[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Movie Night

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 2680 words

B/D: I wanted to do more Christmas stories than this, but I went through some hefty writer's block and couldn't get any to pan out. Maybe I need a break from OJ stories in the new year. There should be one more story up on New Year's Day if I can finish it, hopefully.

If you had to live one day in the life of some other creature – one day with paws, scales, feathers, or chitin – there were far worse creatures to change places with than Nath’s cat. The morning had seen them besieged with light, downy snow that quickly packed itself into thick layers until it lay like a cold duvet on the pavement. Nath, looking out of her balcony window at the winter scene, had seen the tell-tale pawprint track leading to where her feline friend waited for her outside the apartments, and (after checking nobody was looking) descended to collect him.

Once inside, he had been ensconced upon the softest cushion in the house, plied with a tin of tuna and left to his own devices. The only things demanded of him for this princely treatment was that he was occasionally subject to bursts of spontaneous affection from his attendant humans, and that he didn’t lick Nath’s eyebrows with a fishy cat tongue. The former was easy to manage; the latter, not so much.

There was another visitor to the house that day, and it was Sora. To Nath’s great distress, somebody had given her a hat. This was a terrifying prospect, because although would it keep the warmth from escaping Sora’s head, it would also trap all the strange and mysterious thoughts that usually percolated safely out into the atmosphere before they had chance to be acted upon.

“I’ve come to do cultural studies,” she said as she came in, which was both admirably vague and made her sound like an alien. (To be fair, she did live with Hime). Thankfully, Sora was far more likely to say ‘take me to your kitchen’ than ‘take me to your leader’.

Nath’s kitchen was, in fact, a source of perpetual fascination for her. It was full of gadgets, because anything that let Nath avoid chopping vegetables with a knife held between her toes was a Good Thing™. There were buttons to be pressed, whirs to be observed, settings to be unsettled. She had made overtures towards the coffee machine that the coffee machine was not returning, and had resolved to give it a piece of her mind when Nath was out of earshot. (The coffee machine did not accept flattery as payment. It demanded the ritual sacrifice of one goat per month, and Nath was in permanent arrears. Sometimes with an hour of prayer and some scented candles she could wheedle a shot of espresso out of it, and it was the best damn espresso she had ever tasted).

Fortunately, the cat attracted Sora’s attention long before she got within arm’s reach of any unguarded cutlery. One moment she had been tracking a course straight for the pantry; the next, she had collapsed to the floor like a house of cards, all the better to pet the cat.

“Hello, Mr Roger. How are you? Tell me about your day, please,” she said. Mr Roger, upon learning that he was not called Major or Whisper or Kaze or Cinnamon today, began to purr. Sora spoke more politely to the cat than any other living being, and often had long, involved, utterly one-sided conversations with him, because the cat couldn’t judge her if she got the words wrong and ended up talking nonsense. Which she did, routinely and much to Nath’s amusement.

“So, what are we ‘culturally studying’?”

Sora rolled over and looked at her upside-down. Her hat, which looked hand-knitted and had rather more in the way of pom-poms than a respectable hat should have, fell off her head. “The night… of miracles!”

For a moment, Nath pondered the likelihood that Sora had unwittingly joined some kind of bizarre doomsday cult and was about to preach her message to an innocent 10,000 year old superweapon and her adopted stray cat. After deciding that the odds were sufficiently in favour of ‘no’, she began the long and torturous process of making Sora explain anything.

“Explain.”

The blonde girl rolled over and pulled a small data disk from her pocket. She was a huge advocate of pockets; someday, somebody would introduce her to the concept of cargo pants or dungarees, and she would never wear a skirt again. “Suguri’s friend who looks like a pineapple told her it’s an old holiday and it’s coming up. They want to research it. So Hime looked on the web and found a bunch of videos, and we have to watch them and report back.”

“‘Friend who looks like a pineapple’. ‘Research’. ‘Have to’. Right.”

Nath sighed. She loved her new friends, she really did. (Anything under 100 years old counted as new, in her opinion.) But it seemed like every day held a fifty percent chance that she’d be roped into one of their bizarre schemes. Where did they all come from? It couldn’t be Sora, who, left to her own devices, was quite happy to spend her time doing her best imitation of a rug. A rug that snored, granted, but still a rug. It was unlikely to be Suguri, who from what Nath had gathered, spent the last 5000 years looking after the environment and eating cup noodles. And Hime, despite her mischievous streak, couldn’t possibly produce this many zany plans while also being busy with knitting, cooking, and consuming more ice cream than was safe for the human stomach. Yet, if you put the three together, they seemed to turn into a perpetual motion engine that produced only chaos and arguments about food. It was unfathomable. She had to stop going along with it.

But then again, she thought, it was snowing, and the cat was in. She couldn’t go anywhere while the cat was in – who knew what might happen? The ventilation ducts might get clogged with cat fur and set fire to the building. And it wasn’t like she had been planning to do anything particularly special with her day, anyway. It wouldn’t be such a huge sacrifice to use it for a movie night. And Sora would be happy, which had at some point made its way to the list of things in her brain marked ‘Important’.

“Fine, fine,” she sighed. “We can watch the videos. Go and dig my arms out of the closet and I’ll start setting up the screen.”

“We need popcorn, too,” Sora said as she climbed to her feet.

Nath frowned. “You won’t like popcorn.”

“But we’re watching movies together, so we have to have popcorn. I’ve never done that. I want to know what it feels like.”

“Have you ever heard popcorn being made?”

Sora tilted her head. “At the popcorn factory? Doesn’t it just come in a bag?”

“No. At least not the stuff I have. It starts as a bag of kernels, and then you put it in the microwave and they all start exploding with so much force that it turns them inside out,” she explains, her frown deepening. “It’s going to scare the cat, and it’s going to scare you.”

“Don’t worry. Me and the cat are the bravest. We won’t get scared at all.”

Nath rolled her eyes but held her tongue, and went into the kitchen to make some corn explode. When she returned three minutes later, both of her very brave friends had were hiding behind the curtain.

“I didn’t get scared. Mr Roger got scared, and I went to cheer him up,” Sora said fiercely as she emerged, with such conviction that Nath almost believed her. “Let me try it.”

She snatched up a handful and stuffed it into her mouth. There were many ways to eat popcorn – you could chew it, chomp it, snarf it, masticate it, gobble it, shovel it into your mouth-hole like a JCB scoops up gravel at a building site. But those are ways that people eat, and Sora had instead elected to bite down with the force of a saber-toothed tiger and crush the popcorn into a fine powder with her powerful jaws. She glowered as she finished atomising her snack.

“It’s good. I like it. I told you I’d like it.” She had that stubborn, prize-fighter set to her jaw again. “I wasn’t scared at all. Just because it sounds like ammo cooking off doesn’t mean I can’t eat it.”

“Oh, I see,” Nath replied lightly, raising her fluffy eyebrows. “Well, since you like it so much, I should probably cook some more.”

“No!” Sora said quickly, and a little too loudly. “That’s too much popcorn. You might get addicted. You’re scaring Mr Roger. No more popcorn for you.”

There followed a brief but intense negotiation of popcorn rights, ending only when Nath invoked the ‘my house, my rules’ clause of popcorn law. With the matter settled, they arranged themselves for optimal movie-watching: two cushions side by side, the bowl of popcorn in the middle, and the cat happily oscillating between them in his endless quest to soak up any love that was going spare.

For a few moments – the opening credits, specifically – everything was peaceful. But then, dominating the screen like a hydrogen blimp, a huge man in red took centre stage. He had a bushy white beard that shook when he talked, a huge, fat belly that shook when he talked, and was attended to by an army of elves who also shook when he talked.

“Nath, who’s that guy?” Sora whispered. Her hands were full of popcorn: truly, she had discovered the joys of eating and watching TV at the same time.

“I don’t know,” Nath hissed. “I feel like I remember him from somewhere, though. I think… maybe… he’s a superhero? It’s been a long time.”

“A superhero…? But he has all those tiny slave people. And listen to him laugh ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ I think that’s meant to be an evil laugh. Look, he’s breaking and entering!”

They watched in amazement as he somehow compressed his massive girth so he could slide through a space better-suited for a Victorian orphan, and, as silently as a winter night, stole through the house to leave some ‘gifts’ (probably bombs) under a tree before evaporating without trace.

“Why is he dressed in red? It’s not good camouflage,” Sora complained. “He’s trying to be a cat burglar, but he’s not very smart.”

Nath thought for a moment. “I… think it’s because he represents communism? Or capitalism. I’m not sure. He might be communist because he’s spreading society’s wealth around more evenly, but he might be capitalist because he’s encouraging everybody to go out and buy gifts for each other.”

“I think,” Sora replied slowly, “it’s because red means ‘danger’. He’s telling everybody that he’s a great warrior. Maybe there’ll be a fight scene.”

Unfortunately, the scene changed before the mysterious man in red could get into any fisticuffs, and instead the movie dedicated itself to trundling around after a group of children. It was a concept that Nath found fundamentally boring. She had tried to get behind the idea of children, and had accepted them as a grim inevitability if she wanted the human race to be alive and keep selling her groceries, but as a general rule she wasn’t interested until they hit the age of forty, at which point they had enough life experiences to hold a decent conversation.

She took the opportunity to steal a sidelong glance at Sora. To her surprise, the blonde girl’s gaze was riveted to the screen; it seemed the lack of sweet kung-fu action had not dampened her enthusiasm for the film in the slightest. Unfortunately, one of the benefits of being a highly advanced weapon of war was having highly advanced peripheral vision, and she soon noticed she was being watched.

“Look at the kids. They all look really happy,” she said, in a slow and dreamy voice. “The biggest thing they have to worry about is that Santa might not come. Not bombs, or guns. Just Santa. It’s the same way I’ve felt since I woke up. Like there’s nothing looming over my head. I’m… really happy, that the world became like this while I was asleep. That’s all.”

Nath sighed, and rolled her shoulders. Maybe if it had been somebody else – anybody else – she would have reminded them that the film was just a story. That the children were paid actors, and long dead at that. But did it really matter? The fact of the matter was that they had moved into a world where a happy movie – where a happy ending – wasn’t impossible, or even absurd. It sparked a thought inside her, and it felt too important not to let out.

“Hey, Sora. Hear me out for a moment, okay?” she said, and hesitated. “This is… probably a bad idea, but…”

“Tell me anyway. I’ll decide if it’s bad or not.”

She swallowed, cleared her throat. “On New Year’s Eve, this town has a fireworks display. I think it might be good for you to go. Don’t get me wrong – you won’t like fireworks. They’re worse than popcorn. Maybe even worse than thunder,” she began. “But… the whole town turns out for it. I think it would be good for you to go out and see some of the people living in this world. You might even make some new friends.”

Sora didn’t answer. Instead, she toppled sideways to rest her head on Nath’s lap.

“What,” Nath asked, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Getting comfy. You’re soft,” the girl replied, with the look of somebody who was very pleased with themselves.

“No, I’m not.”

“Okay. No, you’re not. Your thighs are all muscley. But I’m pretending you’re soft. Do you like fireworks, Nath?” She looked up with those deep, piercing eyes, and suddenly Nath realised her real motive for the lap pillow. She looked away, found her eyes locked to the screen.

“I was scared of them, at first. For the longest time, I thought they were… childish, somehow. Loud and garish. I wanted humanity to grow out of them. But then I realised that they’re expressive, you know? It’s like all the excitement about the year to come is trapped inside a bubble, and then you pop it and let everything out.”

“You’re right,” Sora murmured. “I probably won’t like fireworks. But I’ll try to like them. If I try hard enough, I might like them next year. Or the year after. Will you go to the display with me?”

“Of course.” She ruffled her hair a little. “I wouldn’t ask you to go somewhere where you’ll be scared and then not go myself.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Hey, Nath. All the people in the movie are buying gifts for each other. If I got you a gift, what would you want?”

Nath sighed. “Your questions are always so difficult.”

“That’s how you know they’re good questions.”

She feigned thinking for a second. “Well, I’d settle for my nose back. You never did return it.”

Sora grinned. “That’s because I’m a master thief. Even better than Santa. I’m just deciding what to steal next.”

“So far, you’ve stolen exclusively noses, hugs and popcorn. Somehow, I don’t think the world needs to be too afraid,” Nath said with a low chuckle. “Uh… That said, do you mind getting up? This is a little embarrassing.”

“Nope. Can’t get up. The cat’s sleeping on my tummy.”

Nath raised her eyebrows, and tore her eyes away from the screen. Sure enough, the cat had migrated to Sora’s abdomen and was curled up in a very cuddly, contented ball.

“Well. I guess that’s that, then.”

“That’s that.”

The movie ended with Santa having gone through some kind of redemption arc and the kids receiving dozens of gifts, none smaller than their heads. Another movie began, and neither Sora or the cat showed any signs of wanting to move. It was only when the girl began snoring that Nath realised that she had been tricked, and the master thief had already stolen her lap. Eventually, she began to feel drowsy herself.

That night she dreamed of rabbit ears, and couldn’t tell why.

A/N: I feel like this was kinda doofy, but I've been running really low on inspiration as of late.