Work Text:
Head throbbing, foot firmly wedged in a trash can, one hand bruised and bloody, and what could be politely described as condensed chaos having occurred in no less than three separate rooms across Mr. Green’s house, Miles seriously regretted their decision to feed their acquaintance’s cat. It had all started the second they opened the door on the last night Miles’ presence was required.
Well, no that is not quite right; the moment Miles realized that the automatic cat food dispenser was not working was the first plank yanked out of the very precarious tower of Jenga that was Mr. Green’s house and home. Mr. Green lived in a very nice house a few blocks away from Miles’ apartment. Mr. Green was rather infamous around the neighborhood for his pickiness and his temperament, and Miles usually avoided him like the plague. On one particularly rainy day at the grocery store, Miles happened to be choosing between the marked down cans of tomato soup or their usual standby of cup ramen when they overheard shouting. Mr. Green was yelling at someone over the phone so loudly the entire grocery store could hear him. Just listening to Mr. Green’s side of the conversation, Miles realized that Mr. Green must have been talking to his cat sitter. The poor man in question was under strict quarantine and couldn’t even leave his bed, let alone take care of Mr. Green’s cat during Mr. Green’s annual trip to India. Mr. Green seemed less worried about his cat sitter than he was desperate to find someone to take care of his precious baby, Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan. Mr. Green began having a minor meltdown, carrying on about “Who would take care of my darling Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan?” and “No one else understands her wonderful temperament and her schedule!”
Mr. Green was a rather infamous member of the community, though he remained relatively unknown; what Miles knew for a fact was that Mr. Green liked schedules and was incredibly stubborn about anything that did not involve things going to schedule. The insensitivity regarding his cat was new, though it was certainly a fact Miles would’ve been more than happy having never learned it. Miles usually avoided Mr. Green to the best of their ability, but they weren’t fast enough to get away from Mr. Green’s paralyzing stare. Mr. Green moved with the speed a man his age should no longer be able to, and thrusted his finger in Miles’ face, saying “You! I recognize you, young lady.”
“Uh, hi there, Mr. Green. Is something the matter?” Please say no, please say no, please say no...
"Yes, there is, as a matter of fact. The ungrateful cretin who was supposed to take care of my darling Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan has chosen now, of all times, to fall ill with some disease he called mono! Well, I have never heard of such a disease, and I am quite sure he was merely faking as he does not wish to lie to my face and tell me that Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan was anything less than her usual angelic self.”
“Uh, Mr. Green, mono is a real-” Miles attempted to interject.
Mr. Green plowed right on, as though he hadn’t heard Miles: “So, you will take care of Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan, and you will do it for the same rate as that useless wastrel I was planning to hire: $110 an hour. Meet me at my home at exactly 3 PM on Thursday, as I leave on Friday, and you must be ready. I will give you the full details you need to properly take care of my Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan.” And with that, Mr. Green stormed off, still in a foul mood. Miles had not been given much say in the matter, but they weren’t one to turn down that kind of money. Their hours at work had just been cut back, so they did need money to make rent this month. Mr. Green was so ecstatic that he had found someone to take care of his baby girl at this late stage he had ignored his usual procedure of extensive background checks and references, but in his usual manner he had steamrolled the poor soul in front him; Miles was really not looking forward to becoming more acquainted with Mr. Green, but hey, money is money.
Miles showed up to Mr. Green’s house as instructed and on time, to learn how to properly take care of Rani (it didn’t matter that Miles was getting paid for this, no amount of money was worth calling the cat by that ridiculously long name) properly. It is rather important to note that if you took the whitest of white paint, mixed it with a metric ton of cottage cheese, and topped it all off with the look of fresh snowfall, you would have an approximation of Mr. Green’s skin tone; not to mention that Mr. Green’s ancestry could be best described as “stayed behind in Norway when the Vikings decided to go out and about exploring places for many, many centuries before accidentally getting on the wrong fishing boat and moving to America”. Just looking at Mr. Green, one wouldn’t be able to tell of his love affair with Indian culture. The inside of Mr. Green’s house looked almost nothing like the outside; there were portraits, actual painted portraits of the cat decorating the walls. What space on the walls the cat’s portraits didn’t occupy were filled with knickknacks, fetishes, and tapestries that all had a distinctly Indian feel to them. Miles took a closer look at one rather pretty tapestry, only to be snapped at, since it was “incredibly expensive, young lady, do not touch it or breathe on it! You could irreparably damage it!”
I’m not a young lady, more of a theydy, Miles snickered to themself, but they backed away from the tapestry, and tried their best to not touch anything else. Trying desperately not to laugh at the ridiculous amount of pictures of the cat, Miles paid very close attention to Mr. Green’s extraordinarily detailed explanation of Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan’s schedule and preferences (for instance, Rani had two separate brushes, and each one needed to be brushed in a different direction; Miles was starting to seriously regret offering to take care of what was shaping up to be a real prima donna of a cat). “You must follow all the instructions I give you and keep my house in precisely the same way as you left it, young lady. The last fellow who I hired to help properly take care of Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan had nudged one of my statues of Ganesha half an inch out of place. He was, of course, summarily dismissed when I came back, nor would I ever hire him again. How could I trust someone to take care of my darling Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan when he could help himself to touch everything in my house?”
“Ah, there’s no need to worry about that, Mr. Green! I’m pretty good at keeping things tidy around my own apartment, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be just fine with your house. You can count on me to take good care of your house and Rani!” Miles nervously grinned. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re paying me an ungodly amount to take care of your cat, I certainly wouldn’t stay and risk getting on the wrong side of that delightful personality of yours, Mr. Green.
Mr. Green snorted. “Her name is Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan, and we shall simply have to see about that, young lady.” Suppressing their frustration, Miles continued to pay close attention to Mr. Green and his distressingly detailed instructions. The final piece of information that Mr. Green decided Miles needed was the exact hour and minute he planned on coming home, which was 8:30 PM precisely. Miles assumed he meant ballpark, since not even Mr. Green and his immense love of keeping to schedule (a trait he appeared to have passed on to his cat) could control the airports’ schedules. Since Miles had shown up after their shift, they missed out on actually meeting Rani (her naptime was at exactly 2:25 PM each day), but they figured that wouldn’t be much of a problem.
They turned out to be mostly right. Mr. Green left on time, and Miles showed up on time for the first thirteen days out of fourteen. Everything went perfectly: Rani was fed, brushed, played with, and out the door Miles went. Miles started thinking that this was a very easy way to make a good chunk of money, babysitting such a calm cat. The fourteenth and final day Miles had to feed Rani did not go quite according to plan.
Ranideva Amirejibi Balakrishnan, the rather tubby and slightly spoiled Maine Coon mix, was very much used to her routine and thoroughly expected each and every person (a word which here means: anyone who walks over the threshold of the house and pays attention to Rani for more than five seconds) she oversaw to keep to schedule. Once Miles realized that the dry food had not come out on time, mainly due to Rani’s caterwauls of distress and dismay; they looked inside to find that it was empty. Luckily, Mr. Green had shown them how to refill it as well as where he kept the cat food, so it should not have been much of an issue. However, Rani was accustomed to having her dry food first at 7:35 PM, followed immediately by piping hot salmon and shredded chicken at exactly 7:45 PM, no sooner and certainly no later. As the clock had just struck 7:45, Rani was howling as though someone had murdered six generations of her family in front of her very eyes and was dogging Miles’ every step. This was a problem, as Rani was also strictly an indoor cat, and the dry cat food was kept in a shed outside to prevent any late-night feasts. Miles tried to shove the cat away from their feet and the door, but only succeeded in louder caterwauls and an even clingier cat; they had no choice but to leave the salmon and chicken heating up on the stove (according to Mr. Green, Rani could tell the difference between the microwave and the stove). Miles tried to leave the cat indoors, but Rani absolutely needed to watch them put the food in her bowls, otherwise she would be forced to lodge a complaint with the large, bipedal not-cat who actually understood her routine; Rani honestly could not figure out why her standard food supplier had to give up his sacred duty in order to do something completely unrelated. “Ranideva, huh? Mr. Green should’ve named you Devil Cat, you ungrateful little brat.” Giving up with a sigh, Miles opened the back door and trudged out to the backyard shed followed by Rani the Devil Cat stalking their every move.
Opening the shed, retrieving the dry food, and returning were pretty simple, and the only difficulty was keeping the cat out of the dry food container (which didn’t take much more effort than Miles was expecting). No, the problem became apparent when Miles reentered the house; Miles stared in shock, Rani stared in shock, the raccoon stared in – well definitely not shame, as raccoons have been documented with a severe deficiency in such things. It was quiet until the raccoon twitched, which set off Rani, who took great offense in this intruder in her home; bad enough that the replacement food supplier couldn’t even bother to get her food out on time, she now had to deal with one of the ugliest, rudest cats she’d ever seen. So naturally, Rani hissed at it. The raccoon did not take the insult well, and lunged at Rani, growling all the while. The cat took off with a yowl, followed both an angry raccoon in hot pursuit and a slightly frantic Miles right behind the raccoon. In Miles’ panic, they failed to notice one of Devil Cat’s toys rolling around on the floor…
“Shit!” and promptly proceeded to allow their face to become rather intimately acquainted with the doorframe, leaving what was sure to be a rather sizeable bruise. Stumbling around in pain, Miles didn’t watch their footing, tripped, and just barely missed knocking the head on the expensive looking glass coffee table. Miles wondered if it would really be all that bad if they took just a minute for themself to recover from the … everything. A chorus of yowls, shrieks, and tearing fabric answered that question. Grumbling all the while, Miles pushed themself off the ground only to stop and stare slack-jawed at the – for lack of a better word – destruction that had apparently passed through the living room and left its tracks behind, the way footprints do on a dirt path after a hard rain. There were a few statues of Ganesha that had decided to take the Greco-Roman route – no arms and, very occasionally, no head – tapestries shredded by claws frantic to get away from something, and more than one portrait of Rani on the ground. A sound that could be best described as the howl of the damned broke Miles out of their reverie; there very much was still a raccoon in the house, as well as an unfed cat that was reaching apocalyptic levels of rage. Naturally, as Miles had chosen this particular moment in time to slow down and take stock of where the little bugger (a word which here might refer to either the cat or the raccoon; Miles hadn’t quite been decided yet) might have scampered off to, things got even worse.
A horrible burning smell assaulted Miles’ nose and they quickly realized that they had never actually taken the wet food off the stove. Letting out a string of curses, Miles sprinted back into the kitchen to find that the salmon had completely blackened, the chicken was on fire, and the kitchen was full of acrid, dark grey smoke. Miles had no idea where the fire extinguisher was if Mr. Green even kept one, so they did the next best thing: scream and slam a lid down on the pan. A scrabbling on the tiles behind them quickly got their attention, and Miles turned round to notice that problems 1 and 2 had decided to attack the kitchen next. Rani took one look at what Miles was doing, and immediately made a beeline for them, yowling all the while; after all, though this replacement feeder was not up to snuff, Rani still recognized what they were doing at the stove, and that meant her dinner should be ready. The raccoon launched itself right after her with all the speed of a ballistic missile intent on wiping out its target. Miles lurched from the impacts and tried desperately to get the animals off themself without getting scratched or bit.
Regretfully for Miles, they had decided to wear jeans, which easily provided Devil Cat with plenty of clawholds to better check on her food. Miles took the logical route: flailing wildly about until they managed to smack both Devil Cat and the raccoon off of them, though not without Rani taking great offense to this and scratching the living daylights out of every piece of Miles her tubby little body could reach (which turned out to be most of Miles’ left arm as well as their hand). Devil Cat bounced off the ground, skidding to a halt on the kitchen tile a couple feet away. She took one look at Miles, then the raccoon, and finally the open door. Thoroughly offended, she slunk out the backdoor, grumbling and complaining all the way, with the raccoon taking stock of its new territory. Miles was freaking out over the fact that Devil Cat had done some significant damage to their hand, and only barely registered that Devil Cat, a very-much-indoor-only cat, had gone outside to do who knows what. Miles put it in the back of their head and decided to check on the food and assess the damage.
“Oh man, that does not even vaguely look edible,” Miles grimaced, taking in the charred remains of what had once been top shelf salmon and organic, grass-fed, hand-reared, free-range chicken breast, now very firmly stuck to the cast iron pan. Groaning a little, Miles reached for a spatula and looked for the garbage can. Just as they were about to scrape off the … let’s be generous and call it a meal, a caterwaul split the night as the clock in the hall chimed out that it was fifteen minutes past eight. Miles froze, realizing that Mr. Green was on his way home and the house looked like a bomb had hit it. The next second saw an entire amorphous gang of neighborhood cats streaming into the kitchen, yowling, screaming, and hissing all the while. The raccoon froze seeing that its fun had been quickly cut short, and immediately started plotting its escape. The cats froze in turn when their leader took in exactly what was happening in her kitchen while she had left to get reinforcements: the replacement feeder was going to throw away her food! They might even deign to feed this horribly striped fat cat that had ruined her home! As that was simply unacceptable, the tidal wave of cats started up again, this time with a clear target in mind: Miles and the trash can.
Miles, seeing the cats swarm towards them, took the most logical route: dropping the pan like it was burning them, turning around, and booking it (it is important to note about Miles that they weren’t exactly built for stamina; back during their schooldays, what they excelled in was dashing, not marathons. This had not changed much in the years between then and now; it is just as important to note that Miles only ever excelled at dashing if they knew the terrain they were running on particularly well, otherwise they had a delightful tendency to trip over anything and everything in their path. This wonderful little character trait has decided to raise its head and bite Miles in the butt). In their haste, Miles forgot that there was a trash can directly in their escape path and stepped in it with such force that they couldn’t get it out again. Arms wheeling like a windmill, Miles collapsed on the ground, and was swarmed with an entire horde of angry, screeching cats. The raccoon, on the other hand, took one look at Miles, decided it had had enough fun, and promptly sauntered out of the open door.
With Miles’ only hope of a distraction out the door, they decided to respond in a logical manner: namely screaming their head off and thrashing about like a spider had somehow managed to sneak its way down their shirt. The mass of cats, startled by this weird bipedal not-cat, all scattered in different directions throughout the house. There are fewer things worse to have in an already-trashed house that has been visited by a furious, spoiled brat of a devil cat and the shameless raccoon that has never been in a human house before, than an entire clowder of freaked out cats shrieking and spitting all over the place. After the cats had fled to the rest of the house, Miles groaned in pain and forced themself off the floor. Taking in the destruction, Miles trudged after the cats as best they could with a trash can on their leg and managed to somehow wrangle every cat out of the house; Miles slammed the door shut and collapsed against it. Devil Cat decided this was a perfect time to speak up, and alerted Miles to the fact that she still had not been fed.
Something in Miles just snapped at Devil Cat’s plaintive meow, as though she had done nothing wrong. They lunged for Devil Cat; their arms were stretched out like great claws. Devil Cat only narrowly escaped Miles’ grip and immediately started screaming bloody murder. Miles took no notice of this and simply continued chasing the devil around the house. The two of them had managed to make a full circuit through the house, with broken statues, torn tapestries, and utterly ruined portraits of Devil Cat littered throughout, when the clock in the hall chimed 8:30 PM precisely (Mr. Green always was meticulous about keeping his clock perfectly in time, frequently saying that the constant access to exact time was the only thing the Internet was good for). Both cat and human immediately froze at the sound, with Devil Cat turning to look at Miles with what could only be described as a look of pure malice. Devil Cat sprinted for her bed, curled up in it and acted as though she had slept through the whole thing. Miles just stared at Devil Cat, and said, “Really? Now you behave?” In that same instant, Miles heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door.
“Oh, shit."