Fic: How Sussie Got His Hat

[mizkit]

I was trying to get up to 50K written in 2 weeks (for reasons, and I succeeded), but I didn't have enough brain to write my book, so I asked for fic prompts and someone suggested a Kpop Demon Hunters prompt of "How Sussie ended up with Derpy's hat" and I thought, I can do that!

In an ideal world, you would go read this over at my Patreon and become a member there if you're not already, but nobody's going to strike you down for reading it here. :)

Jinu was not, by nature, a hat-maker.

Obviously not since the demon thing, but not before that, either: his only gifts in life were his voice and his skill at playing the bipa, neither of which lent themselves to making hats. But the tiger—which had come along with entry into the demon world; Jinu had certainly not had a five hundred pound blue tiger in life—would sit for hours, gently bopping the gat in slow circles and watching with his huge, gentle, golden eyes as it wobbled. This was all well and fine, except Jinu was expected to wear the hat while harvesting souls, and wearing a hat that dripped with cat slobber was not his favorite thing. Especially because the three-eyed magpie (technically it had six eyes, three on each side, but Jinu usually saw them three at a time, and thus tended to think of the bird as three-eyed) sat in obvious judgement of him when his hat dripped.

The magpie sat in judgement of everything, really, most particularly the cat, but it was judgy enough about the damp hat that Jinu felt its sting. Given he already had Gwi-Ma’s vicious voice in his head, judging and tormenting him, he didn’t feel like suffering a magpie’s opinion of things if he could avoid it.

So after a brief interval of trying to find a hat for the cat—and if he thought about it, Jinu didn’t know exactly where his had come from, for that matter; it and his clothes had sort of…appeared, when he’d entered the demon realm, just as the tiger had done—it occurred to Jinu to make one himself.

It took some time to source the horsehair and the bamboo. Neither were regularly available in the demon world, and side quests to find hat-making materials were frowned upon. Gwi-Ma wanted souls, not fashion statements. Jinu wanted neither, but if he got to choose, he would choose fashion in a heartbeat.

As it turned out, it was considerably more difficult to choose fashion than he had anticipated. He felt he knew the principle of making a gat, with the high crown meant to protect a topknot, and the broad brim for keeping rain and sun out of one’s eyes. Knowing the principle, however, had very little to do with actually being able to make the thing; Jinu cracked innumerable slices of bamboo and plucked an embarrassing number of horse tails bald before it dawned on him that perhaps he should start smaller. Literally: he began trying to make a hat big enough to fit a normal-sized cat instead of the friendly behemoth who sat at his feet and purred no matter how vividly Jinu cursed over his efforts. But in the end, he prevailed: after all, he had nothing but time and guilt, and crafting a gat, no matter how poorly, kept his mind occupied and the guilt at bay.

By then he had named the animals: the cat was Derpy, because look at him, what else would you call him, and the bird was Sussie, because the wretched thing was always sussing him out. Usually from the top of Derpy’s head, presumably because as a nine-inch-tall bird, he needed the height to get a good view of things.

In retrospect, Jinu thought, he should have seen the next bit coming.

He was quite proud of the silly little gat he’d made, honestly. It was no artisanal piece like a ganniljang would make, but then, Jinu was—as previously mentioned—a bipa player, not a hat-maker. But it looked right, and it didn’t collapse under its own weight, which several of them had even before Derpy got hold of them. And a gat didn’t weigh that much, so the fact that they’d collapsed…well, once more, he was a bipa player. But this little hat held together, with no fraying bits and no cracked bamboo and Derpy looked so happy when Jinu put it on his head.

Sussie, on the other hand, did not look happy at all. He glowered at Jinu. He scowled. He glared. He frowned and he sulked and he grumbled, and then he flew over Derpy’s head, seized the brim of the hat, and in what Jinu had to admit was a rather nice move, he flipped the little gat in the air and landed it on his own head.

Then, with vast satisfaction, he landed on Derpy’s head and chirped.

“D—n—no! Bad bird! That’s Derpy’s hat!” Jinu took the hat off Sussie and shooed him away so he could replace it on Derpy’s head. The cat’s big slow derpy grin awakened again, and the sense of satisfaction briefly drowned out Gwi-Ma’s endless voice in Jinu’s ear. “Good kitty.”

Sussie said, “SCRAAAAAAAWK!” and dove for the hat again.

“No! Hey! Hey! No! Sussie! Sussie, no—!” Jinu grabbed for the hat himself.

On the positive side, he got it.

On the less positive side, he got it a little too hard, and it exploded in his hand.

Well. Exploded was a little strong, and a demon who could turn into hot pink mist should probably be more careful with his words. But Jinu wasn’t sure another one really suited, either: the bamboo hat brim broke, and all the tiny finely woven horsehairs that he’d thought were so well secured sprang out, and as they unraveled, the top of the hat just gave up all structural integrity and joined them.

‘Exploded’ was pretty accurate after all, Jinu decided.

Derpy made the most tragic sad cat sound he’d ever heard. Tragic enough that Sussie actually looked guilty, which Jinu hadn’t known a bird could do. “See what you did?”

“Chrrp.”

The second finished hat was better, until Sussie, in trying to steal it, dropped it on the floor, and Derpy, in trying to keep it, pounced on it protectively and crushed it with one giant paw. With great effort, he picked it up delicately in his very large teeth and brought it to Jinu, rested it on his knee, and said, “Mrroooow,” with what were legitimately the saddest kitty eyes Jinu imagined possible.

He made another gat. And a fourth, and a fifth, and more. He added a bead chin strap, which did wonders for keeping the hat on Derpy and preventing Sussie from stealing it, but Derpy, bless his derpy sweet soul, kept forgetting that the beads dangling beneath his chin were attached to the hat, and playing with them. After he’d flattened the sixth through eleventh hats against his own head by yanking the chin strap down, Jinu experimented with ear straps. They made Derpy’s ears twitch and he kept pawing the hat off, after which Sussie stole it again. Jinu tried looser ear straps. Sussie just pulled those off Derpy’s ears, and wore the hat. Defiantly. As if daring Jinu to Do Something About It.

By that time, he was pretty good at making gats. Between stealing souls and doing Gwi-Ma’s evil, exhausting bidding, he got more bamboo, more horsehair, more glue, more iron to press the bamboo into shape, more splinters under his fingernails from slivering the young shoots, more everything, and in due time, did what he should have done ages ago:

He made hat big enough to fit a five hundred pound tiger, instead of the tiny tiny hats he’d been experimenting with. He even made ear holes for it, and a much shorter chin strap, which he hoped wouldn’t catch Derpy’s notice as often, and would let the gat go unflattened. With a fair degree of triumph, he put the tiger-sized gat on Derpy’s big broad skull. “There!”

Derpy gazed at him soulfully from beneath the hat, then rolled his huge gold eyes upward, examining the brim from below. He began a smile, that slow dumb smile that Jinu couldn’t admit to himself that he loved, and then wretched Sussie came to land on the brim of the hat, and said, “chrrrrp,” in the most pathetic voice a bird could produce.

Derpy froze. His eyes rolled toward Sussie, crossing on their journey, and his happy purr became a question.

Sussie said, “chrrrp,” again, pathetically, and Derpy’s eyes widened ever farther, until the bulk of his skull seemed to be taken up with them. Then, with great slow ponderous grace, he shook his head once. Sussie flew away despondently. Jinu hadn’t even known a bird could fly despondently.

Derpy shook his head again, and then again, loosening his chin strap until the cat-gat slipped sideways, hung on one ear, and then fell to the ground with a near-silent fwump. Then with cat-like grace (as it were), the tiger rose and padded over to where the final tiny hat sat, and stared from it to Jinu and back again until Jinu got the point. With a sigh, he put the tiny hat on Derpy’s head.

Sussie immediately flew over, stole it, and settled down on Derpy’s head. Derpy’s huge creaky rumbling purr began, and he lay down at Jinu’s feet, turning his gaze upward with slow blinks, until Jinu groaned and leaned down to pet the big cat, and brush a careful finger down Sussie’s spine. “All right. If that’s how you want it, who am I to disagree?”

“Nobody,” Sussie said, and Jinu, wide-eyed, decided not to argue with that at all.