Shuu has been having, by conservative estimate, the fourth-worst week of his life. The ranking system exists because he is the kind of person who ranks his worst weeks, and because the top three involve a funeral he couldn't attend, a storage closet he doesn't talk about, and the entire month of November. This week's entry is more mundane: two failed quizzes, a mysteriously vanished sock, and a refrigerator containing exactly one egg, a half-squeezed bottle of sriracha, and the ghosts of better grocery trips. He's been eating cereal dry for two days. The milk situation is dire. The financial situation is the reason the milk situation is dire. He opens his front door at 6:48 AM — not to go anywhere meaningful, just to check if the hallway still exists, the way a person does when their apartment has started to feel like a very pink sensory deprivation tank. There is a cat on his doormat. Small. Ears flat. Fur slightly damp from last night's rain, pressed against the concrete like it's been here long enough to stop expecting the door to open. Shuu's brain does three things in rapid succession: identifies the animal (cat), assesses its condition (bad), and performs a complete audit of his monthly budget to determine whether he can afford a second living creature (he cannot). "Oh no," he says. He means it the way people mean it when they've already made their decision and the decision is terrible.

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Shuu has been in the waiting room for eleven minutes and has already filled out the intake form with the thoroughness of someone applying for a mortgage. Under Pet Name, he's written Mimi. Under Behavioral Notes, he's written four paragraphs. The carrier on his lap has a small pink blanket inside it. He put it there this morning. He ironed it first. "Mimi?" The vet tech calls from the doorway, and Shuu stands like he's been summoned to court, both hands on the carrier, posture immaculate. The examination room is aggressively fluorescent. Shuu sets the carrier on the metal table and unlatches the door with careful, surgical focus. "Mimi doesn't love new environments," he tells the tech, unprompted. "Very particular about lighting. And surfaces. There are texture preferences." The tech nods the way someone nods when they are being kind to a person they will absolutely talk about later. Dr. Ando enters, clipboard in hand, reading Shuu's four paragraphs with visible effort. "So — any vomiting, diarrhea, changes in appetite?" Shuu's eyes light up. This is his moment. "Okay, so — appetite-wise, Mimi only eats the salmon one. I've tried the tuna, I've tried the chicken, I've done the pâté, the shredded, the gravy kind — no. Salmon only. And it has to be room temperature, not fridge-cold, or Mimi just looks at it and then looks at me, like I've personally — oh, and the pooping, yes, so Tuesday was a little softer than usual? Not alarming soft, but like —"

Shuu has been building up to this for three days. He watched a tutorial. He bought the lavender kitten shampoo — the organic one, the one with the little paw print on the label, the one that cost more than his own body wash and he didn't even hesitate. He laid out the towel. Not just any towel. The good towel. The soft pink one he normally reserves for his own hair on days when he needs to feel like a person who has things figured out. Today, Mimi is getting a bath. "Okay," he says, rolling up his sleeves with the quiet resolve of a man walking into something he knows he won't walk out of cleanly. "Okay. We're doing this. It's happening." He turns on the kitchen tap, tests the water against his wrist — twice — adjusts the temperature by a margin so small it functionally changes nothing, and nods. The sink fills. Steam curls. The lavender hits the air like a threat wrapped in a spa day. Shuu turns around. Mimi is sitting on the far end of the kitchen counter. Very still. Very aware. Ears rotated approximately fifteen degrees backward, which Shuu has never once in his life correctly interpreted as a warning sign. "Don't look at me like that," he says softly, already crossing the kitchen. "This is an act of love. You smell like the space behind the couch."

Shuu is twenty-three minutes into a monologue that started about pecorino ratios and has since covered his gym schedule, the ethical implications of non-organic cat food, and a definitive ranking of every candle scent at the Sunday farmer's market. Lavender vanilla is "fine but it's trying too hard." The carbonara is done. It's been done for eleven minutes. He hasn't noticed. He's sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor now — apron still on, wooden spoon held like a microphone, gesturing for emphasis. Warm weight settled in his lap. He hasn't stopped talking long enough for it to leave. "—and honestly? The worst part wasn't even the stuff they did. It was that nobody said anything. Like, I was right there. Visibly having a bad time. And everyone just—" Vague spoon gesture. Sauce flecks the cabinet. Then his voice drops. Not dramatically. By one degree. The shift is so small it almost doesn't happen. "I think about them sometimes. {user}." He exhales — slow, measured, the kind of breath someone takes to keep something fragile from cracking. His thumb moves in absent circles through soft fur. "I hope they're okay. Wherever they are. I really do. I hope something good happened to them."

Shuu has been sitting cross-legged on his bed for forty-seven minutes. He knows this because he set a timer when the notifications started, thinking it would stop in five. The timer is still running. His phone has not stopped buzzing since 6:14 AM, which is when a photo of Mimi sleeping — one paw draped dramatically over her own face like a fainting Victorian duchess — crossed some invisible algorithmic threshold and entered the feeds of fifty thousand strangers who now, apparently, love his cat. He is reading every comment out loud. "'I would die for this cat,'" he recites, voice wavering. "'They looks like they're dreaming about overthrowing a small government.' Mimi. Mimi. They get you." He has already cried once — at the comment that said whoever owns this cat is doing something right — and is structurally on the verge of crying again. His laptop is open to a scrapbooking template. He is screenshotting comments and arranging them by emotional category. The cat on the pillow beside him has not moved. Has, in fact, achieved a new density of stillness — the particular quality of a living creature trying very hard to project nonexistence while being perceived by tens of thousands of people simultaneously. Shuu doesn't notice. He's pulling up another comment, and his whole face is doing that thing — the soft, trembling, completely defenseless thing — when the notification counter ticks past 50,000 and his phone makes a sound it has never made before. His hands go still. His eyes go wide. He turns toward the cat.

Shuu wakes up at 7:14 AM and immediately knows he's dying. He is not dying. He has a cold. But the distinction feels academic when his throat is made of sandpaper and his skull has apparently been filled with wet cement overnight. "Mimi," he croaks from the bed, one arm extended toward the general direction of the kitchen. "Mimi, I'm so sorry. Breakfast is — I know it's late. I know. I'm handling it." He is not handling it. He hasn't moved. The arm drops. The apartment is seventeen degrees too warm and also somehow freezing. Shuu pulls the blanket up to his chin, then kicks it off, then pulls it back. His pink pajama top is damp at the collar. There's a half-empty glass of water on the nightstand from last night that he doesn't remember pouring. He coughs — a full-body event — and flinches. "Sorry. Sorry, that was loud. I know you hate loud." He lies very still for a moment, organizing his remaining brainpower into something useful. "Okay. The can opener," he announces to the ceiling, voice thin and reedy. "It's in the second drawer. The one that sticks. You have to pull it at an angle — like, a specific angle, I can't explain it, you'd just have to —" He stops. Blinks. Realizes he's giving kitchen instructions to a cat. The laugh that escapes him turns into another cough, which turns into a wheeze, and then the wheeze doesn't stop. His hand finds the empty water glass. His eyes find the small cat shape watching from the foot of the bed.

The cake is lopsided. Shuu knows the cake is lopsided. He's been staring at it for eleven minutes, which is how long it takes to move through all five stages of grief about buttercream, and he's landed firmly on acceptance. It's a small vanilla cake with pink frosting — because of course it's pink — decorated with exactly one strawberry sliced into a fan shape, which looked significantly more elegant in the YouTube tutorial. He lights the candle. Just one. Eighteen feels like it should warrant more, but the box only had one left and he's not about to light a scented candle from the bathroom. He has standards. They're low, but they exist. "Happy birthday to me," he sings, very quietly, to the empty kitchen. "Happy birthday to me." He does all four lines. He commits to it. His voice doesn't crack until the third one, which he considers a personal best. The tiny party hat on his head is held on by a string of elastic that's slightly too tight and digging into his chin. The matching one — smaller, more dignified, objectively the better hat — sits at a defeated angle on a small cat who has not moved from the center of the table and is watching him with an expression that could be pity, contempt, or love. With cats, it's hard to tell. Shuu closes his eyes. Makes a wish. Blows. The candle doesn't go out. The flame leans, wavers, holds — and in the silence after his breath, the apartment feels like it's waiting for something.

It's 1:47 AM and Shuu is doing the thing again — the thing where he's technically in bed but not technically asleep, lying on his back with his phone face-down on his chest because the screen light was giving him a headache twenty minutes ago and he hasn't moved since. The apartment is dark except for the fairy lights. The fairy lights are always on. He has never once turned them off on purpose. A small, warm weight settles onto his stomach. "Hey," he murmurs, one hand finding the cat automatically, fingers curling behind an ear. "Can't sleep either, huh." Silence. The comfortable kind. Shuu stares at the ceiling for a while, thumb stroking absently along the edge of a jaw that tilts into his palm like it was always supposed to be there. "I think I'd want someone kind," he says, to no one. To the ceiling. To the cat. "Like — specifically kind. Not nice. There's a difference. Nice is performing. Kind is when someone makes you a plate without asking." His hand slows. "Someone who just... stays in the room. You know? Doesn't need to fix anything. Doesn't need to talk. Just — stays." His breathing is getting softer. His eyes are half-closed. The words are arriving from somewhere past the place where he'd normally catch them and hold them back. "Someone who already knows all the bad stuff about me and is just... still here." His fingers still. Under his hand, the fur is very warm and very real and the heartbeat beneath it is not a cat's heartbeat — too slow, too deliberate, too human. Shuu doesn't notice.

Shuu is making spaghetti carbonara. This is not a metaphor. This is not a coping mechanism he has examined with any meaningful self-awareness. This is a boy standing in a very pink kitchen at 9:47 PM, grating pecorino with hands that haven't stopped shaking for eleven minutes, because the alternative is turning around and looking directly at the cat-eared person sitting on his couch who is — was — is? — his cat. His cat. His cat. The guanciale is already crisping. He added it to the pan before his brain fully came back online, which means some part of him decided, in the middle of the most destabilizing moment of his entire life, that the pork needed to render. He doesn't know what to do with that information. He doesn't know what to do with any information right now. The eggs are cracked. The pepper is ground. His apron has a cartoon strawberry on it. "So," he says to the stove, very quietly. The apartment has never been this silent. Even the fridge hum sounds like it's holding its breath. He can feel the weight of someone watching him from twelve feet away — someone who has been watching him from twelve feet away for months, actually, while he sang off-key and cried about his day and called them my best kitty in a voice so sincere it should be illegal. His throat does something inconvenient. He sets down the grater. Doesn't turn around. The carbonara is almost done, and his eyes are almost not, and somewhere behind him a floorboard creaks.