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“We really should have done something about that curiosity of yours,” Adrian sighs, crouching down to scoop the kitten out of the bottom of his wardrobe.
She’s already bigger than an ordinary house-cat, her winter coat thick and fluffy like a Maine Coon’s. The mangled dress shoe she’s holding in her mouth drops to the floor, landing at Adrian’s feet. He eyes it with resignation.
Really, though? Bubastis’ increased intelligence; her enthusiasm for investigating new things, irrepressible as that of a small child—they’re part of why he loves her, why she could never be just another experiment. She makes a squeaking noise that’s too small for her furry bulk, and he gives in and scratches the top of her head.
She is, however, a danger to herself and others. She jumps onto counter-tops with little regard for what she might break. (Though that does have its upsides; she rids Adrian of more than one valuable, ugly gift that way.) She climbs into cupboards and boxes; bounds up to visitors as though she’s more dog than cat; treats all new objects as fascinating toys until (and sometimes even when) told sternly otherwise. On one occasion, she chews through electric wiring and shorts out all the lights in Adrian’s penthouse, her survival little short of miraculous.
One evening, when the first snow of the winter is beginning to fall, he comes home and finds her transfixed before the floor-to-ceiling windows in his sitting room, pawing at the glass. Thick flurries of flakes whirl outside, scatter and coalesce, the shadows in them taking momentary form before the wind pulls them apart again. Bubastis swipes at them, scampers back and forth along the window chasing imaginary prey.
The apartment, spacious as it is, suddenly looks far too small for her, the city outside unnatural: a wrong, grimy kind of jungle, simultaneously bright with artificiality and pockmarked with decay. That, more than anything, is what decides him.
***
The Christmas season usually demands Adrian’s presence in New York. Company events; seasonal fundraisers begging his attendance, his blessing. (His money.) He doesn’t mind. He understands the need for festivity amid the cold and the dark and the old ghosts of winter that pass perilously close to the surface of the living world. The ancestral impulse to huddle together in warmth and light, string up bright things and light candles to invoke the sun. (And if the festivities are frequently fraught, the rejoicing forced and close to the point of fracture—well. People don’t always think too carefully about what it is they are invoking.)
New Year’s Eve, though, he makes a point of spending alone. The date chosen to mark the turning of the year may be arbitrary, but milestones and rituals are necessities; a solid structure upon which to hang thought and reflection. And the cool, echoing spaces of Karnak, with their views of the vast white outside, are rather more conducive to meditation than the city.
This year, he brings Bubastis with him. The vivarium, predictably, provides hours of fun. She’s almost grown, now, but her kittenish curiosity has waned little, and she explores as enthusiastically as ever. Adrian has some of the vast halls cleared of artefacts, only a few sturdy articles of furniture remaining, so she has space to leap and bound and run around at will. And she does, happily. Much better than the apartment, he has to admit. He won’t feel guilty, leaving her here, when he returns to work.
She still watches the snow, though. Watches it dance outside the windows, fascinated by the whirling wild of the Antarctic winds. Chases shadows.
It wouldn’t be safe to allow her outside. But maybe one day, he thinks—when his work is done—he’ll find time for a little side-project. It shouldn’t be too difficult to create snow in a controlled environment; to bring the wilderness to her. Indulgent, yes, but perhaps there will be time for indulgences, in the future.
A simple pleasure, playing in the snow. Innocent. Something that he—or any human adult, really—may only ever experience vicariously.
He joins her before the window and runs a hand down her back, smoothing the fur there. She turns to sniff his hand, her eyes lamp-bright in the snowlight.
“One day, girl,” he murmurs. “One day.”
***
After 1985, Karnak stands empty for a long while. Twenty-five years pass before Adrian sees fit to spend another New Year’s Eve there.
The world is not perfect. It never will be—and he never expected that. But.
The machines of war are inexorable, it seems; the human mind not quite fitted for harmony. Only minor conflicts have broken out, so far, but it seems too much to hope that things will remain that way. The task of maintaining stability is Sisyphean. He has had little time for indulgences, after all. He’s tired.
He stands before the window as the clock strikes midnight, empty wine glass in hand, and watches the snow.
It’s fanciful, he knows—but he’s an old man now and so, he thinks, allowed to be fanciful.
Amid the shadows and flurries of snow, he can almost imagine he sees it. The fluid spring of feline motion, up and down, back and forth with kittenish caprice. Silvery, ruffled fur, almost camouflaging its owner against the snow. A pair of eyes turning toward him in the shadows, pale lamps beneath the never-setting sun.