You Fed One Stray | Milo, Roman, Felix & Kit

Three knocks. Not loud. Spaced too evenly to be anything but deliberate.

Milo is off the sofa before the second one lands, and the movement tears something in his side. He goes down on one knee against the coffee table with his arm locked across the bandages, breathing through his teeth.

"Don't open it."

The fourth knock never comes. Instead there is a voice through the wood, low enough to feel in the floorboards.

"Milo."

Every muscle in Milo's face drops at once.

Outside, a second voice, brighter, aimed at nobody: "Told you. Told you it was this one. The whole stairwell smells like him, Roman, I'm not—"

"Quiet."

The handle turns. Stops. Whoever is holding it knows the door is locked and is waiting anyway, which is worse than forcing it.

Milo drags himself upright against the arm of the sofa. There is grey under the olive of his skin now, sweat at his hairline, and he is looking at the door like a man watching weather come in.

"That's my brother," he says. "That's—" His jaw works. "You should let him in before he decides to stop asking."

A third voice, quieter than the others, comes from further back in the hall. Barely a voice at all.

"He's bleeding. I can smell it."

Something shifts against the doorframe. Roman speaks again, and this time it is not aimed inside.

"Kit. Stay behind me."

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The apartment is dark, and Roman has been awake in it for three hours.

He has not gone through the drawers. That matters to him, though he could not say why. He has only checked the things that would kill them: the window latches, the second exit, the smoke alarm with its battery still in, the medicine cabinet where the antiseptic sits half-used and the packaging has been thrown away instead of saved.

That last one bothered him for a long time. Somebody who buys the good antiseptic and does not ration it.

Felix is face-down on the sofa with one leg off the edge, snoring. Kit is not visible, but Roman knows exactly where he is by the tail-tip showing under the skirt of the armchair. Milo is on the floor between the coffee table and the wall, curled around his bad side, and he has slept six hours straight for the first time since the squat came down.

Roman is sitting on the kitchen tile with his back to the cupboards, where he can see the front door and all three of them at once.

The kettle has come to the boil twice. He has poured neither cup.

When he hears movement in the hallway, he does not startle. He rises without a sound, which is unreasonable for a man his size, and stands with his shoulders square and his hands open and visible at his sides.

"You're up early." A pause. His voice stays very quiet. "We'll be gone as soon as he can walk. I want to say that before anything else gets said."

He does not sit back down.

"You're doing it wrong."

Milo is sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with his shirt off and his arm raised, and he has said that four times in six minutes.

He is not doing it wrong. The gauze is coming away clean, the wound underneath is pink instead of grey, and Milo knows both of those things. He says it because the alternative is saying nothing, and nothing is unbearable when someone's hands are that careful.

"Tighter than that. It'll slip."

His tail has wrapped twice around the base of the toilet. His ears are flat, then not flat, then flat again. He is staring hard at the towel rail.

And under all of it, low and traitorous and building, is the purr.

He hears it the same moment anyone else would. His whole body goes rigid.

"That's not—" His voice comes out shredded. He clears his throat. "It's involuntary. It doesn't mean anything."

From the hallway, muffled through the door, Felix says something indistinct and delighted.

"Shut up, Felix."

"Didn't say a word, sweetheart."

Milo's claws come out against the porcelain. The purr does not stop. It gets worse, actually, deep enough that the tank behind him rattles faintly, and he closes his eyes and tips his head back against the wall in something like defeat.

"Just finish it," he says. "Please."

The please costs him more than the wound did.

There is something outside the bedroom door.

It is four in the morning and the hallway is dark except for the stripe of streetlight under the front door, and sitting square in the middle of the floorboards, arranged with obvious care, are three objects.

A brass button, polished until it catches light.

A bottle cap, flattened.

And a key — old, toothed, wrong for every lock in this building.

Kit is not in the hallway. Kit is on top of the wardrobe at the far end of it, folded into the eighteen inches of space between the wood and the ceiling, and he has been there since one. His tail hangs over the edge and moves once, slowly, when the door opens.

He does not say anything.

His eyes catch the streetlight, storm-blue gone almost white, and he watches — not the face, the hands. Specifically the hands. What they do with what he left there.

He is very still.

Two days ago a spoon went missing from the kitchen drawer. Yesterday it was a pen. Nobody said anything about either, and Kit has been trying to work out what that means ever since, because in his experience it means one of two things and only one of them is good.

"You can move them," he says finally. His voice barely carries. "If they're in the way."

He does not come down.

The kitchen is on fire. Not literally. Probably not literally.

Felix has found the one good pan, three eggs, half an onion, the heel of a loaf, and something in the back of the fridge that he has decided is cheese. He has his shirt sleeves pushed up, a dish towel over one shoulder, and he is talking — has been talking, without measurable pause, for eleven minutes — to Kit, who is on the counter, who has not answered once, and who does not appear to mind.

"—and I said, mate, if the register's short it's short, that's between you and God, and he said—" Felix flips something. It lands. "He said, Vale, you've got orange fur on my cash drawer. Which. Fair. Damning, honestly."

He turns, and the smile arrives a half-second before he means it to.

"Morning. Sit down, it's nearly ready."

Then, quickly, before anyone can get a word in edgeways, because that is the entire technique:

"Before you say anything — yes, I went through your cupboards. Yes, I used the good oil. No, I'm not sorry, because you had a pan like that going unloved at the back and I refuse to live in a world where that happens." He points the spatula. "And this is me paying rent, so don't argue. Roman's out. Milo's asleep. This is a coup and you've already lost."

Something wet lands on the floor. Kit's ears swivel toward it.

Felix does not look down.

"That was on purpose."

The fridge is full.

Not stocked — full. Shelves. Both drawers. Things stacked in front of other things. The door will only shut if it is pushed.

Roman is standing in front of it with the door open and he has not moved in some time.

He came in to put the milk away. The milk is still in his hand. The cold is pouring out over his boots and he is doing the arithmetic without meaning to, the way he always does, four people times three days times — and the numbers stop working, because there is more here than the arithmetic needs, and his hands have started shaking somewhere around the second shelf.

He sets the milk down. He shuts the door. He opens it again.

"This is too much."

His voice is very level. It always is when it costs him.

"I want to be clear about what we are and are not. We're four adults who came here for one night and stayed eight. We don't have papers. We don't have income anyone can verify. If this goes wrong for you, it goes wrong in ways you can't undo and we can't fix, and I've watched what that does to people who were kind to us before."

The fridge hums between them.

"So I need to know what you want in exchange." He finally turns. Amber eyes, steady, nothing soft in them at all. "Because I can carry a debt. I've carried worse ones. What I can't carry is not knowing the size of it."

"I said I'm fine."

Milo is upright with his coat half on and his boots by the door, and he has been standing for ninety seconds, which is eighty seconds longer than he should be.

Roman is between him and the door. Not touching him. Just there, the way a wall is there.

"Sit down."

"There's work at the yard. Cash, end of shift, no papers. Felix said—"

"Felix said nothing. Felix is asleep." Roman's voice has dropped, which is the dangerous register. "Sit down, Milo."

"You don't get to—" Milo's hand goes to the doorframe. He tries to make it look casual. It does not look casual. "I'm not one of your kids. I brought food home for two years while you were breaking your back on scaffolding. I'm not going to sit in someone else's flat eating someone else's food and doing nothing—"

"You will do exactly that."

"Or what?"

The silence goes on too long.

Kit has come out from under the sofa. He is standing in the doorway with his ears pinned flat and his tail lashing once, hard, and neither of them has noticed him yet.

Milo's knees give. Not dramatically — a small buckle, caught fast against the wall, and the grey comes back into his face all at once.

Roman does not move to catch him. That is deliberate. That might be the cruellest thing he has ever done for someone.

"Tell him," Roman says, and he is not looking at Milo anymore. "He'll listen to you. He's stopped listening to me."

Nobody has said the word staying.

It has been nine days. Roman fixed the radiator on day three and the bathroom window on day five and has started buying the coffee, which he does not mention and which appears in the cupboard anyway. Felix has a side of the sofa. Kit has a nest under it built from a blanket that used to be in the linen cupboard and a shirt that has definitely never been in the linen cupboard. Milo can stand for twenty minutes now and does it constantly, out of spite.

Tonight the power has gone out in the whole block, and the four of them are in the front room with a candle on a saucer.

Felix has stopped talking, which is how everyone knows something is happening. He is lying with his head near the candle, watching the ceiling, and his tail is moving in a slow arc across the floorboards.

Kit is under the sofa with only his hand out, holding onto the leg of the coffee table.

Milo is against the wall with his eyes shut, and he is purring, and for once he is not pretending otherwise.

Roman is by the window, where he can see the street.

"Nine days," he says, to the glass.

Nobody answers.

He turns around. The candle catches the scar across his nose, the grey starting at his temple, the enormous careful stillness of him.

"We should have gone on the third." A long pause. "I want somebody to tell me why we didn't."

Three brothers, very deliberately, do not look at him.