Chapter Text
Edwin tries to ignore it at first. Of course he is often thinking of the Cat King. How could Edwin not, when there is a token from the Cat King staring him in the face? Edwin moves the lily-dandelion to the shelf behind him. It is foolish to feel as though it is watching him, but nonetheless, it’s like a stare boring into his back. A gold-eyed stare.
It’s changed again when he turns around next. Starburst pink flowers on wood stems. Stalks with dozens of tiny leaves that when Edwin brushes them, they close up tight.
Catclaw briar, the book tells him. Other common names: Nuttall's sensitive briar and shame-boy.
With a frustrated noise, Edwin shoves back from the desk and begins pacing. This is, of course, when Crystal and Charles return from their “recon mission,” as Crystal had put it.
“Whoa,” Crystal says, taking in the state of him. “You okay, Edwin? I know ghosts can’t actually look flustered, but you definitely do.”
“It is this bloody flower,” Edwin snaps. “Its presence here. What it means.”
“You can just ignore it, mate,” Charles says. “Or I could get rid of it for you?”
“I cannot, Charles! Already it has fixed itself in my thoughts and lingers there like—like—” Edwin cuts himself off, throwing up his hands in frustration. He folds his arms and glowers at the vase, leaning back against the desk.
Behind him, Crystal says to Charles, “I’m going to let you handle this,” before she slips out of the room.
It’s fair. Edwin and Crystal are far too alike to see each other clearly much of the time. Niko understood him so much better—it stings, even now, that loss; one of the few human deaths he ever properly grieved.
He pushes the thought aside. Focus on the problem at hand.
“Ghosts are not supposed to be haunted. I’m quite certain there must be a rule about that,” Edwin mutters.
Charles sighs and sits on the desk edge opposite of Edwin, facing away. He leans back, turning his head to look at him. Edwin keeps his gaze forward, shoulders drawing up.
“We’re not exactly within the rules.”
“Of course we are,” Edwin replies stubbornly.
“Yeah, now, but only after we spent 30 years dodging Death, and after Charlie and her boss realized we could help solve their processing problem.”
“What is your point, Charles.”
“My point is that you’re busy making up demons that don’t exist.”
Edwin flinches. Charles squeezes his shoulder apologetically.
“Sorry. Not the best way to put it,” Charles says. “There’s obviously something unresolved with you and that Cat King, Edwin. What’s the harm in, you know, solving that?”
“It is not that simple,” Edwin says quietly.
“Why not?”
“Charles, I.” Edwin halts, swallows. “Perhaps I haven’t been quite so forthcoming on my feelings in regards to—”
“How you’ve got the warm and fuzzies for the Cat King, yeah? I did put that together after the second time the flower changed into a cat sort of name.”
“The warm and fuzzies?” Edwin repeats in confusion.
“You like-like them,” Charlies clarifies and jostles Edwin.
Edwin fights down a smile, replying primly, “let’s not exaggerate, Charles. I can barely stand them most of the time.”
“Oh, that doesn’t change anything. Happens all the time.”
“Does it really?”
“Trust me, mate. More common than you think.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Edwin says, thinking of Simon and how quickly his affection had soured. The Cat King yelling after Edwin as he ran deeper into the woods, Monty’s betrayal a fresh wound.
“ ‘Course I am!”
“Do you…” Edwin shifts. “Are you not concerned about the sort of person I appear to attract? Monty. The Cat King.” Simon, he adds to himself; he has yet to share that one with Charles.
“I think you’re a big softie, is what.”
Edwin turns sharply. “I am not!”
“Deny it all you like, mate, but all I see is someone who decided he didn’t want anyone else ever to feel as lonely as he did if they didn’t deserve it.”
Edwin looks away.
“Better go see the royal furness before that flower changes and your shoulders start creeping up to your ears again.”
“Yes, all right,” Edwin sighs and gets to his feet.
Edwin puts on his coat and gloves. He picks up the flower, gathering up what little courage he has to his name.
“At some point, you will have to stop disparaging yourself,” Edwin says, finally turning to face Charles. “You are much more than ‘The Brawn,’ as you so eloquently put it.”
“It’s all right,” Charles says with a shrug and that smile Edwin has come to realize is a disguise. “Makes people underestimate me. Good for a surprise advantage.”
“Yes,” Edwin says slowly; “but I wonder how much it makes you underestimate yourself.”
He does not wait for Charles’s response. Edwin turns to the mirror, rolling his shoulders back.
“I’m leaving the case in your capable hands. If you need my assistance—”
“We won’t, mate. Quit putting it off already.”
Edwin feels the corner of his mouth tick up. “Don’t wait up,” he says, and steps through the mirror and into Port Townsend.
Despite rehearing what he will say the entire walk over to the cannery, Edwin finds himself taking an entirely different approach upon arrival. The place is deserted, not a cat in sight. It’s all rather suspicious. When Edwin enters the throne room, as it were, the Cat King looks surprised to see him.
The Cat King gets to their feet, stepping down from their throne.
“Edwin? Is everything—”
It’s too much, everything that hits him when he sees the Cat King again. The genuine concern on their face now. The long…flirtation, before. What he’d seen of himself reflected in the Cat King, despite trying to ignore it, and how it’d all seem so much less important in Hell. The rough stubble he shouldn’t have been able to feel when he, Edwin Paine, who died unkissed and unloved, felt bold enough to do this kissing this time. All of these memories are full of Niko’s vibrance and warmth, save for that last one, when he wished he could have told her about the Cat King’s flower and their parting words. It reopens a wound that Edwin expects will never fully heal.
It ought not be a surprise that he, as Crystal may put it, loses the entirety of his cool.
Edwin marches up to the Cat King and shoves the flower in their face. “Explain.”
The Cat King’s surprise is brief before it’s buried under their usual sly smile.
“Nosegays, Edwin, for me? That is what they called them in your time, did they not?” they ask with an exaggerated arch of their eyebrows. “Nose. Gays.”
“Nosegays were no longer fashionable by the time I was a child, and I’ve heard you had previous lives. Do you not recall their name?” Edwin fires back.
“Pocket full of posies,” the Cat King replies, flashing his teeth in a half grin. “But I always liked tussie-mussie best. Sounds like a good night.”
“Yes, well, on the subject of floriography, kindly explain why you have given me an enchanted lily. Was this meant to lure me back here, draw me into another one of your cat-and-mouse games?”
“Okay, first of all, do you know how rude that phrase is?” The Cat King says, brushing past Edwin. “Second, what are you even talking about?”
“This,” Edwin says, shaking the vase. “This elaborate prank you’ve pulled on me with this enchanted flower that turns into other plants with cat names, so it was impossible to put this all behind me and forget.”
The Cat King is quiet, processing what Edwin says. “You’ve been thinking about me,” they conclude, pleased.
“Clearly,” Edwin says through clenched teeth. “Though how organic the occurrences were remains to be seen when such interference exists.”
“And you’re angry that you’ve been thinking about me,” the Cat King continues.
“I—” Edwin stops. “No.”
“No?”
“No,” Edwin repeats, firmer this time. “I am not angry.”
The Cat King tilts their head. Something changes in the air between them, in the silence that curls up and makes itself comfortable. Usually the Cat King is in constant motion, twirling something, smirking, coiling into Edwin’s space. Now, they’re eerily still, and Edwin is reminded of how little he knows about the magical being before him. At whom he was just yelling.
Thirty years with Charles and mere inches of improvement on being “aces with people.” At least this “people” is nearly as standoffish and, well, catty, as Edwin.
“I hardly know what I am anymore,” Edwin continues, after another long moment. “Things have gotten considerably more complicated recently. I’m unused to it.”
“Unused to complication?” The Cat King repeats. “You?”
Edwin raises his chin stubbornly. “I believe I said ‘considerably more complicated,’ not that they’ve recently become complicated.”
“And you decided to come here.”
“Believe me, I am also beginning to question the wisdom of that decision,” Edwin mutters. He rubs a hand over his face. “My apologies. Can we start again?”
“I’ll go as many rounds as you like,” the Cat King says with one of those smirks that means this is another one of their jokes Edwin doesn’t get. “Might need some recovery time in between, though.”
“...Right.”
“So why’d you come back then? Could have just thrown the flower away or put it in that Sleight of Hand Sack.”
“Bag of tricks backpack.”
“Avoiding the question, darling.”
Edwin huffs. “Well. I suppose it’s as you said. I missed you.”
The Cat King is silent until Edwin meets their gaze. “Say it again,” the Cat King says.
He’s never been the most skilled at reading people, a shortcoming that was recently and quite forcefully pointed out to him, but there’s something in the Cat King’s expression. Uncertainty, or doubt. Like the flicker behind the despair in Simon’s eyes in that horrible room in Hell.
Fear of a trick or lie. The expectation of cruelty.
It is very odd to find himself yet again being the brave one. He would never have believed it back when he was alive. Edwin can hardly believe it now. He expects some of the living would wonder, after escaping hell twice and surviving Esther’s machine of iron and pain, what is there left to be afraid of?
But that’s just it. The worst tortures weren’t the monsters or the demons. They were Simon’s question, do you think it’s torture, the way we are, and knowing how all it had taken was one stupid, angry, lonely boy to place him, eventually, here, in front of another stupid, angry, lonely being.
And besides. He owes this bit of courage to Niko. She was the most lionhearted of them all, in the end.
Edwin steps forward slowly until he can count the Cat King’s eyelashes. The Cat King watches him, tension in every line of their body. Fight or flight, but they do not seem to have decided which, and so Edwin moves slowly, like he does with anyone he encounters carrying a wound so deep, it might as well be their beating heart.
He kisses the corner of the Cat King’s mouth.
“I missed you,” Edwin breathes, lingering a moment longer before straightening up. “Don’t you believe me? I’ve always kept my word.”
“You kept your word because I leashed you to this town,” the Cat King counters, eyes fixed on Edwin’s mouth.
“And yet I finished the task you gave me, even after the bracelet was off.”
“Out of pride. Not exactly the most noble of motivations.”
“If you want noble motivations, I’m afraid you’ll have to speak to Charles,” Edwin replies. “I could fetch him, if you like.”
“This is the worst seduction speech I’ve ever heard.”
“Then perhaps it’s time you put that mouth to better use. I believe you had quite a lot to say on the subject of second kisses, and I have very little to say on noble motivations.”
Edwin leans in, intending to move things along, but he’s stopped by the Cat King’s fingers against Edwin’s lips.
“You don’t want me. Not really,” the Cat King says.
“I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
Edwin brushes away the touch, cupping the Cat King’s jaw in one hand and drawing him in. The kiss is still a bit awkward. Noses do so get in the way, but the Cat King shifts and—ah yes, that’s better. Edwin knows he’s not really supposed to feel sensation as a ghost, but cat kingdom rules seem to be different. He’s glad for it, particularly when the Cat King’s hand clutches his side, hard enough to sting, but it’s… enjoyable, surprisingly. Edwin files it away to examine later, busy as he is.
“I missed you,” Edwin says when they part, pushing his forehead against the Cat King’s. “Truly, I did. I will say it as many times as you like until you believe me.”
“Once more,” the Cat King requests. “Four times, four lives.”
Edwin obliges and then he’s far too busy with seeing what Charles says he misses most about being alive. It’s quite a bit wetter than he expected, and he’s surprised to find that does not reduce his enjoyment of the activity. The Cat King kisses along his jaw, nuzzling into where Edwin’s pulse once beat. They nip him there, sharp and quick, and Edwin hears himself make a strangled sort of noise.
“Mmhmm,” the Cat King murmurs, satisfied. “A bit of rough play.”
“I—before this gets out of hand,” Edwin stammers. “I think…I should like a bit more of a courtship. I know the ways things work these days—”
“Do you?” the Cat King interrupts, tongue dipping below Edwin’s collar.
“—but I am still getting used to the idea that I will not be arrested for my…proclivities.”
The Cat King sighs and draws back. “As if I could say no to you,” they say. “Shall I call upon you in London tomorrow and we can take a turn about the park together? Do you require a chaperone?”
Edwin smirks. “Just the two of us, I should think, unless you have concerns about your own reputation.”
“Well, handsome boys in bowties have gotten me into trouble before,” the Cat King says, straightening Edwin’s; “but I think I’ll risk it this time.”
“Perhaps you can recount one of those stories to me on our promenade tomorrow,” Edwin offers with a quirked eyebrow. He catches the Cat King’s hand and kisses their knuckles, holding the Cat King’s gaze. “Until tomorrow.”
But at the door, Edwin pauses. Something is nagging at him. A clue, not wrapped up neatly, loose end trailing.
“Why did you enchant the lily?” Edwin asks.
“I didn’t,” the Cat King replies. “Not on purpose. I guess…” they trail off, appear to wrestle with something. There’s that twitch of a smile, the same one Edwin saw when he said, you forgot to count yourself. “I missed you, too.”
“Then I suggest you be punctual,” Edwin says with his own twitch of a smile and slips back to London.
The Cat King is punctual. The walk is pleasant—more than pleasant, and Edwin is deeply grateful that sometime in the last century, he’d forgotten how to blush.
The flower had changed while he was gone. It’s back to a green stalk, nearly two feet in height. At the top, five brilliant red blooms, all larger than his hand.
Amaryllis, says a note in Crystal’s handwriting. This one’s called Red Lion.
The flower does not change again.