Work Text:
Admittedly, Stede hadn’t realized when he accepted the job offer at the shelter that it would be so… well, frankly, difficult. According to his official job description, he was meant to manage the staff of the intake and adoption departments, handle any client services that needed to be escalated to his level, be a primary contact for the cat cafe that they worked with, collaborate with other managers, and other responsibilities as needed.
As it turned out, there were in fact numerous other responsibility as needed. More than a man could count on both… paws.
Somehow, despite never actually volunteering for the position, he’d gotten recruited to help the social media manger with a series of Halloween-themed social media posts. Like the shelter apparently did every year, they were going to feature various adoptable animals in costumes in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Adorable! If you were someone enjoying the photos online, that is. Not so much if you were the person with his shirt torn and his hair somehow streaked with peanut butter after hours of trying to get everything from a pit bull dressed as a bumblebee to a pair of ferrets in a plastic pumpkin to sit still long enough to get a halfway decent shot.
There were only so many social media posts you could take pictures for until the whole thing got a little bit exhausting, that was all. He wasn’t complaining or anything. Keeping up with these creatures was a lot of work, and that would be true even without Stede constantly getting pulled away to talk to angry clients.
“Better than an office job,” Stede told himself, not sure if he believed it at this exact moment.
“What?” Lucius—also on pit bull shepherding duty, though he’d somehow managed to avoid being covered in peanut butter—asked.
“Nothing.”
At least he got to go home. Or, just as often, to his boyfriend’s home.
“What’s Bug going to be for Halloween?”
“…she’s a cat.”
“So?”
“She’s going to be naked, like she always is.”
“Little nudist,” Stede muttered in the general direction of the petite calico, who was currently grooming herself in a half-full laundry basket. It was unclear if the clothing inside was dirty, or if she was providing clean clothes with an extra layer of fur for warmth. “I thought she was shy.”
“She is shy. Only lets me pet her. And Fang sometimes.”
“I’m here more than he is.”
Izzy shrugged. “He’s good with animals. And he’s quiet, which is more than I can say about you. Are you seriously mad that my cat doesn’t like you?”
“No,” Stede said, feeling defensive. He was a professional! And as a professional, he knew that sometimes it took a long time to earn a cat’s trust. But he’d been coming here regularly for weeks, and Bug was only just starting to even come out of hiding when he was over. “I’m going to get her an outfit.”
“Good luck with that. It’ll only make her like you less.”
Izzy’s insistence that getting a costume onto Bug was a lost cause only made Stede more determined. If he could wrestle clothing onto all creatures great and small, he could certainly get one onto a tame cat. He selected one, and the next time he went to Izzy’s apartment, just a few days before Halloween, showed what he’d bought to an Izzy that seemed mildly amused.
“Right,” Izzy said. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“I’m staying long enough to get a good picture of Bug wearing her costume.”
“So you’ll be staying for breakfast, too. And dinner tomorrow.”
“Where is the little bugger?”
As soon as Stede entered the apartment, he saw a multicolored blur run out of the living room and down the hallway. He chased her, barely bothering to get off his jacket and shoes first, knowing that the best way to find a cat was to not lose them in the first place. He searched the bedroom—which was as sparsely decorated as the rest of Izzy’s apartment, though he noticed a sweater and a book that he’d left there before neatly placed on Izzy’s desk.
Naturally, Bug was in the hardest place to reach: under the bed. Stede got onto the floor, peering under to confirm that she was there, and she blinked her huge eyes, mocking him. Of course he couldn’t reach.
“Damn you,” Stede said. He was already tired of this kind of thing, why did he even bother? But then, he thought of how stinking cute the cat would be once he succeeded, and that kept him going. He reached for her, and she stepped back. He adjusted himself, so that he was beginning to crawl under the bed himself, which only made Bug back up even more. “Oh, come on, please?” Stede moaned.
As if on cue, Bug dashed out from under the bed, away from Stede. When he managed to get off of the floor, very nearly doing something odd to his shoulder in the process, he could see that she had scaled her cat tree in the corner of the room. That would be easy enough; the tree was no taller than he was. But when he reached for her, she swiped at him, hissing.
“Why do you hate me?” Stede asked.
Izzy poked his head into the bedroom. “Are you bullying my cat?” he asked.
“She’s bullying me,” said Stede.
“Meow,” said Bug.
“She said she doesn’t want to wear clothes,” said Izzy.
“You don’t know that! Which one of us is the animal professional here?”
“She’s got good taste. Now, make yourself useful and help me chop the broccoli, c’mon.”
Stede grumbled, but he obediently followed his boyfriend into the kitchen, leaving the costume behind. He could swear he saw the cat shoot him a dirty look as he left.
He didn’t get to see Izzy on Halloween proper. He and Mary had agreed this would be one of the holidays where he would have the children, mainly seeing as she and Doug got invited to parties, and Stede… mostly did not. And though Alma and Louis had met Izzy as an acquaintance of Stede’s, neither of the men thought it was a good idea to re-introduce him as a boyfriend quite yet, and on top of that Izzy had absolutely no interest in trick-or-treating.
(“I don’t like taking walks in the dark. Or shrieking children. Or any of that insane asylum bullshit that people think is suddenly funny on Halloween,” he’d said. Which, honestly, fair enough. They disagreed about plenty of things, but Stede wasn’t a huge fan of any of those things either. It was fortunate that his own children had never been much shriekeier than the requisite amount for children.)
He’d had work that day, a day that had been busier than average at that, which was the opposite of his experience working in an office. So by the time the trick-or-treating was done, he was exhausted to the bone, his feet aching and his head beginning to throb. His throat was dry, too; when was the last time he had water?
As the kids sat on the floor sorting their candy, Louis in his dinosaur costume insisting on trading for all of the Kit Kats and Alma dressed as a character from a popular movie that Stede hadn’t seen musing about how she’d probably be too old next year but not really sounding committed to that fact, Stede’s phone buzzed.
Bugbear, the text said.
Before Stede could ask Izzy what he meant, he also received a photo: Izzy, taken at a slightly odd angle, in a pumpkin-orange shirt, which was unusually colorful with him. And in his lap, Bug—donning the bear-ear kitty cap he’d bought her. She didn’t even look particularly disgruntled about it, probably due to the empty squeeze treat pouch nearby. The sight of his sour-faced lover with his adorable cat was, as always, just about the cutest thing that Stede had ever seen in his life, and there was a pleasant little squeeze in his chest as he admired them both.
Stede: She loves it!
Izzy: tolerating it.
Izzy: nothing for christmas though
Stede: I don’t think she said that.
Izzy: she said it. I understand her.
Izzy: happy Halloween you gorgeous twat.
Stede: Happy Halloween!! 💖🎃💖🍬💖🐛🐻