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For the first time this week, Neil doesn’t wake up with fur on his mouth. For a moment, Neil’s sleep-addled brain wonders why that’s a strange thing — why would he wake up with fur on his mouth ? — but then he blinks up to the ceiling, and remembers.
At some point in time, between finding himself a coven and becoming a real person, Cat moved in and never left. That’s how it is for most witches, Neil knows. Once they’re settled, they get a familiar.
Neil never thought he’d have one, so it is still very much a novel feeling.
“Cat?” he calls, and then sighs. He forgets, sometimes, that ever since Nicky insisted that wasn’t a valid name, his familiar’s refused to answer to it. He’s Sir Fat Cat McCatterson, now. Neil wonders how that’s any better.
He slides his fingers through his hair, gets up from the bed, and paddles into the living room. It’s not a big room, but it’s so full of plants and flowers that it has many hiding places, specially if you’re a cat willing to jump from pot to pot.
“Sir?” he calls, again, squinting around. Not a noise, no answer. Neil wonders if he should be worried, but he isn’t. Familiars are very smart and Sir, particularly, is smarter than most.
Neil goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on.
Half an hour later, there’s a knock on the door.
Five years ago, Neil would’ve already been halfway through the window, on his way out. Running used to be almost second nature. Today, however, the instinct to bolt comes and goes in the span of a deep breath and instead of panicking, Neil smiles.
There’s only one person who would knock on Neil’s door this early in the morning: Andrew, who’s standing on his doorstep, holding Sir under one arm, his own cat — King Fluffkins, if you would believe it — sitting at his feet.
“Keep your familiar under control,” he says, monotone, face kept carefully blank, just as soon as the door opens. Neil blinks once, twice, and then extends his arms to take his cat. Andrew, who would protest violently on the word gentle being used to describe him, deposits Sir very carefully on Neil’s arms.
Neil uses his foot to open the door a little wider, a clear invitation. “Coffee?” he offers, because he knows Andrew doesn’t like tea, and there’s a little tin of coffee on his cupboard he bought specifically for mornings like this.
They’re… something . Neighbors, always. Friends, usually. Lovers, on the good days. Nothing straightforward enough that Neil has a name to put on it. They carved this something in between coven meetings, built it on shared truths and silent moments. It’s good. It could be better. But Andrew doesn’t trust easily, and Neil is a compulsive liar.
So it’s something, but nothing beyond that, and Neil doesn’t want to lose it by asking for more.
When Neil comes back from the kitchen, balancing two mugs and a plate of toast, Andrew is sitting on the floor, legs crossed, scratching Sir’s belly. Neil stops, for a moment, frozen on the doorway — he feels like he’s intruding, somehow, knows that Andrew doesn’t like people to see the softest parts of him, but when Andrew looks up from what he’s doing to see Neil watching him, he only raises an eyebrow.
He doesn’t seem bothered, he doesn’t stop.
Neil unfreezes, slowly, walks up to him and sits beside him on the floor. The mugs clink when he puts them down. Sir stretches, slowly, the pads of his paws touching Neil’s knee, and then he yawns.
Andrew still doesn’t stop.
“You spoil him,” Neil says without any heat. A comment, merely.
There’s an uptick to Andrew’s lips that indicate he found the comment amusing. It makes him look content. He seems at home, here, sitting on Neil’s living room floor, back resting against the pot of Neil’s schefflera. He looks relaxed, here, like he doesn’t look relaxed anywhere else, except perhaps his own home.
Neil feels like someone’s squeezing his stomach and his heart starts beating faster all at once. It’s an uncomfortable feeling he can’t name, and he has to drink his tea to disguise his grimace.
“And you,” Neil says after he’s gotten himself under control, pointing a finger at Sir. “You’re a traitor.”
The truth is that Neil’s familiar likes Andrew better than he likes Neil. Neil would feel offended, but he shares the same opinion.
It’s easy to like Andrew. Solid, predictable Andrew. People think that he’s aggressive and violent, that he’s dangerous. And they’re correct, completely, but that’s all they see and that’s not all he is. Andrew is as much knives and blood magic as he is hot mugs of coffee and oversized hoodies.
Neil sometimes wishes the others could see him the way he sees him, but he knows that will never happen. Andrew hoards himself more than he hoards his magical secrets, and even if he didn’t, the others have already decided they know who Andrew is, and aren’t ready to change their minds.
In all honesty, Neil thinks it’s their loss.
The coffee’s long gone, but Andrew hasn’t moved, so Neil finds himself looking for a more comfortable position. He dislodges King by accident, who bats at him, annoyed, before moving away to find a better place — he walks around the room, perches on a shelf, but ultimately ends up climbing on Neil’s lap and claiming it for himself.
The silence stretches.
“Do you want me to stop him?” Neil breaks the silence, nodding at Sir.
Andrew frowns. “Stop him?”
“Yeah.” Neil scratches King behind the ears. “I know he keeps getting into your house.” Familiars have a tendency to disregard personal space. And they’re spirits, more or less, so physical barriers don’t mean anything to them if they don’t want them to. It’s weird, nonsense magic that Neil never bothered to learn because a familiar had never been in the cards for him, before.
“If it bothered me,” Andrew answers, “I’d have stopped him.”
It’s Neil’s turn to frown. “You don’t like people you don’t trust in your space.”
Andrew looks pointedly at King sleeping on Neil’s lap. “I trust you.”
I trust you , he says. Easily, no questions asked. No prompts. I trust you . For someone like Andrew — to someone like Neil — that might as well be a love confession.