Chapter Text
Equius changed down with a crunch and a wince, the Metro’s clapped-out gearbox rattling as he turned onto Locas Drive. Already the powdered whiteness of the pear-trees was giving way to new green; it had rained last night and the pavement was littered with tiny round white petals in drifts like dry snow.
He pulled up in front of the clinic in the no-parking zone and dutifully turned on his hazards, a conscientious motorist. “Have a nice day,” he said. “Remember I’m going to pick Eridan up from the theater after work, so I’ll be a bit late.”
Nepeta leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, which--as usual--made him blush and scowl fiercely. “It’s okay, today’s one of the adoption days, I’m gonna have tons of stuff to keep me out of trouble. And I know, I know, no more adopting for me, even if they are super cute. Like laser-focused cuteness. I will be strong.”
“You had better be. I’m still in mourning for that scarf your latest acquisition savaged. --Go on, get out of here, I’ll be late.”
“Love you,” Nepeta piped, blew him another kiss, and hauled herself out of the car--this was a production every time, the passenger door-handle had been replaced with a bit of cord you yanked on to get it open--and waited, as usual, until he was out of sight before going inside the clinic. There had been a Simpsons episode from one of the way early seasons which always came to mind when she saw Equius and Equius’s shitty car in close proximity: Do you find something comical about my appearance when I am driving my automobile?
He’d tried to teach her to drive stick in the Metro and had given up the second time she’d been reduced to tears; not that it really mattered much, since she was nowhere near in a financial position to get hold of her own car. Nepeta considered herself one of Nature’s moochers of rides.
She beamed at Rosa, their clinic manager, sitting behind the front desk. “Morning! Equius is gonna be late picking me up so I can help out with the adoption thing this afternoon. Did the news guy call back to say whether they’d be there?”
“He did. We should have a cameraman and whatever newsperson they can spare swinging by around four-thirty. Remind me to tell Dr. D that he needs to attempt to smile if he shows up on camera. I have no illusions about whether he’ll manage, but he ought at least to make the attempt.”
“Oh, jeez. Yeah. Hopefully nobody will say anything stupid.” Nepeta made a face. “At least not while the news people are around. Oh boy. Is he here yet?”
“He called a minute ago, he’s changing a flat tire. --What?”
She couldn’t help giggling. Driving shitty cars was a trait Equius shared with his half-uncle, along with the scowl, the hair, and the height. “Nothing. I better go get stuff ready for him, he’s likely to be in a super excellent mood when he gets in. Woe betide anyone who hasn’t got the computers up or the cabinets stocked, right?”
Rosa smiled up at her. “I got the coffee started, you needn’t worry about that at least.”
“You are the best,” Nepeta said firmly, and scuttled off to change into scrubs and get ready.
She had been working for Dr. D for...three years now? Maybe three and a bit? At first it had been a favor to Equius, letting his dorky vet-tech-student housemate extern at the clinic, but she had been pretty good at the job even back then. When she’d graduated from the program he had offered her the job at once. Whenever Nepeta had had sufficient to drink she’d drape on Equius and tell him in great length and detail just what a huge stroke of luck it had been for her, meeting him during orientation week: not only had she gotten a housemate, a kickass externship, and now a job out of the deal, she got to look at twice the shinyhair every day, plus Equius and his boyfriend were so insanely adorable together--at which point he tended to scoop her up and carry her to bed, muttering grim imprecations.
Dr. D was pretty chill about stuff like playing music in the lab and having dorky posters around, but he drew the line at adorable Hello Kitty print scrubs, so Nepeta had to make do with boring old green. As she bustled around stocking up the various disposables--gloves, drapes, packaged syringes, catheters, venipuncture kits--she hoped again that the adoption open day would go smoothly and that nobody would say anything too dumb in Darkleer’s hearing. She’d only just started the externship shadowing him when she witnessed her first declawing rant, and Rosa had had to take her aside and calm her down afterward and reassure her that he didn’t do that all the time and he wasn’t going to do it to her.
Since then she’d gotten somewhat adept at sensing lines of conversation with clients that were likely to lead to a telling-off--anything with the word “vegan” in it as applied to carnivores, for example, or a statement that a pet wasn’t going to be neutered because a lack of canine testicle reflected poorly on its owner’s own virility--and was getting better at steering the discussion in safer directions. “It’s not good business, making people cry,” Rosa had told him after one particularly wrathful interview. “It tends to make them not want to give you any money, or come back to give you money in the future. Also they tell their friends.”
Darkleer had folded his arms and looked thunderously at her. “I will not compromise my principles for the sake of retaining a client with the ethics of a cone-snail,” he had said, and then sighed, pushing his little rectangular specs back into place. “Very well. I’ll make an effort to use simpler words next time. --Who’s next?”
Business had gone on as usual. Nepeta was aware that he hadn’t had a good shout at anybody in a while, and that they were probably due for one, especially if he’d already had a lousy car-related morning. She just hoped they could get it over with before the adoption people and the news arrived. And that Kanaya was scheduled to work this afternoon. Between Rosa and Kanaya they ought to be able to smooth over any PR disasters.
As it happened he wasn’t as irritable as they’d feared when he finally did arrive (and spent ten minutes cleaning oil and road-dirt off his hands in the scrub sink). “I’ve been expecting it,” he said as Nepeta fetched him a towel. “Finally an excuse to make the ridiculous outlay of funds worth it for a new set of tires. Do not ever drive on one of those donut spare things, Nepeta. It’s bad for the nerves.”
She had to laugh. “I can’t drive, Doc. You know that, it’s like a thing, I catch rides wherever I go. But we are all really trying super hard to not say we told you so, okay?”
“Then I appreciate your restraint,” said Darkleer, flipping the towel over his shoulder and straightening his glasses. “What’s on the schedule for this morning?”
She had it ready. “You have a spay at nine, approximately 9-month-old cat recently adopted from The Other Shelter, note to check out a possible growth on left ear while you’re at it; we blocked off two hours for that, just in case. Then a Jack Russell with entropion and a bunch of scheduled vax appointments. Mrs. P wants to bring Tricki back in because he’s--” she checked the notes from the call recording--”listless. John called her back and asked if she wanted to make an appointment and she apparently changed her mind.”
Darkleer had been nodding throughout this recitation. “Ugh. If I had a parking voucher for every time she’s tried to get in here with a non-emergency non-appointment I wouldn’t have half the tickets I still need to pay this month. Set up for the spay and see if you can get Rosa in here to help out, I want you on anesthesia and I need another set of hands as well.”
“You got it,” Nepeta said, saluting him, and did not watch him disappear into the changing-room to get his scrubs on despite the fact that it wasn’t a bad view by any standard; the glossy braid of his hair reached almost to the small of his back, absolutely pristine, as it always was. She wished she knew how he managed that, whether he had some kind of small hair-specific magic powers or if he was just genetically blessed beyond all reason, because even Equius’s hair didn’t stay that perfectly put even when she braided it properly for him. Not that he let her all that often.
Get over it, Nep, she could hear him say in her head, and she grinned and trotted off to ask Rosa if she could assist. Their newest intern, a high-school kid named John Egbert, had just arrived, all grins and derpy glasses and long rather capable fingers on the reception-desk computer, and he assured the pair of them he could manage whatever the morning decided to chuck at them.
She knew, rationally, that it wasn’t all that common to feel pure satisfaction in your job, more often than not. And she didn’t want to jinx anything by pointing this out to the universe.
The spay turned out to be a non-starter. Not for the first time Nepeta thought really naughty words at The Other Shelter, who had a hell of a track record for this kind of thing; they’d apparently adopted out a young cat far enough along in her pregnancy that Darkleer didn’t feel comfortable doing the spay/abortion at this point. She was extremely grateful to Rosa for being the one to go back out to the front and have a quiet word with the owner while Darkleer said a lot of unprofessional things under his breath and she prepped what turned out to be a really simple aural hematoma for lancing and dressing.
Their patient, a total sweetheart of an orange tabby with big golden eyes, barely even stopped purring when they had to infiltrate her ear with local, or when Darkleer set in a few very careful stitches to make sure the ear healed smoothly. Nepeta couldn’t help petting her despite her boss’s sidelong look, and had to restrain the cat from bashing her face into their hands as soon as they stopped fussing at her ear. “You are a precious,” she crooned. “Such a precious. Man, the Other Shelter gets like sixty more demerits for this.”
“More like a hundred. No guarantee the owner’s going to want to take on the responsibility of caring for this cat and her kittens; we’ll be lucky if she doesn’t end up here instead.”
Purrrrrr, went their patient, and bonked her hard furry little forehead against his fingertips, anonymous and unappealing in purple nitrile. Nepeta caught the brief moment when his face stopped being a studied blank and took on a passably human expression of charm; she’d seen it before, of course, hundreds of times, but it never stopped being worth looking at. He sighed and rubbed the cat under her narrow triangular chin, eliciting further storms of delighted purring.
“Am I interrupting?” Rosa smiled from the doorway. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Always bad.” Darkleer took his hand away and stepped back from the table; the cat had to turn her attentions to Nepeta instead.
“Okay. The owner is going to take care of...ah, Orange Creamsicle here...throughout the rest of her pregnancy, but she can’t take in all the kittens as well and wants to ask if we could maaaybe shoulder that responsibility when they arrive, as she has no intention of taking them to The Other Shelter.”
“Hm. Could be worse. Did you tell her all the things she’ll have to watch out for, how much she’s agreeing to do?”
“What do you take me for?” Rosa scowled at him for a brief moment, but had to laugh. “Better still, although she can’t give...what did you say, five kittens?...homes, she does have a couple friends who may be able to help foster them when they arrive. Nice girl, really. Seems to have a sensible head on her shoulders.”
“What’s this paragon’s name?” Darkleer stripped off his gloves, tossing them into the red bin. “I ought to speak with her.”
“Aradia Megido.” Rosa double-checked the name against the patient record she was holding. “Also, she wants to know if there’s anything that can legally be done about The Other Shelter being a bunch of unprincipled jerks about this sort of thing.”
Nepeta, cuddling Creamsicle, could’ve sworn her boss grinned for a moment there. Trick of the light, she thought, fending off an ecstatic paw. Had to be.