Work Text:
One summer, Nepeta and Jade come to stay with Rose in the mountains. The forest is big and dark, and full of interesting earth animals, and it’s good to see Kanaya and Rose again. She likes that Rose's lusus is milk-pale, like a purroper lusus, and Rose's lusus ("Call me Mom, dear") is just as tidy as Pounce was. When she and Jade brought Rose things they had killed in the woods, Mom put them in jars ("How delightfully straightforward! Do you think you could get some of the mice out of the pantry?") and put them in a little cabinet where they could see them while they ate breakfast. Rose and Kanaya didn't eat breakfast, and neither did Mom, but Jade and Nepeta liked to sit out in the tiny room and look at the things they had caught. It made Nepeta a little sad that Mom and Rose didn't eat the gifts she brought them, but Kanaya told her humans were fussy eaters.
Sometimes, if Nepeta is very quiet, Mom lets her stay and watch the work in the laboratory, tapping away on computers and calibrating machines. Nepeta knows the rumbly laboratory noises, they're safe and comforting like Equius's machinery, and when Nepeta is tired, she goes and hides in a tiny room, which looks like it belongs to a lost purrincess. One time Nepeta told Mom this and Mom looked off to one side and her voice got really tiny, the way Equius's voice did when Nepeta was talking about Aradia or the Sufferer or the fact that they didn't have a planet or a lusus any more.
One day Nepeta caught an especially nice squirrel (Earth beasts were so tiny! Sometimes she felt bad about hunting them!) and wanted to leave it for Mom. She knew leaving it in the lab would be a bad idea, so she put it, very carefully, on the mat at the entrance to the tiny, sad, pink room. The next time she went in there to take a nap, it was on a shelf, and there was a fishbowl beside it with a cheerful looking goldfish. Nepeta didn't understand why Rose thought Mom made terrible snacks.