Work Text:
It takes Sirius a moment to register what’s happening. Something shakes her shoulder through her blanket, and when she peels her eyelids apart sleepily, a faint artificial glow of streetlamps through the crack in the dorm room curtains paints the wall in front of her.
It must be Nakayama who reaches over and plucks her right earplug out of her ear. Sirius groans. “What the hell is it?”
“Shhh, shhh,” her roommate hisses behind her. “If we get a noise complaint, I’m fucked.” She continues shaking at her shoulder, begging her to roll over and pay attention to her like a needy puppy.
She doesn’t oblige until Nakayama’s hand leaves her shoulder and a high-pitched squeak sounds out in the room. Nakayama whispers soothingly — “Hey, hey,” — as Sirius finally turns around skeptically to see her holding tight to something she has stashed inside her dirt-streaked sweatshirt.
In her hazy, sleep-colored mind, she can barely recognize this scrap of rags poking out of the front of Nakayama’s sweatshirt as a kitten. The little gray thing mews.
Sirius props herself up on an elbow, looking past her roommate to read the time on Nakayama’s alarm clock — it’s just past three in the morning. Nakayama’s ability to sneak in and out of the dorm building at this time of night is impressive; smuggling in an entire shivering kitten is something else entirely.
“You didn’t see a mother nearby?” Sirius whispers.
“No — look, he’s really thin,” Nakayama responds, but it’s hard to see for herself with how she has it bundled so close to her chest. “I heard him crying under a bush in the flower garden. Was a little scared, ‘till he realized I wanted to help him, and he was so cold he just let me scoop him up,” she rambles.
Taking out her other earplug and setting it on her nightstand for now, Sirius sits up. When she reaches a hand out to the kitten, it shies away from her. She frowns. “What are you going to do with it? Him?”
No response. In the dim light, she watches Nakayama’s eyes dart around the room. “I’ll think of something…” she says eventually, absentmindedly patting the cat in her arms. “You know I couldn’t just leave him, Sirius.”
Sirius huffs. “I didn’t say you should have.”
“I don’t have anywhere to put him.” Nakayama bites her lip. “Or food.”
“Do you need me to call a shelter?”
“Would you?” She says it so softly. The girl is an absolute bleeding heart at her core — something like this is enough to sand down some of her rougher edges. Sirius watches her drop a kiss on the head of this unwashed, probably flea-ridden little animal.
While she doesn’t quite have the same kind of soft spot as Nakayama’s, in many ways, she understands. So she picks her cellphone up off of her nightstand and starts a search for anywhere in the area that might be able to take in a stray kitten at this hour of the night.
Shelters near me. Cat rescue. What to do if I found a kitten. Almost every single one of the results contains a location with a big, red CLOSED right next to it. Nakayama’s big violet eyes gaze at her pleadingly from her seat on her bed across the room.
She scrolls down and down and down. It’s a big city — bound to be many cat lovers, too. Too bad none of them are able to take a call at this time. Sirius sighs just as Nakayama gets up, kitten removed from her sweatshirt and cradled in her arms like an infant, and stands in front of her again.
“Hey, can you take him for a second?” she asks, but Sirius feels like she can’t refuse, so she lets her place the cat in the crook of her arm. He’s so small, and shivering, and she’s nervous because she’s never held a cat before in her life. She tries to hold on to her phone to continue searching, but it’s difficult now that she has to be aware of something very alive and relying on her for warmth and protection.
She shifts her arm to try and get the kitten in a more comfortable position, but he slips, tiny claws scratching at her chest through her thin top. It hurts, and she hisses through her teeth as she tries not to make an embarrassingly loud noise of pain, but Nakayama notices regardless. She flicks her desk lamp on to let a little bit of light into the room and comes back over to Sirius, smirking.
“Put your phone down.” Sirius obliges, nervous as a tiny paw settles above her neckline. “You’ve never held a cat before, have you?”
Nakayama takes hold of Sirius’ wrist, the one not wrapped around the cat’s bottom. The light’s still low enough that she probably can’t tell how red her face is. She guides her hand to support the kitten’s shoulders and press him closer to her chest. Sirius adjusts her hold on the kitten’s lower half, and Nakayama nods approvingly. Before she leaves to get back to… whatever she needs to do, she scratches under the kitten’s chin.
“She’s a nice girl, so let’s not be mean to her, ‘kay?”
Sirius watches her pad around the room, trying not to make too much noise as she plucks her flowerpots from their windowsill. She stands up on her bed, balancing precariously on the mattress, and sets the plants down carefully on top of her closet, out of reach of a kitten.
The kitten snuggles closer. Sirius wants to stroke him, keep him from starting to shiver, but she’s too nervous to move her hands from the position Nakayama put them in. You’re so much better at this. Please come take him back. Please?
Next, Nakayama gets down on all fours and peers under her bed.
“What are you doing?” Sirius whispers.
“I don’t throw out all the boxes I open, so,” she reaches under the bed, “there’s one back here? Yeah.” She pulls back with a medium-sized cardboard box that used to contain training equipment. “How lucky.”
Nakayama grips the edges of her dirty white sweatshirt and lifts it off over her head before shoving it into the box. “You can hand him back now.”
The words “can you come up here and take him” die in her throat. Sirius rises from her bed, trying not to alarm the little thing snuggling into her chest, and kneels down on the floor next to the box very slowly.
“How do I…” she starts, and Nakayama giggles, reaching her arms out. She leans forwards, so Nakayama can take the cat from her. He settles into her roommate’s arms easily.
She nuzzles her cheek against the kitten’s. “I know, I know. I’ve got to put you down, though.” Smiling, she places him into the box, and he mewls, missing her warmth and comfort. It evidently doesn’t take much for Nakayama to feel sympathetic and stick her hand in the box to continue petting him.
“Sirius,” she says, looking up, hand still shoved inside the box.
Sirius jolts back into focus. “Hmm?”
“Did you find anything? A place to take him?”
She frowns. “It’s early in the morning. They’re all closed.”
“And we don’t have any food,” Nakayama groans.
They have snacks somewhere, but nothing they could feed a kitten. He doesn’t look young enough that they wouldn’t be able to feed him solid food, so they could get chicken or something from the cafeteria. If it was open, that is.
“I can leave a voicemail at the nearest shelter so they can get him first thing in the morning,” Sirius suggests, “if you think he can hold out for a few more hours?”
Nakayama bites at her thumb on the hand that’s not patting the kitten. “That should be fine...”
“He’s better off here than out there.” You did the right thing.
“That’s true.” She gets up. “You do that, I’ll try and get him something to drink.”
While Nakayama opens her closet to try and find where she might’ve stored a bowl, Sirius leans up to pick her phone up from her mattress. She unlocks it, and the first page she sees is the website for a shelter about two miles away. She taps a button with a little phone icon, puts it on speaker and brings it close to her face.
“Thank you for calling. Unfortunately…” a woman’s voice reads out the recorded message. They’re closed, just as the website had said, and they wouldn’t be open for a few more hours. “If you would like to leave a message, please do so after the tone and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
The tone sounds and Sirius exhales. “Hello, I’m calling because my… we found a kitten alone outside. I don’t know how old he is… we brought him in and are keeping him warm, but we need to find somewhere to take him… um,” she yawns, “We’re in the dorms at Tracen Academy, so I can come in the morning…”
It’s absolutely mortifying. She doesn’t know what to say. Either way, one or both of them is hurtling straight into disciplinary action for sneaking out at night and harboring an animal without permission, and it’s incredibly difficult to explain the situation over the phone in a way that conveys that they need to have a way to discreetly bring this kitten to the shelter.
It won’t matter if she’s the one who gets reprimanded, but if it were Nakayama, who tends to the flowers when others don’t and picks up shivering little kittens without hesitating for even a moment…
She’d have some very choice words for the academy’s management.
She hangs up just as Nakayama comes back with a little teal bowl full of water from the fountain in the hallway. Placing it in the box, she lays down on the rug next to it, head propped up on her elbow. Sirius peers into the makeshift bed to see the kitten sleepily sticking his face into the bowl, messily lapping at the water and flinging droplets all over Nakayama’s sweatshirt. Once he’s had his fill, he opens his mouth in a wide toothy yawn. It’s contagious — it spreads to Nakayama as well.
Sirius looks at the hours of the shelter she’s called. They open at six. There’s a bus that goes that direction. She’s not nearly as skilled at sneaking in and out of the dorms as Nakayama is, but at least that’s past curfew. The most difficult part will be slipping past girls going on morning runs and Hishi Amazon inevitably trying to be friendly and ask what she’s up to today.
Nakayama’s tail hits her in the thigh. “Can you keep watch? I’m gonna… I’m gonna fall asleep.”
Quick to wake up in the middle of the night, but also quick to fall back asleep. Nakayama’s hand dangles into the box limply, the kitten curled against the side close to her fingers. Instead of propping herself up with her elbow, now she has her face tucked into the crook of her arm against the floor.
Sirius, in her mind, means to get up, and fall asleep on her own mattress, but the time on her phone reads 4:06, and the next moment she remembers, the sun has already risen and her ringtone is blaring right next to her ear.
She hisses at the noise and opens her eyes to a face full of Nakayama’s fluffy brown hair. She’d fallen asleep curled around the box full of kitten on the rug. And Sirius, evidently, fell asleep curled around her.
She has to pry her arm out from under Nakayama to grab her phone, and her roommate groans, tail thumping against Sirius’ leg, but she doesn’t wake up.
Before her phone stops ringing, she manages to hit the accept button, and puts it on speaker as quiet as possible, even though Nakayama is a heavy sleeper.
“Hello? Is this… the caller from Tracen Academy last night, asking about an abandoned kitten? I’m sorry… we never received a name.”
“Sirius,” she sputters, entirely too aware of Nakayama right next to her. This entire night has been a nightmare for her image — at least Nakayama was only there for some of it. “Yes, I called last night.”
The voice over the phone softens. “Thank you for calling us — we appreciate your concern. I have a few questions for you, and then we can see if we’re capable of taking in your new little friend. Did you wait for at least a day to see if the kitten’s mother would come back for him?”
At that moment, Nakayama turns over. Her face presses into Sirius’ hip, and her arm hugs her over the tops of her thighs.
“He was thin and shivering,” she says in lieu of an answer.
“Do you have an age estimate?”
“I don’t know sh— anything about cats,” she says immediately, and the person over the phone laughs.
“That’s alright, Sirius.” She finds herself blushing. Multiple reasons, at this point. When will this end? “When would you be able to bring him in to our facility? I’m aware Tracen isn’t very far, but we’re open between now and eight in the evening.”
She looks over at the box full of sleeping, relatively contented kitten. He’s still hungry, so it’s imperative she goes as soon as possible.
“I can be over in thirty minutes,” she decides.
“That’s great,” the person on the other end says surprisedly. “We’ll be waiting for you. And thank you again for your efforts helping the little guy. There’s a good chance you may have saved a life last night.”
Nakayama saved his life last night. “It’s nothing,” she says quickly. And then she hangs up.
Should she wake Nakayama? She’ll probably want to go with Sirius to drop off the little guy at the shelter. But if she gets up now without telling her, Nakayama won’t have to know that she fell asleep holding her last night. And she won’t have the opportunity to be annoying about it.
Nakayama makes the choice for her. When Sirius tries to stand up to put on presentable clothing, she stirs, and her eyes blink open. “Huh?”
“It’s morning,” Sirius says, standing up and leaving her laying on the rug.
“Where’re you going?” she slurs sleepily. Nakayama rolls onto her back, sits up, and rubs at her eyes as she looks into the box to see an undisturbed little gray kitten still sleeping there.
Sirius puts on a bra and something loose and casual from her closet. She’s going to look messier than she ever likes to, but she’s hoping to not draw attention, so that’s probably best.
“I’m dropping your kitten off at the shelter,” she says, pulling on a pair of jeans. “They gave me a call back.”
“Wait, I wanna come too.” It’s barely possible to make out what Nakayama is saying this soon after she wakes up. She tries to get up and blink away the sleepiness, but she’d gotten so little sleep last night that it’s almost futile.
Sirius picks up a pillowcase from Nakayama’s hamper as her roommate watches, struggling to stay awake. She’ll use this to loosely cover the box on her way out, hopefully able to pretend that she’s carrying something else, and then once they’re off academy grounds they can take it off.
She turns back to see Nakayama putting the water bowl on her nightstand and picking the box up in her arms. Her hair is an absolute mess, she’s still dressed in flannel pajama pants and her black undershirt. Since her sweatshirt is currently serving as the kitten’s bedding, Sirius tosses one of her jackets on Nakayama’s bed.
“Put the cat down for now, brush your hair and you can come with,” she tells her.
Reluctantly, Nakayama obliges. She fights her untamed hair with her hairbrush, slips on Sirius’ fur-lined jacket even though it’s big on her, and picks the box up from where she’d set it down on her mattress. Sirius drapes the pillowcase over the box. The kitten stirs. She prays he stays asleep while they’re trying to smuggle him out of the building.
“You’re ready?” she asks. Nakayama nods. Well, she’s not “ready” by Sirius’ personal standards, but they’ll only be out for an hour tops, so she can overlook it.
The kitten doesn’t make any noise on the elevator ride to the first floor of the dormitory. When they step out, Hishi Amazon is at the dorm reception desk flipping through some sort of binder, and Sirius freezes when she looks up and raises an eyebrow.
“What’s that?” asks Hishiama. Sirius glares at her, but a meow sounds out from the box in Nakayama’s arms, and Hishiama’s eyes widen. Sirius glares even harder.
“Kitten,” Nakayama says, tired enough that she’s unable to make proper judgements.
“I’m… well, you’re not really supposed to do that, you know, but…” Hishiama starts.
“We’re taking him to a shelter,” Sirius says curtly.
Hishiama lets out a laugh that makes Sirius wince, because they’re still trying not to draw attention. “You think I’m evil or something? It’s a kitten! Go on. I’ll vouch for you if anyone asks.”
“Thanks.” Nakayama walks up to her at the desk and slides away the pillowcase on their way out. “He’s really cute, right?”
Hishiama’s face melts into an absolutely mushy expression before she shoos the two of them away, still smiling. “Before anyone else sees you!”
The cold autumn air outside of the dorms stings at Sirius’ face. It’s a short walk outside academy grounds to the bus stop they’re waiting for. Normally, they’d walk or run — it’s only two or so miles away, after all. But it would be difficult while carrying a box full of kitten. And the little thing is so small, it would be evil to keep him shivering on their way there.
It doesn’t take long for the bus to come. When they’re on for the short ride, Sirius watches as Nakayama puts her hand in the box resting on her lap to stroke the kitten behind his ears. “Morning, little guy,” she coos. “You’re gonna be at the shelter for two minutes and then a whole family is going to come in and scoop you up because you’re so fuckin’ cute.”
The cat mews, pushing his cheek into Nakayama’s palm. Sirius… kind of wishes they could keep him.
She watches out the window. It doesn’t take more than three or four minutes for the bus to arrive at their location, about half a block from the animal shelter. Nakayama hoists the box back into her arms and they begin the short walk to their destination.
When they arrive at the shelter, a man immediately perks up from his spot at the reception counter when he sees the two young women come in with a box that’s obviously holding some sort of animal. “Are you Sirius?” he asks.
“I’m Nakayama. That’s Sirius,” Nakayama says before Sirius can respond, tilting her head towards her roommate. “We’ve got a delivery for you.” She sets the box down on the counter, grinning widely.
Nakayama bunches the pillowcase up in her hand, letting the young man at the counter see what’s inside. A little gray kitten, safe and uninjured, well-rested, just hungry and a little bit dirty, resting on a white sweatshirt.
“I’m assuming he hasn’t been seen at a vet?” the man asks. “He’s small, but doesn’t look sick or injured…”
“It’s only been three or four hours since we found him,” Sirius explains, and it hits her just how little sleep the two of them had gotten. “We kept him warm and gave him water. That was it.”
The man smiles warmly as Nakayama picks up the kitten and snuggles him close to her, clearly not wanting to say goodbye just yet, before turning his gaze back to Sirius leaning by the door.
“You girls did the right thing, then. Now, since he was found as a stray, there won’t be any sort of surrendering fee…” Sirius listens, nods along as the man goes over the technicalities of what happens when you find a lost kitten. She lets Nakayama focus on showering the kitten with affection, kissing him on the forehead until he mewls for mercy.
When he’s almost done talking, he adds — “I’m sure it’s difficult to give him up.”
Nakayama laughs. “Sirius, can we keep him?”
“I’m still more of a dog person,” Sirius teases. Still smiling, Nakayama hands the little kitten off to the shelter staff. He wriggles in his arms, trying to get back to her, but the man is good at soothing kittens, and he soon settles down.
“He’s in good hands, don’t worry,” the man reassures them. Sirius nods to him appreciatively as Nakayama picks up the box with her now soiled sweatshirt and pillowcase in it and they leave the shelter together.
Both of them yawn in unison. “I’m skipping practice and going right to bed,” Nakayama says at the bus stop.
Sirius scowls. “Stop testing your luck, or you’ll end up with me as your trainer.”
“I wouldn’t hate that,” she responds as the two of them get back onto the bus to Tracen, even if she knows that’s not really what Sirius meant.
They settle down next to each other, as always.
“Sirius,” Nakayama starts, leaning her head back on her roommate’s shoulder. “When we get home, do you want to get back where we left off this morning?”
For the millionth time today, Sirius feels herself blushing.