“What apartment number did they say they were again?” Jean-Paul asked as the climbed the stairs in the unfamiliar apartment complex.
“Apartment 52.” Kyle answered, searching the hallway for the number.
“Funny how they ask us to cat sit for them but don’t invite us to their wedding.” Jean-Paul muttered with the tone of a five year old who was denied McDonalds, Kyle rolled his eyes.
“Oh hush up, if Rogue and Remy had known they were getting married with more than an hour’s notice, they would have made sure we were there.” He said, he didn’t say that they should have been there anyway to support Kitty. Technically they had been invited to the original wedding, but Jean-Paul and Kitty have always been weird around each other ever since that one time Jean-Paul died in her arms. He doesn’t stop to think about how weird that should sound. Things like that stop being weird when you spend enough time with the X-Men. “Besides, I know what you were doing during that wedding, And if I’m being completely honest,” He said, getting close enough to whisper in Jean-Paul’s ear “what we were doing was much better than going to a wedding.” He kiss on his husband’s cheek as turned the key, letting themselves in and flipping a light switch. The pair were greeted almost immediately by a small white cat with a soft meow and a tail flick. ”Well hello there Figaro.” Kyle smiled, scratching Figaro between his ears. On the table was a note and a bottle of wine.
Thanks for watching the boys! Some notes:
1- Oliver takes eye drops once a day before bed. He is feisty about it: it will take a couple tries.
2. Their food is under the kitchen sink. Each cat gets half a can of wet in the morning and one scoop of dry (use the red scooper!)
3. Fig has to be fed separately from Oli and Lucifer! (They will bully him and steal his dinner)
4. Fair warning, Lu is an orange dumbass and will probably do dumb shit. If the dumb dumb shit he does requires medical attention, the number for our vet is on the fridge.
We left some wine on the table but feel free to anything in the fridge or pantry! Thank you again for watching the boys and hope we can get together soon for a double date!
-Rogue and Remy
P.S. Please do not have sex on our furniture.
“I’m a little worried about the fact that they added that last part.” Jean-Paul said,moving in from the note and inspecting the wine curiously.
“Yeah… I don’t think I’ll be asking them to house sit for us anytime soon if they felt they needed to add that.” Kyle said, receiving a chuckle from his husband.
“This is some good wine.” Jean-Paul said, lifting his eyebrows. “Want to get drunk and try to find where they keep all their sex toys?”
“Ew, no. We can drink it later, let’s focus on feeding the cats.” Kyle sighed, taking the bottle and setting it on the table.
Feeding the cats was more a chore than expected. Rogue and Remy had forgotten to mention that Lucifer refused to eat if he wasn’t being watched, or if he could see Oliver out of the corner of his eye, or if he could see the bottom of his bowl. But after about a thirty minute struggle to make sure all the cats had eaten their dinner, and not yet ready to leave the boys, they sat down on the couch to enjoy the wine and see what was on tv. Oliver joined them, purring loudly while stretched out in Jean-Paul’s lap as he scratched between his ears.
“You know Oliver looks a little like my old cats.” Jean-Paul said out of the blue.
“Oh?” Kyle asked, bringing in a pair of wine glasses that were filled far past the proper pour. Jean-Paul looked up with his eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
“Have I never told you about my cats?”
“I never even knew you liked cats until Gambit’s housewarming party!” Kyle exclaimed, remembering his husband’s delight upon seeing Gambit’s little set. He spent half the party with a cat cuddle up in his arms or on his lap. As much as it sometimes irritated him how closed off and private his husband was, it also made him love him that much more. He had been married to JP for three years now and had worked for him for many before that but there were still parts of his past left untold. For Jean-Paul, keep his private life private was an act of defiance in a media that wanted so badly to have all of his secrets, wanting to use them to prove that gays or mutants were inherently bad. And in learning things about Jean-Paul that no other person (with the exception of Aurora) knew about him, It seemed that the longer he realized that Kyle wasn’t going to leave him, the more of his soul he was willing to share.
“Two of them. Bonk and Courier. They were a pair of Russian Blues. I was maybe about fifteen? I saw a man throwing a bag into the Rivière des Prairies and I knew immediately what it was. I jumped in after them and fished them out. Carried them all the way back the Raymonde’s soaking wet and shivering.”
“How did Raymonde react to them?”
“Oh he hated cats, and he was not happy about the fact that I nearly gave myself pneumonia.” Jean-Paul smiled, “he told me that there was no way in hell I was keeping them. But a week later I caught him feeding Bonk from the breakfast table. It wasn’t long after that he caved and let me keep them.” He laughed for a moment, before pausing a sad smile on his face. Kyle knew that look, it was a look of fondness and of grief… but also of guilt. Guilt that he wasn’t able to stop his death, guilt that he never got a chance to say thank you to the man who changed his life and showed him what love was.
“So what happened to Bonk and Courier when you moved out of Raymonde’s?”
“They went with me basically everywhere I could get away with it. I couldn’t sleep during my first Olympic without having them in bed with me. They even lived in the Alpha Flight mansion for a bit after me and Maurice broke up.” He said, looking up at his husband, “but as far as Alpha Flight knows, I never had cats and they definitely did not live in the mansion.” He stressed, and Kyle laughed lightly. As if he would talk to Alpha Flight, let alone spill any of his husbands secrets. He liked having them, being one of the only people to see the side of Jean-Paul who fished cats out of rivers and loved them with every fiber of his being.
“Courier died a couple weeks after I quit Alpha Flight.” He added quietly. Kyle’s heart sank a little, realizing why he might have never known about them before. He already couldn’t imagine what Jean-Paul had gone through quitting Alpha Flight. Caught up in grief for his daughter and being in the international spotlight (both for publicly coming out and the Alpha Flight World Tour) Heather had warned him that Department H was planning on pushing him out of Alpha Flight to get rid of unwanted media attention. Furious and hurt, he chose to leave on his own rather than be fired.
“I always thought Bonk would go first. He had a lot of health issues from the very beginning from being thrown in the river. But he held on for a while after Courier passed. I think he missed her a lot though.” He thinks about how when he was the same age as his husband when he was dealing with this, he was in his sophomore year of college, only just starting worrying less about his schoolwork and family and more about what he was going to do with his life and who he was.
“You know, we could get a cat if you wanted to.” Kyle said softly. Jean-Paul shook his head.
“I appreciate the gesture, my love, but you don’t have to fix every single heartbreak I’ve ever had.” Maybe I don’t have to, Kyle thought, but I’d like to try. “I do want to get a cat someday, and I want to move out of a city, and adopt a bunch of kids… one day. But I like being in the moment with you right now and I have a lot of work I need to do before I can get there, but doing stuff like this, it helps me to get to that point.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, like losing those cats absolutely broke my heart at a time where heartbreak seemed to be around every corner. But I have many memories of them that I shouldn’t allow to be tainted by their deaths, I should share them with someone… I want to share the best parts of my past with the best part of my future.”
Kyle smiled, cupping his hands around his husband’s face and kissing him.
“You’re already wine drunk aren’t you?” He asked, glancing over at Jean-Paul’s almost empty wine glass.
“... peut être”
“You are such a lightweight when he comes to wine.”
“I know… but I still meant every word of what I said.”
“I know.” He said, resting his head on Jean-Paul’s shoulder. Jean-Paul kissed his forehead, rubbing Kyle’s back with one hand and finishing his wine with the other. They sat in silence for a moment, enjoying the buzz of the wine and the quiet of an apartment not unfamiliar but not their home. “So what is your favorite memory… with your cats.”
“After I came home from my first Olympics, I went away for a weekend that was just me and the cats. Stayed in a pet friendly lodge and I brought them skiing, and they absolutely love it. I only did bunny hills and I kept them in a sash around my torso, but they just watched the world pass by, and they looked like they could care less. After I lost Courier, I brought Bonk skiing one last time. We had a nice moment up there, just being on a mountain me and him and watching him bask in the sun… it was nice.”
“It sounds nice.” Kyle hummed, they enjoyed a couple more minutes, Kyle thinking about the mental image of his husband skiing with cats strapped to him and enjoying the background noise of the television. Jean-Paul had found A New Hope on the DVR and put it on. Kyle thought about how funny it was how much Jean-Paul loves Star Wars (another secret Kyle had learned along the way- in fact he could probably quote the first trilogy from memory). The silence is broken when Jean-Paul yawns and sighs.
“We should probably give Oli his eye drops soon so we can head home.” He said. Kyle groaned softly.
“We should probably get some protective gear on.”
“Non. I know what I’m doing.” Jean-Paul said, picking up Oliver and swaddling him up like a baby. “Bonk had eye infections all the time.” He said, taking the eye drops and gently petting his head after each one. “The blanket trick works every time.” He said, releasing Oliver fully medicated in record speed.
“You got some kind of mutant power of controlling cats.” Kyle said, shaking his head.
“Oh for sure, eat your heart out Squirrel Girl.” He said, posing jokingly. Kyle couldn’t help but laugh.
“Come on Catman, lets get home.”
“Alright, see you in the morning boys!” He called back into the living room. Figaro, Lucifer, and Oliver watched them leave from the couch, comfortable and indifferent to their departure. All three cats were asleep by the time Kyle and Jean-Paul had hit the street, walking back to their apartment, hand in hand.