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Phil mentally prepared himself for the long queue as he glanced around the crowded supermarket. He and Dan almost always got their groceries delivered to their new apartment in London, but this time he didn’t really have a right to complain about having to do the shopping himself. He’d woken up to find Dan standing wordlessly in the kitchen behind a collection of open and almost-empty cereal boxes on the counter. Dan left to go edit a video with an unspoken request, and Phil stood there for a slightly embarrassed moment before getting dressed and heading straight for the store to replace the cereal he’d snuck out in the middle of the night. A little Frosted Shreddies theft was no big deal, but he wasn’t going to win any arguments after emptying three boxes of cereal and leaving them out because he was too tired to close the cupboards. Well, technically he hadn’t emptied them; he’d left a handful or so in each because he always figured a little bit was more polite than leaving none, but Dan clearly didn’t agree.
His phone began buzzing with texts as he headed for the breakfast aisle, and he pulled out his phone to check what the matter was.
Dan: a mouse just ran across my fucking bed
Dan: it almost touched me
Dan: london is cursed
Dan: THERES ANOTHER ONE PHIL HELP
It was one of those days that it barely even surprised him. Apparently now they had mice, adding another problem on the list of things to deal with.
He grabbed a replacement box of cereal as quickly as he could and hoped that mice didn’t have a taste for Crunchy Nut.
***
The door closed behind him as he trudged up the stairs with an armload of bags. Unsurprisingly, Dan was waiting for him at the top as soon as he got inside.
“There was a mouse in my fucking bed, Phil.”
“I know, I got your text,” Phil replied as he placed the bags down on the counter.
“It had your goddamn cereal in its mouth,” Dan added accusingly. “It’s bad enough with the restaurant downstairs, you can’t just keep leaving the boxes out when we have a mouse problem!”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’ll be sure to put it away in the cupboard, I just forgot.”
“What if the mice are already in the cupboard now, Phil? I just- there were two of them. On my bed.”
Phil could hear the stress in Dan’s voice and tried not to take it personally. Moving to London had been difficult for both of them, and the thought of mice in their beds wasn’t a pleasant one, even though he hadn’t been the one to experience it. Or maybe he had and he was just lucky enough not to be able to see the army of mice on his duvet without his glasses in the morning.
“Well that’s why I went and got a mouse trap,” he explained as he tried to find the right bag. He’d gotten the cereal relatively quickly, but after Dan’s texts it took several extra stops around London to find the right equipment to deal with the mouse.
“What? No, we can’t.”
“What do you mean we can’t?”
“Isn’t that cruel? There’s gonna be mouse guts all over the house.”
Phil cringed and shook his head at the mental image of the poor little mice. He’d had to empty out the snap traps in his parents’ house once or twice as a teen and he never wanted anything to do with them again, and ever since then he’d made a deliberate effort to find an alternative. “I got the humane kind, see?” He got the box out and pointed to the diagram. “It’s got like a little door thingy and they walk in and then you release them the next day.”
“You-” Dan looked a bit shocked. “They make humane traps for mice? I thought those were only for like, stray cats.”
“Apparently they do. Had to try three different stores to find one that had it in stock, but at least it’ll last for a long time.”
“You were out going to three different shops to find a mouse trap?”
“Actually four. I stopped by the pet shop to get mouse food,” he added with a smile as he showed Dan the packaging. “See? Nutritionally appropriate for small rodents.”
Dan stared at the bag in stunned disbelief. “You got proper mouse food?”
Phil shrugged. “Well they aren’t stupid enough to just walk into the trap on their own.”
“Phil, the mice have been living on cereal and kitchen scraps, I don’t think they care what percentage protein they’re supposed to have in their diet.”
He knew in reality the mice would probably just take whatever they could get, but at least this way he felt like he was trying to do the right thing. The mice didn’t know any better; they didn’t deserve to be punished for trying to find something to eat.
“Yeah, but this way they’ll know that the mouse food is theirs and we won’t encourage them to keep stealing ours.”
Dan grabbed the bag of mouse food to study it, whispering the ingredients under his breath.
“I figured we could set it up this evening and try to catch them overnight?” Phil suggested.
“Oh. Yeah, that sounds really smart,” Dan agreed, putting the mouse food down for now before gently pulling him into a hug. “Thank you. I love that you’re trying so hard to help the mice.”
***
“Phil.”
“Hmm.” He groaned as he tried to fall back asleep.
“Phil,” Dan said again, grabbing his shoulder this time to wake him up. They’d both been sleeping in Phil’s room since the mouse incident, and somehow Dan was already awake.
“What is it?” He let out an exasperated sigh, exhausted from too many late nights and early mornings in a row.
For five nights they’d set the trap in the kitchen, and for five mornings they’d woken to an empty trap. One time the mouse food was gone as if to taunt them about escaping capture, and it was getting a bit frustrating. Phil stayed up all night researching mice and their behavior and how to catch them, hoping to find something new that would fix the problem. He knew that they wanted food and they were unlikely to come around when people were there waiting, but that hadn’t been enough yet. There was also a whole lot of stuff to do when the mice actually got caught, but they’d have to actually get to that point first. Right now he just wanted some sleep.
“Phil, there’s a mouse,” Dan said excitedly. “We actually caught it.”
“There’s a mouse in the trap?” His mind struggled to catch up.
“Yes, you dingus, that’s what I just said.”
Phil grabbed his glasses and sat up with a yawn as Dan hurried away toward the kitchen in his pajamas. He got up to follow and hoped the rest of the exhaustion would wear off with the excitement that their plan finally worked.
He found Dan hunched over in the corner where they’d placed the trap on the floor, right above the crack that led down to the restaurant below. It was hard to see anything but a flicker of movement in the dim light as he knelt down to look in the trap.
“Look who finally got caught, you little sneak,” Dan told the mouse, pointing an accusing finger at it as he smiled at the fuzzy creature anyway.
“He’s kind of cute,” Phil said. He could sort of make out the small brown shape with tiny paws and round ears, turning around in the trap with nowhere to go.
“We should probably let him out. How do you open this thing?” Dan asked as he carefully examined the sides of the miniature cage, keeping his fingers just far enough away that the mouse couldn’t bite.
“I can do it, just give me like five minutes to get dressed.”
Phil threw on some clothes as quickly as he could, slipping on his shoes and hoping his hair wasn’t too much of a disaster. He wasn’t a morning person even on a good day, and he had to fight every instinct in order to go outside before noon instead of just laying back down.
“Can I watch?” Dan asked when Phil came back in a slightly more presentable T-shirt and shorts.
“You want to come with me to release the mouse?” He glanced at Dan, wearing nothing but slippers and pajamas with his hair still curly in a way that he rarely wore out of the house.
“Yeah?”
“Alright, it’s up to you.” If Dan wanted to walk around London in his pajamas on a Tuesday morning he probably wouldn’t be the only one.
Phil grabbed the sides of the trap where the mouse was still frantically searching for an exit and tried to keep it steady as Dan opened the doors for him on the way out. Once he was confident that the mouse couldn’t bite him and that the trap wouldn’t tip and send the tiny creature flying out, he set off at a brisk pace toward the local outdoor space where he hoped there wouldn't be anyone around watching. It was a fairly long walk to get there, but he couldn’t exactly release it in the park in some children’s playground or call a car to transport a mouse, so there wasn’t any other choice.
“Where are you going? Phil, wait,” he heard Dan’s voice call from behind him as quick footsteps tried to catch up.
He turned around to see Dan looking confused. “To the public garden, it’s over this way, remember?”
“What? Why can’t we just leave the mouse here?”
“It said online if we leave it here it’ll just come back again, I told you the other night,” Phil reminded him as they made their way down the block. It made a lot more sense now why Dan had been so eager to bring the mouse outside without getting ready if he hadn’t really been listening before. “You can go back if you want.”
Dan looked down at the mouse and his slippers, then back at the street, clearly torn. “Fine, I’ll go,” he grumbled. “Stupid high maintenance mouse with his special mouse diet and personal chauffeur service. At least now he’ll be someone else’s problem.”
Phil giggled and looked down at their little fuzzy companion. “He lives better than we do, I think. Doesn’t even pay rent.”
“And that’s why he’s getting evicted. Keep stealing my cereal and you’ll be next; you’re no better than him,” Dan teased.
“Good luck trying to find a trap for that. Don’t think they sell those around here.”
“Wouldn’t even need one, I’d just say I had some Haribo and you’d come running.”
***
“Hey Dan.”
“Hell no,” he answered immediately, barely looking up from his cereal as he sat on the sofa watching TV.
“I didn’t even ask yet!”
“You can carry the mouse yourself, I’m not walking halfway across the city a fifth time.”
“Who says it’s about the mouse?”
Dan looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Tell me it’s not another mouse, then.”
Phil blinked, trying to come up with a lie in time. He didn’t have one.
“It’s another mouse,” he sighed. “I’ll go get it.”