lovesong

"It's soaked,” you protest without looking back at him.

"It lives outside, it’s used to it."

"It's a kitten, Si," you complain.

"Kittens live outside too."

You extend a careful hand under the car and the screaming stops, which you choose to interpret as encouragement. "Hi," you say sweetly to the curled-up-black-mass. "Hello. You are very loud, did you know?"

You stretch out your index finger to gently pet it’s cheek and the kitten bites you — not hard — just a test bite, checking if your finger is food, probably. Then just as quickly, it stalks out from under the car and you learn he’s orange, drenched and too skinny for your liking.

It walks directly past your outstretched hand to sit beneath Simon, right in the space between his bulky boots, its probably ten weeks or so. 

"No," Simon says to the cat.

The cat looks up at him and screams again.

“We can’t leave him in the rain. He’s so skinny, Si. Look at him, let’s at least feed him. We just bought plenty tuna.”

“Yeah, and it’s for me,” he grumbles. 

——

You do everything on your own that first night while Simon remains at a distance with his arms crossed, providing pessimistic commentary.

"Cats are unpredictable," he says while you dry between the kitten's ears.

"Uh-huh."

"Carry fleas. Tha’ one's got fleas, guarantee it."

"He's been rained on for days, the fleas have drowned," you turn the kitten over and start to dry his belly, finding confirmation there that he is, in fact, a boy.

"They scratch furniture," he continues later from the sofa while you crank open a can of tuna in the kitchen. "Piss in shoes, bring in dead things," he lists. "We’re not keepin’ this cat."

"Nobody said we were," you sing-song through the doorway, scratching at the kitten's chin, cooing at him where he’s sat on the countertop. 

"Puttin’ it on the record, s’all.”

The kitten eats some tuna from your hand and drinks some water out of the saucer you place on the floor. After, he ignores the box you lined with blankets completely, and opts to fall asleep in the middle of the living room floor, just in front of Simon’s socked feet. 

——

In the morning you make a list — litter, cat food, flea treatment to ease Simon’s mind — and leave the two of them alone together. 

——

The kitten follows him around immediately and everywhere, at a peppy rolling trot. The kitchen, down the hallway, he shuts the bathroom door just to find a paw under it seconds later, sweeping side to side.

When he comes out the kitten falls in at his heel again.

"You've got the whole flat," Simon tells him.

The kitten looks up at him, wide-eyed, and says nothing, which is somehow worse than the screaming, Simon thinks. 

He starts the kettle on the stove and the kitten jumps — scrabbles, mostly, all back legs — onto the counter and sits down next to him.

"No," Simon says. "Off."

The kitten stares at him.

"Y’not meant to be up here, mate. Counters are for food."

Simon picks him up one-handed and sets him on the floor.

The kitten is back on the counter before the kettle boils. Simon sets him down again.

By the third try, the kitten nearly sticks the landing, wobbles, and headbutts Simon's forearm, and Simon stands there and has a quiet think.

"Well,” he slides the kitten away with his hand. “Not near the hob, then," he decides. "Gotta draw the line somewhere, yeah?"

By the time your home, they're both in the front room — Simon on the sofa, the kitten on the armrest, both facing the telly. 

"Checked. Shelter’s open Monday," he says before you've even got your shoes off. 

You look at the bag of litter in your arms, then at the cat right at Simon's side.

"Right," you say, rolling your eyes. "Monday."

——

To your surprise, Monday comes and goes without a complaint. When you return from work and find the two of them on the couch again, you choose very deliberately not to ask. 

Tuesday there's a proper bowl on the floor in the kitchen, stainless steel and weighted, because ‘the saucer kept sliding’.

Wednesday you come home to a litter box with a hood on it, tucked behind the bathroom door.

Thursday it's a scratching post — sisal, with a platform bed on top — and a small mouse toy, already disemboweled in the hallway.

You… did not buy any of it. 

The kitten has started to become a resident. He has routines now: he sits in the counter's approved quadrant while Simon cooks, supervising. He does laps of the flat at three AM like a lunatic and sleeps until ten like the king of this place. 

Two weeks later, he is, visibly, day by day, less kitten and more cat.

You're both on the sofa, your feet in Simon's lap, nose in a book, some film on in the background that you’re not sure Simon is even half-watching because there is an awful lot of shifting going on behind your novel. Then a small rhythmic thump against your ankle. Then another. 

Thump. Thump-thump. ThumpThumpThump. 

You lower the book.

Simon has pulled the string of his hoodie out to dangle over the armrest, swinging it side-to-side, round-and-round, and the cat is up on his back legs boxing at it, every lunge sending an orange ball airborne, ricocheting off your shins.

“Really?” you ask fondly.

“‘e started it,” Simon says, eyes still on the cat.

He flicks the string and the cat leaps, misses, and slides halfway down the armrest with a scrabble; Simon catches him around the middle with one hand and sets him back up top.

The kitten catches the string at last — teeth and claws sunk in, back feet kicking, growling at it like prey. Simon lets him keep it, the corner of his mouth tugging sideways, satisfied; charmed, even.

You watch them over the top of your book — your enormous, cat-hating man, losing a tug-of-war to one.

“Should probably name him,” you try, hiding your grin, pushing your feet under his thighs.

“Been callin’ ‘im Nigel,” he says, not looking over. “Decided that’s what ‘e wants t’be called.”

You sit up so fast you lose your page. You furrow your brows. “Nigel?!” you complain. “We’re not calling him Nigel!”

“S’too late, love,” he grins down at Nigel. “Look at ‘im and tell me tha’ s’not a Nigel.” He nudges his foot under the cat and he climbs up his leg right away, as if the trick has been practiced.

The pair turn and look at you at the same time, heads tilted exactly the same.

You tilt yours back, the corner of your mouth twitching up. 

Dinner makes him feel a guilty kind of thrill. Every time he looks at Necie, she shivers, looking at the shape of his arms, the tattoos and scars that had earned a lot of comments the first time he’d met her aunt. She knows danger when she sees it, but she trusts her aunt’s judgment enough to keep her thoughts to herself. Still, there’s a stubborn set to her mouth as she watches him eat the food she’s prepared. He’s failed to fold himself small enough for comfort, but there’s a smile there when he scrapes his plate and goes for seconds. Eventually, she starts arguing against something that her aunt says, and she doesn’t include him, but she begins to relax. He focuses on eating, lets B’s voice wash over him as the scotch bonnet starts to make him sweat.

For all that he focuses on the food, on not being threatening, he miscalculates, at the end of the meal. She flinches when he reaches to take her plate, and he pauses for a moment, arm extended. But watching B harass him means she’s surprised, not nervous. She meets his eyes with zero hesitation.

She’s not afraid of him.

By the time he’s done washing up, Necie’s relaxed and B’s navigated to her show. Tension rolls back in when he settles on his side of the couch, then slowly winds down as the host prattles on. Simon watches her looking at him from his periphery while scrolling through articles on his phone.

When she eventually gets up to take a call, B turns to him with an arched eyebrow. “Well?”

Simon narrows his eyes back. “Well?”

“She’s a good girl,” B says. “Smart, and she can cook. You should take her out, see how you get along.”

“She’s in a relationship,” Simon points out. “You told me that.”

“She’s in a situationship,” she corrects, with air quotes. “She needs a real man. Even if it’s just for a night.”

Simon snorts. She’s been on him to “find a good woman and settle down” almost since they met. Three months of silence had almost convinced him that she was done trying to set him up with anyone. But perhaps it was just that he’d been gone just as often as he’d been home.

“She don’t seem interested,” he dismisses. “Don’t need me sniffin’ after ‘er. She’s ‘ere because she feels safe.”

“Because she doesn’t feel safe at home,” B counters.

“She won’t feel safe if’n you throw a man at ‘er,” he mutters.

“Don’t be stubborn,” she says back, as he hears Necie emerging from a room down the hall. “She’s got enough of that for both of you.”

It doesn’t look like there’s much stubbornness left in her, when she returns to her seat. The willful woman trading barbs with her aunt has been replaced by a chastened, subdued version of herself. Necie sits, withdrawn into herself through the next episode of Feud, staring into the middle distance.

He gets caught in the pout of her lips, again. She’s not frowning, really, but the way she bites her lip in thought makes her mouth look more plush. Now that she’s not paying him any mind, he lets himself watch her openly. The stillness he noted earlier is back, and there’s the slightest pinch of her brow. Who called, to make her retreat so thoroughly. He wonders if B’s obvious contempt for the man in her life is well founded.

When Necie wraps her arms around herself, he wants to drape the throw over her shoulders.

B catches him looking and smirks.

“Should call it a night,” he says, leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees. Necie’s shoulders tighten, just a hair. He looks away before her eyes can catch his. “Leavin’ in the afternoon, ’ll stop by before I go.”

Necie surprises him by speaking up. “Do you… I can pack some of the stew.”

She’s up and out of the room before he can catch her eyes. Simon ignores B’s waggling eyebrows and stands to get his jacket and shoes. He keeps his back to the room until he can hear Necie approaching, then turns to face her. With barely there half-smile, she passes him a tall deli container filled to the brim with stew and rice.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah,” she says, looking away. “Have a, uh, safe trip, tomorrow.”

He takes the couple of steps down the hall to put the food in his fridge before heading back out to do his rounds of the building. The loose treads on the stairs he notes as he descends to the basement, where he checks the laundry room for broken machines. Then up, seven flights, to the roof. One of the girls from the 4th floor hastily pinches out her joint when she sees him, but he pays her no mind, just walks his circuit and descends back down the stairs to his own flat.

The television is still audible through the wall, just barely, and he listens as horns signal the next round of surveys. It’s comforting as he drifts through the front room and kitchen, checking windows and locks the way he did in B’s apartment after dinner. He can’t hear as much in his bedroom, the home gym he barely uses, so he heads back to the front room to sit at his table and check the knives he keeps in the house.

The show ends, eventually, and as B turns off the television everything goes quiet in the next apartment. Simon imagines her shuffling through her evening routine, finds himself musing about how Necie fits in. Does she stay often enough to have her own things in the bathroom, in the guest closet? It’s probably hard for her to find space where Mrs. B keeps her odds and ends, in that room that smells like patchouli and dried hibiscus. But maybe she sleeps well there, sheds her defenses enough to relax, if this is where she runs to be safe.

Away from a man, he thinks, testing the sharpness of a blade on the tip of his thumb. Would she feel safer, he wonders, knowing that a killer is right next door? Does she know he has a key? That he knows the window to the room she’s sleeping in isn’t as secure as he would like? Has she ever questioned the extra set of keys by the door, his keys, that her aunt has been here, in his kitchen, that Simon would protect B with his life?

It’s easy to imagine Necie at his small table, here, curled in on herself. And Simon decides that he would protect her, too, if she lets him. She slots into place in his mind, a part of B’s household, his responsibility, easy as breathing.

That drive to keep them safe, along with the fact that he’s still restless from the last mission, has him on the fire escape in the dark hours of the morning. He’s just lit a second cigarette when he hears the scrape of a window, sees Necie’s startled face. She visibly decides not to retreat, settles herself small right next to the open window. When Simon leaves her be, she gets lost in her book with an ease that makes a part of him hum, content.

Sitting on the steps, your hands are limp in your lap as a detective kneels before you. Her posture is professional but kind as she nods along to your rambling while she records it on her notepad. You keep shaking your head. Eyes squeezing shut, you go to wipe at your eyes until you realize you can't with the substance that stains you. Your tears are quiet. The detective hands you a tissue, but it's not enough.

A few officers stop him from approaching you—a job he appreciates as a captain. Keep the area secure. But they don't see the storm raging in his chest. Anger and fear bundled into one from your frantic please, they're in the house text message that stirred him from a dead sleep at half past two in the morning. They don't know how he would rip the world apart to hold you.

"John?"

Tender—your call for him is the only key he needs. They let him pass. Understanding the look on his face, the detective says she has enough information for now, but still gives you her card to call her if there's anything else you want to add. John replaces her spot, kneeling before you with his hands cupping over yours, unafraid of the blood that taints them.

"Are you hurt?" It's the thing that's been eating at him the most. He can heal the emotional and psychological scars, but he wouldn't be able to live with himself if you were injured.

You shake your head. "It's not my blood. It's not my blood."

He has to scrape you off of the steps to get you into his car. Limp like fresh carrion, he guides you the whole way there, leading you to the passenger's seat and buckling you in when you can't seem to get your fingers to work well enough to do it yourself. The drive to his place is quiet. He doesn't bother to turn the radio on as the engine rattles below his feet while you stare through the windshield with eyes he wishes he could polish back into shining again.

Everything is simple once he pulls up to his house—slow. No sudden movements lest he scares you into hiding again. When he opens the door for you, offering you his hand to keep yourself steady as you rise, he expects you to keep quiet but is pleasantly surprised when you speak.

"I want a bath."

He has no qualms about it, and leads you to the bathroom the moment the front door is locked behind him. There's no fuss about being naked in front of him. You're too numb to it. All you can do is sink down into the water John's drawn for you and sit as the plain water dissolves the filth staining you. John stays nearby watching as you pitifully thumb at the dried blood on your hands, but it's all you seem focused on. It still lingers in dry patches along your throat, chin—even the tip of your nose that he loves to pepper with kisses.

Seeing you like this breaks him. It's as if you're holding a mirror up to him when he comes back from overseas, body battered and mind attempting to mend and replace the parts that make him human; but he's just a copy of a copy of a copy. He's so blurred out that sometimes he can't see his true self through the gore.

Unable to handle seeing you like this, John dips his hand in the water and raises it to your face. You don't move or flinch when he rubs his thumb over your collarbone to scrape away the blood, and he's not sure if he should take pride in knowing that you don't fear him, or mourn the smile that should be breaking on your lips at this movement.

"I was so scared." Your voice is hollow. It lacks the lilt of happiness that should be there; that wide-eyed awe he loves to witness in your spirit that now seems snuffed out—ash baked into the ground. "I thought I was going to die when they broke in. I didn't know what to do. Grabbed a knife from the kitchen and I just… I dunno…"

John doesn't stop cleaning you. Each pass of his wet thumb over your body is another inch clean—another inch of you he gets back. He passes over the apple of your cheek and the tip of your nose before you finally look up at him.

"I just kept thinking that I couldn't die. I had to stay alive. For you." Your voice breaks as the tears begin to well up in the corners of your eyes again. "I had to see you again."

Someday, John will tell you about the mantra that keeps him going when he's away from you, and how eerily similar it is to the one you're spewing at him now. He'll tell you about all the things he's done, and how he's done them all for you. For now, he settles for kissing the tip of your nose and revels in knowing that you're safe in his hands.

"You were so brave, darling. I've got you. You did what you had to," he assures before cradling the back of your head. "Let me do the work, now."

Notes specific to the courier: (this next bit will contain spoilers and also discussions of gender identity as well as misgendering of a character)

The courier (not currently named or nicknamed), if asked, uses they/them pronouns and is genderfluid. This is important to the story because while the 141 are looking into the threatening postcards and their sender they are also looking into the courier, who Ghost will misgender as male. Later into the story another character will identify them as female before they make direct contact with the courier who will inform them that they go by they/them.