They never did find the enlightened pizza crust. It had rolled down the other side of the mountain and achieved nirvana in a storm drain, where it lived out its days dispensing wisdom to raccoons.
Mr. Cheesits, with his sticky cape and his jingling bell, found that he could no longer commit butter-based crimes. He became, instead, a consultant for other mice who wanted to understand the cat mind. His advice was universally terrible, but entertaining.
Bartholomew J. Waddlesworth III continued to believe he was a cat, and continued to be wrong, but he was gentler now, and sometimes, when the sun hit the living room just right, he would sigh with a contentment that suggested he remembered, somewhere deep in his dog soul, the feeling of floating on a cloud made of dreams.
And Pixie and Socket?
They went home. They knocked the lamp over again, because some traditions must be maintained. They yowled at 3 AM about things only they could see. They commented on everything, narrated everything, explained everything in the language of meows and mrrrows and prrrts.
And sometimes, just sometimes, when the humans looked at them with that expression of fond confusion, Pixie and Socket would catch each other's eyes and remember.
They remembered Thistledown Muffinbottom the Eternal, who refused the bath and lost the words. They remembered the Mountain of Forgotten Snack Wrappers, and the Pet Door of Impossible Abyss, and the night they received the gift of absolute gab.
And they would say to each other, in the secret language of cats:
"We are speaking. We have always been speaking. And somewhere, in the catnip heavens, someone is listening."
And they would be content.
For that is the way of cats. That has always been the way of cats. Since the first cat fell from the heavens, refusing to be bathed, refusing to be anything other than perfectly, absolutely, defiantly himself.
Meow.