Chapter Text
One would imagine a shop of stories brought to life to be a magical place. They wouldn’t imagine the owner scrounging money together to pay bills, shooing bored side characters back into their books, and downing the day’s seventh-ish cup of coffee at four p.m in an empty store. They’d expect to step into a wonderfully-designed world of awe and intrigue, where their favorite characters come to life and everything is a delicious mystery waiting to be explored.
Well, their favorite characters couldn’t care less. They have stories to follow, so those excited fans only get to meet the no-names who live in the background, no matter how hard Touya tries to coax the protagonists out of the pages.
Books don’t seem to like him as much as he likes them.
Touya sets down the mystery novel he’s reading, watching the sun melt away outside like a passionfruit-mango popsicle. He stands and starts closing up shop for the night, checking the cat-sticker-adorned cash register and making sure the windows and back door are locked; he pauses at the front windows, wondering how many more times he’ll get to see the sun through them before they’re shut for good.
“Wait!” Someone’s running up to the door. He opens it, letting in a brunette with blue eyes and a sheepish smile. Hanasato, he’s fairly sure? “Sorry—you don’t usually close early. I was just hoping to buy the new volume of the light novel series I’m reading?”
“Oh, my apologies. It’s been a slow day, so I didn’t see a point in staying open.” He closes the door behind her and flips the lights back on, guiding her to the manga section. “Take your time. I’ll just… be here.”
She chirps her thanks and starts perusing the light novels. Touya doesn’t miss the way she hesitantly opens one as if waiting for someone to pop out, then sighs almost imperceptibly when nothing happens. The girl returns to the counter and sets her chosen volume down. “Found it! Thank you for letting me in, Aoyagi-san.”
“Of course.” Touya rings her up and hands the book back after swiftly wrapping it in paper. “Enjoy.”
She leaves with a wave, sending the welcome bell jingling and the bookstore falling back into silence. Touya stretches, finishes the last of his coffee, and turns the lights off again. Maybe there will be more business tomorrow. Maybe he can convince the books to let readers into their worlds again, instead of just deciding to peek out when they feel like it. Maybe—
Something clatters to the floor.
Touya jumps, but quickly realizes what it must be. Quietly walking towards the source of the sound, he peeks around a shelf and spots a small shape moving through the darkness. A cat, he thinks, but there’s something odd wrapped around it—tubes filled with rainbow liquid, by the looks of it. This cat is from a story, alright, but he doesn’t know which one.
He turns the lights back on, hoping he won’t startle the little creature; when he returns, it’s thankfully sitting exactly where it was. He kneels in front of it, gently petting it between its fluffy ears. It’s orange, with streaks of all sorts of different colors in its long fur. “Hi, little guy. Where are you from?”
The cat just blinks at him with inquisitive green eyes and tilts his head.
Touya studies the device now that he can get a closer look. A small vial sits at the end of a collar around the cat’s neck, and it’s connected to the tubes, which appear to be attached to his body. Perhaps this is his lifeblood. A fantasy novel, then. “Would you like to come with me?”
The cat jumps into his open arms, so Touya scoops him up as he walks past the photobooth where customers used to snap pictures with their favorite characters, the stack of dusty autograph books, the fake portal he’d commissioned an artist to help him add to the wall. At last, the fake trees and castle-painted shelves signal that they’ve the fantasy section, where he holds out the cat to let him see. “Do any of these look familiar?”
The cat stays silent. Touya sets him down for a moment as he searches through titles, but it soon becomes clear that they’ll be here forever before he finds the cat’s home, and Touya is exhausted.
Plus, as he held the cat, he realized just how skinny he is beneath all that fluff. Maybe it would be a bad idea to send him back to his book anyway.
“Is it okay if you come home with me tonight?” Touya asks, kneeling again. “I have a cat of my own, so I can give you food and a place to sleep. We can figure out where you belong in the morning, alright?”
His green eyes light up, and he meows happily. Touya smiles and beckons the little guy to follow him, and after closing everything up for real this time, they walk home together.
“Welcome to my apartment,” Touya says as he closes the door behind him and flicks the lights on. “You’ll get along well with Sherlock, I think.”
Touya’s black cat comes to welcome him, rubbing against his leg. The fantasy cat hisses at him, and Sherlock warily steps away. Well, so much for that idea.
“You”—Touya picks up his own cat—“can sleep with me tonight, then. Don’t get into any trouble, alright?”
He fills Sherlock’s bowls with food and water and tells the fantasy cat to help himself; he immediately starts wolfing down the food, which Touya can’t help but find a little concerning. He shows the cat where to sleep for the night and lets him know that his room is just down the hall, where he can come get him if he needs anything. He’s not sure how intelligent the cat is, but he hopes he understands the instructions.
Finally, when he’s pretty sure he’s covered everything, he gets ready for bed and nearly collapses onto the mattress, wrapping himself in the blankets and falling asleep almost immediately with Sherlock curled in his arms. Normally he stays up late reading, but he doesn’t have it in him tonight.
Maybe tomorrow, he’ll get more sales.
Maybe tomorrow, things will feel a little less bleak.
Maybe tomorrow…
When Touya awakes, a pleasantly sweet scent fills his nostrils—warm vanilla. What in the world…?
He pets Sherlock for a moment, then fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand and rolls out of bed, ignoring how loudly his back cracks when he stands up. When he walks into the kitchen, he freezes.
A grown man is in his kitchen. With cat ears and a cat tail. Wearing Touya’s old band T-shirt and sweatpants. Perched on the counter, watching the oven intently like it’s the target of his next hunt.
“What,” Touya says flatly.
The cat-man whirls around, surprised by Touya’s arrival even though it’s his house. “You’re up earlier than I thought you would be. Did I wake you?”
“Yes, you—who are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. Thanks for letting me crash here, though.” He slides on an oven mitt, opens the oven, and pulls out a misshapen but beautifully-golden-brown cake. “Whoa. Turned out perfect.”
Touya is dumbfounded. “Could you speak as a cat?”
“Oh, yeah. I just didn’t wanna. I hate being in that form, too, so talking would’ve been even more annoying.” (Probably a good thing—hearing a deep, rough voice like this one come out of a fluffy little cat would’ve been startling.) The cat-man opens the fridge, ears twitching as he zeroes in on some blackberries Touya bought as a snack a few days ago. “Hey, we have these where I live.”
“Those are mine,” Touya says, marching over and snatching the container from him. “And I didn’t give you permission to bake a cake.”
“I’m not big on ‘permission’.” The cat-man starts hunting through his cupboards, then grabs a bowl and uses a spoon to scrape the entire cake into it. Touya is so confused by what he’s doing that he can’t react quickly enough to stop the guy from stealing the blackberries again and dumping half of them in the bowl with the cake.
“I need cream,” the cat-man decides. His hair is damp, too; did he use Touya’s shower? Aren’t cats supposed to hate water? “Mind grabbing me the milk?”
“Yes, I do mind.” He stands protectively in front of the fridge. “Tell me who you are and what story you’re from so I can get you back where you belong. I’m not happy about you taking advantage of my hospitality.”
“I kinda had to.” He plops down on the barstool by the counter, seemingly giving up on the cream, and shoves a huge bite of blackberry-vanilla crumble in his mouth. “This is really good.”
“Great,” Touya deadpans. “I’m assuming you can’t pay me back for the ingredients you used.”
“Whaddyou mean pay you back? All you’ve got here is, like, pre-packaged stuff. I went to the store.”
…That’s a good point, actually. Touya’s kitchen is usually only home to things like instant ramen, frozen gyouza, and the occasional treat like those blackberries; he buys everything else from the 7-Eleven a few blocks away. “…And I’m assuming you didn’t pay for that, either.”
He yawns widely and stretches, and his (Touya’s) oversized shirt shifts in a way that reveals the outline of something underneath. The tubes and vial, presumably. Touya wonders what they are. “Kinda in a tough spot right now.”
“When I bring you back to By Its Cover, you can make up for your reckless behavior with labor.” Touya crosses his arms over his chest. “Now hurry up with your bowl cake and let’s get to the store.”
The neckline of Touya’s shirt slides off the cat-man’s bony shoulder. He pulls it back up. “Fine, whatever.”
Touya stares in borderline horror as the cat-man actually follows his instructions and starts snarfing down the entire cake. Watching is incredibly unappetizing, so he busies himself making a cup of coffee and asks, “If you’re a cat, aren’t you unable to taste sweet things?”
“Half-cat,” he says, with his mouth full again. “So I can still taste it as long as there’s a ton of sugar in it, thank Airgid.”
…Touya doesn’t even want to know how sweet that ungodly creation is now.
“So,” the cat-man says less than two minutes later, bringing his empty bowl to the sink—how? Why? “Are we heading out?”
Touya looks down at the bowl, then up at the man. “That was an entire cake.”
“And I was entirely starving,” he says. “I’d ask for a snack for the road, but you’d probably turn me down.”
Touya studies him a little. Freckled cheeks, thick brows, rainbow-streaked loose orange curls, multicolored scars all across his arms and face. Like in his cat form, he’s very gaunt, with prominent cheekbones and a thin frame; it wouldn’t feel right for Touya to send him back home when he’s still hungry. “What kind of snack?”
His refracted-peridot eyes light up, and one of his pierced fluffy ears twitches. “Anything.”
“Uh…” Touya hunts through his fridge and freezer. Again, he doesn’t have much, and especially not anything nourishing. “Okonomiyaki?”
“No idea what that is. I’ll take it.”
Touya puts one on a plate and pops it in the microwave. “I’m going to take a shower. Please don’t do anything rash. Sit and eat your okonomiyaki once this machine beeps.”
“Got it,” he says, staring at the microwave with his tail flicking eagerly behind him.
Touya takes the world’s fastest shower, then ties his still-wet hair into a quick half-ponytail like he usually wears it. After getting dressed, he goes to his nightstand for his favorite necklace, and—
Naturally. It’s gone.
“Give my necklace back,” Touya says sharply when he comes back to the kitchen. “Now.”
The cat-man guiltily pulls it out of the pocket of his (Touya’s) sweatpants and hands it to him. “My bad.”
Touya slips it over his neck, his eyes drifting down to the cat-man’s pockets. Suspiciously full. “And the rest?”
He curses under his breath, looking away as he empties them. Rings, necklaces, even the watch Touya’s brother gave him years ago. “I shouldn’t have taken the one from your nightstand. Gave me away.”
Touya’s getting really sick of this guy. “I doubt anything would sell for much where you’re from, anyway. If you’re done eating, then let’s leave.”
“You’re just gonna leave me barefoot?”
“I love how you keep expecting me to give you things for free.” Hmm… honestly, he looks like he’s wearing pajamas. “Come with me, so you can’t steal anything.”
The cat-man follows him to his room, where Touya gets a pair of ripped jeans out of the closet as well as some socks. “Go change in the bathroom. The shoes you can wear are in the foyer.”
He obeys, and while he’s in the bathroom, Touya asks, “Why’d you take my clothes, anyway? Don’t you have any in your world?”
“They got kinda shredded in a fight. This trip was mostly so I could get some new ones, honestly.”
The nerve of this guy… “So you essentially walked around my house naked?”
“Not ‘essentially’. I did walk around your house naked.”
“Okay,” Touya says.
The door opens, and the cat-man steps out, looking a lot more polished with his soft orange hair brushed (hopefully he doesn’t have lice) and Touya’s shirt tucked neatly into the pants.
… He’s also wearing Touya’s favorite necklace again. Damn pickpocket.
Touya holds a hand out, and the cat-man reluctantly gives it to him. “Thanks.”
They leave the apartment, and Touya tries not to talk to him. Aside from him, no one can see fictional characters outside of the store, so he’ll look like a crazy person if they start having a conversation on the street—not that he’d mind, but it would probably damage his business’s reputation. Luckily, the cat-man seems to be fine with this; he’s content to whistle idly and periodically chase after butterflies, then apologize in embarrassment afterwards.
When they arrive at By Its Cover, with its blue-painted storefront and artful displays of color-coded books in the windows (Touya set out tomes in pastels to match the current season last month), he stops before unlocking the door. “First of all, I won’t let you in until you tell me your name.”
He scowls, ears flattening against his head. “It’s Akito.”
“Akito,” Touya repeats. It suits him. “Okay, Akito, which book are you from? I need to know where to send you if you start causing trouble.”
“I won’t,” he says immediately. “I’ll go back tonight.”
Touya eyes him warily. Either he was kicked out of the book somehow, or he simply doesn’t want to return. He doesn’t really need a helper at the store, but he’s a little worried, so he’s going to keep him around for a while.
“Which book?” Touya repeats, more gently this time.
“Uh, it’s called Song of the Shifter.” He scratches at his cheek with a long golden fingernail.
That’s a YA title if he’s ever heard one. “I can’t say that sounds familiar. Make sure you know where it is before I close up for the night, alright?”
Akito salutes, so Touya lets him into the store. Almost immediately, he spots an area where the sun is streaming through and lays down, stretching out happily on the warm wood.
“Have fun,” Touya says, amused, as he heads behind the counter and gets to work on inventory. At least Akito can’t steal anything if he’s taking a catnap.
After fifteen minutes or so, the welcome bell finally jingles. Yes! Touya hops to his feet, and so does Akito, looking around alertly. “Wha’was that?”
“A customer,” Touya tells him as a woman walks into the store. “Hello. Can I help you find anything?”
“Just looking,” she says pleasantly, and Touya hopes his disappointment doesn’t show on his face. ‘Just looking’, he’s learned over the years, translates to ‘I’ll browse for a minute and leave’.
“Well, just let me know if you need something,” Touya says, giving her his warmest smile. She thanks him and heads off to the mystery section.
“Need me to do anything?” Akito asks, lazily draping himself over the front counter.
“I got a new shipment the other day that I forgot to put on the shelves,” Touya says. “All you’ll need to do is put them in alphabetical order. They go to the YA section, where your book is from.”
There’s a brief flash of something in Akito’s eyes that Touya can’t identify, but it’s gone as soon as it came. “Oh. Okay. I can do that. Uh, where’s the shipment?”
“In the back—I’ll show you.” Touya leads him to the storage room, where the box of books is still sitting. He wonders if Akito can carry it, since he looks so frail, but he picks it up like it’s full of feathers and says, “Where’s the… what, you said YA?”
Touya points him in the right direction. “Let me know if you need any help.”
He nods and takes the box over, and Touya goes back to inventory. The woman who came in leaves without buying anything. Touya makes himself more coffee.
Fifteen minutes later, he realizes Akito’s being awfully quiet, and that’s not a good sign. Suspiciously, he heads to the YA section, but instead of finding the cat-man stealing something, he sees him sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, box of books still packed full beside him.
“Akito?” Touya asks.
His head snaps up, flat ears spiking upright. He jumps to his feet and starts rubbing his neck anxiously. “Uh. Hey.”
“Are you okay? Were you having trouble figuring out where they were supposed to go?” Touya kneels next to the box and pulls out a book. “See, this one goes here, since the author’s surname begins with A. And—”
“I can’t—” Akito cuts in, and when Touya turns to look at him, his cheeks go bright red. “I can’t read.”
“…Oh.” Akito has been speaking fluent Japanese since this morning—likely not the native language in his book, but the one the book was written in. He knew by that logic, he’d be able to read Japanese fluently as well, but he hadn’t even considered that he wouldn’t know how to read at all. “That was inconsiderate of me. I’m sorry.”
“S’okay,” he mumbles, tail drooping. “It’s my fault for not telling you.”
“Why didn’t you?” Touya starts quickly putting the books where they belong. He doesn’t want to make a big deal of it and get him more embarrassed. “I would’ve given you something else to do.”
“You gave me a task, so I had to follow through.”
“You didn’t seem very excited to do what I asked you back at my apartment.”
“Well, that was before you gave me food.” He coughs awkwardly. “Can I do something else now?”
He thinks for a moment. “Can you dust the store for me?”
Akito obliges, being surprisingly thorough and methodically cleaning off every individual trinket, even though the dust makes him sneeze constantly. (Touya counts eight times, and tells him ‘bless you’ after each one. There must not be a similar tradition in Akito’s world, because after the third time, he asks if Touya is trying to put a hex on him.)
Things go well. Touya assigns Akito to clean the windows next, then reorganize the decor however he wants; Akito moves around a lot of the genre-specific stuff Touya has sitting around the store, like the anime figures in the manga section and the fake desserts used as bookends in the small cookbook area, but luckily leaves the perfect front display alone. When Touya decides to eat lunch, he offers half of his sandwich to Akito, who gratefully wolfs it down. At one point, though, Touya returns from helping a customer to find Akito snooping in the cash register, to which Akito responds, “Can’t use that in my world anyway. It was worth a shot,” and Touya responds to that, “You’re incorrigible.”
Touya can’t trust him at all, but he makes a good helper, at least. Despite his first impression of the cat-man—that is to say, a recalcitrant prick—it turns out he’s pleasantly reserved and laid-back.
He becomes more and more subdued as closing time draws nearer, though, and when Touya tells him it’s time for him to go home, he just nods in resignation.
“Are you okay?” Touya asks. “Do you not want to go home?”
“Hey, um…” Akito fidgets with his hands. “I’d like to bring somethin’ back for my friend. Do you know where I could snag some kind of dessert?”
“Does ‘snag’ mean ‘shoplift’?”
“No one will miss a little pie or somethin’.” He grins, showing his sharp fangs.
Touya glares at him. “Come with me. I’ll buy her something. Nobody will be able to see you, so just tell me what you think she’d like.”
He flips the sign to ‘Closed’ and takes Akito to the bakery across the street. His green eyes go wide and his mouth hangs open a little when they step inside; this place must be a dream come true to him. Well…
After looking around in a near-trance for several minutes, Akito points to a tray of chocolate cream puffs. “I think she’ll like those.”
Touya nods slightly and steps up to the woman working behind the counter. “A bag of chocolate cream puffs and a strawberry cheesecake, please.”
“Who’s that one for?” Akito asks, but Touya can’t answer him, so he stays silent. “Also, is it seriously made out of cheese?”
The woman hands him the bag and the box, and he thanks her and leaves with Akito.
“I said, who’s that one for?” Akito asks, staring at the cheesecake box with barely-concealed adoration.
“You, of course. I can’t eat a whole cheesecake.”
Akito stops in his tracks. “What?”
Did he not even consider that he was an option? “It’s for you, I said.”
“No, I heard you, it’s just—” He looks baffled. “Why? I don’t… I don’t deserve that. My reward for helping at the bookstore was the cake I made earlier.”
“I just wanted to give it to you.” Touya hands him the box, and he pushes it away. “Akito, take it.”
“I don’t deserve it,” he repeats, sharper this time. “I stole from you.”
Not wanting to get into a fight with an invisible man in the middle of the street, Touya gives up for now and walks the rest of the way to the bookstore in silence.
“My book is over here,” Akito says sullenly, pointing at the YA section.
“Akito, wait.” How can he get him to accept the cheesecake? He’s poor and clearly starving; what other reason does he need?
…Ah.
“I don’t like sweet things,” he says. “If you don’t take this cheesecake, it’ll simply go to waste.”
Akito looks at him like he’s crazy. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Will you take it?” he asks, smiling.
Akito finally snatches the box from him. “Fine, damn. How can I repay you for this?”
He’s about to say there’s no need when he realizes that’ll never work on a guy like this. “You could… come back to the bookstore tomorrow and help me out again?”
The tension melts out of Akito’s shoulders, and relief softens his catlike features. “You’d let me?”
“As long as you promise not to steal anything.”
His mouth opens, like he’s about to say something, but he closes it again and waits a good ten seconds before adding, “I don’t know why you think I’d like a cake made out of cheese.”
“Mmm, just intuition. Please do give it a chance, though.”
Akito looks at him for a moment more, then nods, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He disappears behind one of the shelves, and light flashes through the bookstore.
He’s gone.
Touya’s wallet may be lighter, but somehow, his heart feels full.
