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“Daddy. I found an orphan.”
Azriel’s head whipped around so fast his neck almost cracked. If he told his wife that, the only thing she would hear would be the cracking part and make a joke about him getting old.
“What?”
He placed his knife on the kitchen countertop and looked towards the back door, to the little girl walking in with a few leaves in her pigtails and her lavender sweater balled up in her tiny arms. He removed the kitchen towel that was thrown over his left shoulder and wiped his hands before placing it down next to the knife and chopping board.
“I found an orphan in our garden.”
Azriel approached his daughter, mouth opening to ask what on earth she was talking about, when a little noise coming from the sweater made him stop. The little noise sounded a lot like it belonged to something with claws and fur. As if to confirm what it was, the little thing decided to poke its little head – after struggling for a few seconds– out of the sweater.
“Look daddy, look. She’s a baby,” Catrin exclaimed as though he wasn’t seeing the fluffy black kitten too.
The tiny creature looked around with bright yellow, almost gold, eyes. It seemed more curious than afraid despite being in the arms of an excited child. Cat beamed at the kitten in her arms. She jumped on the spot, causing the kitten’s head to move this way and that while its body remained trapped in its prison made of wool.
“Ok honey, calm down,” Azriel said and reached out his hands to take the kitten from his daughter’s arms before its head flew off.
Cat pointed at the door leading to their garden. “She was alone in that bush,” she explained, leaving Azriel to guess in which of the several bushes in their backyard she could be referring to.
Azriel held the sweater in the crook of his arm and extricated the kitten from it with his right hand. He handed the sweater back to Cat when he was done and took a closer look at the black ball of fur. It looked quite thin to him but showed no sign of injuries.
“How do you know it’s an orphan?”
“She told me,” Cat replied with a shrug.
The kitten meowed. Azriel had no idea whether it was to confirm or deny what Cat had said. He looked down at his daughter but decided against questioning her supposed ability to talk to animals.
“She?” he asked instead.
“The baby,” Cat pointed to the kitten that was busy trying to climb on Azriel’s shoulder.
He pulled the little thing away, removing its claws from his t-shirt when it tried to hold on, and turned it around.
“It’s a he.”
“He who?” Cat furrowed her brows.
“The baby,” Azriel explained as he brought the kitten closer to Cat’s face. “It’s a male.”
Cat giggled at the paw that reached out to boop her nose. There was dirt on her knees, on her bare feet and forearms. The blue jumper she wore was in a barely better state than the rest of her. Azriel smiled at her dishevelled state but sighed internally for the fact that he had thought of changing her clothes before letting her play outside. Gwyn would have been pissed if Cat had ruined yet another one of her school clothes.
“You’re my baby brother now,” Cat announced to the kitten while she petted its head.
Azriel laughed. “Hold up honey. What if his mommy comes back for him?”
Cat wrapped her arms around one of her father’s legs. “But he was alone,” she reminded Azriel, looking up at him with her big blue eyes and a pout on her lips. Not for the first time in 4 years, Azriel noticed Cat’s striking resemblance with Gwyn whenever she used the puppy eyes on him in a desperate attempt to get him to agree with something he had said no to. Apart from having her father’s black hair, everyone who knew Gwyn could see that Cat, on the outside, was a pretty good copy of her.
“Mommy can be his mommy too.”
Azriel’s eyes darted from his daughter to the kitten nipping at his finger with his sharp teeth. He knew that it was common for cats to adopt their humans instead of the opposite and this one did not seem to be an exception to this rule. The longer he took to reply, the tighter Cat wrapped her arms around his leg.
“Daddy pleeease.” She threw her head back and dragged the last word until Azriel sighed and stopped her with an, “Ok fine.” Cat gasped and looked at him with hope in her eyes.
Azriel hadn’t had a pet since he was a child. He had always been fond of cats. His daughter had also been asking for a pet for a while now – well, either that or a sibling. Azriel had been on Cat’s side the whole time in trying to convince Gwyn to agree to either of those. With the way this little thing here was purring and scratching at his shirt, he thought perhaps it was a trick of fate that had sent him here.
“OK listen. We will give him back to his mommy if she comes back,” he stated as firmly as he could to Cat as she gripped the fabric of his pants and nodded with a widening smile. “And we’ll have to ask your own mommy if she agrees with this.”
Her messy pigtails moved when she nodded again and started jumping. “If she says yes, then we can keep the baby,” Azriel added.
The squeal that Cat let out was so loud that even the kitten jumped in surprise. She released his legs and started running excitedly around the kitchen while waving her dirty sweater. Azriel lifted the kitten up to his face. “You still got time to run buddy.”
The little thing meowed, and tried again to climb on his shoulder.
ฅ^•⩊•^ฅ
“Mommy, mommy. I found an orphan. Can we keep it mommy?”
Gwyn stopped at the threshold with one foot still outside. She didn’t have the time to put the other one in before her daughter was hugging her leg. It wasn’t the first time that Cat greeted her at door when she came back home. Though usually Gwyn was greeted with a “hi mommy” before the babbles started.
“Can we keep it mommy please?” Cat asked very loudly while jumping on the spot.
Gwyn placed her bag on the small bench near the front door. She picked Cat up and smooched her cheek. Her daughter smelled like the bubble-gum shower gel she liked so much. Judging by Cat’s clean matching yellow t-shirt and shorts, she guessed that her daughter must have had her bath not long before her arrival. Even her hair was styled in the twin French braids that Azriel was so skilled at doing now.
“Hello to you too, my darling.”
Cat wrapped her arms around Gwyn’s neck and returned her mother’s kiss with another one of her own.
“Now, what was it you were saying?” She asked as she walked them further inside the house.
Cat beamed at her and placed her hands on Gwyn’s cheeks. “Can we keep the little orphan, mommy?”
Gwyn’s brows furrowed. “What orphan?”
“The baby.”
“What baby?”
“The orphan,” Cat said like it should be obvious.
She had had many interesting conversations with her daughter before but this one felt particular strange.
“What on earth are you –”
Gwyn stopped abruptly when she reached the living area.
“Can we keep it mommy pleeease,” Cat kept going, shaking her mother’s face, while Gwyn took in what her eyes were seeing.
Azriel was lying down on his back, shirtless, on the carpet beside the coffee table, with a little black kitten on his chest. The kitten was hitting and biting the finger that Azriel kept waving at it.
“Hello, my love,” he greeted her but didn’t look away from the kitten. There was no doubt his smile was more for the little thing than for Gwyn. Azriel laughed every time the kitten missed his finger when he removed his hand faster than it could hit it.
“What is this?” Gwyn whispered to no one in particular. Her body was still frozen and her eyes glued on the scene before her.
“It’s a baby,” Cat replied.
The kitten attacked Azriel’s hand again, wrapping its tiny paws around his wrist and turned on itself but it only managed to slide off his chest and fall down clumsily on its back. Gwyn gasped and let out a shriek louder than when the enemies in the enemies-to-lovers book she was currently reading finally became lovers. She placed an equally excited Catrin on the ground before she ran towards a stunned Azriel. Gwyn sat on the floor beside him and picked up the kitten.
“Hi little baby,” she cooed while petting it. “Aren’t you the cutest little kitty.”
Cat reached her mother and leaned over her shoulder to watch. Azriel rose from the floor and stretched out his legs before filling Gwyn in on everything that she had missed before she came back. He rested his back against their grey couch and pulled Gwyn by the waist until she sat on one of his legs. Though his wife wasn’t paying him any attention, he still kissed her cheek and lips. It only took a second before Cat felt left out and moved to sit on his other one. The little girl brought her face close to Azriel’s until he kissed her on the cheek too. And another one on the tip of her nose where it always made her smile the most. Azriel wrapped his arms around them both and they all snuggled against him. Meanwhile the kitten between them was only interested in playing with whatever moved in front of its face.
“So, we are keeping it?” Azriel asked unnecessarily.
“Of course we are.”
The kitten stopped and stared at Catrin when she squealed from her mother’s answer. But then it went back to what it was doing, as though the little thing was already used to all this.