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There was often a disturbance outside of Han Sooyoung’s apartment.
It wasn’t because of the neighborhood. Of course not. She lived in a perfectly fine neighborhood, thank you very much. Not the wealthiest neighborhood out there, but you couldn’t ask for any more in a first-world country. With the economy going to crap, you’d take any living space, two meals a day, and access to the internet over anything else, really.
Her headache was caused by the two damn stray cats living outside her apartment. One black, one white. Well, it didn’t matter what the hell they looked like. These bastards found it necessary to fight all day long, chasing each other's tails and whatnot.
From dawn to dusk, she’d see these fuckers prancing around the streets, jumping on walls in reach, knocking over houseplants like cats do. Grabbing onto each other’s paws, clawing at the other, messy catfights. They reminded her of two toddlers fighting over a singular toy. But in this instance, the object analogous to a toy would be the cats themselves. These damn cats thought annoying each other was the most amusing thing in the world, apparently.
Correction: the white cat with furry black paws—the one she dubbed that damn little fucking shit—seemed to love annoying the black one.
Great thing she didn’t love the sounds that they’d make during these sessions—where the white one acted like a full-blown attention-whore, meowing and crying and jumping. Doing whatever it would take to bother the black one, if just for a single nanosecond.
The flow she usually found herself in when typing out her trashy novels was broken more than once by the clattering and yowling of these two cats. She pulled at her hair each time they happened. Even through her closed windows, doors—she couldn’t get any peace or quiet at all. Her writer’s block flaring up more often wasn’t helping either. Now, she’d been cramming and forcing ten-thousand words of utter bullcrap every week—publishing chapters for her webnovel that she’d likely have to retcon in the future. Hopefully her readers don’t care about plot holes.
She wouldn’t be surprised if their fighting could be heard throughout the entire neighborhood. Her ears couldn’t handle any more of this. Rather, her sanity couldn’t handle any more of this. If this continued, she’d surely go insane.
At more than one point, she considered throwing her laptop off her balcony. If that would startle the cats into stopping their nonsense, she’d sacrifice any sort of money for peace and quiet.
Of course, she’s not that much of an asshole. But still. There’s only so much annoyance one person can take before they combust.
She found herself at her wit’s end by the second month of this nonsense happening. By now, the weather had transitioned. Starting from the slightly chilly autumn weather, there was a sense of foreboding in the air. The anticipation of colder weather, snowy days. Now, with shorter days and darker mornings, everyone found themselves cooped up inside. Snug as a bug, some would say.
She’d have thought someone would’ve grabbed these two cats and shoved them into a shelter at this point. Apparently not.
It’s not that surprising. If the government of the country couldn’t get shit done, of course the local government wouldn’t either. And with how individualistic society is, nobody would do shit about two cats. Everyone was too worried about job prospects, the stock market, pleasing shareholders, blah, blah, blah. All of this corporate, economic gibberish that she didn’t want to delve into.
Whatever. The biggest problem in her life right now were these two damn cats. The yowling could be heard from up in her apartment on the tenth floor. From the pitch, she could tell that it was the white one, screaming and crying as usual, for whatever reason.
God-fucking-damnit.
She’d have loved to stay inside, away from the cold weather. But this was the final straw. The final-final-final straw. She actually planned on doing something about it t-minus negative three weeks ago, but she kept delaying it. It was dumb of her to even think that someone would have dealt with it by now.
Grabbing onto her coat, she shoved her arms through it in a haphazard fashion. Wearing nothing but her fuzzy slippers and her duck-printed pajamas, Han Sooyoung locked the door to her apartment and waited by the elevator. Its slow dings would be irritating if she hadn’t been dealing with these two furry fucks for two whole months.
“Tenth floor,” the elevator announced before opening. Stepping in, she shivered. The elevator was a solid five degrees colder than it was in the hallway. Dear god. She could already imagine how cold it was going to be outside.
Which made it even more shocking that these cats still hadn’t found shelter yet. What the hell were they doing? Did they not care for their own well being? Were they born just to annoy the hell out of each other? Is this what they mean in trickle-down economics, where the most annoyed—likely the black cat in this situation—would share some of his annoyance with her? What the hell. Does that even make any sense?
Either way, it didn’t matter. The elevator door opened in no time at all, and she found herself in the apartment lobby. Strangely lavish, she had no care for it as she opened the door to see the little shit she was looking for. The damn white cat.
She’d seen him in person before, but he’d run away too quickly for her to catch. She knew it was a him since she’d overheard one of her neighbors talking about it. They were annoyed too, but like her, they were waiting for other people to take care of it. Classic bystander effect.
But here, she caught a much better glance. Despite being a stray, his fur was quite clean, nicely groomed. Short-haired and quite typical with hazel brown eyes. If he hadn’t been bothering her for weeks, she’d consider him at least a little cute.
The other culprit was here too. Was this cat a pedigree? Compared to the little shit, he looked downright majestic. His fur was clean as well, though a little longer. She’d never understand how these two stayed so clean, despite their roughhousing. Some sort of cat magic, she supposed.
The two were staring off, right in front of the automatic door. The white cat kept opening his mouth, a litany of meows spewing out. The black one stared at him while he did so, sitting and waving his fluffy black tail, his eyes trained on the white cat.
Perfect. She’d grab them, run to another neighborhood, and drop them off there. If her plan went as smoothly as she imagined, they’d stay there for good.
But things never do go as well as they should, do they? As soon as the automatic door sensed her, a gust of wind swept into her face. She couldn’t see.
“Fuck!” she said. Or she tried to say. As soon as she opened her mouth, her hair flew in. She spat and spat as the wind kept blowing cold air and tendrils of her own hair into her mouth and eyes. If she were subjected to this cold any longer, she wouldn’t be surprised if her ears fell off from frostbite.
The cats, sensing a perfect opportunity—or maybe a blast of warm air from the apartment lobby, jumped her.
“Yowch! Help! You damn—fuck!” The two cats climbed her like a cat tower. She didn’t know what the hell their plan was and she didn’t need to know. She just needed to get these things off of her!
She realized one thing in particular in all of this.
This was a mistake. This was a huge mistake.
The one time that she decided to go and deal with the problem—the worse the problem had gotten. If she knew that they’d team up and attack her, she wouldn’t have done this at all.
“Get off, you little shits! Off—off!”
She’d stumbled back far enough that the sensor for the automatic door had stopped triggering. The door had closed with a whoosh, but not before sending a biting breeze. Even in the confines of her furry slippers, her feet had gotten uncomfortably cold. There was no part of her body that wasn’t about to necrotize from exposure to the almost-zero-degree weather.
What wasn’t helping were the two cats currently climbing at her legs. As if mocking her, they meowed and meowed, as if they were crying my savior, my savior!
Sure, it was cold, but really? She considered screaming again, but she wasn’t too eager to get a noise complaint. She toned down her voice, her hands grabbing onto the white one, “Please get off. I’ll take you to a shelter, okay?”
The white one, surprisingly, doesn’t act up. Her hands, on his furry back and belly, found hold on him, stable. He gaped at her with a half-opened mouth, brown eyes staring dumbly at her. “Meow?” he says.
“Meow, meow to you too, dude.”
She actually didn’t know what to do. The black one was still grabbing at her ankle, trying to reach the white one.
“Hey, dude. I thought you hated this little shit here? What gives?”
The black cat glared at her.
Damn. What a shitty attitude.
Gloating, she rubbed the cat on the belly. The thing was really, really soft. She kept petting it, the white cat meowing hesitantly as she did so. At each meow, the black cat pawed at her harder, desperate to reach the white one.
Man, what the hell. She was supposed to be taking them to another neighborhood. Or even better, an animal shelter. With how soft—and cute, but she wouldn’t ever admit it—the cat was, she’d forgotten her current state. Her hands felt as though there was no circulation through them and her legs were growing numb. She had to go back up into her apartment.
She plopped the cat back onto the ground. She’d long since abandoned her plans of dropping them off at another neighborhood. It’d be too treacherous of a journey in her current state of wear.
“Hey, stay here, alright? I’ll take you to a shelter another day,” she says to the white cat.
The black cat finally stopped pawing at her and sat back down like an obedient child. With the white cat in reach, he was apparently satiated. He stared at the white cat, almost creepily. The white cat continued to meow.
“Ugh, I’ll take that as a yes, alright? You’re lucky you guys are so cute.”
But as she began to depart, she felt a presence behind her. It would be more accurate to say she heard. The two cats weren’t particularly subtle. The white cat kept meowing like he wanted her to hear him.
She turned back to face him. They both stare at her expectantly.
“I told you, I’ll take you some other day, okay? Now go back out there and scram.”
She gestured to the automatic door, but it was a moot point. The cats didn’t understand a word she said.
If they didn’t understand, she’d make them understand then.
In both of her arms, she grabbed both the black and white cat in one fell swoop. The black one started yowling as if he were being abducted. Well, that wasn’t entirely far from the truth.
“So darn stubborn.” Her breath misted in the air as the automatic door slid open again. She lowered herself, dropping them safely on the sidewalk outside of the door. Then, as soon as she did, she went back into the apartment complex as quickly as she could manage. She’d actually die if she had to deal with one more second of this wintry cold.
The white cat stared at her. She stared back.
What the hell was his problem?
Not like it mattered now. She was going to go back to her warm, cozy apartment and chillax. She was going to finish the chapter for this week—the one that had been giving her a full-blown migraine since Sunday. She was going to type it out in one single burst and then get a full ten hours of sleep. That was the plan.
It’s expected that her plans never come to fruition as they should. But as soon as she stepped away from the door, she heard it open again, the sliding nearly as grating on her ears as the cacophony of meows that erupt behind her.
“I told you guys to stay outside…” she said. The cats stared at her like they didn’t understand Korean. Well, of course they didn’t.
She went to pick them up again. Then, after braving through another seven seconds of the outside air, she dropped them on the pavement again and walked back inside. The door closed again.
The door then opened again. The cats walked in.
She picked them up. She dropped them outside. She walked back inside.
They follow her.
“Oh my god.” She felt as though she had aged fifteen years. Where had her youth gone? Her strength? She was reduced to a skeleton, flesh turning gangrenous in the cold. These damn cats.
She stared at them, their eyes still unblinking. Huge, void-like, if she kept staring, she’d probably discover some secret of the universe. Maybe.
Definitely not. These things were dumber than bricks. But they were cute. But they kept bothering her, so they weren’t. They weren’t cute at all. Not at all. Nada.
She sighed. She wasn’t gonna entertain this any longer. If they’d make a mess in the lobby, it wouldn’t be her problem. If anyone reviewed the security footage, they’d definitely see her putting in great efforts to stop it.
She clicked the elevator button. The metal was warmer than her hand at this point. She was out for too long.
As soon as the elevator door opens, she steps in, pressing the button to the tenth floor. The cats, of course, came closer, closer. She spammed the elevator close button.
Close, close! Damn it, close. Who the fuck designed these?
The door wasn’t closing. The cats managed to slip in, these rat bastards. As soon as they did, the elevator door finally had the mind to close.
Too late. Really?
Now stuck in an elevator with two cats, Han Sooyoung felt the urge to slam her head into the elevator panel.
She had made a mistake, and that meant she had to deal with the consequences of it.
The elevator hummed, pulling upwards till a ding! signified the tenth floor had been reached.
Finally, warmth from her lovely hallway graced her face, arms, hands, and legs. The cats huddled against her legs, their bodies rubbing against her ankles. She resisted the urge to swat them away, the ticklish feeling unbearable. Thankfully, they stop in time, finding more interest in the hallway than in her. But it wouldn’t do her any good to have these cats roaming here.
She grabbed onto them again. “You furry, stubborn little shits are coming with me.”
Nobody had told her how hard it was to enter in a keycode with two cats in her hand. Likely, no normal person was ever in a situation she had found herself in. Adopting the two stray cats that had terrorized her for a whole two months.
“Fuck. Why does this have to happen to me?”
Han Sooyoung and her shitty planning skills. She wanted to die.
The white cat chased the black cat’s tail in her apartment. It seemed they were having the time of their lives.