#trying a new format do you like it

Jackie is a war vet coming home from a long deployment.

Anti is his lucky black cat that he’s been missing for years now.

When he returns home, however, he finds his best friend, Marvin, missing—although he was supposed to be cat sitting Anti for him while he was deployed…

He goes to call him and ask where he is—but there’s a man in his kitchen.

Continue on AO3 or…

~

The man is short with dark skin (dark gray, he later learns) and black hair.

He has eerily familiar piercing green eyes when he turns, a CAT EAR flicking atop his head as he picks up the sounds of Jackie walking and gasping.

The can of tuna he’d been holding in his black clawed hands falls.

And then Jackie has an armful of purring, “YE’RE BACK!!!”

~

It turns out, Jackie learns, that Anti is actually a daemon.

A CAT daemon. He’d been arguing with a dog daemon (ex?) friend of his (Dark) in the alleyway Jackie had found him in and was too tired to tell him anything when the human decided to rescue him and nurse him back to health.

By the time he WAS healthy again…

He just liked being with Jackie.

~

Marvin, of course, still got an earful.

He WAS supposed to be watching him, after all.

Still, the flamboyant man only sighed and rolled his eyes.

He then revealed that he’d actually been a magician this whole time and realized, albeit belatedly and only after Anti refused to be taken care of by him, the truth when he came to cat sit Anti and found… well, a cat DAEMON instead.

(After a discussion, he decided to just bring the daemon food every few days.)

~

“So…” Jackie breathes deeply, trying not to be angry, “You just… left him???”

“Well…” Marvin, the veteran can somehow tell, looks around himself nervously, as though Jackie’s gonna pop out of no where and take him down (which, honestly, he COULD do). “He said he only wanted to be with YOU…”

The magician trails off unsurely but Jackie can hear the truth in his words.

He glances down at the purring cat daemon in his lap and sighs, “It’s fine.”