#also I cut the specific mention of the aspca on 92nd but in my head that's where they got her

[windowsandfeelings]

dair & 12 on the kiss prompts??

Dair & ...in grief

They get the call on a Thursday to come pick up the box. They go together.

It’s just plain brown corrugated cardboard with a paw-print inked on the side and a label reading “Hadley Waldorf-Humphrey.” The receptionist sets it down on the counter in front of them, and Blair stares at it while Dan signs all the paperwork. Somehow, the box seems both too big and too small for its contents, and she can’t bring herself to reach out and pick it up.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the receptionist says. It sounds to Blair like she’s on the other side of a glass wall.

“Thank you,” Dan says. He slides the box into a New Yorker tote and takes Blair’s hand. “Let’s go.” His voice is low, his head bent to the side, his mouth close to her ear, and she lets him lead her out of the small veterinary clinic, onto a steaming Upper East Side sidewalk.

They cut west down 66th. The streets are quiet, most of the neighborhood off in the Hamptons for the holiday weekend. They slide into the park near the zoo, where it’s five degrees cooler in the shade, the tiniest bit of relief from the oppression of late summer, and it’s an easy walk to the duck pond. The tote bag bangs against Dan’s hip, but he doesn’t complain. He keeps a tight grip on her hand, squeezing it every few minutes.

They find a secluded spot on the edge of the pond, between a couple of trees and largely out of sight, and for a moment they just stand there, hand in hand, looking out over the water. Then Dan reaches into the tote bag and pulls out the box.

The box that isn’t Hadley, not really.

Blair can still feel the soft brush of Hadley against her ankles, the scratch of Hadley’s tongue on the back of her hand. She was a small cat, made more of fur and personality than anything else; prone to dramatically flinging herself at the floor, the furniture, Dan’s lap. Fond of napping in the bathroom sink, burying herself in pillows, hissing at unwelcome guests. They’d acquired her in the first month of their marriage, on a whim one Saturday afternoon. She was already a lady, grown as big as she’d ever get. Had already lived a life before they brought her into theirs.

They’d carried her home in a cardboard box that day, too.

Dan lets go of her hand to tear at the corner of the box, where it’s glued shut. There’s a plastic bag inside, but there’s some loose dust—what’s left of her delicate bones, her plush fur, her pink nose—that clings to his fingers, and some more that drifts away in a breeze. Blair can feel hot tears climbing her throat, pushing their way to the surface, but she swallows them down. “We should say something,” she says. “First.”

Dan nods. “What do you want to say?” he asks.

Well, she hasn’t thought about it, how to sum up Hadley into words. “I—” she starts, but whatever else she wants to stay is stuck somewhere below the tears. She shakes her head.

“Remember the time we had Serena over?” Dan asks. He’s just holding the box, now, out in front of him, one corner of the flap peeled up. “It was like a week after we got her, and we were spending all of our time chasing her around the apartment trying to stop her from peeing on the furniture, and you forgot you’d invited Serena to dinner and she showed up and found us on our knees scrubbing the carpet in my office.”

Blair nods. At the time it felt like such a low moment for her, cleaning up cat urine.

“Or when Hadley fell completely in love with Nate and tried to surgically attach herself to him so he couldn’t leave without her?”

Blair had to buy Nate a new sweater after that, to replace the one Hadley shredded.

“And then when she realized Jenny actually did get to go home with Nate and never forgave her?”

A laugh makes it through the tears, bubbling up out of Blair’s mouth. She can still picture it: Hadley hissing at Jenny in the foyer and Jenny hissing right back.

“She was a good cat,” Blair says. It comes out with a single sharp sob.

Dan steps closer to her, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, and she presses her face into his neck. Her tears pool where her mouth meets the cotton of his crew-neck tee. He kisses her, featherlight, at her hairline. Once. Twice. “She was such a good cat,” he says into her hair.

She pulls herself together one breath at a time, until she can step away from him, stand on her own. She slides one finger under each eye, flicking away the tears that have gathered in her lashes. Dan waits for, her, not-Hadley still clutched in one hand.

“I’m ready now,” she says. She’s not, not really, but she’ll pretend.

With one hard yank, Dan gets the edge of the box off, enough to get to the plastic bag inside. They crouch down together at the edge of the water.

“Goodbye, Hadley,” she says, as the ashes pour out into the duck pond. Some of them saturate, and sink, and some float away from them, a little gray bubble drifting off into Central Park.

“Bye, Had,” Dan echoes.

Blair swallows, and takes his hand, and together they watch her go.