Work Text:
“You said the address is within city limits, right?“
"On my honor, lass. The flat is only a little ways from the shelter…assuming you get lucky with the stoplights, of course.”
Emma rolls her eyes at the grin in his voice. From the sound of it, he seems to know she’s sitting in the middle lane, waiting for the light to turn green. She’s on a time limit - when is she not - but at least her younger passenger is being patient. Emma’s known him since the day he was born, and it’s been years since he gave her an ounce of trouble. David would always tell a different story, but then that’s how she got herself into this mess, isn’t it?
“It’s going to be sixty bucks for the half-hour, just so you know.”
“That’s fine.” He almost sounds like he’s chuckling at her as he says it, and Emma has to assume it’s something on the other end of the line. He’s been perfectly polite for the rest of the call, “You can charge it to my card the second you pull up.”
And she does, just after admiring the building she’s parallel parked in front of. At first she can’t imagine anybody wanting to live in an apartment building so tall - carrying sofas up that many stairs had to be deadly - but when she caught a glance of the view on the other end of the open hallway, she understood.
“Check out that view, Henry,” she mutters, looking down at her companion. He makes a small noise in reply, wordlessly reminding her they’re here for a reason, and she turns them back toward the door.
For a man who was definitely expecting company, he sure takes his time answering the door, Emma thinks to herself, shifting her weight from foot to foot as she debates knocking again. She’s only just shuffled the awkwardly sized box in her hands to her hip, preparing to knock again, when she hears footsteps. Thank goodness, she thinks. Henry’s cute, but the little boy sure is heavy.
“Can I help…” The second he opens the door, his tone changes from polite to curious. He’s a bit younger than she imagined him, but that’s definitely the voice of the man she’d spoken to on the way over. His hand slides off the door and next to his side, and then he just looks confused. “Is that a cat in a box?”
“His name is Henry. This is how he prefers to travel,” she tells him, surprised he wasn’t already letting her in. In fact, the more he stares at her and the black cat she’s just hauled up nine flights of stairs, the more she starts to wonder if all of this is just someone’s idea of a joke.
“You called and asked to take us up on the MSPCA’s Kitten Delivery Day,” Emma says slowly, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. “All the money goes to the shelter’s Howl-o-ween fundraiser…we just talked about this less than ten minutes ago.”
“I’m sorry, lass, but I don’t think we did.”
“So you’re telling me there are two Irish men in Boston who asked me to bring my best black cat over?”
Understanding washes over his face like a sunrise, and while he gives her no explanation, he does let her inside. Emma’s not so certain she wants to step in anymore, much less for an entire hour, but when he meets her eyes again he seems genuinely apologetic. Either that, or the blue of his eyes is just doing something to make it seem that way.
“You spoke to my brother on the phone earlier. He must have thought I could use some company,” he explains, shutting the door behind him. “I had no idea the animal shelter was holding a…”
“Howl-o-ween fundraiser,” Emma supplies, trying to keep Henry inside the box. He’s always been the curious type, and it’s showing now as his paw darts between the folds of his makeshift carrier. Stay or leave, she needs to give him a bit of fresh air. “Your brother paid sixty bucks for thirty minutes of feline de-stressing. If you don’t want it, I can go find someone else.”
He looks at her silently, just long enough for it to be awkward, and Emma can’t help thinking that David’s the one who owes her now, past favors be damned. There aren’t many things she wouldn’t do for her foster brother, especially after he’d given her a job and let her rent a room in the loft above the animal shelter, but driving around and entering strangers’ homes in the name of adoption should already be on her list of deal breakers.
“You said his name was Henry? I’m Killian Jones.”
She’s surprised to see his eyes soften the second she pulls the cat out of his box. Henry gets a bit of stage fright at first, sniffing Killian’s hand when he offers it, but the rest turns out to be smooth sailing. Killian leaves them alone on his couch for a moment, disappearing down the hall, but he returns with a tiny ball of rope and all is forgiven in the black cat’s eyes.
Their time passes remarkably quickly, almost faster than Emma intends it to. The two of them spend it entertaining Henry on the floor, dragging the rope beneath their raised knees as Emma tells him about the program.
“Most people fall in love with the idea of adopting a spooky black cat around Halloween,” she explains, dancing the end of the rope just out of reach of Henry’s paws. “Once the holiday’s over, they either bring them back or dump them in the wild. Not all of our cats are black, but it’s a good way to help educate the public on what it really means to own a pet.”
“I find it hard to imagine anyone doing that to this handsome lad,” he comments, smiling as Henry’s tail flicks against his calf.
“You’d be surprised.” Emma glances up at him long enough to see the curiosity in his eyes, and it’s only then she realizes how honest the remark is. It begs explaining, she knows it, and for some reason she feels the urge to continue on. “I’ve worked for the shelter since graduating community college. My foster brother runs it. Family business.” She tucks her hair behind her ear, aware that she has both the man and the cat’s attention, and Emma taps her fingers against her leg to beckon Henry closer. “It’s actually a pretty happy place, you know. There’s enough funding to give the animals what they really need, and we’re no-kill. It’s just the older ones…”
“You don’t want to abandon them,” he offers softly, finishing the thought for her. “Nobody deserves that.”
Henry, lousy cat that he is, slips out of her grip and immediately plops down next to Killian’s leg as soon as he finishes saying it, creating the scene Emma’s wished for the cat ever since they were introduced. He seems perfectly at home here, and in the moment she hates that this started as a bit of a prank. Welcoming as Killian’s been, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who adopts a cat on impulse. What he does seem like, though, is the kind of guy who understands abandonment as well as her. She’s not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing, and neither of them brings it up, but it’s there in the gentle way he scratches the underside of Henry’s chin.
“I promise you, Liam’s not that bad,” he tells her after explaining a bit about himself. He seems to realize how strange it might be to come into someone’s home with a loaner pet, and tries to fill in the gaps by telling her all about his well-meaning, joke-loving brother. “I’ve no idea why he decided to call you up and send you here on my day off,” he says to her, keeping his eyes on the cat in his lap, “but I can’t say I mind much, now that you’re here.”
“You’re actually my last customers of the day. We’re headed back home after this,” she tells him, unwilling to check the time. Every second she spends here is a second she can imagine life like this on a permanent basis — Emma stops herself short of imagining what it would be like with this particular man, handsome and sharp-jawed as he is, but with her favorite cat half-sprawled in his lap it’s a difficult thing to do. They look like they’ve always known each other, like she’s the stranger rather than Killian. They play together just as well, once they learn from each other a bit, and it doesn’t take an idiot to see they’re suited for each other.
She tries not to let her heart fall a bit when she hears his soft oh in response, refusing to let her mind cover all the things she was hoping to hear instead. It’s not his fault, she thinks. She can’t really blame him for the pasts she and Henry have had, she knows she can’t project her issues onto him. It’s knowing they’d stopped at eight different locations in the city, and nobody had taken interest in adopting the little black cat she liked so much. Hisoh stings with the force of seven other no’s, and it’s all she can do to keep the hurt off her face.
If Killian sees it anyway, he’s polite enough to keep from mentioning it, even when he bids the both of them a fond goodbye and walks them down every single flight of stairs they’d climbed.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You did a good job today,” Emma says softly, listening to the quiet noises Henry makes when he’s back in his temporary carrier. She likes talking to him when it’s just the two of them like this — it makes things easier. Besides, she thinks as she drives them back toward the shelter, there’s always Christmas.
It’s not as easy for her to follow her own advice for the rest of the day, though, even when David happily announces that a dozen adoptions were in progress as of three in the afternoon, even when a steady trickle of new faces cycles through in search of a new friend. She even honors a secret tradition of theirs, sneaking Henry up into her apartment after David locks up for the night and letting him doze off next to her on the couch, but it doesn’t help much. Her mind is stuck on Killian Jones and his apparent inability to see a perfect match when he came across one.
Emma wakes up to paws kneading her stomach and sighs. “You should come with a snooze button,” she tells him groggily, sitting up and shaking her hair out of her face. He steals a place on her pillow the second she stands, as if he’d forgotten their routine, but in the end they make it back downstairs to their respective corners of the shelter. The busyness of yesterday makes today seem to pass glacially in response, with only a few visitors interested in making an adoption, nothing David can’t handle by himself. She remembers thinking that very thought when he approaches her, beaming and asking if she has a moment to speak with someone.
Killian’s the last person she expects to see sitting in the lobby, filling out an adoption form with his clipboard balanced on one leg. She’s too surprised to see the nervousness on his face, much less register the hope on her own, and she can barely stand waiting for him to finish up and come to her.
“What are you doing here?”
He looks up once he sees it’s her at the counter, giving her nearly the same look he’d given when he first opened the door yesterday. It fades away more quickly than it had last time, though, and he lifts the corner of his mouth in a grin.
“Filling out emergency contact information, it seems. I’m sure Liam won’t mind, seeing as he’s the one who called you.”
“No,” Emma corrects, glancing down at his handwriting on the page. “What are you doing?”
He has the good sense to look sheepish, eyes contrite and finger scratching the skin behind his ear, but there’s a bit of decisiveness Emma sees in his expression, too. “I’m here to see Henry. I’d like to adopt the little lad, if you find me a suitable parent.”
The words are a bit more flowery than she’d always pictured them. He’s not the little girl she imagined curling up next to Henry on a cold day, snuggling with him and feeding him too many bites of chicken under the dinner table. Emma abandons her idea of the family Henry could have gone to as she holds his earnest gaze, trying to think of something to say.
“Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?” She finally asks. “What changed your mind?”
“We’ve been misunderstanding each other for a while, Emma,” Killian replies, soft smile still trained on her. “I said what little I did because I had nothing to provide for a pet. I spent the night thinking about how nice it was to have someone in the house on the same twelve-hour shift,” he added, leaning his elbows on the countertop, “and by morning I knew I couldn’t stand the quiet any longer. I, ah, I came here right from the pet supply shop.”
Emma knows what he’s getting at, but she can barely believe her ears all the same. Killian wanted him, and the second his paperwork was stamped and processed, Henry had a home. Henry had a family.
“I guess I better say goodbye,” Emma says later, as she returns with Henry in the exact same box he’d been in yesterday. She’s walking slowly and carefully with him in her arms, half because he’s more alert today and half because it’ll be the last time. She knows she can’t be a savior for all of the animals she sees through their doors, but he is one she thinks she’ll especially miss.
“Well…you don’t have to,” Killian pipes up, his voice lifting strangely at the end of his thought. Emma’s not sure what he’s talking about until she sees him indicating one part of his application in particular. She missed it before, but now she sees she little scribble in the margins. Two words. Call me?
“It was Henry’s idea,” He tells her, mischief lacing with hope in his accented voice. “He wanted to thank you for helping us find each other. Perhaps we could make you dinner sometime?”
Emma looks at them both, and finds it in her to grin, to nod and keep most of the blush on her cheeks from spreading.
“So long as it’s not tuna,” she answers back.
“All right,” Killian laughs. “It’s a date.”