Beware of the Cougar (Patreon)

The plaza was alive tonight.

Lanterns strung between wooden posts cast everything in warm light, swaying gently with the coastal breeze. The streets hummed with laughter, the clatter of game stalls, and the rich smell of grilled meats and sweet festival bread drifting from every direction. Children darted between adults and painted faces. Somewhere nearby, a small band had struck up a lively tune that had a cluster of older faunus clapping along.

Kali walked through all of it, hands loosely clasped behind her back, a small smile on her lips.

It was a beautiful sight, really. Her people were happy, loud, unbothered by the weight of the world for one night. The Full Moon Festival, an ironic name, had always been Menagerie's way of exhaling, a collective breath let out after another hard year, and watching it never got old.

It was also, if she was being completely honest with herself, the best thing she could have done tonight.

Better than sitting in that office surrounded by reports she'd already read time and time again, waiting for news that hadn't come. Better than staring at the ceiling of a bedroom that felt larger than it used to.

A simple stroll… for a hunt.

Or maybe just a quiet stroll through the festival, nothing more, nothing less. Something ordinary, outside of politics or the particular headache that had been building for over a week.

Which inevitably brought her thoughts back to Sienna.

Kali's smile tightened.

Sienna Khan was somewhere in Mistral, doing something that her informants had been frustratingly unable to pin down beyond the vaguest of outlines. That woman had a talent for disappearing and only appeared when she did something. 

Nothing good. That much Kali was certain of, the way you were certain. Whatever Sienna was building toward, it wasn't going to land quietly on anyone's doorstep.

And yet…

She'd sat across from Ghira not three days ago, laid it out as plainly as she could and watched his expression settle into that particular stillness that meant he'd heard her, processed it, and filed it under not yet.

‘When she does something that actually requires our direct response,’ he'd said, with that infuriating calm of his, ‘we'll respond accordingly.’

Ghira was reactive, never proactive.

Kali had smiled and nodded and excused herself from the room before she said something she'd regret.

She stopped walking.

Kali stood there in the middle of the street with lantern light flickering across her face and the band playing somewhere behind her and took three long breaths the way her mother had taught her when she was small and prone to letting her temper take control of her

In. Hold. Out.

The tension in her shoulders didn't disappear, but it lessened.

She thought of Ghira — not the co-leader across the table, but the man she'd known longer than that. The one she'd laughed with, built something beautiful and lasting, loved genuinely and without reservation for decades that she still looked back on with joy. That hadn't been a mistake. She was old enough and honest enough with herself to know the difference between something that had failed and something that had simply run its course.

It had been Blake leaving that cracked it open. Not a fight, not a betrayal, just the quiet, awful realization that the life they'd built together had been oriented around something that was no longer there. They'd looked at each other one evening and both understood without needing to say it aloud. What followed had been private.

They were still parents. They were still partners in the work that mattered. They simply weren't that to each other anymore.

No one outside a very small circle knew, and that was how it would stay. The politics alone made that necessary, never mind everything else.

Kali exhaled slowly and resumed walking, smoothing her expression back into serenity.

Ancient history. Tonight was not for that.

Tonight she wanted company. A little lightness, a little fun.

‘Maybe a little more than fun,’ she thought, and felt no guilt about it. She was not so far past her prime that her only remaining pleasures were domestic ones. Inevitably, the image surfaced unbidden: a rocking chair, knitting needles, surrounded by grandchildren demanding another story.

She laughed quietly to herself, soft enough that the couple passing nearby didn't notice.

Where had that come from?

She'd love it, truthfully. She knew herself well enough to admit that. But Blake was somewhere out in the world doing something, and Kali had made her peace with that too. Her daughter would find her way back, eventually. She always believed that. And when she did, Kali would be standing at the door with her arms open — for Blake, and yes, for Ghira too, because whatever they were to each other now, they would never stop being Blake’s parents. 

But that was a future thing.

A patient thing.

Tonight was a now thing.

The street opened up ahead of her into a quieter stretch, away from the loudest stalls and the densest crowds. A few vendors operated at a more relaxed pace here, and the benches along the low retaining wall were occupied by people content to simply sit and watch the bay glitter under the shattered moon rather than chase the noise.

She was taking in the scene, letting her gaze drift pleasantly across familiar faces and pleasant strangers, when something snagged her attention.

A man sat alone on one of the benches, slightly apart from the nearest group, eating a red snowcone. He was shirtless, which wasn't unusual at the island, and the moonlight caught the lines of a physique that told her he was not a slouch. Not too young, but not old either. The perfect in-between.

What stopped her, though, wasn't any of that.

It was the absence of extra traits.

He was a human.

Kali's amber eyes settled on him with full curiosity. Humans weren't unwelcome in Menagerie; that was an ugly rumor and an unfair one at that, but they were rare here, and rare at the Full Moon Festival most of all. This was a faunus celebration. The kind of event that drew their people home from across the kingdoms.

So what, exactly, was this human doing here?

Sitting all alone. Which dismissed the idea that he had come with a partner.

Her head tilted slightly.

Interesting.

He hadn't noticed her yet. Or if he had, he was doing a good job at pretending otherwise, which in its own way was also interesting. Most people noticed her, not out of vanity, just experience. She had a presence that tended to cause others to turn her way. She'd found it equal parts useful and exhausting over the years.

This man was relaxed, free from burden and no pressing obligations to the world.

She envied that.

Kali considered walking on but then again, it was such a rarity to find a human here.

So naturally she sat down on the far end of his bench.

Making sure to leave a respectable distance between them. She settled in and turned her gaze to the bay, folding her hands in her lap, the very picture of a woman simply enjoying the view.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him glance over, as expected.

She didn't look back. Not yet.

One of the lanterns overhead rocked gently on its cord, throwing amber light across the retaining wall in slow, lazy sweeps.

"The red ones are better than they look."

Kali turned her head at that remark. So he wasn’t one to shy away and had initiative, a good trait.

He was holding out the snowcone slightly, not quite offering it, more like showing it. His expression was easy.

"The vendor down by the fish stalls is charging twice the price for the exact same thing in blue," he continued. "Seems unfair."

Kali felt the corner of her mouth pull upward despite herself. "It's the… novelty tax," she said. "Blue raspberry isn't a common flavor. People pay extra for the experience."

"The experience of a blue tongue?"

"The experience of having a blue tongue. There's a difference." She kept her expression mild. "People like to feel like they chose something."

He considered that for a moment, then looked down at his red snowcone. "So I'm the pragmatist."

"Or you simply have good instincts."

That earned her a look. A small smile followed it. "I'll take that."

Up close, the estimate she'd formed from across the street held. He was solidly built in the way of someone who worked with their body rather than trained for aesthetics.

And the eyes. Dark, calm, with something behind them that wasn't quite restless but was adjacent to it. The look of a man who'd seen enough of the world to stop being surprised by it but hadn't yet stopped being curious.

Definitely interesting.

"You're not from Menagerie," she said. Not an accusation. Just a harmless statement.

"That obvious?"

She smiled. "A little."

He didn't seem bothered by it. "Visiting. My family wanted to come for the festival; my sister mostly, she's been talking about it for months. I'm just along to make sure nobody buys something ridiculous and then has to carry it home."

Kali's brows lifted slightly. "Your family came for the Full Moon Festival?"

"They love it. The whole thing." He gestured loosely toward the noise and light up the hill. "The music, the food, the spectacles. My sister was excited the moment we departed from the port."

It was a sweet image. It was also mildly baffling, because the Full Moon Festival was not precisely a well-traveled destination for humans, however welcome they technically were. Most didn't know enough about it to seek it out. Most didn't particularly want to.

"That's lovely," she said, and meant it, though her curiosity had sharpened considerably. "I only ask because the festival tends to draw mostly faunus. It's not the most obvious choice of holiday for a human family."

He looked at her again but he gave her a knowing smile.

"Well," he said, "they're not human."

Kali blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"My family." He nodded back up toward the festival crowds. "Faunus. My mother, my father, my sister." A brief pause. "I'm the odd one out."

She stared at him for just a moment before she found her manners again. "I apologize. I didn't mean to imply, I wasn't suggesting you were adopted, I just-"

He let out a short laugh without any edge of offense in it. "It's fine. You're not the first person to assume that."

"I really wasn't trying to—"

"Kali." He said her name so casually, which she found she didn't mind at all. "I promise, I'm not offended. It's a reasonable conclusion. Most people land there."

She settled, ears relaxing from where they'd pulled back slightly. "Then how?"

"Same way it's always worked." He shrugged, unhurried about it. "A human in the family tree, going back far enough. My grandmother's grandmother was human. Which apparently decided, a few generations later, that I was the one who was going to take after her." He glanced down at his hand, turned it over once, then back up with a half-smile. "My mother says I'm a statistical miracle. My sister says I'm proof the universe has a sense of humor."

Kali absorbed that.

She knew biology, of course she did. It was one of those facts that existed at the quiet intersection of faunus history and genetics, rarely discussed but not unknown. The recessive expression of human traits in a faunus lineage since when a human and a faunus mingled, a faunus was always born… most of the time. A 1 of 1000 chance.

She was sitting next to a largely theoretical man.

"That is…" she started, choosing her words, "very surprising to hear about."

"I've been told." He didn't say it with any particular pride or bitterness.

"And your family?" she asked, because now she was simply curious. "They're well? Enjoying the festival?"

The expression that crossed his face was welcoming. "My sister has stuffed her mouth with all kinds of foods in the last hour and is currently attempting to win the big prize at the ring toss stalls. My parents are somewhere by the music." He glanced back up the hill. "So I’m sure they're fine."

"And you're down here."

"They don't need me hovering." A brief pause. "Also my sister specifically told me to, quote, go find something to do, you're ruining my concentration."

Kali giggled. It slipped out before she thought to moderate it, which was honestly a relief. "She sounds… energetic."

"She really is."

She looked at him for a moment, reassessing in the quiet way she did when someone revealed themselves to be more interesting than the surface suggested. This human was at a faunus festival by choice and clearly at ease in it; no performance of tolerance, no careful watching of his own behavior. Just a man on a bench eating a snowcone unbothered by his surroundings.

"You're familiar with the festival," she observed. "You know what it is, what it means."

"Hard not to, growing up in our house." He tilted his head slightly. "My mother takes traditions seriously. Not rigidly; she's not like that, but she wanted us to understand where things came from." He glanced up at the lanterns. "The Full Moon Festival is about release, right? Whatever the year put on you, you set it down for one night. Let it go properly. Be present."

"More or less," Kali said. "Depending on who you ask, the specifics vary by island and family tradition. But that's the heart of it."

He nodded, like that confirmed something he'd already understood.

Well then.

She stood, smoothing the front of her long dress with both hands, and looked down at him with the smile she reserved for things she'd decided on.

"I'm Kali," she said.

"Riven."

"Well, Riven since your sister has banned you for a while, and you've already finished your snowcone." She tilted her head toward the quieter stretch of festival walkway that curved along the bay. "Walk with me. There are parts of the festival most new visitors miss because they go straight for the games."

He looked at her for just a moment, not suspicious, probably thinking.

"Lead the way," he said, and stood up.

He was taller than she'd clocked from across the street, which she noted without particular alarm. They fell into step together naturally enough, the distance between them easy.

"The vendor on the eastern path does braised fish on rice paper that is worth the wait," she said, already steering them gently toward the quieter lantern-lit path along the water. "And there's a candlemaker near the old shrine who makes the moon floats, little wax lanterns you set on the water. Festival tradition, the older one. Most of the younger crowd doesn't bother with it anymore, which is a shame."

"Why don't they?"

"It takes patience," she said simply. "You have to be still long enough to watch it drift out."

He glanced at her sidelong. "And that's a problem?"

"For some people." A small smile. "Tonight is about letting go. Most people interpret that as… activity. Eating, dancing, spending money on things that glow." She kept her gaze ahead. "But there's another way to let something go. You can be still with it first. Acknowledge it properly. Then let it go."

A beat of quiet between them, easy rather than empty.

"That sounds like something a mother would teach you," he commented.

Kali considered that and felt something shift warmly in her chest.

"It does, doesn't it?" she agreed. "She was a perceptive woman."

They walked on; the lanterns swaying above them, the bay glittering to their left, the festival noise sitting at a comfortable distance behind them like music from another room. For the first time since she'd left the office that evening, Kali wasn't thinking about reports, or Sienna, or the particular weight of being the person everyone needed to be something for.

She was just Kali.

Walking beside someone who didn't know her name meant anything at all and finding, to her own mild surprise, that it felt exactly as good as she'd hoped.

Just a stroll, she thought.

Nothing more, nothing less.

She didn't quite believe that anymore, and she found she didn't particularly mind.

At the end, she had found her target.

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AN: The cougar is now stalking her prey, getting ready to pounce. Wanted a little more build up before jumping to sex, it would get boring for me otherwise.