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Taako is the one to bring the first cat home.
Kravitz tears his way into the kitchen after one exceedingly long day, breathing in deeply in the expectation of some gorgeously savory smell wafting up from whatever Taako’s cooking for dinner.
Instead, he inhales a generous number of feathers from one of the couch pillows, which is in pieces all over the kitchen, his husband, and Angus. The last of these is laughing, the first one can’t, and the middle is most definitely not. Kravitz coughs out the feathers violently, but even that isn’t enough to draw their attention.
“It’s not funny!” Taako says desperately as he darts around the kitchen, chasing something Kravitz can’t make out through the drifting feathers. “Kravitz is going to be home any minute and—”
“Hello, love,” Kravitz says, catching Taako around the waist and pulling him in for a kiss in greeting.
“Gross!” Angus says, covering his eyes.
“Yeah, yeah,” Taako says, batting his eyelashes dramatically up at Kravitz, prompting another groan from Angus.
“So why exactly is there a destroyed pillow all over the kitchen?”
“Oh! Well my man, you’re not gonna believe this—”
“Taako found a kitten on the street,” Angus says, watching the floor intently.
“Ango!” Taako hisses. “You gotta ease him into it!”
“Why did you bring it home?” Kravitz asks, and now he sees the small gray blur sprinting around the kitchen, batting at the falling feathers and easily avoiding Taako’s hands. Angus hops off his usual stool and stoops, waiting patiently. Taako meanwhile flops against Kravitz dramatically.
“Kraaaaav, it just looked so sad all by itself in that box!” he whines.
“Do you even want a cat?”
Angus pounces, lifting his hands triumphantly. “Got her!”
Kravitz looks away from his adorable pouting husband into the face of the cutest creature that could possibly exist, sorry Taako. The tiny gray kitten, trapped in Angus’s gentle grasp, meows piteously as it blinks huge blue eyes. “Oh,” he breathes, reaching for the kitten. Angus carefully transfers the kitten to him while Taako looks on, smug.
“I’m thinking of calling her Duchess Stinkclaw,” Taako proclaims.
“What?” Kravitz demands, but softly, pressing his cheek against the kitten, who mews very quietly. He turns it towards Taako pleadingly, trying to make his eyes as big as hers. “She’s too beautiful for that! Princess, maybe.”
“Garbage girl,” Taako says.
“No!!”
“Stinky,” Angus adds.
“Angus! You’re taking his side?”
“Gross baby.”
“No!!!”
Duchess Princess Stinkclaw Regina, Esquire, is adopted summarily.
Taako also brings cat number two home.
Sort of.
This one is older, not quite a kitten anymore, and yowling. Kravitz is relaxing on one of his rare days off, flopped on the couch with one of Angus’s Caleb Cleveland novels, wearing his casual at home three-piece suit sans jacket and all, when Taako stumbles in holding a small black ball of fury.
“Oh thank Istus,” Taako gasps, and launches the thing directly at Kravitz. “Babe, I love you, I’m sorry.”
Kravitz shrieks in a way that makes Angus come running, flipping to his skeleton form just in time to avoid some very painful scratches directly to his face. As it is, the cat gouges deep into the bone, hissing up a storm.
“We must honor his sacrifice,” Taako tells Angus solemnly.
Angus isn’t listening, instead watching Kravitz wrestle with this cat demon that his beloved husband just threw on him. He tilts his head, much like Kravitz does when he’s confused, and then plunges in, snatching the cat from Kravitz’s skull with astonishing dexterity. Kravitz wonders idly, while blocking his skull, if Angus has been sitting in on June’s rogue lessons with Carey and Davenport.
“Angus be careful!” Taako shouts as Kravitz warily lowers his arms.
But Angus is just smushing his face into the cat’s side, and the cat, instead of mauling Angus then and there, is purring, tail curling idly. Angus looks sideways at them, smiling, although when the cat sees where his attention has landed, it hisses violently.
“His name is Carburetor,” Angus declares, roundly ignoring the Look that Kravitz and Taako exchange.
“If you say so, kiddo,” Taako sighs.
*
The third finds them.
Taako and Kravitz are sitting on the porch swing, Taako nestled in Kravitz’s lap, Kravitz idly swinging them with one toe on the porch. Duchess Princess Stinkclaw Regina, Esquire is purring in Taako’s lap, while Carburetor is sprawled over a dozing Angus, both of them lying warm in the sun.
Kravitz groans softly when his reaper sense pings, telling him that there’s a ghost of some sort nearby.
“What’s up, babe?” Taako asks sleepily.
“Ghost,” Kravitz says, searching with his reaper senses. To his surprise, nothing with a human or humanoid soul shows up, but rather, there’s a small blip on his metaphorical radar. He hums a modified bard spell, overlaying his usual vision with something not unlike fantasy infrared.
The ghost is directly in front of them.
The ghost is also, apparently, a small cat.
“Oh,” Kravitz says thoughtfully.
“Oh?” Taako asks.
Kravitz hums another spell, this one allowing the ghost cat to become visible. Taako squawks in surprise as it materializes on the arm of the swing, ghostly meowing echoing through the air.
“I love him,” Kravitz and Taako say at the same time, grinning at each other.
“My turn,” Taako says, booping Kravitz on the nose.
“Aww,” Kravitz complains, but quietly, so as not to wake Duchess Princess Stinkclaw Regina, Esquire, Angus, or the hell cat Carburetor.
Taako smiles lovingly at the ghost cat. “Fantasy Guy Fieri.”
Kravitz grins as Taako hums, feeling to Kravitz not unlike purring. “It’s perfect.”
*
Kravitz rescues bundle of joy number four, rather more literally than is usually meant.
He dispatches the last of the necromancers with a swing of his scythe, yelling “Fourteen!” to Barry, who is keeping track for this reaping’s game.
“Fuck!” Lup shouts. “I was at twelve!”
“Eleven for me,” Barry says. “Big circle this time.”
“Guess who’s not doing paperwork today, suckers!” Kravitz says gleefully. He laughs over Lup and Barry groaning, high fiving himself and already thinking of how he’s going to recount the day’s events to Taako and Angus, when he hears a rattling sound behind him.
He spins, cloak swirling around him, scythe out.
Instead of another necromancer or a cursed thrall, a small animal skeleton pulls itself from the rubble of the necromantic cult’s rather poorly built castle. He stares at it, dematerializing his scythe, and realizes that it’s the animated skeleton of a cat. It shakes the dust off its bones, much like a living cat would shake off water, and tilts its skull up at him.
“Mrow?” it says, or tries to. Really, it’s more clacking of bones, but Kravitz is enchanted nonetheless.
“I know an elf and a little boy who are going to love you,” he tells it, scooping it up in his arms. The skeleton cat meows again and snuggles against his cloak. “Sergeant Mortimer of the First Skeleton Battalion.”
*
Their final cat, for the moment, is a full flesh and blood kitty, white with little black paws and black spots all over, that Taako just straight up stole from Lucretia.
“No cats on the moon!” he screams over his shoulder as Kravitz sprints next to him, dodging spells.
“That’s dogs!” Lucretia calls back, nearly clipping Kravitz with a Scorching Ray. “Cats are smart enough not to just run right off the goddamn thing! Give her back!”
“No!”
“Love, maybe we should—” Kravitz tries.
“She named her Oreo.”
“Oh,” Kravitz pauses, in thought, not in running. He turns, running backwards so he can look Lucretia dead in the eye from across the quad. “We’re naming her Agnes!”
“Hell yeah, babe!” Taako screams as they round a corner, high fiving him as Lucretia yells after them, swearing revenge. They skid into the cannon dome, Taako winking at a furious, tied up Avi as Angus frantically keys in coordinates.
“You know we gotta watch out for her vengeance, right sir?” Angus says, waving them into a sphere.
“It’s fine, little man,” Taako says, leaping into the sphere and turning to help them both in. Angus casts a quick Mage Hand to fire them off. “We have Cap’nport on our side.”
“You know she’s going to get Lup and Barry,” Kravitz says, panting. “This is going to mean war.”
Taako’s eyes gleam as Angus blasts them off and he holds the confused cat up to his face. “Oh yes,” he whispers. “I’m counting on it.”