#Next Gen Jellicles my beloveds... <3

[theimpossiblescheme]

(Another entry for @bombawife‘s OC week--this time I get to talk about my Platoria kittens, or rather let their friends and mentors talk about them for me!)

To Aphrodite Jinx, the Junkyard’s self-appointed “handy cat” (but please, call them AJ, all their friends do), Bianca was very much her father’s daughter.  Plato’s cheerful eagerness and restless energy shone out of her, and there was some flickering of forgetting her own strength and trying to channel it into something elegant and calm instead.  But while Plato always looked for ways to make himself needed and useful, Bianca looked to make things useful.  She loved junk–all manner of junk, anything that looked interesting on the pile over the old car boot.  Newspapers, old suitcases, strings of holiday lights, electric bits and bobs, teakettles, tennis racquets, glass jars, orphaned container lids… some of it hung in her corner of the den to decorate the wall, but most of it she rushed over to AJ with questions upon questions.  “Why would somebody ever throw this away?” she wondered, knowing neither of them could answer–who knew why humans did anything?  But oh, weren’t they funny and sometimes rather fascinating?  One afternoon, Bianca helped herself to a pair of welding goggles she’d found hanging on the bedstead, and ever since she refused to take them off.  Most of the time they hung around her neck, but every so often AJ would find her wearing them properly, sprawled out on the ground and determinedly tinkering with some new doodad she’d found, and it always made them smile.  Another afternoon, Bianca tied a ribbon around an old sparkplug, and AJ laughed to see it dangling from her neck as she perused a half-torn book.  You couldn’t deny her creativity, even if it had a strange way of manifesting.  One of these days, they really needed to introduce Bianca to their humans’ garage–she’d have a field day there.

To Tumblebrutus, one of the Junkyard’s many new healers, Cygnus was very much his mama’s boy.  Victoria’s quiet empathy echoed in his voice every time he spoke, reassuring every patient in the den that they were in good paws, and he moved with the same balletic precision that came from sitting and watching her practice every morning.  If only he had her confidence, too.  The kid had it in him, Tumble knew.  He saw it every time Cygnus second-guessed himself about where an injury had come from or how to cure a bad cough, looking back like he knew the answer, but was scared he might be wrong after all.  Some days he needed to prod him along, but other days all he could do was stand back and nod as Cygnus’s instincts guided him.  Let the kid trust himself–it was the only way he’d get better.  And fair was fair, everybody learned at their own pace.  Neither of them had Cori’s extreme soothing calm or Tanto’s mastery of herbs (who did, really?), but he listened with round eyes and perked ears to every lesson.  Cygnus always balked a bit at bandaging wounds, but he took great care not to cut off the bloodflow.  Where he excelled, however, was bedside manner.  He was frankly amazing at getting even younger kittens to sit still and tell them how brave they were, and sometimes he’d jokingly glare back at Tumble for saying a broken leg from backflipping off a car was “pretty cool, you gotta admit.”  And at the end of a long day, they’d send their “latest victim (quit calling them that, you’re gonna scare them off!)” home with a treat and an encouraging word.

To Jemima, the London Jellicles’ Keeper of Memory, Anastasia took after… strangely enough, both of them, and yet neither of them.  Oh, certainly, she had the sweet, earnest nature and soulful eyes everyone knew and loved so dearly, and she was every bit as sublime a dancer.  But there was something lurking underneath.  A frailty that didn’t suit such an energetic kitten–not of body, but of soul.  Like a hairline crack in a porcelain vase.  A sadness, too, that also didn’t belong in someone so young.  Every time Nastya sat alone, away from her little circle of friends (and occasional protective circle of older siblings), Jemima could sense it even from far away.  And so much more besides–glimpses of guttering streetlamps and autumn leaves, pangs of hunger, the heaviness of rain in her fur… and beneath even that, flashes of joy.  Of dancing, twirling skirts, the scent of roses and perfume sprayed to cover sweat, paws clasped to her heart as countless other cats cheered.  She never pried or said anything, of course–a cat valued their privacy above all else–but it was rather like hearing a tearful argument from an upstairs window, except with only one voice.  She couldn’t bear to hear Nastya’s struggling as so many things dead and forgotten boiled to the surface of her mind, and when she finally came to ask for help she wasted no time in telling the dear kitten she didn’t have to figure it all out herself.  Jemima would help her, Victoria and Plato would help her, Bianca, Cygnus, everyone who loved her–they would all be there beside her on this path, like always, toward her own happiness.  And it was the proudest hug Jemima had ever given when Nastya threw grateful arms around her neck and held on tight.