cw: tooth rotting retired!simon fluff.
Retired!Simon who buys a small, old fixer-upper place when he gets out.
And with that old place comes a distrustful, mean old cat.
He doesn't dare kick her out. He's the one invading, after all.
She makes this clear from the first morning. He comes downstairs to find her sitting in the middle of the kitchen. She's a grey-muzzled tabby, one ear half-gone, the other swiveling toward him as he hits the bottom step. When he gets too close she goes flat and still and shows him her teeth. And then she watches him take a step back and seems to find it acceptable.
He learns the rules fast.
The back room is hers. It's barely more than a mudroom, a catches-all kind of space with a window that's never quite shut right, but it's an easy in and out and she's been using it long before he arrived.
It's simple, he stays out. He rarely even looks in when he passes. If he forgets himself and drifts too close she materializes just inside the doorway, spine up, and plants herself between him and the room until he backs off.
He backs off and he keeps to his part of the house and she keeps to hers and that's how September goes.
He leaves food by the back door. It's good stuff, not the cheap kind. Water too, changed every morning.
He stops standing around waiting to see if she'll eat it and goes back to the hallway floorboards that need sanding, or the bathroom tiles to be redone, or the roof leak and the damp patch in the corner of his bedroom that needs cutting out before it gets worse.
The house has a lot wrong with it. He works through it room by room. The days fill up without him having to think too hard about it. He likes it. Something to do with his hands. Mending, not breaking.
She starts appearing at the far end of whatever room he's in as September tips into October. Sat on top of the kitchen cupboards or at the end of the hallway, watching him sand or replaster or measure twice and cut once.
He doesn't acknowledge her.
She doesn't acknowledge him.
He cracks the kitchen window a few inches because she seems to like being able to come and go and the house could use the cool fall air anyway.
She disappears in the second week of October.
He notices on the second day. The food bowl sits untouched by the door and he changes the water and goes back to the living room, which is nearly done now. The floors are good, walls are good, the second hand and garage sale furniture he's cleaned up and repaired, the shelving either side of the fireplace that took him the better part of two weeks to get level.
He works. He fills the days. And he tries not to think about the cat.
On the fourth day of her absence, he does the mudroom.
He finds himself stood in the doorway looking at it—the cracked window, the cold coming in under the sill, the general unloved state of it—and before he's really consciously decided anything he's got his jacket on and he's at the hardware store.
He works fast, not knowing if when she'll be back.
He patches the worst of the damp. And puts a proper seal around the window frame so it holds out most of the draught while still sitting open. He builds a small den space along the back wall, nothing complicated, and lines it with an thick, old jumper and extra fabric he doesn't need. He sweeps the floor and hangs string lights from the ceiling. He puts a second water bowl in the corner and leaves it clean and full.
He stands back and looks at it for a moment, then goes and makes himself a cup of tea.
He's in the kitchen four days later when she comes through the window.
She's thinner. He sees that straight away. He turns back to what he's doing and gives her a minute, then gets up and puts fresh food down by the outside door like usual for her.
On the way back from the hardware store that afternoon he stops and buys a rotisserie chicken. He pulls it apart at the kitchen counter, and puts a bowl of it by the door. She's waiting there just beyond the light of the house. When Simon goes, she eats the whole thing. He washes the bowl and puts it away.
He doesn't notice the mudroom jumper has been pressed flat until he's walking past three days later. He's been busy with the bathroom again, and the fireplace. There are small muddy paw prints across the floor.
And then some mid October Wednesday.
She brings in four of them, maybe three weeks old, eyes barely open, legs still figuring it out.
He's at the kitchen table when she comes through the window with the first one and disappears into the mudroom. He puts his mug down. She comes back. Does it again. He sits there a still as he can and doesn't move until she's done all four, and then he sits there a little longer.
Then he spends forty minutes on the phone with a veterinary surgery and drives forty-five minutes each way the following morning. He vaccinates all four of them while she is away for a while.
There are three girls, grey and small. And one darker grey boy with a little white fluffy stripe down the middle of his head between his ears.
His hands are careful, methodical, the same way they've always been careful with things that couldn't afford for him to be otherwise.
She comes back, standing in the mudroom doorway. Eyes very much on him. She barely has time to get her teeth bared before he's making his way back out.
The living room is good by then. Floors, walls, the fireplace cleaned out and drawing properly for the first time in years. He reads there in the evenings when the light goes long across the floor.
He's on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, newest book open, when he hears small, curious noises or small, curious creatures, and then the soft uncoordinated sounds of the very small creatures navigating hard floors.
She comes in first and stops in the middle of the rug. He keeps his eyes on the page.
She sits and begins to wash her face. The kittens come in behind her eventually. All four of them, tumbling, batting at the strips of light on the floor, and finding the sofa and beginning to climb it with great seriousness. He turns a page. Two of the girls them make it up and collapse against his leg from the effort. The third finds his boot. The boy sits in the middle of the rug and yells at nothing until he tips over sideways and falls asleep where he lands.
Simon stops with his book. He doesn't move. He can feel the small warm weight of the pair against his leg and the one on the toe of his boot, and he can see the little mohawked on completely out on the floor, and he just... sits there, very, very still.
She looks at him for a long moment from the cushion beside him. Then she steps closer, turns twice, and settles against his side.
He doesn't breathe for a second. Then, slowly, he lets his hand rest on the sofa beside her, not daring to touch her, but he can feel the warmth of her there.
After a while she starts to purr, low and a little rusty.
He looks up at the ceiling.
"Alright", he finally whispers aloud. "We can share."
She lets out an agreeable little sigh.
