For the "Love Is In The Air" challenge at Jellicle Fiction. In the sense that it is related to love and I did get this pairing from the Random Pairing Gen. Otherwise... I'm still not sure quite where this came from, to be honest :) It's... definitely different. And maybe it doesn't quite work in terms of making sense - it's certainly not a direct representation or allegory of anything.
Thanks to Cassandra for reassuring me it isn't completely nonsensical ^^ It might still be open to a bit of improvement, so all kinds of comments are welcome...
The title is from The Hollow Men. It's one of Eliot's bleakest poems... but I do love it. I hadn't realised till I reread it just now, title-searching, how much the atmosphere corresponds to some of this.
~
"Came to find you..."
Words didn't come easily, in that place. He forced his eyes open, his lips apart, the breath he didn't have any more misting in the freezing air.
Mungojerrie stumbled onwards.
"I came - t'find - you -"
But he wasn't sure now if he was making a sound. He walked - if you can call it that - on and on and on, but she wasn't there. There was nothing but this featureless landscape: plain and misleading as the inside of his eyelids, nothing but the sand slipping and grating beneath his feet. He couldn't see her anywhere. Maybe he wasn't moving at all. Maybe the non-existant ground that shifted grey and blue and soft and sharp was an illusion too, treacherous...
"E..!!" he shouted, and the single syllable finally ripped itself out of his chest and his throat, and he collapsed on the blue-grey sand. There was no blood, not anymore, not here, like there was no breath; there were just the open wounds, just gaping holes and missing patches in a patchwork of mismatched fur... an absurd sight... They'd done the job properly, alright, when they killed him.
None of that mattered now though. Nor do the simple and sordid circumstances which led to this and which are all too quickly told. Mungojerrie had got into trouble. He was always in trouble; such was his life. He'd made promises he couldn't keep, which is what you did in his world of lawless avenues and omnipotent gangland lords, just to survive. Just to buy yourself a little time and survive a little longer... But of course, for all their laughs, he and his friends had always known that it was likely to end up like this for each of them, sooner or later. The cards had been dealt long before he'd known that they were playing.
But... he'd promised to protect her. The one promise he'd always meant to keep... The only one that mattered. And now, though he was already dead, the memory of that promise was killing him.
"I dun' know where you are..." he whispered, less than a whisper, because the place was stealing away the life and breath from him... an absurd thought... he almost laughed, but stopped a million miles short...
...She had, she had always had, an unreal quality about her. Ineffably fragile, but surely untouchable, unbreakable... So he had thought. Who was she? She had been his secret - but, he realised with a sudden stabbing pain that was far worse than anything that had yet happened - he knew hardly anything about her. She was gone and he had nothing, nothing real to hold on to.
She'd never liked to talk about her past... With her elegant manner, the perfect lines and symmetries of her features, Exotica could have been some red-cushion beauty whose owners had died... or abandoned her... She could have fallen straight out of some Orient fairy tale. She was all that and far more than that to him. She didn't - she couldn't - belong in his dusty, dangerous world (but if he'd known who to thank, he would have poured out thanks every single day that she was there all the same...). So he'd tried to keep her a secret from them... to keep her safe...
He'd failed.
But none of that mattered now. Because suddenly he thought heard her voice, carried on the perfectly still air.
"Mungo?"
Can you hallucinate when you're dead? Could you dream up such an impossible, uncatchable torn-velvet sweetness? Well, of course you could, and what better time?? Little else in the world had failed to practise some deception on him; why should his own mind be any different...?
He didn't care. He scrambled to his feet.
"E!" he called again, like to speak her whole name was to step into the presence of something so set apart and holy he'd be burned up in an instant..."E!"
"Mungojerrie?"
Mungojerrie felt his heart squeeze painfully. He swallowed hard. "I'm here... I'm-"
"Mungo...?"
"Here!" he shouted, "I'm here! E, I -"
He stopped. In a single terrifying instant, Mungojerrie realised she that she couldn't hear him.
"Mungo?"
The pressure in his chest intensified. "I'm here!" He strained his eyes, started running in a random direction. The sand flew up all around him, stinging his eyes and choking his useless lungs...
"Mungo, I'm sorry."
That stunned him so much he stopped running.
"I'm so, so sorry. They killed you too, didn't they? It was my fault...!"
"No!" Mungojerrie tried to shout, but once again the wind in that place snatched away the word before he could utter it. Never, he wanted to say. Never! Never yours.
"...And now I can't find you...!!"
Her voice caught at something and broke.
"I'm here... I'm here," he cried again, his voice breaking too. "...why can't you hear me...?"
~~~
Later... maybe. Time is irrelevant.
Her voice in that place was everywhere and nowhere... Sometimes he tried to find her, sometimes he fell to the ground, sand in his eyes and his gashes... none of that mattered...
"I was never perfect. You... I didn't deserve what you gave me. I am - so - sorry. F-forgive me? Please?"
"O' course I do!" he cried, despite the pain of speaking, and the fact that it was useless anyway... "I - anything! There's nothin' to forgive! E, there's nothin' you ever did... It was me. It was me. It was - always -" Punctured lungs took a deep, unreal breath and he tried to steady himself. "Can you ever forgive me?"
"Of course, of course, anything..! Mungo-!"
"You can hear me!" Mungojerrie sprang forward again.
"Yes...!"
He ran on and on, but the darkness and the desert yielded nothing... "Oh, E... E, where are you?"
"I... I don't know."
Her voice was everywhere and nowhere... Could it - oh, Everlasting Cat, please no - be only in his head?
Do dead cats dream, anyway?
"I wish I could find you.." he moaned.
"Me too!"
The closest to a laugh you could manage here, and it was nearly enough to break your heart.
Mungojerrie stopped and strained his eyes again. He tried to listen. There was no sound except the wind... It had become much louder without his noticing the change.
When Exotica spoke again, her voice was serious, and hesitant. Mungojerrie shivered.
"I think... I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. That's always the way, you know."
"I won' lose you again," he said.
...If he closed his eyes he could almost see her, almost feel her... Fur ruffled by the wind she was so close... Were those his tears or hers trickling down his mutilated face...?
"I don't want you to worry... ok? This - this isn't real, or - it's not real enough - This isn't the end. Any minute now we'll wake up and we'll be back in the world before it ever went wrong... before we can remember... like it was meant to be, ok? You mustn't be scared."
Her soft voice was gently rending him to pieces all over again...
"You know... All of this... all the shadows are going to come tumbling down like rain..."
"I won' lose you again," he insisted, wager-my-soul-against-all-the-world...
"And then we'll see it all clearly... Face to face... Mungo...!"
"I won' lose you!!" There was an ache inside him, deeper and more lasting than any of his wounds.
"Oh, Mungo, please...! It's so hard to hold on to... And it's so dark. I can't do this on my own!"
The tears were pouring down now from his closed eyes, splashing down and sinking into the sand without a trace...
"You're not on your own!" he cried. "Oh, E, E, I'm here, I just... I don't understand..."
"...Face to face..."
"Yes... I - "
"Promise me..."
He opened his eyes.
Exotica stood before him.
She too was marked and torn, but still - as she'd always been. Regal and humble and beautiful... her eyes, just as he had always known them, held unexplainable love and sadness - he tried to stretch out a paw to reach her - but an expanse opened up between them and they were falling each backwards, torn apart and away... She cried out - the sand swirled, whipped up into the air, hard and hot and burning underfoot --
Mungojerrie dug his claws in, striving for purchase, even as the whole landscape was ripped apart and flung in all directions. The desert became a dry, driving river...
"I will find you!" he cried above the noise, again and again, though each utterance seemed to tear his whole body in two. "I will find you!"
And then there was nothing at all.
~~~
The sands settle. They are gone. But what does it matter? Theirs' is only one of a thousand-a-day unwitnessed tragedies, played out with so little grace...
Do dead cats dream? Can torn souls entertain such cruel delusions of hope and a future?
Or perhaps it was merely that he had never died at all, not yet; this is possibly crueler still. Life had always seemed so unfair to Mungojerrie, though he never complained, merely got on with it as best he could... Poor reward to merely wake up again to his life, knowing all the while that it could only end one way, that he was destined to lose his Exotica... His Exotica, his waking dream; had she ever really been at all...?
When the storm cleared up and and the sands cooled, they might have been swept away forever, vanished without a trace. Or sent back into the dark, reborn blind into the world, without a clue, without a chance... Would you see two more kittens, just trying again to find something lovely and tragic and un-remembered, and getting no closer each time...?
Or could you find, somewhere, clearer and more real than ever before, Exotica and her Mungojerrie... laughing with his sister and all their friends...? Laughing as everything falls into place at last. Completely in love. Complete in love...
...Somewhere where the shadows have fallen away for the last time, and the rain has made a garden of every desert...
~~~