For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt, after That Damn Cat (LJ) and Bless the Cat (LJ).

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Zenobia had held on to a hundred and ten, not because she really was enjoying life anymore, not even with every charm she could come up with, but simply to irritate her family.

This also meant that her niece was not young and, possibly, Zenobia considered, rather irritated as well, which hadn’t really been her point. Of the seventeen potentials, Elenora had always been her favorite niece for the position, and she’d made an effort, as much as she did with anyone, at least, to be friendly with the girl.

Girl. She chuckled into her tea. The girl in question was now in her mid-seventies, hale and hearty but prone to be a bit crotchety. And Zenobia was at the end of her ability or desire to hold on any longer, so she was having a long talk with her niece.

“This,” she said, about two hours and four cups of tea in, “is The Cat.” The Damn Cat allowed himself to be picked up in a way he never would have tolerated in her younger days. “You will find that he neither likes to tell you about himself nor to be talked about.”

“Yes, Aunt Zennie.” Elenora had taken on the family’s annoying habit of talking to her as if she was a little gone in the brain. Zenobia whacked the woman over the knuckles with her tarot deck as if she was a wayward child.

“If you’re going to be the next Aunt – and you are – you might as well know what you’re doing,” she scolded. “Pay attention and stop acting as if I’ve gone batty.”

“And what if you have?” she snapped back. “Talking to your cat? What’s next, talking to your tea? Having conversations with the lawn furniture?”

“Your Aunt Fabiana talked to her settee quite frequently in her mid-thirties. It told her all sorts of things her husband was up to behind her back. My point is, young lady, you might be a little more willing to believe things when you’re a member of this family and have been for seventy-three years.”

Elenora glared back at her. “I’m perfectly willing to believe normal things like demons and ghosts, the tarot and charms, but Aunt Zenobia, you’re talking about talking to your cat!”

“Yes I am,” she hissed, “and you would do well to listen.”

“You would,” The Damn Cat finally deigned to say. “I have helped your Aunts more than you can imagine.”

“My… Aunts. Plural.” Elenora studied The Cat thoughtfully. “You are, then, not an ordinary cat.”

“I should say not.” He groomed himself pointedly. “Not in any way. But I am still, miss, a cat. I like cream, and chicken. And the occasional slice of beef.”

“He is a very pampered cat,” Zenobia admitted, “but he has more than earned his keep and, Elenora, I think he will do the same for you.” She looked her niece in the eye. “There are many things I will leave you, because you will be the Aunt. The Cat, I am leaving to you because you are my heir.”

Next: Legacy Cat (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/284206.html. You can comment here or there.

For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt, after That Damn Cat (LJ).

“You should hear what they’re saying today,” the Damn Cat told Zenobia, as she set out his evening chicken.

“Indeed?” The cat, she’d discovered, loved to gossip, was completely incorrigible and occasionally very interesting. “More to do with Maude’s beau-they-don’t-approve of?” Zenobia had had a couple of those herself, back in the day. One of them still wrote her monthly; she wondered, sometimes, what his wife thought about that.

“Well, he’s quite the story, isn’t he? Every time someone talks about him, another salacious detail comes out. Tasty.” The cat licked his chops. “But no, that’s not what you ought to be worried about right now.”

That stopped her in her tracks. “Worried?” She put another piece of meat on the cat’s saucer. “That’s not a word you normally use. Tell me, what should I be worried about?”

“Gottleib and Edith plotting to kill you and put in Ida in your stead.”

“Ida?” The idea was beyond horrifying; it was stupidly offensive. “The pretty little flutterbrain wouldn’t know a charm if it bit her up her skirt, where, I might add, any number of things have already bitten her.”

“That’s the idea.” The cat pointedly groomed itself. “She’s sweet, passive, and biddable, things that they believe – rightly, of course – that you are not.”

“She’s likely to end up pregnant any moment now, too; she’s indiscreet enough.” Zenobia was still steaming over her uncle and cousin’s choice of replacement; she realized, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the rest of the cat’s news would have to sink in soon enough.

“Well, then. It shouldn’t be all that hard to eliminate her as a rival, should it?” The Damn Cat looked downright smug. “I’ve always thought your family’s insistence on spinster Aunts was foolish, but since it is unlikely to change any time soon…”

Zenobia sat down inelegantly, the kitchen stool wobbling under her. “They really mean to do away with me?”

“They seem to.” He filled his mouth with meat and kept talking. “You’re too powerful for their tastes, too intractable.”

“I’m the Aunt,” she snapped. “I’m supposed to be the power of the family and the guidestone. I’m not supposed to be passive and biddable. If the family wanted passive and biddable, they would have given the power to an Uncle!“

The cat nodded. “So what are you going to do about it? You don’t strike me as the sort to deal with such things passively.”

“Of course I’m not. But if I confront Gottleib and Edith directly, I reveal that I know what they’re up to. I might need that again.”

“Especially if you’re going to continue to make waves. You might need my surveillance again.”

“Indeed. Good kitty,” she added idly, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. Over his loud purring, she mused, “getting her pregnant seems the thing to do. I’m going to have to pay a visit to Cousin Lewis.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/278563.html. You can comment here or there.

For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt.

Zenobia didn’t give the cat a name, but she did leave a bowl of cream out for him every morning, and a bit of her dinner meat every evening.

Her Aunt Beulah had left her the cat, along with the property and the title, when she vanished into the mist one late-November evening. He was, at that point, already an elderly cat, if family memory held, but, in this case, family memory, generally a very reliable thing, seemed to falter.

That was to say, that while family memory seemed to agree that the cat had been around for quite a while, it seemed to falter horribly, no matter which particular family member one was talking to, if pressed on the details. When had Beulah gotten the cat? Well, she’d gotten it from her Aunt Mary.

That cats did not live that long did not seem to faze anyone.

What was more, in looking at Beulah’s writings, she had, indeed, inherited a cat – several, as a matter of fact, none of them a Siamese tom. And while she had bemoaned the cats all over the place for the first several months, she had then started talking about Aristarchus, as she called her cat, as if she had had him all along.

Digging into Mary’s writings was trickier, the handwriting crabbed, the language a bit archaic and speckled with German and French for no apparent reason, but she, too, seemed to have had cats, too many cats, so many that Beulah’s notes on taking over the house and the title involved weeks of cleaning up after cats. Mary didn’t mention any specific cat by name, but there were occasionally mentions of That Damn Cat, which could, given the cat’s personality, be considered a name.

What Zenobia could determine from family journals, family gossip, and confused mutters was that Mary had been one of the batty aunts, one of the ones that was considered dangerous. Since Zenobia herself was considered dangerous, she took that with a grain of salt.

When she found That Damn Cat urinating on Mary’s journal, however, she took it as a suggestion perhaps she should stop researching his past. She gave him his cream and his dinner, and he kept the mice down and, from time to time, he gave her advice on her more complicated goings-on.

And, she soon discovered, he liked to spy, not only on her, which was irritating, but on the entire family, which was very illuminating. It seemed he had a way to get into just about anywhere, and, as a cat, he could observe on just about anything without cause for comment. Soon he was bringing Zenobia reports on the rest of her family.

Much of it was benign things, gossip and backstabbing and affairs, petty stuff that any family had. Some of it was strange but not deadly, tricks being performed on the sly, a card reading, an enchantment, stuff that was supposed to be the purview of the Aunt of the year.

And one of the tales the cat brought her saved her life.

Next: Bless the Cat (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268903.html. You can comment here or there.