Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Cats. Why was it always cats?
Last winter, Merlin Lucifer had been ill.
It was the sort of thing you weren’t supposed to notice about a mouser, but Gabriel loved his cat.
He spent long hours with the ginger tom in his lap, Gabriel accommodating his rotations through various ridiculous sleeping positions while he worked at his desk or in his chair by the fire.
Sometimes Merlin Lucifer interrupted council meetings, demanding with horrible yowls that the guards open the door, and would only calm down when he’d rubbed himself against Gwen’s chair, bitten Lord Best on the ankle, and safely ensconced himself on Gabriel’s thighs.
Every item of clothing Gabriel owned was covered in a fine layer of sunny orange cat fur.
The pages probably complained about it behind his back, because when his things were taken away to be cleaned, they always came back spotless.
Gabriel had no idea how they managed it.
Vigorous wiping with a sweaty palm only seemed to move it all around.
A palpable barrier had already begun to form between Arthur and Gabriel by the end of January, lumpy and hulking, filling the spaces between their words and bodies until it felt like they had to constantly talk around it.
That frosty morning, Arthur had knocked on Gabriel’s door, and Gabriel had actually considered not answering it, wanting desperately to see Arthur, but simultaneously terrified of the cracks he might find in their relationship when forced to examine it up close.
“Have you seen ML?” Arthur said, once he’d been admitted.
He was wearing one of Gabriel’s mother’s knitted monstrosities, a long, chunky cowl with arms, an immediate hand-me-down from Gwen, who—unlike Arthur—didn’t find ugly clothes funny, and felt no need to wear them for the delight of horrifying all those who beheld you.
“Hello,” Gabriel said, putting down his book. “I think he’s under the bed.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“Um…” Gabriel stalled. What was expected of him here? He never knew. “I said hello, didn’t I?”
Arthur raised his eyebrows. His lips were slightly chapped, and there was a fine sweep of dark stubble on his cheeks. It made him look sharper. Older. “Not a kind word to spare for my cowl?”
“Oh. It’s very … nice.”
Arthur looked disappointed, but rallied. “The one thing it’s not is nice. Your mother is an evil genius. Anyway—cat? Cat, where the hell are you?”
He disappeared into the bedroom portion of Gabriel’s chambers and began talking in a low voice.
Gabriel tried to get back to his book, but just knowing that Arthur was in the next room made it impossible to focus.
Eventually he put it down, and went in to find Arthur lying on the floor, head and shoulders under the bed, legs crossed absentmindedly at the ankles.
“What are you doing?”
“He’s been sick,” Arthur said, muffled.
“Yes, he does that sometimes.”
“I know he does that sometimes, he likes to do it on my pillow sometimes, but usually he’s fine afterward. This time he looks miserable.”
Gabriel went awkwardly down on to his knees and peered under the bed. Arthur was waving a bit of feather down at the cat, who was huddled in the corner by the wall, watching the feather without much interest.
“Here, Merlin,” Gabriel said, digging in his pocket for a twist of jerky he kept on his person to distract the cat from chewing on valuable vellum or council members’ body parts. It was tricky to lean forward while trying not to put pressure on his scar. He tried anyway. “It’s a treat, look.”
Merlin Lucifer stayed where he was, and worry flared in Gabriel’s gut.
“See? There’s something wrong with him,” said Arthur. “Maybe he ate a rat with poison in it? Or another hair ribbon?”
His elbow was flush with Gabriel’s, their heads almost touching, the two of them physically closer than they had been in a week. Arthur turned toward him, his cheek almost brushing against Gabriel’s, and then he had to turn rapidly away again to sneeze.
“Dusty,” he said.
“Mmm.”
“Maybe we could try to grab him from the other side?”
“I don’t want to upset him.” Gabriel thought for a moment, watching Merlin Lucifer breathe in and out, a sad loaf of gingerbread. “I’ll go and ask the Master of Hounds what we should do.”
“And bring the physician,” Arthur added. “And the Wizard.”
When Gwen bumped into Gabriel in the hall and he explained where he was going with such a dire expression on his face, she insinuated that it might be overkill to bring every possible health professional in Camelot to investigate a hiding cat, but then again, she’d never been much of an animal person.
Half an hour later, five pairs of legs were sticking out from under the bed; Masters Truman, Buchanan, and Torres were all lying on the floor to give their expert opinions, bookended by Arthur and Gabriel.
“Could be that his humors are misaligned,” said Master Truman. “He’s a boy cat, is he not? So he should be warm and dry, like a man. Women are cold and wet. He might be phlegmatic.”
“Or perhaps worms,” said Master Torres, who spent almost every waking moment of his life with the castle’s hunting dogs. “Have you noticed any? In his feces?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. Arthur?”
“I live by the doctrine that a man’s feces are his own business,” Arthur said solemnly. “Also, he mostly poos in the grounds somewhere and buries it, except when he does it in Lord Best’s shoes. We could ask Lord Best if he’s noticed any worms in his stockings.”
Things were difficult enough with Lord Best, and talk of worms would not improve things.
“Perhaps he’s in love, and has found himself unrequited,” said Master Buchanan. The Wizard was prone to such romantic notions. “Or dehydrated.”
“Most likely he’s in some sort of internal discomfort, if he’s been vomiting,” said Master Torres, the most useful of the lot. “Give him plain chicken broth, see if he improves.”
“Yes,” said Master Buchanan, pleased. “And perhaps some goat’s milk for pudding, if he wants it.”
The royal council of the ailing cat disbanded, and Gabriel went personally to oversee the production of some broth and some plain boiled chicken in the kitchens, which the cook obviously hated.
Back upstairs, Arthur took the dish from him and pushed it over to Merlin Lucifer, who sniffed it thoroughly, licked his lips, then lapsed back into loafish indifference.
“Poor little man,” Arthur crooned. “I can watch him, if you want to go back to … kinging.”
Gabriel couldn’t imagine being anywhere but this room. “No, I’ll have Oakley cancel my afternoon.”
They were back under the bed together again, the steady rhythm of Arthur’s breathing next to him a comfort. “You’re mad. What if someone invades?”
“Gwen can deal with it.”
Arthur laughed, and nudged Gabriel fondly, a sort of full-body nuzzle like he was a cat himself, or an inquisitive horse hopeful for a carrot. He was very tactile like that, always wanting some part of the two of them to be touching, which was why this recent distance had felt so strange.
He seemed to notice what he’d done—and that it was no longer normal between them—because he stopped moving, then put his hand on Gabriel’s very gently, almost as if it could have been an accident of under-bed shuffling.
Gabriel didn’t move. Arthur started talking softly to Merlin Lucifer, and only broke away to fetch pillows, a candle, and the book Gabriel had been reading.
They stayed like that, camped on the floor, watching until Merlin Lucifer unclenched slightly and went to lap at his broth, at which Arthur cheered under his breath.
Eventually Merlin Lucifer finished off the entire bowl, then took a few bites of the boiled chicken, and even acquiesced to a few scratches on the head.
The danger seemed to have passed, but neither Arthur nor Gabriel moved.
They had recaptured something elusive here on the floor during their cat vigil, and as soon as they got up, it would be over.
“Read to me,” Arthur said, turning over onto his side.
“It’s dull,” Gabriel said, picking up his discarded book. “It would bore you.”
“Might not.”
“It will. It’s … it’s actually about a plague. Account from a physician. Mostly about the measures he recommended, which everybody ignored.”
“Sounds nice and depressing.”
“A little,” Gabriel admitted. “But sometimes the humanity bleeds through. He lost his own daughter. It’s sort of his testimony. Like he’s trying to tell her that he really tried. I don’t know.”
“See, that does sound interesting. You can’t just assume I won’t want to hear about things. I love hearing about things. I might surprise you. I am very surprising.”
This edged dangerously close to being about much more than a book.
“I know.”
“I miss you,” Arthur said, very quietly, perhaps quieter than he’d ever been. Gabriel’s heart sank. He had acknowledged the reality of their situation, so they were done for.
Although … maybe not. There was still the magic of the floor. Gabriel didn’t know what to say, so he did what Arthur always did—drew closer. Put his hand on Arthur’s arm. Leaned in, got a lungful of his air.
Arthur had reacted at once, like he’d been waiting for permission; he kissed Gabriel, hard and then soft, and put his warm hands on Gabriel’s face like he was trying to keep him there.
How many times had they done this before?
A hundred, at least, and at first Gabriel had been able to lose himself in it—to think only of Arthur and where his hands were at that precise moment, to almost cease to exist except in the places Arthur touched him, but then something had gone wrong.
He’d been too aware of himself, too conscious of the life that waited for him outside whichever locked room they were entwined in, and the more he remembered himself, the less he felt like a person who could do … this.
Hold on to Arthur like a lifeline, unwilling and unable to let go; let Arthur’s hands slip inside his shirt without flinching; rest his head in the hollow of Arthur’s collarbone and breathe in the smell of him, and smile when the heart beneath him beat faster just from his nearness.
Arthur was always rushing full speed into everything, and Gabriel was quiet and considered and unhurried, and when the two of them were alone and it felt like they had all the time in the world, he’d enjoyed being the one to slow Arthur down.
Not that he’d had any idea what he was doing. But Arthur hadn’t seemed to mind. It appeared to Gabriel that love—because he knew of no other word for what this was, even if it wasn’t spoken aloud—had a calming effect on Arthur. Gabriel found it terrifying and strange.
That night, they’d kissed and moved together clumsily and Arthur had laughed and Gabriel had felt embarrassingly close to crying, and eventually Merlin Lucifer had felt well enough to come out from under the bed and shout at them for paying attention to anything other than him.
They had never kissed again.
Now Arthur was standing in front of Gabriel holding one end of a rope; at the other end of it was the kitten, the strangest-looking creature Gabriel had ever seen, with a reddish spotted coat just visible through an outer layer of black fur, and ears so pointy and enormous it looked like another species entirely.
The kitten had hissed at first, and given Arthur a nice, deep slash to the neck as he’d wrestled it into its makeshift collar, but now it was just standing with its back slightly arched and its ears pinned back, looking warily around at its captors.
“It won’t be happy, Arthur,” Gabriel said, as Arthur smiled down at the cat, already besotted. “It’s meant to live in the woods.”
“But it won’t live, if we leave it here. It’ll die. Too young. Too small.”
The too-small kitten, the size of John’s terrier, growled weakly.
“Maybe that’s what’s meant to happen. I know it’s hard, but that’s how it is in nature. Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
Arthur shook his head, rejecting this outright.
“Just let me try. There’s plenty of room at Camelot.
Give me some time with her, once we get back.
If it doesn’t work, we can find somewhere safe and far away from people to release her once she’s big enough.
If it does work, it’ll be the greatest thing that’s ever happened to anyone. It’s win-win.”
It was hard enough to say no to Arthur. To say no to Arthur and a motherless kitten was always going to be a losing battle.
Besides, there was desperation in his voice that seemed out of kilter with the urgency of this situation. It occurred to Gabriel that Arthur didn’t really need his permission, but he was asking anyway. Like their lives were still entwined. Like they made decisions together.
That was enough for him to say, “Yes, all right, but if it becomes an issue of safety—”
“I’ll make her a little enclosure,” Arthur said happily, clearly having already concocted this plan, sure that Gabriel would agree. “We can use the cage meant for the Beast to send her home, make it nice and comfy. We can take her out for walks! It’s going to work.”
“We’ll see,” said Gabriel, but all he could think was that for the first time in nearly a year, he was the reason that Arthur was smiling.