Jellicle Understudy Ch 16

Chapter 16. Chronological Cats
Time passes

Things progressed quickly for the couple, cats, and cast that year.  Susan Jane Tanner healed from her surgery and came back to play her old role, though she was fine with the decision to only have her singing parts in.  At her age, some of her dancing ability had suffered, and she graciously accepted that fact and deferred to Jillian and Andrew’s decision.  Phyllida took more than a month to recover from her bout of swine flu, though once she did, not only was Alicia not fired as she had feared, but the two actresses worked out an arrangement to switch nights and weeks, depending on what their personal calendars dictated.  Andrew and Jillian both had agreed, and other than a hiccup here and there, it had worked out fine.  
About six months into the show, Michael Gambon had a bout of sciatica so severe he’d had to quit the show to seek therapy, and to everyone’s pleasant surprise, Steven Mo Hannan, the very first American Gus, had been on a break and volunteered to take up the part until a replacement could be found.  He’d been shocked at the existence of the Jellicles, and even more surprised at the inter-species couple darting about the stage, but once he’d gotten over it, he regaled them all with tales from the very first go around.  Alicia felt she fell in love with the departed Timothy Scott, just a bit, listening to Steven wax poetic about how he’d loved the actor; one of the many victims of the AIDS epidemic that decimated the acting world before she’d been born. Three wonderfully fulfilling months passed before he left the show again when a new, more permanent actor was found.
Rebecca, Jo Gibb, and Jason all left the show at various times to either start families or add new members to their existing ones, and their understudies took up their mantles graciously.  They still came by to pal around with their friends on cast from time to time, however, and Alicia made sure to spoil their anklebiters rotten.  Veerley left the show at the end of the year to go back to Belgium and take up a roll in Phantom of the Opera there.  She sent clips from rehearsal, and though Alicia didn’t understand her native language, she thought she made a lovely, pixie-like Christine.
Several other cast and crew members left for various reasons; moves, illnesses, better pay, better parts, all of which was understandable.  Every now and again though, someone refused to list their reason for leaving, and Alicia couldn’t help but feel that in some way, it had something to do with her and Mistoffelees.

The movie premiere had been…interesting.  She hadn’t been able to afford a dress, having spent all her money on tickets for her family, which even at half price for staff had been ridiculous.  Mistoffelees had asked for Jenny’s help in designing it, and come premiere night, she’d found him rucking in her closet, pulling out an old sun dress she never wore anymore.  He’d flicked her clothes off her before she could say a word, whipped the faded green cotton on her, and waved his hands flamboyantly.  The next second, in a shower of tiny lights, she looked down to see herself in a twirling, sparkling, corseted gold and cerulean number that hid her tummy and jacked her boobs up to her neck fabulously (Tugger had practically drooled on her all night thanks to that.  Bomba had stomped his foot to pulp by the end of the night, but complemented her on the look nonwithstanding.)  The fine chained ankh dangled right above her cleavage.  Mistoffelees took her distracted state to switch into his Michael glamour, a tie and a goofy pair of converse matching her dress peeping from a rather austere suit.
There’d been a nerve wracking hour at the premiere in front of the cameras, where Alicia was sure they were going to be found out.  She’d never thought to ask about cameras and magic and how one reacted to the other, and with Mistoffelees, Tugger and several other Jellicles glamoured within an inch of their lives, she’d been terrified the whole night every time someone picked up a phone.  She kept seeing in her mind’s eye, swat teams or hazmats bursting through the doors and kidnapping her friends and loved ones to drag them off to some god forsaken lab in the middle of nowhere, throwing the humans into Gitmo for good measure.  Nothing of the sort had happened, but the fear had remained.  She’d signed pictures with a shaky hand and her eyes hadn’t been dry of tears the whole night.  The film had gone over well, as had the peeps of the fan stories.  Alicia got to meet the authors of them, and found them all wonderfully kooky and genuinely kind people, and made plans to keep in contact with them all in the future.

Her father slowly recovered from his heart attack, and while things where slow on the mend, they were definitely getting better.  He and Mistoffelees could sit in the same room without trying to kill one another with their eyes now.  Alicia never told her father what she’d revealed to Misto, but something in the way he acted towards the tom told her he knew.  She also never mentioned that Misto was a cat, since she didn’t want to wind up in the loony bin.  Sheen finally came out of the closet at Easter, and Alicia was afraid they were going to throw him out of the house.  She gave her parents the riot act for the first time in her life.  He father had looked about to pop a vein, and her mother dumbstruck in her chair.  Later that night, when they had gone to sleep, still confused and seething and shooting Sheen and his boyfriend dirty looks, her brother had crept into her room to thank her.  Mistoffelees felt that it was the right thing to do to have at least someone in her family know the truth, and though he almost fainted when he saw the black cat transform, and demanded three hours worth of answers afterwards, Sheen said he understood, and was happy for his sister…though the ‘Beauty and the Bestiality’ jokes didn’t end for a while.  Keiko decided, even after her parents had accepted Sheen, to stay soundly in her closet for the time being.

Old Deuteronomy slowly came to forgive his son and accept the human in his life.  It was difficult at first, he himself not being as used to humans as he once had been, combined with the fact that he and Mistoffelees were not as close as he would have cared to have been.  For the most part, the issue was toed around, and Alicia, while not exactly ignored, was not readily welcomed into the discussions she heard in the junkyard for some time.  The old tom was much friendlier to her after an incident in the late summer, when she took a random stray kitten in to fatten up before taking to the vet to get any shots it might have needed.  She had been one of his youngest daughters, lost after a storm and too young and frightened to talk or transform on her own, and Alicia had no way of knowing that.  The random kindness had moved the old leader to see that his son’s lover was different than the average human.  

Alicia was able to finish out the next semester of veterinary school with ease, since she’d taken a focus on more feline courses.  She put her skills to good use that March, when Jellylorum asked her to assist with Victoria’s new kit.  It was a bloody affair, as they always were with Vicky, but the white queen made it through fine, if a little worse for wear, and her new daughter, Calistara was healthy as the proverbial horse.  The kitten was a creamy patch ginger, with a darker red patch in the shape of an oblong star on her back.  Jelly and Alicia shared a knowing look; Jellylorum was the only other cat who knew exactly how much Mistoffelees had told her.

The majority of the cats who’d shunned them came back throughout the year to either apologize, or at the very least, come to an understanding.  She and Electra were never as close as they were before, but they could be civil. Jenny came around almost a year later, when Skimble had dragged her over to Alicia’s apartment in cat form to show her there was nothing unusual about her and Mistoffelees other than the fact that she wasn’t as furry as him. That had been an incredibly awkward moment when she’d noticed them, past the wonderful things the black tom was doing, gazing at her through the window.  Once they could look at each other without blushing, the two forgave each other quickly enough.  She resolutely went about not talking to Skimbleshanks for a month, accusing him of being the literal translation of a peeping tom and denying him his favorite shrimp and tuna casserole, which he protested loudly and in vain. Mistoffelees was left in the middle of the whole affair, giggling.  
Munkustrap and his mate, however, had not come around and showed no signs they were going to.  Every now and again, the couple would receive a sad glance from Demeter.  Mistoffelees knew his sister-in-law wouldn’t go against her mate, and had a hard time watching Alicia hurt over the loss of not one, but two friends, but there was nothing he could do.  Munkustrap argued with him on a weekly basis; it never came to blows, though there had been close calls.  The grey tabby seemed resentful of relearning his place, and still fearful of the potential danger the human girl represented, though no actual danger came.  He’d had fallings out with both his children, and was even more bitter about that.  Several of Mistoffelees’ kittenhood tom friends had followed the guardians lead and refused to acknowledge the two any longer.
Bustopher Jones, while never impolite to his nephew’s lover, made it clear he was uncomfortable with the match, but then, Alicia figured that was as best as she would get from the upper crust socialite cat.  She’d never been a match for his manners, and her Marine potty mouth and coarse, one-of-the-guys manners had always grated his nerves. His fussy, fusty Persian mate was not as kind, and made it clear she was one of the cats behind the saying: dogs have owners, cats have staff, as that was clearly all she thought Alicia was good for, and lectured her new nephew constantly on falling for the ‘undesirable help.’  Mistoffelees refused to argue with a pregnant queen, but silence suited him just fine at family dinners.  On the one occasion Bustopher and his mate had come to Alicia’s apartment for dinner, Leary had made his opinion of the two of them quite plain, and they’d not come back since…not that Alicia could blame them; hairball stains were quite hard to get out of white fur.

In June of the next year, Alicia found herself feeling restless and couldn’t figure out why.  Over the course of the year and a half, she’d understudied and even subbed most of the younger female roles (and had asked Misto to set up filming of each instance.) She loved the cast, and couldn’t imagine leaving, but by July, she’d put her finger on the problem.  She’d grown bored.  The show she’d worked so hard to get on had been in her veins for over a year, she’d suffered through some minor celebrity, and now, her heart had grown tired of the routine.  The music still made a chill go up her spine, but the tingling nervousness that brought out her best performance was leaving, and she felt so old hat at the dances that she actually felt her mind wonder some nights.  She felt guilty, and never said anything about it, but Gillian and Andrew both noticed that she’d stagnated a bit, and were the ones who suggested, oddly cheerfully, that she seek another role.  When asked why they were so okay with her leaving, their reasons were eerily similar, and wise in a gracious way that Alicia had thought gone from the world.
They told her she’d taken her main role as far as she possibly could, done an admirable job on all occasions when she was asked to step in, and had learned as much from the show as she ever would, which was more than a lot of actors could say.  They let her skip rehearsals for alternate auditions until she landed something. When she got a role as a full cast member for a quartet of Rogers and Hammerstein shows playing over the next year, they both expressed they were happy for her. She invited the both of them to a private lunch, and presented them with paintings she’d made in the interim as tokens of her deep gratitude to how wonderful they’d been to her.  She continued to sneak on set on occasion whenever they were in town, and even managed to visit them when she took her winter holidays in England with Misto (which was infinitely easier and cheaper when her boyfriend could just teleport her there.)

In spring of the next year, Mistoffelees and Alicia decided to share the apartment, and go at the whole being a couple business full time.  Jacob was happy for them, but would miss his longtime roommate.  Mistoffelees had a hard time of it for several months, but he finally worked it out with Jacob in September.  He started acting as if he’d taken sick, and though it broke his heart to leave little Julia, his time with her family had started drawing to a close.  By November, the act had worked, and Jacob ‘took him to the vet’ to be put to sleep.  In reality, he dropped him off at Alicia’s, where he picked up some poor feline soul that the blond had taken in for its last few moments to comfort.  It had died the night before and Mistoffelees glamoured it to look like him.  He and Jake parted on good terms, sharing a long hug but no words.  No words were needed between the man, who had cared for him for years, and the cat, who had shown the man a side of the world he’d have never known otherwise.  Jacob and Mistoffelees made promises to visit, and the cat promised to not leave his little daughter without a feline friend for long, casually dropping the hint that Fallifax was looking to have her first owner.  Alicia and the tom sat on the couch for the rest of the evening, silently contemplating their future, ensconced in the electric feeling of change in the air.