself as if to soothe his own jolt, inhaling and exhaling. The phenomenon seemed to retract in rhythm with his deescalating mood, rendering the typical uninterrupted darkness of his fur. 

Munkustrap had seen Mistoffelees “sparkle” before — all the frequenters of the Junkyard had. But this wasn’t quite the same.

“The electricity,” the magician began, dispelling the tabby’s unspoken confoundment. “From the wires…” 

“It looked like you absorbed it,” Munkustrap interrupted, replaying the event on a loop in his imagination, increasingly unsettled with each repetition. 

“I did,” Mistoffelees answered, still hugging himself. Munkustrap wasn’t sure, but it started to look as if the younger cat were shivering. “The problem is, I’m still…hanging onto it. I’m a walking livewire.”

The silver tabby’s eyes widened, looking Mistoffelees up and down, wondering how a cat—let alone such a small one—could possibly be harboring all that power, all that energy. “Well can’t you…release it? Let it out?” he sputtered, feeling helpless and stupid, two sensations that were as unwelcome as they were unfamiliar.

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because electricity travels through water.” Mistoffelees’s yellow eyes darted ruefully at the lazily trickling stream running down the floor of the tunnel. “If I had let it out in those floodwaters…you’d be dead. Everyone would be.” 

Munkustrap followed his gaze. “Then I guess an enclosed, flooded sewer tunnel wouldn’t do either?”  

Mistoffelees forced a fleeting smirk at him. “I wouldn’t try it in close quarters, even bone dry.” 

Munkustrap wanted to appreciate the nonchalance, but at the sight of his young friend standing a measured length away, hugging himself, shivering…he found himself struggling to force a reciprocal grin. “Are you in pain?” 

“No.” 

“You’re shaking.” 

“I’m cold.” 

Well, Munkustrap had his doubts, but that was a serviceable explanation. And it alerted him to the fact that he, too, was cold, and that together the two of them were quite a pair of pathetic-looking, sopping-wet felines, silhouettes deflated and whiskers drooping. He felt a twist of nausea at the thought, suddenly recalling that he had inhaled a remarkable amount of the murky, sedimentary floodwaters in which he was standing. No telling what sorts of pathogens he had managed to ingest in so doing; he could only hope that the repercussions wouldn’t end up being too incapacitating to find his way back to the other Jellicles. 

And Mistoffelees — he had been unconscious. There was no doubt that he had aspirated an unheavenly amount of the contaminated water himself. The tabby’s mouth drew into a thin line, and he nearly asked the pintsized tuxedo whether he was also feeling the inevitable symptoms of illness.

He stopped himself, however, knowing Mistoffelees well enough to know that he would not exactly be forthcoming about such matters; and knowing that, even more importantly, there was no use standing in the sewer discussing such things. The best alternative for the both of them was to expedite their involuntary visit. 

“Let’s pick a direction and start walking,” he resolved, looking down one end of the tunnel, and then turning to look down the other. Both were identical, equally dark, abyssal voids. He found himself about as convinced of one scenario as the other. If only he had a coin to flip.

His decision, ultimately, was random. He began to walk past Mistoffelees, trusting the other would follow. "This way.” 

“No.”

Munkustrap paused and turned back around to find the conjurer rooted to the same spot; still overly taut and hugging himself, yellow eyes like headlamps in the dark. The tabby hardly had a moment to be confused before Mistoffelees nodded in the opposite direction. 

“That way,” he stated, quietly, sounding almost as if he were in fear of reprimand over the contrarianism. But his eyes were wide, and he had almost a detached look—a look the meaning of which was recognizable to anybody who knew him well. His insistence was at the behest of more than just felinological instinct; he had an unfailing sense that seemingly no other cats possessed…certainly part and parcel with his magic. 

Knowing better than to doubt Mistoffelees’s transcendental intuition, Munkustrap soundlessly obeyed. He took the lead, walking down the mortar tunnel, his uneven gait punctuated by the sloshing sound of water beneath two sets of trundling paws. Munkustrap didn’t need to hazard a look over his shoulder to ensure that Mistoffelees was behind him; but, he did anyway. The two exchanged eye contact for a brief moment; and while Mistoffelees appeared outwardly unbothered — soakenness, coldness, and dirtiness notwithstanding — Munkustrap had his own sense that the placid expression veneered the extent of exertion required to keep a lid on the upsurge of magic beneath the surface. 

He had his own woes pecking away at his psyche to boot; the pain in his side was relentless and insisted upon lancing down his leg every two or three steps, perpetuating a limp. He cuffed a paw over the affronted area at his ribs, probing again in search of obvious deformations, then massaging in search of relief. 

Of the latter, there was little. 

A stifled, wet cough behind him momentarily jolted him out of his thoughts and sent his ears turning outward. He kept his eyes determinedly forward, warring with his instincts and his carnal desire to rest. But above the temptation, he knew that the best thing for both of them was to press forward, rather than linger and fuss over their calamities. At least, he hoped.

The two managed to walk what felt like a respectable distance through the tunnel; but despite their perseverance, the tunnel seemed to continue stretching ad infinitum with no indication of an exit. Munkustrap had no intention of stopping, but his determination could only do so much against the protests of his body. He couldn’t have been sure how long he had been ambulating forward, favoring one leg, before a wave of dizziness erupted, fit to keel him over. The tabby involuntarily listed sideways as the world seesawed, one arm instinctively extending out to brace himself against the wall. He managed to stay vertical, but his muscles insistently quivered as if to protest that fact.

He felt Mistoffelees’s presence close some of the distance between them, saw the dark shadow of the small cat in his periphery, and then saw it retreat a step. He felt a buzz of static in the air that fluctuated in accordance with the tuxedo’s proximity. Munkustrap took a deep breath and let his head hang for a moment, allowing himself the luxury of closing his eyes until the dizziness receded. When he opened them and looked aloft, there stood his younger companion, watching him with wide eyes. 

“I’m all right,” Munkustrap muttered, intuiting the question lingering behind the conjurer’s yellow eyes. “I just…need a moment.” 

Mistoffelees was hugging himself again. His ears were turned out and his level of alertness perceptibly high as he looked down the tunnel into the direction they had been heading, and then over his shoulder toward the direction from which they had been headed. When he turned back to the Protector, his expression was inscrutable; usually, Munk would encourage him to try to vocalize his consternations. Mistoffelees was often not particularly verbal, but could be remarkably expressive in almost any other facet—in his face, his body, the movements of his tail or the twitching of his whiskers. 

But Munkustrap chose to let the silence linger, focusing on evening out his breathing and swallowing back the nausea. 

“Would it help to sit?”

The silver tabby looked over to his companion, surprised that he had elected to break the silence. 

Every fiber in Munkustrap’s being disliked the idea of stalling even more, but it was as if his body took over at the suggestion. He slumped down to the mortar, leaning himself against the curved wall with a deep breath. “Perhaps, for…just a moment,” he exhaled as he reached the floor. “I just need to catch my breath.”

Mistoffelees shuffled forward and then sat himself down beside Munkustrap, as close as he dared without touching. The Protector felt the shaking in his sinew recede and the nausea quell slightly. When the vertigo subsided, he cracked his eyes open and turned them towards the magician, giving the latter a good long stare. 

“How are you doing?” he asked. 

Mistoffelees stayed silent for a protracted moment. “All right.” 

Munkustrap’s features pinched, wrought with disbelief. The tuxedo was shivering too; moreso, the tabby thought, than he himself had been. His eyes looked glassy and his shoulders were shrugged and rigid, the water and muck clinging to his short fur and probably seeping the frigid cold into his bones. Munkustrap at least had his longer coat and bulkier frame to provide some insulation.

He had scooted himself slightly towards the smaller cat without thinking, but stopped when the conjurer recoiled, ears pressed back. 

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Munkustrap said softly, extending an inviting arm. He wasn’t actually as confident as he had sounded; but the heartbreakingly pathetic sight of the freezing, shrunken young tom was enough for his protective instincts to buoy above any reservations. 

Mistoffelees hugged himself tighter. “I don’t know.” 

“It’ll be all right,” Munkustrap repeated, gesturing with his extended arm for Mistoffelees to come nearer. “If you shock me, and it’s too much to bear, you can move back again.” 

The diminutive magician hesitated only briefly before slinking forward with surprising quickness, as if ripping off a bandage. He pressed into Munk’s side, at first cautiously; the latter felt the crackle of energy, his fir rising, animated by electricity wherever it came into contact with the smaller cat. But it was hardly anything Munk couldn’t handle; in fact, it was barely painful. It felt odd, yes…but he could adapt to the sensation the more he focused on enveloping his fellow feline.

He experimentally nuzzled his cheek against the fur on Mistoffelees’s head. When it seemed as though no untoward feats of electrocution were imminent, the magician began to relax, pressing himself more into the larger tom, submitting to his felinological instincts to seek warmth. Granted, both were still wet, which certainly didn’t help matters. But Munkustrap still, as always, seemed to manufacture heat like a furnace. 

The tabby felt a frown tug at the corners of his mouth as the two of them sat there in silence. Mistoffelees was shaking something fierce; Munk wanted to ask whether that was more attributable to the cold, as opposed to the excess magic, or vice-versa…but, supposing it didn’t really make a difference at the end of the day, he just allowed the quietness to continue, his anxiety marginally quelled by the sensation of his younger friend’s head nuzzling into his shoulder. 

Munkustrap took a deep breath and let his jaw rest a bit on the top of Mistoffelees’s crown, in between the ears. Suddenly he remembered when the enigmatic magician first arrived at the junkyard; it seemed like only yesterday when he was just a little kitten and Munkustrap then had his hands full with his frenetic brother and the strange Conjuring Cat to whom he had latched on. Munkustrap had been grateful then, as ever, that Mistoffelees happened to arrive when he did, to unexpectedly become something of a crutch that Tugger had needed at the time. Since then, Mistoffelees hadn’t grown all that much physically, despite coming into his own as a core member of the tribe. Yet, still, Munkustrap occasionally caught himself contesting with the instinct to look out for him with the same paternalistic fervor he had developed all that time ago. 

A couple of ragged coughs jolted the silver tabby out of his fugue. Munkustrap stiffened somewhat and looked down at the darkly furred feline attempting to stifle his hacks with a paw. 

“That doesn’t sound good,” Munkustrap lead with a frown. 

Mistoffelees beat the last few phlegmy coughs out of his chest. “I think I inhaled more of that water than I ever drank in my life,” he commented lightheartedly.

It hadn’t done much to soothe the tabby's concerns. And now that Munkustrap was roused from his somnolence somewhat, he was back to looking at himself and his companion up and down, observing the dirty water and mud pasting down patches of fur, drying and caking into clumps patternlessly. “Imagine if Jenny saw us now,” he quipped. “Looking so unsightly. She’d be frantic.”  

Mistoffelees coughed out a chuckle. “She just hollerer at Pouncival earlier this week for not cleaning between his toes.” He extended an arm and examined his paw, toes spread and nails retracted. His arm was shaking as he did so. “I’m sorry.”

He sounded abruptly morose. Munk looked back down at him, an eyebrow quirked.

Mistoffelees continued before the tabby could probe. “I would have used magic to…dry us off, or generate heat, or something. But I’m worried that if I cast any spells, that I’ll lose control over the…” 

He trailed off, and, as if to demonstrate, a few errant sparks germinated out of his palm, flickering out with short little pops. He watched it solemnly. “...You know.” 

Munkustrap squeezed him a little harder, nuzzling his head again. “Don’t be sorry,” he said softly, and in earnest. “If it weren’t for you, all of us who were out there would be dead right now.” 

The magician lowered the outstretched paw, letting it fall limply onto his thigh. Munkustrap could feel his shoulders rise and fall as he took a deep, somewhat unconvinced-sounding breath. “I suppose,” he relented. 

Munkustrap squirmed somewhat, trying to erect his posture, anxious to ward off the fatigue that he felt leadening his limbs. He knew they had to get up soon and keep going, or it seemed likely that neither of them would be getting up at all. He felt the weight against his side feeling increasingly heavy as well, the more Mistoffelees relaxed. The vague eminence of body heat, as well as the comfort inherent in touch, both had a rather soporific effect to which no cat was immune. The Protector’s instincts hollered at him to get to his feet; but his muscles and the lingering nausea and the dull headache he was forming all warred against them.

He couldn’t let himself fall asleep, though. He couldn't allow either of them to.

“What made you want to come this way?” the tabby suddenly asked, looking over Mistoffelees’s head, down the end of the tunnel they just traversed. 

The conjurer jolted somewhat, as if yanked back from the precipice of sleep. He blinked owlishly before answering.“...Just…a feeling, I suppose.” 

“A feeling that…something bad is back there?” Munkustrap asked, still looking at the darkened void in question. 

“I don’t know. Perhaps,” the younger cat answered. “It’s just a niggling…I don’t know how to explain it. It felt like a warning.” His head then turned to look the same way Munk was looking. “In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that…” 

He stilled, going silent. Munkustrap waited patiently for him to continue his thought, but instead the tuxedo continued looking down the tunnel, statuesquely still, as if entranced by it. The Jellicle Protector liked to think of himself as rather unflappable…but when Mistoffelees or the twins or whoever got like that…he’d be remiss to insist that it didn’t make his fur stand up on end. 

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Convinced that what?” 

Mistoffelees twitched again, in that same way that made it seem as if he had been snapped out of catatonia. He looked up at Munkustrap, and then back down the tunnel. “...That we’re really alone.” 

The tabby drew his lips into a fine line, now wishing he hadn't asked. He wanted to insist upon some kind of elucidation on such an ominous portent, but he sensed that if Mistoffelees had any such inklings, he would voice them without prompting. “We should probably get going,” he instead remarked, instilling his inflection with as much resolution as he could manage. 

“Are you sure you don’t need longer?” Mistoffelees asked, furrowed eyes turning back onto the elder. “Is your leg going to be all right?” 

“My leg?” Munkustrap looked down at his affronted appendage, which was extended straight out away from him. Mistoffelees must have noticed him limping. “It’s not really my leg that’s the problem, I don’t think,” he speculated, rolling his ankle around as if to prove his limb’s haleness. “I think I landed funny on my side is all. Might be some bruised ribs. Just makes me feel a bit stiff.” 

That was a gross understatement, and Munk knew that Mistoffelees was more than likely aware of that. But, blessedly, the conjurer didn’t press further. At any rate, the tabby hardly gave him a chance to, electing instead to wrench himself up off the mortar. He scraped together every ounce of grace on a prayer, hoping to make it appear as if he were as dexteric as ever getting to his feet. 

It probably wasn't all that convincing, but on that he had no interest in dwelling. Instead, he offered a paw down to Mistoffelees.

But Mistoffelees wasn't looking at him. Rather, his eyes were fixed, wide and focused, down the tunnel. He was staring in the direction from which they came; in the direction of whatever nondescript hazard tweaked the Conjuring Cat's instincts.

Munkustrap squinted in that direction, starting to feel his hackles raise. He wasn’t sure if it was a result of his own felinological senses or if it was just the apprehension that Mistoffelees’s mannerisms sometimes ignited. “What is it?” he asked when he could no longer tolerate the uncertainty. 

Mistoffelees’s ear twitched. He tilted up his chin. “Look,” was all he said, whisper quiet. 

Munkustrap looked, and at first, there was nothing besides darkness. But just as his engines of anxiety were revving to the maximum, he saw what must have been fixating Mistoffelees’s attention start to materialize.

A dark shape, with a head and shoulders, seemingly only somewhat shorter than Munkustrap, emerged from the blackness and was slowly making its way towards them. Instinctively, Munkustrap took a step forward, sidling himself in front of the younger cat, squinting his eyes and sniffing the air in a tenacious bid to gauge the silhouette. Its gait was a little odd—while there wasn’t quite a limp, its steps were halting and stiff. The Protector was almost entirely sure that it was a cat, although its frame was clumpy, broken up by chunks of tangled, unkempt hair. 

Munkustrap took another step forward and inhaled, ready to call out to the stranger. But he felt a gently tug on his wrist, the air crackling with the pop of static shock. 

“We should go,” Mistoffelees said, quiet as a whisper. 

The tabby kept his eyes forward, but slightly angled his head towards the magician. “He may need help.” 

The smaller cat seemingly had nothing to say to that, but his grip on Munkustrap’s wrist didn’t relent. 

“Hello?” the Protector called out, voice echoing perilously off seemingly every stone. “Are you all right?” 

There was no response, but at this point, the silhouette was no more than ten feet away. His features were all still obfuscated in the darkness, but the tabby could now be certain that it was indeed a cat, if not a woefully disheveled one. It seemed to be hunched over, the clumps of matted fur reacting to the inertia of his walk like formless pendulums. Its whiskers were uncombed and unruly, different lengths and twisted. When Munkustrap called out to it, it didn’t answer back; but, rather, it stopped in its tracks. The posture seemed to erect ever so slightly, and it was easy to imagine the apparition raking the other two cats over, sizing them up as they were him. 

Munkustrap squared off his posture as much as he could, shoulders rolling back with his arms drifting away from his sides, feet were spread far apart. For a moment, his aches and pains were forgotten. He tried to tune into his instincts, but his concentration was disrupted by the sensation of Mistoffelees’s paw detaching from his wrist and instead moving up to his bicep. 

“Munkustrap,” he whispered, barely louder than before. “We should go.” 

The Protector couldn’t have explained why, but he was starting to get the idea that perhaps he should listen. There was something to the urgency laden in the tuxedo’s voice that pushed his inchoate apprehensions over the edge. And yet, the tabby wasn’t certain enough that making a run for it was the best course of action, not the least because if the stranger laid chase, the two sodden felines weren’t in the greatest condition to outrun him. Then again, it seemed as if the mute apparition wasn’t the halest himself. 

Although — what if he were correct and the cat required help? Maybe the darkness and injury addled his ordinary pragmatism. It'd be rather callous to forsake a cat in need based on a hunch.

Perhaps it was the thrum of nausea, or the fatigue, or perhaps it was his impression of the stranger as nonthreatening, but something compelled Munkustrap to make a crucial mistake. He took his eyes off the cat to look back at Mistoffelees, maybe to ask him what he thought was wrong, or maybe to encourage him to retreat on his own. He would never know either way, because barely had a moment passed that he was no longer watching the silhouette that he felt something large and hard slam into his front. He was wrenched backwards, his feet flying up from beneath him, and his back broke the surface of the shallow water with a harrowing thwack to the stone floor. The inertia sent his head careening backwards to meet the mortar, and fireworks exploded behind his eyes. 

He had his determinedly honed instincts to thank for his quick, thoughtless reaction; through the haze of pain and a swell of dizziness, Munkustrap’s strong arms shot forward and connected with a solid surface, his hands quickly finding the attacker’s wrists and bracing around them. The violent pursuer's extended claws, long and untamed, hung perilously over the silver tabby’s head, shaking more by the second as his muscles protested. Through the haze of brain fog and darkness, he could see a pair of eyes, wide with bushy brows pinched inward and low, green that glowed in the dark with a feverish, gleeful fervor. For a moment Munkustrap assumed he was hallucinating. 

He could only internalize such a morbid visual, imagined or not, for a fleeting moment; just as his muscles were about to give up on preventing the poised claws from sinking into the flesh of his face, all the pressure in its entirety was removed at once from his body. He grunted, ratcheting himself upward, finding it difficult to get to his feet. The shallow pool of mucky water clung anew to his hair, and his limbs were feeling more leaden by the second. 

Instead of becoming bipedal, he elected to flip his upper body over, keeping himself propped on his elbows, just in time to see what had become of his attacker. In the span of a couple seconds, he took in the sight of the matted, amorphous silhouette entangled with a much smaller, darker one. It wasn’t long before the former overtook the latter, all but bodily throwing him to the ground face-down, straddling his upper body so that it was all he could do to remain fixed in that position. The claws of the mad cat’s one hand were digging into Mistoffelees’s shoulder where it was pinned, and the other hand pressed into the back of his head, keeping his face submerged in the water. The Conjuring Cat, for his part, barely struggled in response, tense but unmoving under his adversary’s hold.

Munkustrap’s appendages quaked anew with a combination of strain and fiery adrenaline as he got his knees under him and leapt to his feet, charging towards the stranger.

“Get away from him!” he hollered, the elevated volume frying his vocal chords in such a way that it came out like a feral growl. 

He barrelled into the other cat thoughtlessly, putting his full weight behind the attack, and the two went sprawling into the puddle of water a couple feet away. The silver tabby only processed the following few moments distantly, dodging and parrying the attacker’s swipes with pure, instinctive reflex alone. The matted animal was far from his toughest opponent; his style of retaliation was chaotic, tactless, his limbs stiff and his movements jerky. He definitely seemed to be an older cat — and, Munkustrap would have lamented had he had the wherewithal, the stranger would have been easily overcome on a day where the Jellicle Protector wasn’t waterlogged, sick, weakened, and sore. Tugger would have assuredly pointed and laughed if only he could see his brother’s dismal performance. 

Even despite the hurdles, however, Munkustrap was able to get the stranger underneath him, pinning him on his back with both shoulders pressed beneath the water into the cold stone below. The brown puddle lapped about his face, just shallow enough to narrowly avoid overtaking his eyes, nose, and mouth. 

Munkustrap, now that he found himself in an advantageous position, took a second to just breathe. There were sounds behind him; water sloshing, a pained groan, a series of sputtering coughs — Mistoffelees, no doubt, struggling to recover, but evidently conscious. It took every fiber of the tabby’s being to not abandon his quarry in favor of checking over his friend; but he had every assurance that the second he let his guard down, the stranger would resume his quixotic crusade with as much vigor as before.

“Who are you?” Munkustrap demanded. “Why did you attack us?” 

The wonders never ceased; rather than a sensible answer, the tabby was met with the sound of laughter, equal parts joyous and maniacal and building with fervor, echoing off the stone surfaces of the tunnel in a feverish pitch. Wide-eyed and speechless, the Protector could only stare at the cat pinned beneath him. 

Now he could get a good look at the crazed feline; definitely older than Munkustrap, but not as old as Gus. Collarless, with a long coat that was matted like wool, browned and neglected. A tangle of disheveled whiskers jutted out of his snout and eye ridges like the spindly legs of a crushed harvestman spider. His mouth, agape as he cackled, was populated by a handful of yellow, decaying teeth. His eyes were a sickly greenish color, one of them seemingly stuck in a perpetual squint while the other one gaped open widely.

The tabby rarely found himself at a loss for words, but at the moment he couldn’t weave a single coherent thought together. Instead, he stared, aghast, at the pitiable creature beneath him until his senseless chortles seemed to die down.

“Strangers in these parts!” the feline hollered at the backend of an abruptly interrupted guffaw. “No, harbingers! Ha, ha, ha! You’ve come to signal the end, have you not?! Yes. I’ve been waiting for you.” 

Mumkustrap blinked, almost stupidly. He wasn’t sure if he had heard correctly. 

“Wh—” 

“Well, you’ll never rapture me! The Everlasting Cat be damned!” His mood suddenly changed, his face falling into a scowl so abruptly that Munkustrap would have missed the transition if he had blinked. “I warned them. I tried to warn them that the end was nigh, but they wouldn’t listen. They said I was mad! But I always saw the signs.” 

Munkustrap’s eyes narrowed. “You’re confused,” he chided, straddling confoundment and amazement equally. “We’re regular cats, like you, and we’re lost down here. If you’d just calm down, we could—” 

He was stopped short when the strange cat wrenched his head backward, hawked, and then spit square in the tabby’s face. Munkustrap turned just in time for it to miss his eye, but he still made a noise of disgust when the globular projectile hit his temple. He managed to maintain his hold on his adversary, however, barely aware that his claws had unsheathed themselves from his fingertips and were digging into the other’s shoulders. 

“I know demons when I see them,” the mad cat snarled. “I’m not so easily fooled as the others. You may come to dust, but that — that —” his eyes roved crazily, trying to catch a glimpse of something outside his peripheral. “That little creature you’re with carries the markings of the Devil!”

“No,” Munkustrap retaliated. “Listen to me. We’re normal cats, like you! We can help you, if you just—” 

 The mad cat erupted in another peel of laughter. “I will not be fooled!” he repeated. “You cannot trick me! He practices the dark arts! I felt it!”

 The silver tabby’s eyes narrowed, frustration mounting. He inhaled to respond, but a third voice stopped him short.

“Munk.” 

Munkustrap, for a split moment, risked looking away from the crazy cat towards the source, and found the form of Mistoffelees trudging up to his peripheral. When he approached, Munkustrap could see that the tuxedo was pressing a paw into the opposite shoulder — and, despite being soaked with water, dark streaks of blood were just barely perceptible as they wormed between the magician’s fingers and dribbled down his side, getting lost in the rest of the detritus beleaguering his fur. His white face had been browned from the contaminated water, but was also now peppered with sanguine scratches; a particularly nasty one arched just above his left eye.

“He can’t be reasoned with,” Mistoffelees continued, voice weak but insistent. The two Jellicles looked correspondingly down at their pursuer, who was back to smiling and cackling lowly in the back of his throat as if the exchange amused him. “And we…we need to go.” 

“If I let him go, he’ll attack us again,” Munkustrap countered, glaring down at his catch. “We need to figure out what—” 

“We need to go, Munk!” Mistoffelees repeated feverishly, one of his ears twitching. He removed his paw from his mutilated shoulder and batted at it, even now, out of habit. “All of us. We need to run.” 

A wave of apprehension, for seemingly the umpteenth time that day, hit Munkustrap like a train. “Wh—” 

“He knows,” the mad cat interrupted, his own whiskers twitching. “The runt knows, ha, ha! Only the Devil gives the gift of foresight. He knows it’s coming.” 

Munkustrap’s head whipped back towards Mistoffelees, almost frantic. “What’s coming?”  

As if in answer, a low whooshing noise ensnared all their attentions. Munkustrap’s own ears turned outwards as he tried to gauge it, unable to put his paw on what exactly it was that he was hearing. It was deep, low, thunderous, and consistent, growing ever so steadily louder. Whatever it was, he felt a knot of dread bunch up and tighten in his rib cage as a result of it.

Before he could vocalize something — before he even determined what it was he wanted to vocalize — Mistoffelees had backed up and was now facing the opposite direction, staring into the darkness with his ears flattened. Beneath Munkustrap, the mad cat began cackling anew. 

“Too late,” Mistoffelees murmured. “We can’t outrun it.” 

Munkustrap didn’t bother asking for clarification, immeasurably beyond expecting simple explanations for anything anymore. Instead, while still keeping his hands clamping the mad cat down, he looked over his shoulder just in time to witness an impending disaster that sent his pupils contracting into pinpricks of black. 

It was a wall of water, roiling and rushing, encompassing every spare inch of the tunnel. The front end of it broke and roiled in choppy fits of foamy white lacerations. Munkustrap distantly internalized a sensation of discomfort in his inner-ears when the whooshing noise became abruptly deafening, and then immediately afterwards he couldn’t have said what he felt.

All his muscles braced, and then suddenly a pitch blackness engulfed him, along with a loss of his spatial faculties so that there no longer seemed to be any up or down or left or right. He could feel that he was moving, but could make no sense of his speed or direction. His body collided with a few solid things along the way, although his eyes were screwed shut the entire time, and trying to open them only met him with a dim, murky quagmire comprised of sedimente that lashed at his corneas. 

It was a battle to hold his breath the entire time, but he did; or at least, he thought he did, despite the exigent instinct to take a breath, especially when the initial force of the water sweeping him away seemed to push the precious air out of him. Still, there was no escaping the muck’s infiltration of his nose and mouth, no matter how tightly he kept his lips sealed together. A distant knell of panic thrummed somewhere in the back of his head, a burning sensation in his lungs burgeoning, and it felt like forever that there was no way to breach the water. It was like the entire world had been submerged; everywhere, just water, infinite and dark and unforgiving. 

White dots started to cluster behind his eyelids and he nearly lost his thready grasp on consciousness, when all of a sudden he felt an abyssal emptiness beneath him. The nondescript, directionless inertia was replaced in less than a second by downward pull of freefall, and now instead of tumbling uncontrollable through a pipe, he found himself launched downward, the tunnel emptying out into a massive basin. It seemed like the fall took forever, and when the tabby broke the surface of the pool below, it felt like hitting concrete.

He recovered quickly, however, driven by a fervent question that constituted his only coherent thought.. Where is Mistoffelees? 

His body seemed to move on its own accord, driving him upward through the quagmire until his head breached the surface of the pool. He inhaled a bevy of air so greedily that his lungs burned, and his paws shot towards his eyes to clear them of all the mist and scum clouding his vision. For a fleeting cluster of seconds, he took in his surroundings if for no other reason than to finally orient himself; the pool’s diameter was massive and extended vertically towards a ceiling so far above him that it was almost entirely lost to shadow. There was a bit of grating somewhere up there letting in a marginal amount of light. The cylindrical wall of the basin, made of smooth concrete, was dotted around its perimeters with giant pipes the likes from which Munkustrap had just been ejected. They were draining water into the basin, starting and stopping ruthlessly, causing the water in the bottom to rise. All around him were brown, sputtering cataracts.

The tabby tore his eyes away and looked around, spinning in place as he waded water. He paused rigidly when he spotted what he was looking for: a small, dark shape on the other side of the basin, black fur framing a white face that stood out against the darkness. Munkustrap wasted no time, swimming as quickly as he could over to where Mistoffelees was, close to one of the waterfalls descending from a particularly high pipe. 

The smaller feline was noticeably struggling to wade water; he was keeping his face above the surface, just barely, his eyes closed and brows furrowed as if with strain, mouth agape as he attempted to respirate without the turbulent water splashing into his nose and mouth. 

“Mistoffelees,” Munkustrap called as he drew near. The Conjurer wrenched his eyes open, and even through the low lighting, the Protector could sense the relief therein. 

As soon as he got to Mistoffelees, Munkustrap oriented himself next to him and wrapped an arm around his waist, doing his best to hoist the tuxedo up somewhat so that he wasn’t so perilously close to inhaling the water. He felt pressure behind his neck when a skinny arm wrapped around him, shaking with either exertion or cold—or, likely enough, both. 

Pulses of electricity were emanating off the illusionist, and Munkustrap had felt it even before he mad physical contact. The water around Mistoffelees lightly glistened with the occasional discharge of static, materializing in tiny white dots on the surface that vanished as soon as they appeared. Unlike before, this electricity was palpable, and it did hurt Munkustrap to have it connecting with his side; probably more from the involuntary muscle contraction than from the shocks themselves. But he beared it with little more than a low grunt. 

“Ah—I’m—I’m sorry,” Mistoffelees stammered, coughing. Munkustrap felt himself listing to the side as the tuxedo tried to pull away from him. 

“No! No,” the tabby protested, jerkily tightening his grasp around Mistoffelees’s waist. He found himself almost having to shout above the roar of the cataracts. “It’s fine! I can handle it.” 

Truthfully, the intermittent electrocutions weren’t too difficult to ignore with everything else barraging Munkustrap’s senses at the same time. He most definitely was at the mercy of his adrenaline, able to momentarily forego perceiving his aches and pains while he assessed his surroundings, trying to come up with a way to get out of the water. No matter how much cortisol pumped through his felinological vascular system, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to wade in this water for long — especially not with a seemingly somnolent Mistoffelees wilting at his side.

The tabby took a couple breaths that were as restorative as he could manage, and assessed his surroundings for the second time. The lowest pipe was only a few feet above them; there was no hope of scrabbling up the smooth concrete, but if they could wait long enough for the water to keep rising, the two of them would be able to haul themselves up into that tunnel and pray to the Everlasting Cat that it had an outlet.

“We need to get out of here,” Munkustrap huffed uselessly, although he mostly wanted to reassure himself that Mistoffelees was staying cognizant. The tabby hazarded a sidelong look at his young friend and found him looking blearily up at the same drainage pipe that he himself had been eyeing. “We just have to wait for the water to rise enough.” 

Mistoffelees didn’t answer immediately, but his eyes lazily strolled from the pipe to the broad vicinity, tracking around the entire expanse as if in search of something.

“What about that other cat?” he exclaimed, his searching becoming marginally more frantic. “Where is he?” 

Munkustrap did his own canvassing, the question jolting him somewhat. In all the tumult and confusion, he managed to essentially forget the unhinged feline that had been his most imminent hurdle just a few minutes ago. Indeed, all he saw around him was roiling water and concrete. A pinch of some bastardized version of concern sprouted at the forefront of his mind, and he almost wanted to chastise himself for foregoing the wellbeing of a fellow feline — no matter how violent and seemingly psychotic they were. 

He was also deeply disconcerted by the sheer notion that a violent maniac was in their midst and his whereabouts were unknown. 

“I don’t know,” the tabby admitted. He started to kick his feet, abruptly anxious to get closer to the low pipe. “Let’s focus on getting out of this water. And then we—” 

Munkustrap stopped dead when Mistoffelees stiffened and inhaled sharply. The elder cat looked toward the younger, wide-eyed. 

“What?” he demanded. 

“I felt something,” Mistoffelees said, looking down at the surface of the water that was lapping up around his upper chest. “Something bumped into me.” 

As if cued, Munkustrap felt something brush up against his own ankle, making him involuntarily yelp an incoherent protest and yank it back, sending both cats volting. The silver tabby barely noticed how his grip around Mistoffelees tightened so much that the smaller tomcat grunted lowly in protest, his arm that was slung around Munkustrap’s shoulder automatically retracting. The Protector could hardly spare the wherewithal to lay out an apology, however, scrutinizing the water around them with such intensity that it felt like his eyes were going to leap straight out of his head. Was it that other cat? Was it some new abomination entirely?

For a prolonged moment, Munkustrap felt no more anomalies presenting themselves from within the dark murk, and he heard no further interjections from Mistoffelees. 

“Maybe it was just debris,” the elder postulated. His grip on the small magician loosened slightly, freeing up some range of motion for him to start tugging them towards the pipe again. “Come on. Let’s —” 

He stopped short when he felt something seem to brush by him again in the vicinity of his legs. He had the keen sense that whatever it was was not debris, but before he could even take a moment further to process that impression, the water seemed to erupt in front of his face like a geyser, sending him reeling backward. He heard a voice over the din, or perhaps a couple voices, shouting unintelligibly. In almost the same moment he felt his arm jerk, and Mistoffelees was pulled out of his grasp. He caught just a glimpse of a disheveled beige blur enveloping the tuxedo before both of them disappeared beneath the turbulent, frothy surface of the water.

The tabby didn’t waste a second. Without even thinking, he dove, and tentatively reached around the blackened depths of the water, flailing for a firm grasp on anything. His eyes were open, but even a cat’s keen vision was all but useless against the obscurity of the sewage. He persisted, driven by carnal instinct alone — not a way he was used to operating, but there was little else to go on. 

When seemed to find purchase against something solid, he closed his hand around it automatically, grip iron-tight. The item beneath his paw pads was definitely organic, and the tabby had no doubt that he had gotten a hold of one of the other cats. At first he wasn’t sure which one, but it clicked after only a moment that there was the sensation of electrical buzzing just beneath his palm. Mistoffelees seemed lax in his hold, which was alarming to say the least, but Munkustrap’s first visceral priority was freeing him from his attacker and getting them both back to the open air. When he started swimming upwards, he felt resistance, and then a set of claws swiping somewhere near his abdomen. He kicked harshly in that general direction, feeling his foot connect. He kicked again, and again, and bent down to swipe his own claws through the haze, knowing that they struck home from the sensation of resistance as they hooked into flesh. All of a sudden, the burden of weight pulling him further away from the water’s surface detached, and Munkustrap was left only with Mistoffelees still in his grasp. 

As soon as his head broke the surface, he took in a huge breath fit to challenge his lungs’ capacity. Then he resituated his grip on Mistoffelees and looked down at him, a pang of icy fear hammering at his heart at the sight of the small tom; he hung in Munkustrap’s hold, limp, eyes closed, face a mess of oozing scratches and grimy deposits from the dirty water.

The Protector grunted with exertion as he made for the direction of the low pipe; by now, the water had risen just enough for him to feel confident that he could heave the two of them up over the lip of it. There was nothing he could do for Mistoffelees until both of them were out of the water, and just as importantly, without range of another attack.

It was difficult to close the distance to the pipe. Munkustrap felt himself leadened with more than just an inert cat clutched to his side; his limbs felt numb and difficult to govern, and a collage of pain that he had been able to overlook in all the excitement was beginning to waft back over him relentlessly. The ache in his side flared up again, worse than it was before, but even more imminent than that was the stabbing sensation wracking the back of his skull. By the time he reached the pipe, his vision was all but swimming, all the while a tidal wave of nausea pooled in his belly. 

The tabby came up on the concrete wall after what felt like forever. He reached and grabbed the lip of the pipe with one hand, while his other arm still had Mistoffelees secured.  In the back of his head it occurred to him that, in a way, it was fortunate that it was the magician he was having to lug along; even the tiny tuxedo felt like a sizeable burden in the tabby’s weakened state. If it had been just about any other cat, they both might have been out of luck. 

He grunted from exertion as his free arm did the work of heaving the two of them up. It was a short distance to cover, but he had none of his typical felinological grace, and a lot less of his signature strength, to make the process easier. The metallic edge burrowed into his torso as he wormed over it, and the extant pain in his ribs flared up so much that he couldn’t suppress a pained yelp. Despite the haze of agony, he managed to haul himself up enough and reorient so that he could pull Mistoffelees up the rest of the way after him; unfortunately, younger cat was still comatose and not helping him out any. 

After enough unbecoming squirming, he hooked his hands under each of Mistoffelees’s shoulders and pulled. 

The final leg of the task couldn’t, of course, have been easy. 

Munkustrap lurched forward and hollered before he was able to tell what happened. The younger cat almost disappeared back into the water, but the elder grabbed wildly at his arm and prevented it from happening; then he got a look at the reason for the disruption, taking in none other than the form of the mad cat who had bursted through the water once more and had his claws digging into Mistoffelees’s back, attempting to pull him back under. Fresh lines of blood germinated in the wake of his assault, but it wasn’t the only red that Munkustrap was seeing. 

With an almighty shout, he angled his upper body over the edge of the pipe as much as he could without falling in and swiped with one hand, putting all his strength into the parry. His claws came down over the mad cat’s face, gouging four deep marks diagonally across. The unhinged stranger yowled, still with a crazed smile plastered across his features, even as his hands dislodged and he went tumbling back into the water. 

Without wasting another second, Munkustrap heaved again and yanked Mistoffelees up the rest of the way.

He settled the tuxedo down and didn’t bother giving himself a moment to catch his breath; instead, he hovered over the inert form of his younger friend, taking in the sight of him. His eyes darted first to the magician’s chest, and he was relieved, at least, to see a slight rise and fall. It was fractious and weak, but it was there. The tabby’s paw then floated for a second just over Mistoffelees’s face, eventually settling on his brow. 

Munkustrap’s features pinched. He expected to be met with coldness from the chill of the water, but the small tom’s forehead was burning hot. The sensation of static still buzzed about the surface of his sopping-wet fur, but it wasn’t nearly as noticeable as it had been when he was wide awake, and Munk doubted that the wellspring of electricity alone was to blame for the heat. Inhaling the contaminated floodwaters was assuredly pathogenic enough; but Munkustrap also knew that Mistoffelees had accumulated multiple open wounds, and now they too had been exposed to the sewage and were assuredly becoming infected. 

Munkustrap felt his arms shaking; he felt his entire person begin to wilt. He knelt lower and sniffed at his charge habitually, examining the scent — in so doing, he found pretty much what he expected, which was the pall of grime and illness. 

Gently, he turned Mistoffelees onto his side to examine the gouges in his back. He hissed at the grizzly sight. His paw ghosted over the oozing lacerations, but barely had he touched the younger cat when the latter erupted into a spasmodic fit of coughing.

It went on for an agonizing moment; the coughs became so violent that they were tantamount to full blown gags. Munkustrap watched helplessly.

"I know...I know, Misto," he murmured, hand hovering just above the wracked frame. White sparks popped off the ends of his fur with every hack. Munkustrap felt useless and pathetic, the soothing words seeming like a mockery of a ministration. But what else could he do? "Just breathe through it."

When it was over, the illusionist groaned and became boneless again, inert and unconscious.

“Misto,” he said quietly, encouragingly nuzzling the young tom’s cheek. “Mistoffelees.” 

For a long, agonizing moment, the conjurer didn’t respond. The seconds seemed to tick by forever as far as Munkustrap was concerned; perhaps it was his own malaise, or perhaps the sewer’s fumes were dismantling his carefully constructed faculties, but the Jellicle Protector felt abruptly encumbered by an attack of despair, of some ambivalent combination of worry, and panic, and sadness. It was because he had asked for Mistoffelees’s help that the young, good-natured tuxedo had ended up in this predicament to begin with. Looking at him laying on the sodden surface of the pipe, supine and deathly still, instilled a spike of dread that he hadn’t recalled feeling since…

He bowed his head low and shook off the memories, exerting his limited reserves of energy to vanquish the nightmarish flashes of his mother’s face, of those that had belonged to his littermates, bright-eyed and innocent kittens, scared and confused…

 He took a deep breath, and elected to redirect his focus on quelling the shaking in his limbs.

 His hand automatically lifted and fell to Mistoffelees’s chest, as if to further console himself with the reassurance that the magician was still very much alive, ignoring the static shock upon contact. He couldn’t help but recall the first days of the young tom’s arrival to the Junkyard. Back then, he was a handful of months old, but bizarrely small for his age, rake-thin, and so quiet that all and sundry spent the first few weeks thinking that he wasn’t capable of speaking. Now, after a few years, he was still small and still quiet — but his indispensable presence among the Jellicles had been beyond palpable, and there wasn’t a heart in the tribe into which the eccentric tomcat hadn’t managed to worm. 

Munkustrap had been no exception. Old Deuteronomy had seemed to glean that there was something about the new arrival that merited keen attention, even by kitten standards. “Watch out for this one,” he had advised the Jellicle Protector, who was no stranger to corralling kittens. Ordinarily, though, he delegated a lot of those responsibilities among the elder population of the colony, as he had no shortage of duties himself — and ordinarily, in any case, taking on a kitten was a village effort. 

But Munkustrap intuited from the beginning, even without Deuteronomy’s encouragement, that he would be particularly watchful of Mistoffelees…that there was something about him. And it turned out that doing so wasn’t much of a challenge, as the diminutive arrival elected to pin himself to Munkustrap’s side without prompting. Munkustrap could recall encouraging Mistoffelees to socialize more with the other cats his age, and plenty of instances where he had to shoo him off under the pretenses of taking care of tasks the likes of which were not suited or safe for a kitten. But the Protector couldn’t have said he ever minded the displays of loyalty.

The tabby almost smiled fondly at the thought, but he maintained his sense of presence effectively enough to not get entirely lost in his memories. Looking at Mistoffelees’s face now, he almost couldn’t recognize him next to the picture of him in his mind’s eye. Under the dirt and scratches, his features were lax. It looked almost as if he were peacefully asleep. 

He tore his eyes away and looked down the pipe, where it stretched seemingly forever into darkness. Then he looked the other way at the basin, and observed how the water was lowering now. The rushing noises had settled and from his vantage point, and it had appeared as though the draining had stopped; but he knew better than to bank on that continuing to be the case. If the two of them didn’t start moving, there was a solid possibility of another surge flooding them out of the pipe again, right back into the basin. 

With that thought, he looked back down at the prone feline. “M–Mistoffelees,” he said, finding his voice catching in his throat. He coughed into his fist, and then subconsciously tallied up a sore throat with his other problems. “Mistoffelees,” he repeated, louder. 

It could have been his imagination, but Munkustrap swore he saw the small cat’s brows twitch. Encouraged, Munkustrap transitioned his paw to his shoulder and gave it a shake. “Misto,” he said louder. “Wake up.” 

“Hhh—” The magician’s head lulled. A strained look overtook his features, like waking up was a herculean effort. 

 Munkustrap gave him another little shake for good measure. “Misto?” 

 The illusionist’s eyes fluttered a bit before they cracked open. For a moment it seemed as if he needed to process the image of Munk’s face hovering above him before his eyes screwed shut again, accompanied by a groan. 

 “It’s Mistoffelees,” he corrected, shakily lifting a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.

 Munkustrap paused dumbly for a second before surprising himself with a bemused scoff. Of all things over which to be preoccupied at a time like this…in a way it was relief to know that, despite everything, Mistoffelees lost none of his endearing pedantry.

“Sorry,” Munkustrap said, bereft of sincerity. He reached out hesitantly as Mistoffelees tried, with difficulty, to push himself into a seated position. “Easy, easy,” he soothed. 

The magical cat groaned as he managed to sidle towards the wall of the pipe, a shaking hand gravitating towards his head where the gash oozed blood into his eye. “Wh…what—” 

“Hold on,” Munk said, reaching. “Let me look at you.” 

He went to plant a gentle paw on Mistoffelees’s shoulder, but he was met with a rather intense electric shock that gave them both a jolt.

“Sorry,” Mistoffelees rued immediately, wrapping his arms around himself again. He shrank away from Munkustrap’s hovering presence the same way he had when the latter first woke up.

“It’s all right,” the Protector said, brimming with sympathy. It was hard to see in the dark, but Mistoffelees looked awful — about as bad as Munkustrap had ever seen him. Shaking, deflated, and bleeding from a surfeit of vicious wounds that he didn’t even want to try to count. He wanted to reach out again, but knew better than to do so. That left him with making an assessment based on questions alone—and what was he to ask? Are you all right? He was sure he already knew the answer to that. As he continued looking at the tuxedo, he noticed a few sparks dancing anew along strands of fur, standing out against the darkness of the pipe like little shooting stars. 

“How are you doing?” he asked, eyeing the evidence of barely-contained electricity. "I mean, specifically with the, er…” 

He faltered, unsure how to phrase it. But Mistoffelees, ever so clever, knew to what he was referring. 

“It’s getting—ah—” he cut himself off with a pained yelp when a few particularly large bolts of electricity ran down his person, causing his body to flinch as if he himself had been electrocuted. He recovered quickly enough, but with a look on his face that came off as equal parts physically pained and emotionally chagrined. “...a little harder to manage.” 

Munkustrap nodded solemnly. He scrubbed his hand down his face and took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry about all this. I got you into this mess…but I’ll get us both out, I promise.” 

Mistoffelees seemed to give Munkustrap the good grace of looking genuinely puzzled. “None of this is your fault,” he countered. “I’d rather—nnf—” he paused again, wracked by another zap. “---suffer down here for a while, than have lost you all to that utility pole.” 

Munkustrap smiled fondly. “I guess I owe you more than a thanks—although this isn’t nearly the first time you and your magic have come in clutch.” 

The younger tom seemed to shrink more at that, his shoulders shrugging further up as if to conceal himself from the praise. A timid smile tugged at his features nonetheless. That was just like Mistoffelees, the elder cat thought; thriving on adulation when he was performing, but shying away from it otherwise. 

After a rapid beat, however, his face fell, making it seem as if a new thought had occurred to him. “What happened to that other cat?” he asked, looking back into the basin.

Munkustrap sighed. “I don’t know. We tussled after he pulled you under. As soon as I shook him off I focused on getting us out of there.” 

Mistoffelees appeared discontented, but couldn’t seem to come up with the words to express as much. Instead, his eyes, glowing in dark, roved his older companion up and down. “Are you all right? You're bleeding...” 

Munkustrap, in earnest, looked down at himself—it was the first time since encountering the mad cat that it ever occurred to him to assess his own physical condition; although, it wasn’t like there was much he could do for himself in the sewer anyway. It was difficult to be discerning in the dark, but he was unsurprised to find himself bleeding indeed from a surfeit of scratches and scrapes—most of which were doubtlessly incurred during his scuffles with the insane stranger. Some were worse than others; the most noticeable superficial injuries were the large gouges running down his left oblique, dying his fur in that area an unsightly combination of crimson and brown. Beneath the surface, the pain in his ribs had escalated to new heights and the back of his head continued to throb where it had made solid contact with the mortar not terribly long ago. The silver tabby swallowed thickly as he calculated these observations, suddenly stricken with an intense malaise as if keying into his calamities caused the effects of which to slam into him all at once. Dizziness, nausea, weakness, pain, cold…all came flooding back where the remaining dregs of his adrenaline were cushioning him before. 

“Munkustrap?”

Mistoffelees’s quiet voice jerked the Protector out of his fugue; as if to dislodge the last of his haze, he gave his head a bit of a shake, although it wasn’t much for fear of exacerbating his perpetually intensifying migraine. His eyes landed on those of his companion’s. 

“I’m all right,” Munkustrap assured, plastering on an unconvincing smile. Mistoffelees, of course, was visibly unconvinced. “Well—all right enough, anyway,” the tabby amended. As if to demonstrate, he began the arduous task of hauling himself to his feet, exerting every ounce of willpower left within him to make it appear as though it wasn’t half as difficult as it felt. “Well enough to keep going, that is. There’s not much we can do for ourselves down here, is there? Best we can do is keep walking until we find an exit.” 

The tabby hoped his augmented determination would shed some gusto on the younger cat, but Mistoffelees appeared enduringly lugubrious as he watched the Protector rise to his full height. He appeared to see the truth in Munkustrap’s words, however. There wasn’t resolve on his face so much as vague resignation, but it was enough for him to attempt rising to his feet.

Munkustrap watched him carefully; Mistoffelees put on a brave face, but it was plain that his own afflictions were heavily encumbering him. The tabby felt a cacophony of dread and vengeful wrath overtake him anew; the mad cat’s handiwork was all over him --- deep gouges, oozing crimson in long strokes. Munkustrap knew he himself could handle a good deal of damage; he had been in fights and came out the other side with a bevy of wounds that would have taken out a less physically adept cat. But Mistoffelees…while sharp as a tack in mind and formidable with the cunning leverage of his powers…was still physically weak and so, so small. 

Munkustrap instinctively reached forward to help him up, but the younger tomcat recoiled from his touch, evidently fearful of shocking him again. The tabby relented, but with grievous dissent.

Mistoffelees did manage to get himself vertical with a few effortful grunts and hisses, but one of his legs had been all but shredded by the mad cat. He leaned himself against the wall of the pipe in an attempt to alleviate some of the weight on it. 

Munkustrap fought hard against his instincts to insist upon at least lending Mistoffelees an arm. He knew what the result would be; so, instead, once he was assured that the younger cat wouldn’t imminently keel over, he turned to continue their trek into the darkness.

“Ha, ha, ha!” 

A dreadfully familiar voice echoed off the solid interiors. Mistoffelees gasped and turned around. Munkustrap followed suit, skittering towards the direction from which it came and positioning himself in front of the conjurer, arms and legs rigidly spread in a protective posture that was as perfunctory to him as scratching an itch. 

It wasn’t necessary, it turned out; the psychotic peel did belong to the mad cat, but he was on the other side of the basin, standing in the mouth of a pipe juxtaposed to the one in which the Jellicles stood poised. At this distance, he was back to being a silhouette, although his green eyes stood out against the dark, uneven and crazed and feverishly bright. 

“Go and don’t come back, harbingers,” he shouted across the pool. “I’ll never go with you. The Jellicle Cats will never rapture me!” His proclamation dissolved into another hysterical fit of laughter, and seemingly without requiring a reply, he turned and trundled into the pipe, ragged and dripping form disappearing into darkness. 

Only when he was gone did Munkustrap feel emboldened to relax his posture. He looked over his shoulder to exchange a bewildered look with Mistoffelees. The smaller cat seemed about as speechless as the elder, and all he had to offer by way of a rejoinder to the encounter was a puzzled shake of his head. A multitude of unasked questions lingered between them, but both were resolute that they couldn’t afford the luxury of dwelling on it. 

On that thought, Munkustrap turned and started walking again, and sure enough the halting, uneven steps of the Conjuring Cat followed behind him.

Chapter Text

Munkustrap had no idea how long they had been walking when he noticed that he was using the wall for support. The endless aches and pains certainly weren’t doing any favors for his internal clock (or his sanity), but neither was the neverending stretch of darkness ahead of him. Dully, he thought it was no wonder that that cat had gone insane down here.

Mistoffelees’s footsteps behind him were but a thin consolation. His audible limp was intermittently punctuated by involuntary yelps from what the tabby imagined were more involuntary zaps , peppered in between by stifled coughs. Munkustrap was woe to admit that he wasn’t exactly faring much better; he struggled to control his own bouts of respiratory distress, and by now couldn’t stand up straight without incapacitating retaliation from the pain in his ribs. Breathing felt laborious. His bad leg almost couldn’t bear any weight…and that combined with persistent waves of dizziness made staying vertical a formidable challenge.

He became so fixated on one foot in front of the other that he almost didn’t notice the way the tunnel opened up into a yawning cavern, which sported two additional tunnels on the other side of it.

The tabby stopped abruptly right in the mouth of the opening, causing Mistoffelees to only narrowly avoid running into him. One hand still braced against the wall, the Protector took in the sight of two more dark, endless sewer mains. “A fork in the road,” he muttered.

“Mmmm,” was all that he heard in response from behind him. 

“Let’s take a break,” Munkustrap found himself saying before he was aware that he had made any resolution to say it. His back was sliding down the pipe’s wall and, just like that, the damp floor came up to meet him. Somewhere nearby, he heard a soft, comparable thud and angled his head just enough to see that Mistoffelees had, cooperatively, sunken to his knees. His glowing eyes were directed vaguely floorward, vacant and fatigued, almost unseeing. The small frame was trembling, and now his fur was constantly alight with a medley of little sparks. Munkustrap could feel the electricity in the air now; distantly, he wondered how painful it was to be holding in an unquantifiable amount of power, needing so desperately to be released. How long could the Conjuring Cat go on before the task of containing all that energy was too much? 

The silver tabby then looked in the opposite direction of the seemingly endless tunnels and almost cringed; it was clear that he was nearing the bottom of his rope, and Mistoffelees, no doubt, was all but clinging to the frayed ends of his.

The Protector weighed his options, but he found himself coming up short. The only clear course of action was to keep walking. Surely the humans built these elaborate structures with intermittent exits…but, how much further would they have to go to reach one? What if it was locked or inaccessible? How long had they been walking so far? How much longer could they possibly last?

“You should go without me.” 

Munkustrap’s eyes shot open — he hadn’t realized they had closed to begin with. The green irises swam askance to where the soft voice had come from; and there sat Mistoffelees, arms wound tightly about his narrow frame, back leaned against the smooth siding of the pipe. The yellow orbs were locked onto the tabby, fever-bright and wracked with nystagmus. 

“What?” 

Munkustrap almost couldn’t recognize his own voice. His stoic veneer, apparently, had receded by the curtains of illness and pain. Now he just sounded as patently dumbfounded as he felt. 

“Keep going,” Mistoffelees reiterated. His voice was hoarse and apprehensive. “I’ll go back. We need to get as far away from each other as possible.” 

The Protector blinked stupidly. He wouldn’t be reclaiming his unflappable image any time soon, it seemed. “What are you talking about?”

“The electricity,” the tuxedo rued. It almost looked like his shivering increased, as if even acknowledging it made its presence all the more exigent. “I can’t…I can’t hold onto it for much longer. It has to be dispelled.” 

“Then dispel it.”

“I told you I can’t,” Mistoffelees sounded borderline desperate. Ordinarily he seemed so surefooted; especially when it came to his magic. “Not down here …not without getting you killed. The best chance you have is getting away from me so that when I let it out, it doesn’t reach you.” 

“We’re not separating,” Munkustrap countered with finality, his spine erecting. It seemed like the absurdity of the idea imbued him with some bastardized form of strength. “I told you I would get us both out of here, and I mean to see through to that. If we keep going, eventually we’re bound to find an exit.” 

“When?” Mistoffelees’s eyes grew brighter with the emotional uptick. “Who knows how much longer we’ll have to go before that happens? And what if I lose control before then?”

Munkustrap swallowed dryly. He allowed himself the indignity of breaking eye contact, his head tipping back against the wall. Mistoffelees was very obviously struggling; very obviously in pain. And all the Protector could think to do was ask him to continue in that way indefinitely, to placate his self-assigned role as some kind of savior. The idea planted a pit of rankled anger and despair in the base of his throat; he and Mistoffelees were in this situation to begin with because he had solicited the Conjuring Cat’s assistance for his abilities. If that had been forgivable, now Mistoffelees was hurt and ill, and could only entertain the notion of perpetuating his suffering alone to increase Munkustrap’s chances of escaping with his life. He almost wanted to wipe the image of his young companion’s wide, agonized eyes from his imagination. All he could see was a cat—one of his dearest friends, no less, and one of the tribe’s brightest lights—that he had failed to protect. 

“We can keep walking and hope there’s an exit around the corner,” the tuxedo went on quietly, gently awakening the tabby from his malaise, “while there’s a decent chance my magic will be the death of you if there isn’t. Or we can separate; you’ll be safer from me, and you have better odds finding a way out if you’re not dead. You can send the others down here to search for me, if that would put your mind at ease.” 

Munkustrap couldn’t restrain himself from snorting at the suggestion. Put your mind at ease , he said . The understatement and absurdity of suggesting he’d do anything to the contrary of turning London’s sewers inside out to find him was almost hilarious. 

“What if the mains flood again?” the tabby proffered. “What if you pass out again and drown? What if that crazy cat finds you?” 

There was an unpleasant beat of silence; it wasn’t awkward, per se, but it wreaked of something unpleasant. 

“...I can look after myself, Munkustrap,” Mistoffelees said eventually, voice softened to a near-whisper. “I’m not a—” 

“I know,” Munkustrap interrupted. His hand flew to the bridge of his nose and pinched hard, the pain in his skull resonating around to the fragile cushion behind his eyes. “I know you’re not.” 

A kitten. Munkustrap almost wanted to laugh again. Maybe his fever was making him delirious. 

It wasn’t the first time he had heard this argument. Mistoffelees’s transition out of kittenhood was missable because he had always been quiet, always been pointed and refined, always been seemingly more comfortable in the presence of older cats, and was apparently destined to remain no more than half the average size of an adult. Where other young cats all but thunder loudly through adolescence, Mistoffelees matured in much the way that he went about doing everything; clandestinely, obfuscated by reticence and secretiveness, in a way so unlike any other cat that Munkustrap could recall guiding in any capacity through their formative years.

But there was more to it than that. Munkustrap couldn't have articulated what exactly, but he knew there just was. 

Keep an eye on that one, Old Deuteronomy had said, ancient eyes fondly twinkling. I believe that there's more to this kitten than meets the eye.

“Munk—” 

“No, Mistoffelees,” the tabby interrupted, sensing that the magician would break the silence just in time to repudiate the unspoken argument. “We have to come up with something else.” 

Munkustrap wasn’t looking directly at him, but he could tell by the way the smaller Jellicle’s posture tightened right within his peripheral vision that he was displeased with that response. “Why not?” 

“Because I don’t like it,” the tabby snapped. He hadn’t meant to sound harsh, but it seemed like his faculties for stoicism had been among the first of his leaderly qualities to evaporate. “And that’s enough of a reason.” 

“It’s too dangerous for us to stay together.” 

“It’s too dangerous for you to go off on your own.” 

“I said I can look after—” 

“You would have drowned back there if I hadn’t rescued you.” Munkustrap finally turned his head and peeled his back away from the wall, his spine erect and eyes planted firmly on the younger tomcat. “So I don’t want to hear it.”

As if cued by the sudden sharpness, a particularly strong surge of electricity flashed over Mistoffelees’s frame, causing a series of isolated twitches wracking his nerve endings in such rapid succession that it was all he could do to flinch back as if struck. Ears flattened to his head, he looked away from the elder cat and bowed his head, every muscle taut and rigid, eyes shut, appearing to take a moment to get recomposed.  

Munkustrap also looked away then, letting himself fall up against the wall again. He felt a pang of something akin to guilt, along with a wave of pity upstaking the momentary flash of ire.  He shut his own eyes against a fresh wave of vertigo and tried to reset his systems with a few deep breaths.

He hadn’t meant to sound so cross; it had been so long since he ever lost his composure like that, even with the kittens. He wondered if he should apologize now or later; if he should wait for the moment to simmer down, and for the circumstances to be more apropos. Or perhaps he should do it now, if it would held Mistoffelees keep a lid on his surging powers. Or even if the two never saw the light of day again—but, no , he chastised himself, he couldn’t even entertain such a notion. 

  Everlasting , if he could just think straight. 

When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t sure how much time had gone by. He only had the sense that silence had endured for long enough to be uncomfortable. Munkustrap would have diplomatically broken it sooner, probably to lay out that apology, if he hadn’t been losing time to wage a battle against blissful syncope. 

He let his head lull so that his eyes could more easily find Mistoffelees — but, when they did, it was immediately apparent that something wasn’t right. 

The Conjuring Cat was no longer leaning against the wall, but sat upright with his spine completely erect, every inch of him statuesquely still. He stared vacantly ahead with wide eyes, and ears that were turned forward like satellites, observant, keenly listening. His shaking seemed to have been quelled by his focus, and the only part of him that moved were his whiskers, twitching minutely as he sniffed the air in rhythmic puffs.

Munkustrap knew what all this signified well enough, and it immediately raised his hackles. “Mistoffelees?” 

The magician didn’t acknowledge him. Munkustrap grew tenser, ready to leap up in the case of some fresh new absurdity approaching. “Mistoffelees! What is it?” 

Was it the crazy cat? Another surge of floodwaters? The tabby’s mind swam with untoward possibilities. 

“Do you hear that?” 

Mistoffelees had asked the question so quietly that it almost evaded Munkustrap’s comprehension. The Protector instinctively keyed into the environment with as much acuity as his condition would allow, but, unsurprisingly, whatever the tuxedo sensed was mute to him. All he heard was the haunting, reverberating white noise of gaping mortar tunnels, hypnotic drip-drops in the distance, and the vague, muffled sound of water moving lazily elsewhere.

“Hear what?” Munkustrap asked after a protracted moment, already rearranging himself so that he could get to his feet. “What do you sense?” 

“Voices,” Mistoffelees murmured. He sounded almost dreamy, like he was half-awake. It was difficult to tell if he was truly tranced, although Munkustrap had a hard time compartmentalizing the effects of his friend’s magic even on a good day. Tugger had always been much better at that, explaining the arcane concepts to others as if he himself had been imbued with such mysticisms. The tabby almost envied his little brother of his ability to inuit such things; although it certainly mustn’t have had the least to do with the unique, enigmatic intimacy the two of them shared. 

“I don’t…hear anything,” he eventually stated, watching the tuxedo carefully. 

Mistoffelees turned his head in Munkustrap’s direction, but looked past him, at the clearing where the two adjacent tunnels yawned into oblivion. His expression was vacuous, but suddenly tightened when his frame was wracked by another zap. Afterwards, his head hung and he coughed wetly, clumsily adjusting his limbs as if making to rise to his feet. 

Munkustrap remained trained on him, feeling nervous. He wanted to check Mistoffelees’s temperature, concerned that this was an instance of fevered delirium, rather than magical sensory perception. But he knew if he tried, that the Conjuring Cat would resist for fear of shocking him; and that, even if Munkustrap could be sure that a fever was frying his brain, it’s not as if anything could be done about it in the sewer. 

Mistoffelees managed to stand upright and was listening to whatever inaudible phenomenon had him rapt. 

“This way,” he said, and started walking. 

Munkustrap wrenched his own self upwards after him, hesitating for a moment as the small figure limped past him and into the cavern, towards one of the two tunnels on the other side of it. 

“Mistoffelees,” he said after him. His voice echoed off the mortar; a multitude of questions that he had too much brain fog to articulate hung out in the back of his throat.

Accordingly, Mistoffelees paused in his tracks and looked back. 

“How do you know?” 

“I just know.” 

Munkustrap fully expected that answer; in hindsight, it felt absurd that he had even asked. Before he could think to say anything further, Mistoffelees, still very much in the midst of his fugue, turned back around and continued walking—or, limping—wherever the preternatural intuition guided him. If he had been chapped by the tone the Protector had taken with him, apparently it was already forgotten. That, at least, made things marginally less complicated. 

If Mistoffelees was cracked at the end of the day, well, the tunnels were a coin toss anyway; resigned to whichever fate, Munkustrap followed.

The tunnel was much the same as the ones the two Jellicles previously traversed; moist, dark, seemingly endless. After an untold amount of time spent walking, the tabby’s feet seemed to stop on their own accord. There he stood, back erect, aches and pains momentarily forgotten as he fine tuned every one of his senses to assure himself as accurately as possible that he wasn’t going crazy. After a moment, he was even more sure than ever that he was hearing something unusual, something in the distance that cut through the industrial, monotonous phenomena of a gaping man-made sewer main. A voice.

Mitsoffelees seemed to notice that Munkustrap stopped following him, and paused himself. He looked over his shoulder at the elder feline, face vaguely expectant. 

“I hear it,” Munkustrap said, although he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself. He took a few gimpy steps forward until he was shoulder-to-shoulder with the magician, aurally straining himself again, hoping that his ears did not deceive him. 

There was a voice…he wasn’t imagining it! And to make matters all the more jubilant, it was a voice that he recognized, one that sent a wellspring of relief through his blood.

It was a deep, commanding voice, but it was youthful and it carried an ineffable combination of unsureness and warmth. The tunnel swallowed it just enough that the syllables of whatever it was saying were unintelligible, but the tabby didn’t feel the need to interpret the sound.

“That’s Alonzo,” Munkustrap breathed. He started limping forward, vigor renewed, at as fast a pace as he could manage. Water unevenly splashed behind him with every one of Mistoffelees’s own hobbling footfalls. 

Munkustrap used his own operatic voice to call back with as much power as he could manage, ensuring that Alonzo would stay put. When they rounded a corner, it became obvious from where precisely the young cat’s voice had been emanating. The darkness of the underlit sewer tunnel brightened marginally with the low evening lighting of London eking through a small opening somewhere above them. Evening , Munkustrap distantly thought as he drew nearer, relief flooding every fiber of his person. How long have we been down here?

“There, Mistoffelees,” the tabby pointed out breathlessly, although he was sure the Conjuring Cat would see the storm drain with his own two eyes, which were keener in the dark than any other cat’s. “We’re close. Can you make it?”

What he expected was a verbal answer, but none were forthcoming. Mistoffelees’s footfalls stopped in that moment, causing Munkustrap to look back over his shoulder. There the tuxedo stood, ears flattened outwards, hackles raised. The end of his tail twitched. Despite the visibly heightened guard, he didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular. Instead, his eyes transitioned from vaguely floorward to where they rested on Munkustrap’s. His brow was furrowed. It was difficult to get a read on him, but to Munkustrap, he looked almost…horrified.

He hardly required a moment to ponder over it; his heart sank down to his ankles before he even needed Mistoffelees to articulate what the problem was. This time, the low rushing noise came to his ears just as quickly, and it was one that was harrowingly familiar. The duo exchanged but fleeting glances before taking off in as much of a run as they could manage towards the storm drain. 

Rusted rungs of an ancient service ladder, each fixed individually to the mortar, led up to the opening. It was high up, and the distant form of Alonzo peeking through the narrow opening in the curb was visible against the dingy backdrop of a dark, cloudy dusk. The shadowed figure visibly perked up as soon as Munkustrap reached the ladder, shoulders angling as if he had every intention of coming down there to meet them. 

“Stay up there,” the tabby quickly admonished, not bothering to veil the panic in his voice. “We’re coming to you.” 

In the next moment, Mistoffelees closed the distance and made it to the bottom rung after him; at the same time, a monumental wall of water came barrelling around the corner, rushing down the main at a speed that, to Munkustrap, seemed incomprehensibly fast and tormentingly slow all at once. He vaguely heard himself hollering at Mistoffelees to start ascending the ladder, and his own limbs moved of their own accord following in close pursuit. 

The Protector knew that the two of them had no shot at making it to the top before the massive barrage of floodwaters would shove down the pipe to meet them. His whole body moved without a single coherent thought, and he found himself surging upwards to get just behind Mistoffelees, hooking an arm around his waist so that the small tuxedo was entirely squished to his frontside with nothing but a startled yelp to indicate his surprise, or perhaps pain. 

The Protector, for his part, felt his own bevy of hurt upon contact. Electricity seemed to course through every solitary nerve ending, but he knew it had been coming and had mentally prepared himself to hang on regardless. By the time the water had engulfed them, he felt as if all of his muscles were taut enough to snap, and that every inch of him were stuck with pins and needles, tiny zaps of freezing-cold pinpricks right down to the very tips of his fur. He felt himself listing to the side of the waterflow, pushed with solid and constant force, a ferocious storm’s winds up against a rather stubborn pebble. 

Munkustrap felt so many things that he couldn’t think even vaguely straight; he felt breathless, he felt freezing, he felt achy and tired, and yet wound up so tightly that he could no longer command an inch of himself to move. It felt like it was all happening in a short burst, and yet at the same time it felt as if it was taking so long that he distantly began to wonder if the barrage would ever end; whether he’d ever be able to take a breath of air again. The temptation of wistful unconsciousness tugged at the edges of his mind but he vehemently resisted; he had to hang onto Mistoffelees. With one hand clinging to the rungs while the other arm was cinched around the magical cat’s waist, it took every ounce of strength and willpower to remain fixed on the service ladder while the floodwaters did seemingly all they could to dislodge him.

Suddenly, a sensation gave him a jolt that made the effort all the more difficult. At first it felt like something pushing up against his torso and shoulders, making the pain in his ribs flare unbearably. He let out an involuntary yelp, drowned and muffled by the water, wasting precious breath. His hand on the rung began to slip as it became harder to resist the erratic shoves to his frontside — and then, he realized what was happening. Mistoffelees was wriggling, pushing against him; he was trying to get away . The silver tabby couldn’t see anything in the rushing murk, but he could feel the lithe frame jerking in his hold, small hands grabbing at his arm, attempting in earnest to severe from him as if wrongly imprisoned. Munkustrap didn’t bother devoting an ounce of thought to why his young friend would be trying to escape, why he would be trying to get himself carried away by violent floodwaters. He only tightened his grip reflexively.

The pressure of the water seemed to suddenly pick up in intensity, and then the next thing the tabby knew, he was abruptly submerged in a world of pain; and while it wasn’t the worst pain he ever felt, it was among one of the most bizarre sensations, period. It was a different kind of pain. Every sinew in his body tensed and he jerked involuntarily. His arms went rigid and he lost his grip on the rung—and, concurrently, on the Conjuring Cat.

But, he didn’t go anywhere.  He felt his legs kick out, detaching from the ladder in the direction of the currents, but something had latched around his wrist and held him in place. He retained just enough wherewithal to reach with his other arm for the rung, doubly securing himself; but a combination of dread, panic, and suffocation all catapulted him within a moment’s notice of passing out. 

It was a small mercy when all of a sudden his head was above the water, just barely. The volume of sewage had decreased enough to expose the upper half of the service ladder, and Munkustrap — after coughing his lungs out — could then see that it was Alonzo’s strong hand around his wrist that had kept him from getting swept up in the current. 

“Alonzo—” he sputtered, eyes wide and terrified. 

“Come on,” the younger tom hollered over the sound of the rushing water, giving the wrist a pull. 

“Mistoffelees,” the tabby panted, ignoring the beseechment entirely. “I lost my — I lost my grip on him.” 

Alonzo was an expressive cat; unlike his mentor, he wasn’t as adept at veneering his visceral reactions behind a stoic exterior. He threw an alarmed look in the general direction of the waterflow. When he looked back at Munkustrap, he tried to force his features back into a veil of calm. 

“We’ll get him,” he responded. “We have to get out of here first.” 

Munk wasn’t totally bereft of his ability to rationalize, despite his condition; he knew that, pragmatically, Alonzo was right, and that furthermore they were in no position to have an argument while half-submerged in sewage on a rusty service ladder. The younger cat relinquished the elder’s wrist and together they ascended the rest of the way, with Alonzo hefting himself deftly out of the storm drain. Munkustrap prepared himself to attempt the same, although he wasn’t confident in his upper body muscles to accomplish anything athletic; it was hard enough just to climb the rungs. 

It turned out, however, that he didn’t have to, as two pairs of arms wormed through the opening and grabbed each of the tabby’s hands, pulling him up with enough combined strength to alleviate him of any need to exert his own. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, looking up at an overcast night sky, dark puffy clouds vaguely illuminated by a haze of London’s smoggy ambient light. The asphalt beneath him was wet, but the rain had slowed to a drizzle. His chest heaved as he coughed, his own hacks sounding muffled and distant in his ears. He heard a voice—or, perhaps, a couple voices—but at first didn’t have the presence of mind to distinguish any words or put faces to the sounds. Stabbing pain in his ribs caused a red haze to crowd into the edges of his vision, and it was all he could do to focus singularly on warding it off.

Suddenly, the bandwidth of his vision was consumed by Alonzo’s face as the latter loomed over him, leaning him close with a stare riddled in discernment and worry. His mouth was moving, but more a moment all the tabby heard was the contiguous ringing seemingly emanating from within his skull. 

Sound faded back in after he keyed into the familiar face; “Munkustrap,” Alonzo had been saying, repeating, trying with steadily increasing fervor to get his undivided attention. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?” 

Instead of answering coherently, Munk flipped himself onto his side and dissolved into a violent coughing fit, expelling an excess of invasive sewage from his lungs and diaphragm. He barely felt the large hand gently, unsurely, descending to his back. 

After a few seconds of this, he ratcheted himself up onto all fours and beat a hand into his chest, encouraging some more effective hacks. His throat felt tight and raw, but he forced his voice out anyway. “Mistoffelees,” he croaked in between coughs. “Mistoffelees is—is still down there.” 

“We know,” Alonzo said. “We have to wait for—” 

“He’s injured,” Munkustrap interrupted, the last of his most incapacitating expulsions dying off from within his chest. He shakily got himself to a knelt position, trying to erect his spine to its full length without keeling over. “And sick. We have to find him quickly.” 

“We will,” Alonzo assured, holding up his palms as if to placate his frantic mentor. “But first we have to—” 

He was cut off when Munkustrap stumbled on his knees over to where the storm drain yawned out of the curb, planting his hand on the lip of the cobblestone walkway so that he could peer down into the sewer main. Water was still rushing within, continuing to obscure at least half of the service ladder. The tabby cursed his own rotten name at the sight of it; one of his dearest friends, a young cat he’d been looking after since kittenhood, who trusted him as his protector and leader, as a younger brother would trust an elder — he was down there, lost in that hellish murk. 

“Dammit,” he cursed under his breath. He then repeated himself — “Dammit!” — and smacked the curb. “I had him! I lost him! I can’t believe I let that happen.” 

He turned his gaze onto Alonzo, and saw for the first time that Coricopat was there too, standing a bit behind him. They were both looking at him with wide, furrowed eyes, shining in the dim lighting, looking perhaps about as helpless as Munkustrap felt. 

Alonzo, for his part, tried as always to put on a brave face. He got closer to Munkustrap, but stopped short of putting his hand on the tabby’s shoulder. “We won’t rest until we find him,” he assured, and Munkustrap knew he meant it. Alonzo adored Mistoffelees; there were few in the Junkyard besides the Protector himself to whom he was closer. “I’ll follow the direction of the water flow to the next storm drain. Coricopat’s going to take you back to—” 

“No,” Munkustrap immediately protested. “I’m going with you.” 

Alonzo and Coricopat exchanged nervous glances. “Munkustrap,” the black-and-white tom started uncertainly. “You’re in pretty bad shape. It’d be better if—” 

“You’re right, I am,” the Protector retorted. He used the curb to lever himself up to his feet as if showing he was hale enough to stand would dispute the comment nonetheless. “And for as bad as I am, Mistoffelees is worse off. If we don’t find him soon, he might—he—” 

“You’ll slow us down,” Alonzo responded, shaking his head. It was a bold argument, but he said it softly. “And if Mistoffelees is in as bad a way as you’re saying, then time is of the essence. Right?” 

It took a moment for Munkustrap’s brain to catch up with Alonzo’s assessment. Even through the mental fog, he knew that there wasn’t any disputing his protegee’s argument. But instead of verbalizing a concession, it seemed like all he could do was shake his head, his feverish eyes breaking contact with Alonzo’s to dart around to various imperfections in the asphalt, unable to lock onto any one thing. All he could see was Mistoffelees’s apprehensive face in his mind’s eye, the intuitive descent of fear over his cherubic face, the red and brown stains in his white fur where blood from his wounds coagulated and matted the strands. Munkustrap looked down at his empty arms dumbly, barely seeing his own surfeit of bumps and scratches. A sensory phantom of corporeal weight momentarily encumbered him as he recollected the moments before the water wrenched Mistoffelees from his grasp. And then his imagination spasmed involuntarily, jolting him back to an alleyway years ago, just outside the Junkyard, when a crowd of Jellicles encircled the limp body of the tiniest kitten any of them had ever seen. 

“Munk…?” 

The tabby’s eyes flickered up to Alonzo’s face, and he was jarred, once again, out of his fugue. “You’re right…you’re right,” he conceded, his head swiveling back and forth, eyes still wandering between abstract spots on the ground. He pushed a tuft of wet fur back from his forehead. “I just…I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I let this happen. I don't understand how I lost my grip.” 

Alonzo’s eyes were saucer-sized, his features pinched, his posture tense and unsettled. “Munk, listen. You didn’t—” 

“Munkustrap! Alonzo!” 

Both the toms’ heads shot in the direction of their names and landed on Coricopat, who was knelt in front of the storm drain, a stunned expression on his face. While he was a little more expressive than Tantomile, it was odd to see such unabridged emotion. “Come look at this.” 

The two cats joined him to form a trio, and together they crowded in front of the slat, looking down in the dark depths where water continued rushing. It hardly took a second for Munkustrap and Alonzo to understand what had Coricopat rapt; the water wasn’t merely a dark stream of murk, lost in the shadow of the sewer main, as it had been before. Now, it was illuminated with long, jagged bolts of searing-white light that came and went in flashes, cutting through the murk and highlighting every undulating particle, just like the spindly bolts of lightning that had early been dancing across the angry sky. 

The water was so rife with the electric cracks that there was hardly a moment where the white light didn’t emanate from the drain in between flashes. 

“ What the—” Alonzo muttered, eruditely breaking the silence between them. 

After an unquantifiable amount of time, the strobing flashes abruptly receded, replaced by a less intense variation of isolated particles flashing here and there like fireflies. The sidewalk dimmed. 

Coricopat was the first to lean away, his features pinched. A hand gravitated towards his temple and tapped the spot there, a nervous habit of his. 

“Mistoffelees,” he said pensively. “He’s…he’s…” 

Munkustrap was bowled over by a wave of vertigo in that moment, although it was more from sheer apprehension than any of his superficial afflictions. Coricopat was empathic and intuitive, often seeming to glean things about others from a distance; especially when it came to Mistoffelees, a cat with whom his bond was rivaled only by that which he had with his sister. 

“He’s what ?” Alonzo demanded, taking a step toward him. 

Coricopat looked at him, a bit cowed, and then looked back at the storm drain. His bright eyes widened. “Look,” he breathed. 

The others followed his gaze. Black smoke was seeping out of the drain slat, trailing lazily upward where it gathered on the walkway just beyond the curb. It moved in a way that no ordinary smoke would, unmotivated by any external force in the air itself, like it had a mind of its own. Even more strangely were the infinitesimal, numerous particles permeating the dark cloud, twinkling ethereally as they caught the light of the dim gas lamps above. To most bystanders, this would be a novel phenomenon, something ghostly and inexplicable. But to the three felines present, it was a familiar sight. 

The smoke eventually stopped coming and swirled in an isolated form over the cobblestone, condensing until it formed a shape. In a matter of seconds, the amorphous black fog corporealized, gracefully and beautifully solidifying smoothly into the form of Mistoffelees. 

Munkustrap was holding his breath without realizing, his mouth slightly ajar. For a moment he doubted what he was seeing. When Mistoffelees fully emerged from the smoke, at first, his eyes were entirely black, the yellow irises replaced by inky darkness. He stood with his back fully erect and his limbs straightened, looking as though he were hanging limply in the air. When he alighted, he blinked, and the last remaining bit of smoke curled out from beneath his eyelids, which flickered open again to reveal the ordinary glowing yellow beneath. The small cat’s eyes landed on the three standing on the asphalt in front of him—and then, they closed, and he pitched forward, as limp and as lifeless as a doll. 

Munkustrap had seen it coming and jolted to catch him, but he was held back by Coricopat; a good thing, it turned out, because in his condition he assuredly would have lost his balance and ate the pavement himself. It was Alonzo who lunged and caught the Conjuring Cat just in time; for a moment, they were a tangle of black and white as the older cat gently lowered the younger, arranging him in such a way that he’d lay across Alonzo’s lap as he sunk to his knees. One of his hands gently cradled Mistoffelees’s head, and the other gravitated toward his chest, searching for a heartbeat. 

“Mistoffelees,” he said tentatively, his tone unabashedly infused with urgency and fear, abject panic brewing in the undertow. 

Coricopat and Munkustrap were by his side in the next moment, the latter supported by the former. The Protector lowered himself to his knees as easily as he could, narrowly avoiding involuntary grunts of pain as every atrocity his body had been tolerating beat him over the head with more and more vigor. He could barely be bothered to pay attention to that; all he could see or think about was the languid form draped across Alonzo’s legs. His own paw and gently took the magician’s jaw, angling his head to get a look at him. He looked all the worse for wear, which the tabby expected; by now, after being submerged for the umpteenth time in the dirty floodwaters, his white fur was all but dyed brown. The gash over his eyes stained almost the entire side of his face a dark, desaturated red. 

He moved his paw in front of the little cat’s nose. 

“Is he breathing?” Coricopat asked, his voice shaking. He had none of the pretenses of heroic stoicism that either of his compatriots had, and he didn’t attempt to conceal his despair. Tears gathered at the bases of his brown eyes. 

“Yes,” Munkustrap responded. He moved his paw to Mistoffelees’s cheek, weakly swiping at the blood that gathered there. “But barely.” 

“He’s burning. ” Alonzo exhaled. His hand lifted from Mistoffelees’s chest and moved to hover above a set of deep gouges in the younger cat’s leg, a few of many littering his frame in varying depths and sizes. There was no telling how much blood the little cat had lost, especially with how difficult it was to distinguish the dark sanguine among his soaked, muddy fur. When he tore his eyes away to look at his mentor, they looked about as stormy as the turbulent sky. “What happened down there?” he asked, his voice like a hiss. “Both of you look like you’ve been attacked .” 

“We were,” Munkustrap responded simply. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, so tightly that fireworks of color exploded in the void of darkness. “I’ll explain everything later. We need to get him back to the Egyptian now. ” 

Alonzo ducked his head, gently rearranging the limp frame in his arms, placing one arm beneath his upper body and the other under his knees. Through it all, Mistoffelees didn’t so much as stir. “It’s a long walk,” the monochromatic tom rued. “We scattered all over London looking for you two, trying to hit every storm drain. Coricopat and I went the furthest.” 

“Then we better move fast,” Munkustrap responded, nonplussed. His determination lost a bit of power when he listed to the side trying to get into step. Coricopat, who was still supporting him, mercifully prevented his inevitable descent to the asphalt. 

“All right,” Munkustrap murmured, pinching the bridge of his nose. He took a couple deep breaths to ameliorate the debilitating pain and nausea. Darkness waned in and out of the corners of his vision and he distantly started to wonder how he would make it all the way back. “Alonzo, go ahead of us. Go as fast as you can. We’ll be right behind you.” 

Alonzo got to his feet carefully, angling Mistoffelees in such a way that his head could nest in the crook of the older tom’s neck. His brown eyes darted back and forth between Munkustrap and Coricopat. “Are you sure?” 

“Go, Alonzo,” Coricopat said gently, before the Protector could answer. “We’ll get back fine, eventually. Mistoffelees needs you to move quickly.” 

Alonzo hardly needed more prompting than that. With a nod, he turned and took off with his cargo held tightly against his chest, going as fast as he dared. Coricopat and Munkustrap walked behind him at a much slower pace, with the silver tabby leaning at least half his weight against the empath. Coricopat was holding his hand tight where it landed on his shoulder, his arm draped around the back of his neck. The younger cat was a bit shorter, so the arrangement was somewhat awkward, but he boasted a strength and sturdiness that was often overlooked. 

“You may need to carry me back,” Munkustrap quipped, trying to dissolve some of the frustration of not being able to walk without white-hot pain shooting up and down the entire side of his body. 

“I will if I must,” Coricopat answered with the same wilting levity, trying to angle a small smile at the Protector. 

A silence passed between them that was a bit awkward, although Munkustrap barely had any energy to spare over social mores. He liked to think that he knew every cat in his extended proverbial family rather well, but Coricopat and Tantomile were among his most introverted cohorts. For the most part, they seemed to prefer each other’s company over anyone else’s, and the others with whom they were close were precious few and closely guarded. Munkustrap, in his demanding and elevated position, was hardly sought out by either of them for camaraderie. 

Coricopat was tense next to him, sturdy and steady as he walked. His fingers drummed rhythmically against his hand. His was more tactile and fidgety than Tantomile, always seemingly less sure of himself, more kiddish in a way. 

“Would talking help to keep you alert?” 

Munk angled his head to follow the voice. Coricopat wasn’t looking at him when he spoke, minding the pathway ahead of them instead. They were walking through a quiet part of the city, along a poorly-lit backroad, headed for a tight alley. If they could use the fire escapes and rooftops, it surely would have been a quicker journey, but that was clearly out of the question. 

“Couldn’t hurt,” the Protector answered groggily, realizing that he had no idea how far they had come or where they relatively were. “...I was watching through the window when…it happened,” Coricopat said, still looking forward. Munk glanced at him again and thought that he looked a little distant. His voice was, perhaps, a tad meeker than it usually was. “When the lightning hit that pole, I mean. And Mistoffelees…uh—” 

The silver tabby couldn’t restrain himself from snorting slightly, amused at his compatriot’s ineloquence. Often enough, it was difficult to describe the Conjurer’s mystical feats; but this was on another level of awe-inspiring the likes of which he hadn’t exhibited since, maybe, conjuring Old Deuteronomy back from Macavity. 

“He used his magic to…absorb, I suppose, the electricity,” Munkustrap supplied. He paused to cough. “...If he hadn’t, Alonzo, Cassandra, and I would all be goners.”

“The water,” Coricopat continued. “That was…?” 

Munkustrap made a noise that was jointly pensive and pained. “He had to…he kept saying he couldn’t just hold it all in. I suppose all that energy had to go somewhere. When he was swept away, he must have…I guess that’s when he dispelled it.” 

“I felt him sort of…wane, for a moment.”

Munkustrap glanced sidelong at him again. “Wane?” 

“I had been trying to sense him, to…to reach out to him, all night. It’s easier when the moon is full.” With that, he glanced up at the cloudy sky, through which the moon in any phase was completely obfuscated. “I thought I felt him, finally, which is what led Alonzo and I to that storm drain. But after the water…after it…er, whatever you’d call it. After that, there was a moment when I couldn’t feel him anymore. Such a bright light was suddenly gone. I thought…” 

Munkustrap coughed again, cutting him off. It was something of a mercy. He may have augmented the hacks a touch. Coricopat didn’t conclude his thought even after the fit died down. 

“...He’s badly drained,” he said instead. “The entire ordeal cost him greatly, I believe. Where magic is concerned, that is, among…other things.” 

Like blood loss and infection and illness, Munkustrap thought bitterly. The memory of Mistoffelees slipping from his grasp flashed before his mind’s eye, crowding out most else. He tried mightily to banish it. 

“We’ve talked about it before,” Munkustrap muttered. “About him being careful with how much he exerts himself. I’ve asked Old Deuteronomy about it, about…whether it’s dangerous for a magical cat to expend too much power. He said that…well, essentially, he said it’s best to err on the side of caution.” 

“It couldn’t be helped in this case, it seems,” Coricopat offered.

Munkustrap exhaled—or, tried to, although it came out more like a series of weak coughs. “I don’t know,” the tabby said, voice hoarse almost beyond audibility. “I had him while we were coming up the ladder. I lost my grip on him. I should have been able to hold on.” 

Coricopat made a discontented noise. “It sounds like it would have gone poorly for you if you had.” 

Munkustrap had nothing to say to that. 

“He may have wanted you to let go.”

The elder feline was formulating a response, but his thoughts lagged, and a coherent retort never developed. It seemed like Coricopat may have been saying something else, but the empathic young tom abruptly sounded distant and muffled, like he was on the other side of a wall. There was a vague sensation of something solid touching his face, but without any resistance left in him, his eyelids slid shut, and for a while time passed unperceived. 

Jellicles had been lined up at various storm drains and manholes within several miles outside the Egyptian. Alonzo knew he would encounter at least a couple of those checkpoints on his route back, but he could only hope that the cats would still be there. They all agreed to meet up back up at the theater no later than dawn, but that didn’t preclude the possibility of wandering off or searching elsewhere. 

It was a profound relief when he came up on a familiar couple of silhouettes in the distance; Asparagus and Plato. As soon as he was spotted, the pair came up to meet him. 

The fuss over the inert cat in Alonzo’s arms was, expectedly, immediate. Asparagus and Plato were both breathless at the sight of him; the elder looking outraged, as if wanting to point the finger at somebody for this; the other, looking expressly distraught, uncharacteristically emotive. Plato was so rarely bothered by anything that it was strange to see a wide-eyed, openly aghast expression come over his features. 

The immediate plethora of questions; What happened? Where was he? Where’s Munkustrap?, had to go on the backburner; Alonzo quickly told them as much. 

“Munkustrap is with Coricopat. He’s hurt too, so they’re moving pretty slow.” 

Their expressions grew infinitely more incredulous, and alarmed, at this intimation, but the Secondary Protector continued full throttle. “I have to get Mistoffelees back to the Egyptian. Munkustrap’s probably not going to be able to walk the whole way back. You both should go in the direction I came from and meet up with them. Coricopat’s going to need the help.” 

Plato’s eyes, wide and glimmering, were flickering between every cat present, including the comatose magician. “But, Alonzo—” he started. 

“I have to go,” the encumbered tom interrupted. “There’s no time to talk.” Mistoffelees is dying was on the tip of his tongue, but he held it. “Go. Now.” 

Alonzo, while having no small measure of influence within the colony, was Asparagus's junior. On any other occasion he’d never doll out orders like that to the respected elder, one whom went back with Old Deuteronomy and other pillars of the tribe since before he was born. But the wizened, if not cranky tom expertly construed the direness of the situation, and nodded reverently. With an encouraging tug on Plato’s arm, they both bounded off into the night in the direction from which Alonzo came. 

As soon as the monochromatic tom took off again, the head nestled in the crook of his neck shifted ever so slightly. The elder cat looked down at the younger, hopeful, and saw that the eyelids were flickering. A faint, almost missable sound seemed to bubble up from the back of his throat. But, the moment passed as quickly as it came, and the marienette’s strings were cut all over again. It gave Alonzo a bit of a fright; compulsively, still afoot, he nuzzled Mistoffelees’s head with his own, lingering for just long enough to detect the sensation of breath against his whiskers. It was there, but it was shallow and halting. 

“Hold on, little one,” he said encouragingly. It may have been more for himself. 

For the first time since it began raining the evening prior, the clouds parted just enough to reveal the ghostly blue glow of a half-moon. Alonzo was tireless as he continued running, picking up speed as if the lunar globe energized him. Mistoffelees didn’t move again the rest of the way back. 

Chapter Text

When Munkustrap awoke, he heard voices before any of his other senses calibrated. He hadn’t keyed into what they were saying at first, momentarily submerged in a fog of incoherent thoughts and disjointed memories. It became immediately apparent to him that he was laying down, that and that he was on something soft, and that he was dry and comfortable. When his sight functionally joined his hearing, all he saw was black; and for a moment, that was odd, until he realized it was because his eyes were still closed. 

He decided to let them linger that way for a moment, taking it one sensory function at a time. He listened to the voices, which were close, but not too close. Hushed, but animated. They sounded like they were on the other side of the room; whatever room this was. Two male voices; two familiar male voices. His brow pinched as his mind rose to the task of assigning identities to the acoustic stimuli. 

“...disappear, without telling anyone where you were going, and you’re blaming me ?” 

He chose to tune into a rather exciting conversation, it seemed. The first voice was strong, youthful, expressive. Alonzo. 

His was quickly joined by a second; “Is that what I said ?” This second voice was also youthful, but it was smoother, more melodic, audibly less dour even while sounding angry. Munkustrap knew it in a heartbeat; Tugger. 

“You’re acting like it’s my fault that you were nowhere to be found when it counted.” 

“ You’re acting like it’s bizarre that I went off to do my own thing when nothing was going on. How was I supposed to know there’d be some crisis?” 

“You could have told somebody where you were going, for one thing—” 

The heated conversation continued as Munkustrap made the bold decision to peel his eyelids apart. For a protracted moment, he couldn’t make out where he was; it clearly wasn’t the Junkyard, but it was somewhere with a familiar scent, and a familiar feeling, and a familiar crosswork of industrial black beams crossing every which way over his head, high up in the recesses of the ceiling. 

The tabby stirred, feeling isolated hubs of pain abruptly make themselves known. He groaned involuntarily, his head lulling in the general direction of the two other cats. It looked like they were in some old dressing room, or some such; a smaller, cozier area, dimly lit by the orange glow of candles nearby. 

“...think I’d want to be involved.” Tugger. 

“Not everything is about you.” Alonzo looked about as intense as he sounded; his ears were flattened, his posture tense, shoulder shrugged. Tugger had a bit of height on him, but it didn’t seem to deter the monochromatic feline, who was unhesitatingly getting in the other’s face. “Maybe we were more worried about finding your brother than wasting time turning the theater upside-down just to pull you away from whatever dame you were macking on.” 

Tugger, for his part, wasn’t as visibly taut as Alonzo. The former always preferred to appear unbothered, and no exception was made here as he leaned against the doorjamb with his arms crossed. His tail was the primary indicator of his attitude, swishing patternlessly back and forth. 

At Alonzo’s last condemnation, however, the Curious Cat pushed himself off and stood his full height, increasing his advantage thereof that much more over the other cat. He placed a hand up, palm-forward, a halting gesture. 

“ Whoa , whoa. First of all, I was not macking on anybody. The Tugger does not mack . Second of all, I had to find out what was going on from the kittens . The kittens !” 

“Whose fault—” 

Munkustrap heard enough. He squeezed his eyes shut again, only for a flurry of vivid, egregious memories to flood back in, like the crack in the dam finally split. His eyelids wrenched apart again and he sat up in a flurry, but paid dearly for it when his ribs protested with a blinding hit of pain. He couldn’t stop the yelp before it grunted out of his throat; it was all he could do to wrap one arm around his affronted torso while the other one kept him from colliding gracelessly back to the floor, which certainly would have only exacerbated his woes. 

That was all quite an effective stop to the conversation. Alonzo was away from the door and on his knees by Munkustrap’s side in a blink. 

“Whoa! Easy,” his protegee soothed, hands hovering unsurely in the air around Munk’s shoulders. 

“Well, well.” That was Tugger’s smug voice. Munkustrap opened his eyes again, jaw clenched and features pinched, so that he could squint up at his errant sibling. He would find him standing right behind Alonzo, hips akimbo, arms crossed back over his chest, a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. Unbothered, as always, or trying to seem that way. “Look who’s back already.” 

“ Eugh —Everlasting,” Munk grunted through his teeth, sounding incensed at the pain itself as if it were an entirely separate entity. He went to massage his ribs instinctively, only then realizing that his whole upper body was enveloped in gauze. 

“You have some broken ribs,” Alonzo explained, noticing the aborted ministration. “...Among other issues. You’re running a fever, too. You need to take it easy; we didn’t think you’d be awake so soon.” 

Munkustrap was shaking his head before his protegee was done speaking. “Mis-Mistoffelees,” he sputtered, finding that the pain left him breathless. “Where is he? Is he all right?” 

“He’s, er, here. I mean, in the theater. With us. He’s in another dressing room down the hall,” Alonzo answered awkwardly. “Jenny’s seeing to him right now. Jellylorum, too. You should probably—” 

“Is he okay ?” Munkustrap insisted sharply, ears pinned back. His head was swimming, but even then it wasn’t lost on him how Alonzo avoided answering the second question. And it wasn’t lost on him, either, the way Tugger fell into an unfunny silence, an undisguised frown abruptly transforming his features. 

“We’re working on him.” That was Alonzo’s feeble attempt at placation. “Honestly, I…couldn’t really tell you. Jenny took him as soon as we got back.” 

“Which was when ?” 

“A little over two hours ago.” It was Tugger who answered. 

Munkustrap squirmed. There was a blanket that had fallen and bunched up around his waist when he bolted upright. He gave an earnest attempt to ignore the pain in favor of getting himself out from under it, but he didn’t make much progress before Alonzo resolutely placed his hands on the older cat’s shoulders, holding him in place. 

“I need to see him,” the tabby stated. 

“Munk, please ,” Alonzo begged. He hated going against his mentor; if he chose to do so, then he must have been desperate. “Jenny was very clear that she didn’t want anyone in there until she gave the okay. I already dealt with your brother here—” he rolled his eyes towards Tugger, who rolled his own eyes back, tail flicking again. There was clearly a story there. “---she’ll kill me if you go waltzing in there now.” 

Munkustrap heaved a sigh, allowing himself to settle back on his elbows. He raised one shaky paw and pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to generate a new notch of pain, almost as if to distract from his seemingly perpetual migraine. Even while frantic, he knew better than to put Alonzo out; against Jenny of all cats. And he was also beginning to understand that his motor functions were all but null at the moment. He wanted, carnally, to see Mistoffelees for himself, as if he couldn’t believe that the Conjuring Cat was alive and being tended to unless he empirically witnessed it; it took an unusual amount of cognitive exertion to remind himself that his charge is in good hands and that showing up to his sickroom uninvited wouldn’t help anything. 

“Where is everyone?” the silver tabby muttered, after wading through the quagmire of pragmatism. “Is everybody here? Accounted for?” 

“Yes,” Alonzo responded. “Everyone’s back. They’re all right outside, in the hallway.” He nodded towards the door. “Jenny told everyone to stay out of the dressing rooms for now. She didn’t want you or Mistoffelees crowded.” 

At that, the tabby felt an unwelcome call of sleep’s reprieve replace the ephemeral rush. He gracelessly sidled back into a lying position, cushioned, apparently, by another blanket that had been folded up for him to lay on. He continued pinching the bridge of his nose, massaging it, searching for some kind of anodyne to his aches and pains. 

“How did I get here?” he asked. His voice had simmered down into a quiet, hoarse facsimile of his ordinarily operatic intonation. He hated hearing himself. “I don’t remember making it back.” 

“You passed out not long after I ran ahead,” Alonzo answered. “I figured you weren’t long for this world. I ran into Asparagus and Plato on the way back and sent them to help Coricopat.” 

Munkustrap blanched. His hand fell to his side. “They had to carry me?” 

“Alternatingly, er, carry, drag…I don’t know. Whatever worked.” 

It was times like these that the tabby understood Mistoffelees’s appreciation for his smallness and slinkiness. To some cats the diminutive stature was mockable, as there was little to offer by way of physical strength. But there was no denying that a tiny cat was portable if nothing else. Munkustrap hated to think of himself as dead weight—not the least because he was one of the tallest and sturdiest cats in the colony. 

“Maybe it was a good thing you kept me in the dark, Cookie,” Tugger piped up with an acidic quip. He looked down at the supine form of his brother. “At least I didn’t have to help lug your heavy ass back here.” 

Alonzo got back up to his feet, ears turned outward, rearing on the taller feline with balled fists. “Do not call me—” 

“Gentlemen.” 

They both turned their gazes to Munkustrap, who had quieted the impending blow-out with the one, weak beseechment. His eyes were squeezed shut, face pained. “Save it,” he eked out, although not with the sternness he would have liked. “Please just tell them—tell everyone—thank you. For looking and…helping us get back.” 

By now, the tabby was bereft of articulation. His words slurred slightly like he was drunk. 

“I will,” he heard Alonzo say. 

He would have descended into sleep, then, kicking and screaming, if it hadn’t been for the feeling of a presence looming over him right by his side. It was a presence he knew better than perhaps any other; one that he had grown accustomed to, fitfully, over the course of years. It was a scent that he recognized, from which he drew comfort, in an odd sort of way that he supposed only a frenetic little brother could. 

“Hey…Munk.” 

The summons was gentle and unsure; Tugger probably wasn’t confident that the Protector was still conscious, and didn’t want to disrupt his slumber if he wasn’t. Munkustrap could have easily capitalized on the rare caution and pretended to not hear him, but his brotherly instincts won out. He cracked an eye open and found, as he expected, the fluffy silhouette of his sibling knelt right next to him. 

Tugger took that as an unspoken indication to continue. He fidgeted with the hem of his glove, which was odd. He so rarely fidgeted. “Um…do you think that, er—after…whatever happened to you guys down there. I know you’re not going to talk about it now, but—uh—” 

Munkustrap’s other eye opened, and he let his head lull so that he could look at his brother more fully; he was, honest-to-Everlasting, fascinated by the display of ineloquence. He knew there was all but one topic that could ever get him stammering like this. 

“...I’m just feeling kind of—I’m a little, er—” 

Munkustrap was almost touched. It occurred to him in that moment that the others hitherto had no way of knowing what exactly had occurred to their beleaguered compatriots in the sewers. Now Tugger, plagued by uncertainty and scared to death, was turning to his big brother for consolation; the silver tabby hardly thought he’d see the day. He had half a mind to challenge the bigger cat to find his verbal footing, to impishly prolong his agony; but, instead, he shakily raised a hand and let it settle comfortingly on the Curious Cat’s knee. 

“I know,” he soothed. “I’m scared too.” 

The younger cat cocked an eyebrow. It was gracious to Munkustrap for him to look so incredulous. “You are?” 

“Yeah. But…don’t worry.” Munkustrap tried to force out a smile, although he couldn’t be sure if he was successful. “Mistoffelees will be okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” The elder sibling gave the knee a pat. “It’d take much more than a bad night in the sewer to bring the Conjuring Cat down. Besides…” his head lulled back into its neutral position, his eyes turned ceilingward, lids droopy. “...You know what Old Deuteronomy says. A cat who worries before it is necessary…” 

“...Worries more than is necessary.” Tugger submitted. 

“Yep.” Munkustrap lifted his hand from the other’s knee and it flopped bonelessly back down to his side. “Besides…it’s bad for…your image.” 

He heard the cathartic sound of his brother’s amused snort, and that was the last thing he heard before his eyelids descended like the final curtain, and he was out like a light.

*****

For the next forty-eight hours, Munkustrap oscillated fitfully in and out of consciousness. He caught glimpses, in his waning periods of wakefulness, of a handful of other cats. It seemed like they were on a rotation, never more than four at a time.

Every time he woke up, he asked after Mistoffelees; he never remembered, apparently, the previous inquiries, so his bedside nurse always intimated that the magical cat was “The same as the last time you asked.” Eventually, the silver tabby stopped demanding clarification, intuiting that he wasn’t going to get much further than that. 

It wasn’t until after two full days of this that he felt marginally like himself; he had no concept of the passing of time up until then, however, and when he awoke and pushed himself up into a sitting position, the first thing he asked was How long have I been asleep? 

It was Cassandra who had been there at the time. “On and off the last two days.” 

The intimation felt like a stake to the heart. “Two days?” he repeated, aghast, pushing the boundaries of his sore throat. He pushed a tuft of disheveled fur back from his forehead. “ Why did you all let me sleep that long?”

Cassandra all but scoffed. “Because you needed it, clearly.” 

There was no point in arguing that; the Protector skipped ahead. “How’s Mistoffelees?” 

His compatriot’s face was, as ever, unreadably stoic. “I don’t know, to be honest,” she eventually answered. “I’d like to say no news is good news.” 

Munkustrap sighed and got himself into a maintainable seated position, where he wasn’t having to use his oblique muscles or put pressure on his arms. That answer was different, at least, than the vague reminders of the Protector’s tautological brain fog. 

“Do you think Jenny would mind if I saw him?” 

He asked the question lugubriously, thinking he already knew the answer. But, to his surprise, he wasn’t met with immediate resistance; rather, Cassandra got up and moved closer to him, her nose gravitating near the side of his face, lingering there as she silently assessed his scent. She then nuzzled her cheek against him; these kinds of gestures were a little more rare to see from Cassandra compared to others, but Munkustrap figured it was done with scientific intent. He let her examine him unprotestingly. 

It was over with quickly enough. She leaned back and eyed him neutrally. “You still have a fever, doll,” she said. “But I’ll ask Miss Jenny for you anyway.” 

The tabby exhaled a puff of air. Ordinarily he’d leverage his influence; but if there was one cat whose orders he couldn’t supersede—besides Old Deuteronomy—it was Jennyanydots. 

Cassandra left for a bit and came back with Alonzo in tow. 

“Hello,” the monochromatic feline greeted pleasantly. Munkustrap barely restrained a frown at the sight of him; he was droopy, fur a little unkempt, his posture somewhat compromised—which, for Alonzo, was a big deal. “Jenny says it’s all right for you to visit Mistoffelees, if you want to.” 

The silver tabby gave an affirmative nod. “You look exhausted. ” 

It was almost like Alonzo put effort into feigning surprise, like he had no idea what the Protector could possibly be talking about. “What? No. I’m fine.” 

There was no utility in arguing; and in the next moment, in any case, Alonzo was hooking his arm around Munkustrap and helping him get to his feet. It was infuriating, to the elder cat, how much he sincerely needed the assistance. The vertigo and nausea had graciously waned after all the sleep, but his limbs all felt stiff and weak, and his fractured ribs seemed to protest every solitary movement. 

“He hasn’t woken up yet, just so you know,” Alonzo commented quietly as the two made their way out. Cassandra pushed the door open for them and held it. 

Munkustrap had nothing to say to that. The journey down the hallway covered a few feet, but it took an embarrassingly long time to traverse it. It was nice, at least, to see a handful of his fellow Jellicles again, as a good many of them were curled up along the baseboards, fast asleep. Munkustrap actually smiled fondly at the sight; it must have been the middle of the day, then, when usually at least half the tribe would be passing the time in the comfort of their humans’ homes. Munkustrap wondered how many had elected to stay at the Egyptian; how many went back to their houses or if any had ventured back to the Junkyard in the wake of the rainstorm. 

The only cat who was in the hallway at the time to wake up as Munkustrap passed was Tumblebrutus, who was curled up in a pile with Jemima and George. When his bleary eyes settled on the adults passing through, he angled up excitedly, eyes wide, narrowly avoiding disturbing his co-sleepers. 

Alonzo hushed him with a silencing gesture before the kitten could say a word; Tumble, graciously, obeyed the unspoken commandment and settled quietly, although he followed Munkustrap carefully with his eyes. The silver tabby smiled and winked at him, genuinely glad to see him on better, calmer terms than last time.

Cassandra softly rapped on the door to the dressing room for them, and Jenny pushed it open a crack hardly before she was done. She looked at Munkustrap warmly, a soft genuine smile and a delicate squint of her eyes. The tabby, towering over her, felt like a kitten in her wake; it was impressive, frankly. 

“Munkustrap, dearest,” she greeted, voice hushed. “It’s so nice to see your eyes open.” 

She nuzzled him gently in the shoulder on his better side—about where her head came up to him, even while he was hunched—and he reciprocated gratefully with a nuzzle to her crown.

This dressing room was identical to the one Munkustrap had been occupying; it was also windowless and also illuminated by the yellow lights of scattered candles. Mistoffelees wasn’t the first cat the tabby saw; Victoria and Pouncival were also there, along with Coricopat and Tantomile. All and sundry perked up the moment Alonzo and Munkustrap hobbled in; the two kittens bounded over to them and nuzzled the Protector in an excited, nonetheless scrupulous greeting, while the twins stood reverently back, each with a warm smile on their faces. The silver tabby couldn’t help but grin, deeply warmed by the affection. A loving nuzzle from some of the youngest members of his family was something he hadn’t realized he had been missing in the fog of his convalescence. 

The jubilation was short lived; Victoria took his hand—gently, like she was handling fine glass—and guided him towards the bundle of blankets on the far side of the room. Nestled deeply within was a tiny, placid figure, almost entirely obfuscated. Mistoffelees was laying on his side with only his neck and head visible, cushioned on a folded comforter. Confoundingly, Munkustrap almost wanted to laugh at the sight; it may have been a delirious cocktail of relief at the image of his young friend alive and safe, of the rush of sadness knowing that he wasn’t out of the woods, and of humor at how ridiculously small he looked bundled into the human-sized textiles. 

Somebody was noticeably absent. 

“No Tugger?” the Protector inquired. 

“Jenny sent him back to the Yard to get more blankets and supplies,” Alonzo supplied. He then added, quietly so that only Munkustrap could hear, “I think she wanted to get rid of him. Do you know your brother hovers?” 

Munk snorted. Alonzo helped him get settled into a seated position next to the comatose tomcat. With only his face visible, the tabby could observe that he had been groomed clean; his fur was no longer darkened by muck and blood. The gash above his eye had been sutured. Even cleaned and stitched, it looked like a nasty cut; it occurred to Munkustrap for the umpteenth time how lucky the colony was to have Jenny, a nurturing provider whose owner happened to be a veterinarian. So many disasters, illnesses, and hurts soothed by the knowledgeable paws of the Gumbie Cat, and the supplies that she had been systematically spiriting away from her human’s clinic for about as long as he could remember. 

Pouncival sat nearby with his knees tucked up to his chin; it was strange to see him so dour and quiet. Victoria slinked to the other side of Mistoffelees and got resettled. 

“Not too close, darling,” Jennyanydots gently chided, and the white cat ruefully scootched back an inch. 

That confused Munkustrap; he reached forward and placed his paw on the top of Mistoffelees’s head in between his ears, but the eldest feline hadn’t given him a slap on the wrist for that . He grimaced somewhat when he felt the intense heat against his paw pads. 

“He doesn’t have anything contagious, does he?” 

“No, no,” Jenny answered quickly. She seemed to intuit the root of Munkustrap’s query. “It’s just that his fever is too high. We have the sheet over him because he shakes, but we can’t do much more than that. I don’t want him getting any warmer.” 

Munk exhaled. Absentmindedly, he stroked the Conjuring Cat’s crown with his thumb. Mistoffelees wasn’t exactly kittenish, but seeing him peacefully asleep, Munkustrap once again found it hard to tell how much he had grown up since he first joined the colony. He was still…eccentric, perhaps. Different , others would fondly say often enough. It was hard to put a finger on him; he seemed youthful and naive at times, like he required exposition and guidance, and to be handled carefully. Other times he seemed ancient and wisened, like he had been alive for as long as the cosmos. Sometimes expressive and readable, and other times abjectly stoic and mute. Honest yet secretive. It had been that way since the beginning, and everybody had always loved him for all his complexity. 

Three-odd years ago, Munkustrap had been in a spot similar to this one; but, Mistoffelees really had been a kitten back then, and the Protector didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. Since then, the magician had become a part of his family, and now Munkustrap felt like he knew him more, and also less, than ever. 

Keep an eye on that one. Incredibly unwelcome pinpricks of saline started accumulating at the bases of Munkustrap’s eyes. I believe there’s more to this kitten than meets the eye.

It was funny. Deuteronomy had repeated the sentiment almost immediately after the Jellicle Ball, when the sun was rising and all the exhausted cats had hunkered down to sleep off the festivities and the excitement from multiple near-disasters. 

The leader and his second had had a long conversation afterwards, as they did every year. Mistoffelees, himself deeply asleep elsewhere, was one of many topics that came up.

Munkustrap blinked. The ancient feline seemed troubled. For as long as he had known Mistoffelees, the extent of the latter’s magic had been a revelation to him, only when it had been used to rescue him from Macavity. 

“Magical Cats were supposed to have gone extinct, more or less, long ago. Did you know that?”

The elderly leader had recollected this pensively, innocently, like he was merely fascinated. But Munkustrap knew him better than that; he sensed that there was something onerous in the undertow. 

The Protector, honestly, hadn’t known about the apparent decline, and eventual disappearance, of magicians. This intimation could have come up countless times before, about Macavity for one thing, but it never had. The Jellicles had always been attune to, and aware of, the concept of magic—long before any ostensibly Magical Cats had come into the picture.

“Old Deuteronomy,” the silver tabby began, voice earnest and incredulous. “Is there something I should be worried about?”

The Jellicle Leader smiled as if to reassure him. “No, no,” he said soothingly. “Just…watch out for him, Munkustrap. Watch out for all of them — protect your tribe.” 

The silver tabby blinked again.

“I will…of course, I will,” he said, in earnest, after a protracted pause. “I always have.” 

Still smiling, Old Deuteronomy leaned forward, and gave the Protector’s knee a couple pats. “I know,” he said, his paw lingering. “I know.” 

His smile hadn’t met his eyes.

A hand to his shoulder jerkily awoke Munkustrap from his reminiscence. Jenny was knelt next to him, looking at him pityingly. 

“He’ll be all right, dear,” she said. 

Jenny wouldn’t say something unless she meant it, but the reassurance felt perfunctory and hollow, like it was a kindly fib meant to placate a kitten. Munkustrap asked, clinically, for a summary. 

Jenny provided it; the most imminent concern, she said, was the fever. Munkustrap’s fever had been stubborn, but it stayed low grade; Mistoffelees’s had been high and so far hadn’t receded a tenth of a degree. There was a rattle in his lungs, so it seemed that inhaling all the contaminated water culminated in pneumonia. She then peeled back the sheet to show Munkustrap the wound dressings; of course, he couldn’t see the gouges beneath the carefully wound gauze, so he settled for a few charitable descriptions. 

The Conjuring Cat’s arms and shoulders were wrapped, concealing the deep lacerations from where untamed claws sunk in. More gauze around his torso protected the wounds on his back. Both legs were dressed, as well, but it was the left one that was really concerning; Jenny didn’t have to use colorful language to describe it; Munkustrap remembered how shredded it had been. The wounds themselves were bad enough; but by the time the prodigal cats had been found, both were sporting infections, undoubtedly augmented by prolonged exposure to sewage contaminated with Everlasting-knew-what. That Mistoffelees was more exigently febrile than Munkustrap could have been for several reasons; a higher net of open wounds, the pneumonia compounding his immune system’s efforts, the smaller stature, an overall less hale constitution…

He was clean, but his ordinarily immaculate fur was interrupted erratically by smaller cuts and scrapes; Jenny quipped that she was sure the Conjuring Cat will be distraught over the irregularities. She concluded her summation by pointing out that she hadn’t detected any broken bones; so there was that, at least.

They had positioned him on his side to make it easier for his lungs, the tabby was told. 

“He hasn’t stirred?” Munk asked. “Not once?” 

“He’s far away.” 

It had been Coricopat who answered before Jenny had a chance to. Munkustrap’s eyes shot up towards him; he had forgotten the twins were there. Tantomile was sitting, expressionless, her head resting against Coricopat’s shoulder; the latter was hugging his knees to himself like Pouncival had been, looking vacantly in Mistoffelees’s general direction. 

“Like I told you,” the empath continued. “Absorbing all that power and holding onto it…and then expelling it all at once…required a lot of magic. It drained him.” He shrunk then, his eyes becoming sympathetic. “He’s exhausted.” 

Munkustrap bit his lip. Jenny had replaced the sheet, but Mistoffelees’s pawtips protruded slightly from beneath the hem. The silvery tabby reached thoughtlessly and took the tiny paw in his, feeling clinically for some sign of life; a twitch, or reciprocal pressure, or anything. 

“That brings me to my own queries for you, Munkustrap,” Jenny said gently. “The last anybody saw of you and Mistoffelees was right before you were swept away. That doesn’t explain all your wounds.” Hey eyes darted to a couple of the spots on the Protector’s own person where bandages concealed vicious claw marks. “I understand if you don’t care to now. But at some point, I’d like to hear about what exactly happened to the two of you down there.” 

There was a beat while Munkustrap collected his thoughts. His head was still foggy; the migraine had been reduced to a dull, constant thrum. Truthfully, he didn’t care to. He would have been content to never think about that insane stranger ever again, much less the odd things he had said, or the wild, feral look in his eyes. But he knew it would have to be done eventually; and the sooner he got out of the way, he figured, the easier he would rest afterwards.  

With a captive audience, he recalled what he could. The others didn’t interrupt once, unless it was to ask a question, or for clarification. Victoria had been radio-silent throughout, but Munkustrap could see her wide-eyed expression unwaveringly latched onto him from where she lay on the other side of Mistoffelees. In the moments where the Protector described the more harrowing details…the little white dancer would reach and settle her paw on Mistoffelees’s head, or somewhere around his neck, carefully avoiding the injured areas. And she would pet him delicately, slowly, a faint and loving touch the tenderness of which no other cat could emulate. 

When he finished recounting, Munkustrap scrubbed a hand down his face with his free hand. “That’s the long and short of it,” he murmured. 

Alonzo sagged next to him. “I’m sorry all this happened,” he rued. “I should have been able to prevent it. I should have been able to get to you before—”

Munkustrap put a hand on his shoulder. “No,” he interrupted forcefully, but not acidically. “Don’t be ridiculous. If you had tried, you probably would have ended up getting swept away along with us.” At that, his gaze fell back to Mistoffelees, whose paw was still encased in Munkustrap’s. 

Jenny’s voice broke in. “Now, don’t you go beating your own self up either, young man.”

Munkustrap could have laughed. There was hardly a cat in existence that knew him so well. “It didn’t have to be this way, Jenny,” he exhaled bitterly, not meeting her stern gaze. “It should be me in Mistoffelees’s place. It’s my duty to protect, and I failed.” 

His ears turned themselves outward with the bout of self-reproach. The extent of his failure was unforgivable; it took the form of one of his own Jellicle Cats, injured and sick, laying in front of him. Old Deuteronomy’s voice rang, louder than ever, between his ears. Watch out for him, Munkustrap. 

He expected a rebuttal from the Gumbie Cat, but, instead, it was Pouncival’s voice—bizarrely quiet and unsteady—that lifted in answer. 

“I wonder what was wrong with that cat,” he queried. “...Why was he saying all those crazy things? And how did he end up in the sewers all alone?” 

“Such questions are for a future date,” Jennyanydots said before Munkustrap could even begin to think of an intelligent response. She turned to the afflicted tabby and placed a gentle paw on his shoulder. “You should probably get back to resting, dear. You look like you’re about to fall over any second.” 

Munkustrap couldn’t deny that he was feeling deader by the second; it was becoming a challenge to keep his eyes open and his spine erect. He nearly conceded the point, but something made him stop short, every preceding thought aborted.

He felt a twitch against his paw; a bit of pressure. He inhaled automatically and then held it. “Mistoffelees?” 

He was sure that Mistoffelees’s hand had fasciculated in his own. All eyes shot in a flash towards the Conjuring Cat; Victoria sat up, orange eyes wide. The twins immediately sat up straight. Pouncival unfolded himself and inched forward, a wide and anticipatory gaze sprawled across his cherubic face. 

After a harrowing moment of dead-silence, the small figure stirred beneath the sheet, a low groan eking out from between vaguely parted lips. 

Munkustrap gave the hand a squeeze. With his other hand, he encouragingly stroked the younger feline’s forehead. “Mistoffelees?” he repeated. “Can you hear me?” 

Fitfully, his eyelids fluttered. The battle to attain wakefulness waged for a long moment before the yellows of his irises finally emerged, glistening and fever-bright. His gaze was bleary, but not vacant. A pair of iridescent pupils swam for a few seconds before they seemed to latch onto Munkustrap’s. The appearance of lucidity was, to all and sundry, a triumph. A series of jubilant smiles were exchanged around the room. 

“Misto,” Alonzo exhaled, his voice dripping in relief. “Welcome back.” 

The magician’s eyes, lagging with nystagmus, found their way to Alonzo. His mouth hung ajar for a moment, eyes squeezing shut, as if he were having to conduct a procedure to summon his voice. 

“... Mistoffelees, ” he corrected. 

His voice was weak and raw and carried no persuasive force whatsoever; but it had a poignant impact nonetheless. Everybody laughed. Alonzo reached and fondly tweaked one of his ears. 

“Apologies, Mr. Mistoffelees,” he teased.

“How are you feeling, dear?” Jenny asked. 

Mistoffelees squeezed his eyes shut again and let out another indistinguishable noise, pressing his face into the comforter. “M’okay,” he answered, muffled. “Munk…”

“I’m right here,” the tabby quickly interjected, giving the paw a light squeeze as if to remind him. 

Tentatively, Mistoffelees cracked his eyes back open and squinted up at the silver tabby. “Y’okay?” 

The elder smiled graciously. “Better off than you.” 

“Mmm…” The yellow eyes closed again. “M’sorry.” 

Munkustrap’s eyebrows quirked inward, face falling into a frown. He almost thought he hadn’t heard right. “Sorry?” he repeated, almost dumbly. “Whatever for?” 

Mistoffelees wiggled his fingers that were still encased in Munkustrap’s large palm. “...Shocking you,” he muttered into the comforter. 

Even though the Conjuring Cat couldn’t see it, the Protector smiled reassuringly. “You don’t have to apologize for that. It’s not like you meant to.” 

Surprisingly, a minute smile eked just barely out on the younger cat’s face, tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I did,” he said through the grin, guiltily. “That last time…I did. Had to make you…let go.” 

Munkustrap felt a jolt of something unpleasant in his spine. A sensory memory of the sensation of a solid form wriggling, flailing, pushing against his chest surfaced in the forefront of his mind. He instinctively turned his eyes to Coricopat, who met him back with a knowing look of his own. When the tabby peered back down at the somnolent tuxedo, he found himself tightening the grip around the latter’s hand subconsciously, as if seeking reparations for his inability to hold on tightly enough before. 

“You shouldn’t have done that, Misto,” he said quietly. “What if you had gotten swept away and had not been able to make yourself reappear?” 

“Mmph,” the tuxedo hummed. “You’d have…gotten…a much bigger shock. Couldn’t hold it back ‘nymore.” 

There was a pause, although Mistoffelees continued before anyone else could break it. He weakly wagged the wrist attached to the paw that Munkustrap had a hold on. “Call me ‘Misto’ again, and I’ll…give y’nother zap.”

Whether there was levity intended or not, the thitherto morose pall seemed to lift at the threat; Pouncival cackled openly, while the others had the good grace to at least attempt to conceal their merriment. Alonzo held a hand up to his mouth to hide his smile. 

Munk shook his head. “Sorry.” 

“Hey, Mistoffelees,” Alonzo cut in.

The tuxedo cat was clearly standing on the precipice of sleep, poised with his arms out and ready to be swallowed by the abyss. But at the sound of his name, his one visible eye cracked open. 

“Thank you,” the elder monochromatic cat said, deeply in earnest. “...For saving our tails out there.” 

“Mmph,” Mistoffelees said again, reclosing the eye. “... Vivat.”

Another surfeit of charmed giggles rose in response. “Vivat,” Alonzo and Munkustrap returned in unison.  

Mr. Mistoffelees might have succumbed to the temptation of consciousness before he could even have heard the response; Jenny quickly thereafter took to the task of persuading Munkustrap to resume resting. He still had a fever, lest he forget, and a lot of healing to do. Munkustrap haggled, requesting to move his own nest of blankets into the dressing room to share with Mistoffelees. It would be easier on Jenny, he argued…and, perhaps more poignantly, he wished to be within watchable proximity of the ailing magician himself. Jenny conceded; but don’t lift a finger unless I tell you to , was her singular condition. 

Pouncival and Victoria ultimately curled up together near Mistoffelees and fell into a restful sleep. Coricopat and Tantomile mirrored the action nearby. Jenny arranged Munkustrap’s blanket nest and helped him to get comfortable. 

“You know,” Alonzo said, as the silver tabby hunkered down, “Tugger’s going to be annoyed that you and Mistoffelees were both awake while he was gone.” 

“Mm,” Munkustrap hummed. He felt himself losing his own battle with remaining conscious as he got comfortable, spread out among the pile of soft textiles on the other side of the dressing room from his fellow patient, beneath the vanity counters. “I volunteer you to deal with him then.” 

Alonzo made a rather chapped noise at that remark. It made Munkustrap chuckle; his own flash of amusement was the last intelligible sensation he underwent before retreating back  into wistful blackness.

*****

Munkustrap’s fever went away the next night; it hadn’t even seemed to properly “break,” favoring instead to simmer down unremarkably until Jenny’s thermometer registered a beautifully banal set of numbers. Mistoffelees, on the other hand, languished in a febrile figure for an entire week. 

He wasn’t so ill that he didn’t enjoy periods of lucidity. “‘The Original Conjuring Cat,’” he recited one evening, a cold cloth—cut down to cat size—draped across his eyes. When he spoke, despite never moving from his prone position, nestled in the blankets, he sounded weak and breathless. “Capable of feats that defy…comprehension. And what…does him in? London’s sewage.” 

There was nary a cat who frequented the Junkyard that didn’t intermittently stop in to check on the Protector and the resident magician. Surprisingly—or, perhaps not—Tugger was the most constant presence. 

“A city block’s worth of electricity may have had something to do with it,” he quipped. His inflection made the comment sound as if it was in good humor, but when Munkustrap overheard it, he knew that the Curious Cat wasn’t a fan of hearing Mistoffelees self-deprecate. “And running into a lethal psychopath probably contributed, too.”

Munkustrap kept seeing the mad cat in his dreams. And, apparently, so did Mistoffelees, who had always had disruptively vivid and unsettling visions in his sleep. One day was particularly bad, where even after abruptly awakening, the Conjuring Cat was feverishly inconsolable, wide-eyed,  gasping, convinced that the feral maniac was there in the room with him. Despite Jenny’s prerogative to avoid cuddling until his fever took a hike, Munkustrap passed the next several hours with an armful of a trembling, twitching tuxedo tom. At the time, it seemed that only the silver tabby was capable of calming him down.

Tugger, of course, had been there to witness the fiasco. He said something that only compounded the unpleasantries of Munkustrap’s internal monologues. 

“I want to kill him,” he had said, dark and sincere, only loud enough for himself and his brother to perceive. “I want to find that crazy bastard and make him pay for what he did to you guys.” 

His eyes were locked onto Mistoffelees, who was trembling dramatically in a restless sleep, tucked into Munkustrap’s chest. The pressure hurt the latter’s ribs, but he could hardly be persuaded to spare a damn for himself in that moment. 

He hadn’t really known how to respond, so he didn’t say anything. On a better day he’d have preached some perfunctory wisdom about the futility of revenge. Instead, he passed a fleeting glance to his errant brother, and they sat side by side, sentinels jointly keeping vigil over a troubled convalescent. 

When Mistoffelees’s fever finally broke, the cats began the process of transitioning back to the Junkyard. Several had already been going back and forth, cleaning up the worst of the damage left in the storm’s wake. The tuxedo tomcat was conscious during the exodus of the Egyptian, but he didn’t have a prayer when it came to walking. The illnesses had left him weakened, and the lacerations sent waves of pain shooting up his leg that the magician couldn’t hope to conceal. Alonzo carried him piggy-back. Munkustrap’s limp had retreated enough for him to walk at a reasonable pace—the dregs of pain having been localized to his ribcage—but Jellylorum supplied him with one of Gus’s walking sticks to assist him. Tugger walked at his side, teasing that he’d be prepared to catch him should he lose his balance. Despite the facetious delivery, Munkustrap had no doubt that he would. 

In the week following, nobody was surprised when Mistoffelees insisted that he was fit to move around freely. He still dawned gauze tightly-wound about his leg, heavily limiting his mobility, but that hardly stopped him from getting about. Unfortunately—particularly for Jenny’s peace of mind—when he began to regain his ability to practice magic, he became all but impossible to contain. Munkustrap found himself watching from a distance once day, as Mistoffelees hobbled about the clearing, trying to dance despite his limited range of motion. Victoria was right there with him, watching and helping, along with a gaggle of other giggling kittens surrounding them.

“He’s going to send Miss Jenny to an early grave,” Alonzo had quipped. 

“Mine too, probably,” Munkustrap answered. 

“I still can’t stop thinking about what he did out in that storm.” The younger cat sounded dually amazed and troubled. “I keep seeing it replay in my head. We all know he can do amazing things, but that was…” 

The sentence hung in the air, the conclusion bereft of suitable vernacular. “Yeah,” Munkustrap supplied, signalling that he truly did understand.

“He’s so young still,” Alonzo continued. “Sometimes I wonder how far his powers will go.” 

Munkustrap inhaled deeply, held it, and let it out through his nose. “I do too.” 

He could see, from his peripheral, Alonzo turn and look at him. “Do you ever worry about it?” 

“About…his magic?” 

“Well, I mean…I guess, I mean about him—in general. Not that he’s ever been one we’ve needed to worry about. I just mean—er, I don’t know what I mean.” 

“ I know what you mean,” Munkustrap responded charitably. “After all, magical cats are so…” 

He paused to think. In the meantime, as if cued by the direction of the conversation, Mistoffelees began generating a bevy of illuminated orbs from his paws, spreading them about the clearing, using them, perhaps, to distract from his severely compromised terpsichorean technique. It seemed to work on the kittens, who were all running around, chasing the clusters of twinkling starlight. 

Magical cats were supposed to have gone extinct long ago. Did you know that, Munkustrap? 

“... rare.” He didn’t like the word, but he couldn’t think of anything else. He felt as though he were suggesting something about a particularly coveted gemstone, or some bizarre animals extant on the radars of human hunters. It made him feel like he was insinuating that Mistoffelees was some kind of uniquely minted token that many a solicitous numismatist would fight to collect.

“Well—we can consider ourselves privileged we have him, then,” Alonzo returned, and he couldn’t have known how much that chafed with Munkustrap’s line of thinking. “One day, we might come to fully understand him.” 

Munkustrap’s eyes quirked. For the first time since the conversation began, he turned his head to look at Alonzo fully. “What do you mean?” 

Alonzo blinked back, shrugged, then looked forward again. “I guess I just mean…I think we’ve only seen the surface so far. You know?” 

“Of Mistoffelees.” 

“Yeah.” The younger cat shrugged. His brown eyes danced between a multitude of glowing orbs as he watched the light show, the ringing of kittenish laughter underpinning the visual like a musical accompaniment. “I suppose I just think that…there’s more to him than…than….”

“Then meets the eye?”

“...Yeah.” 

Munkustrap thinned his lips, then looked forward, following his compatriot’s gaze. The little tuxedo cat had sat down in the clearing, visibly exhausted. The kittens were all simmering down themselves, strewn about the ground in various formations, batting at the remainders of the orbs as they danced downward and faded into oblivion like glittery melting snowflakes. 

In that moment, Mistoffelees’s eyes suddenly—bizarrely quick—jolted to land on Munkustrap’s. The latter was almost startled at the unforeseen eye contact, but he didn’t break it. The yellowish, perpetually glowing irises had him locked into place, mesmerizing, beautiful and unsettling. 

Mistoffelees winked at him, and then flopped onto his back and appeared to fall asleep. Only then did the silver tabby find himself capable of looking away. 

I think there’s more to this kitten than meets the eye. 

Munkustrap banished the recollection, banished the undulation of foreboding, always roiling beneath the surface of his fondness and his familial affection for the enigmatic Conjuring Cat. Suddenly feeling exhausted, he mimicked his young compatriot’s action and stretched himself out on his back, quickly falling into a restorative sleep. 

The next time he woke up, he found himself bordered on either side by the warm exteriors of his fellow felines; Tugger had appeared to his left, and Mistoffelees was nestled into his right side. The tabby was surprised to find that his own arm was around the small tuxedo’s shoulders; either he had done that subconsciously when the other cuddled up to him, or Mistoffelees himself had put it there. He turned his head more fully to get a better look at the slumbering magician, only to see that Alonzo was apart of the puddle, laying chest-down with his one arm thrown protectively across the width of Mistoffelees’s torso. Beyond the shade, a golden sun projected saturated oranges all over the industrial contents strewn about the acreage. It was almost dusk; time to get up soon. 

Persistent grogginess, along with warmth and comfort, protested the notion. Ever since the disastrous rainstorm, Munkustrap had been tiring out quicklier than usual; a normal collateral effect of convalescence, Jenny insisted. The silver tabby could tell, too, that Mistoffelees wasn’t fully back to himself despite his most tenacious efforts to appear as such, bandages notwithstanding. He had been very quiet since the incident—not unusual for him. But the Protector had a feeling that there was something between them that was going unresolved. 

But maybe that was his imagination. 

He looked down again, finding a pair of weary yellow eyes staring up at him. 

“We need to talk,” Munkustrap found himself saying—or, whispering more like. Tugger usually slept like a rock, but Alonzo would wake up at the sound of a pin dropping from France. 

Mistoffelees didn’t respond. He only blinked. 

Munkustrap heaved a sigh. “Later. Okay?” 

The magician’s large eyebrow markings tweaked up at that, but his expression remained placid, unreadable. As if to indicate that he was satisfied with this foretelling, he angled his head back into where it rested in the vicinity of Munkustrap’s shoulder, and closed his eyes again. 

The tabby tightened his grip without realizing it at first. He felt a pang of consternation, abruptly remembering how it felt the last time his arm was hooked around Mistoffelees in precisely this way; the two of them suffocated by water, by the immense pressure of the barrelling current, Munkustrap barely able to keep them in place with his one available hand. He remembered a little too well the sensation of being electrocuted, every inch of sinew and every nerve ending involuntarily locking up, his body going stiff, warring against the violent stimuli. He wondered if it felt half as uncomfortable to harbor many times more that amount of electricity for hours inside one’s own body.

Mistoffelees had hurt him to save him; he risked being drowned, or indefinitely lost, or attacked again, allowing himself to be swept away from rescue. To think Munkustrap had accused him of being unable to look after himself; he had been all too willing to make a dire sacrifice for the salvation of another. 

Even now, he thought he could feel a slight, distant buzz of static tickling at the tips of his fur where his arm connected with the diminutive illusionist. He wondered if Mistoffelees had always been this way and he just never internalized as much; if he always had the effect of electrifying the very air around him with more than just his winsome showmanship. 

The subtle vibration of static energy, strangely enough, was no small comfort. He continued holding onto his friend, indulging in the solace of his solidity, revelling in the comfort of knowing that, this time, he wouldn’t slip out of his grasp. 

His eyelids became heavy before he knew it; unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, the deep and operatic voice of Old Deuteronomy reverberated off the walls of his skull as if announced in an empty cathedral. 

Watch out for him, Munkustrap.

Watch out for all of them. Protect your tribe. 

The advisory echoed into infinity, until he fell back into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

Fin.