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On the first day, Dan thinks this is a bad idea.
When he hears the first “meow” he doesn’t even flinch – he’s too used to the sounds Phil makes, and why would you even consider moving when you can keep scrolling through Tumblr? He skims through another giant post attempting to prove that the government certainly hides aliens in the basement of Buckingham Palace – it’s one of those days – when he hears the second “meow”, which now makes him grow suspicious. It just doesn’t quite sound like all these giraffe noises that Phil constantly makes, a little bit too loud and too often than Dan would’ve ideally preferred (It’s not a giraffe, Dan, it’s a walrus! – Whatever, every animal makes that noise with you.). Then, however, his eye catches a particularly ridiculous accusation of the Queen – she can’t really keep the remains of alien civilizations under her bed – and, again, it makes him forget all about the suspicious meowing.
When he hears the third “meow”, he jumps onto his feet and runs to the kitchen, almost feverishly muttering to himself not the, not the, not the…
Of course, Phil stands in the middle of the kitchen holding a tiny grey kitten in his hands.
“Care to explain?” Dan manages, after blinking for several minutes and making sure that his eyes are not deceiving him. Phil’s expression, predictably, immediately turns guilty.
“I was walking past this lovely old lady and she was selling kittens, and can you imagine, Dan, if no one buys them by the end of the week, they’ll die, can you imagine? I couldn’t leave them to die!”
“Them?” Dan asks, genuine fear in his voice, and for a whole second he expects seven other kittens to jump out of the cupboard.
“Well, it,” Phil impatiently corrects himself and lowers the kitten on the floor to wave his hands in the air. “And I just couldn’t say no! And it kept looking at me like that, so I absolutely had to buy it!”
The kitten looks up at Dan with big brown eyes and Dan is ready to make some kind of a snarky comment, when all of a sudden he is reminded of all the gifsets and screenshots from Tumblr where he looks at Phil with… yes, those exact same eyes, and the only thing that’s missing are the cartoonish pink hearts. Dan looks at Phil, who is nervously twisting his fingers, and sighs.
“For future reference, you’re not allowed to buy animals without consulting me, too. This is not about just house plants anymore,” he mutters and leaves the kitchen to finish reading about the aliens and save himself from admitting defeat even more obviously. He doesn’t have to see Phil to know that he is grinning widely.
***
On the second day, Dan still thinks this is a bad idea.
“We have to name him,” Phil says during breakfast, coffee in hand. Dan decides that bringing the attention to that we would be pointless – but still, he didn’t sign up to care for that little fluffy four-legged creature, thank you very much – and just stares at Phil, unimpressed. “You sure he’s a boy?”
“It can be a gender-neutral cat,” Phil easily agrees, and Dan can’t help but roll his eyes because this sentence would make sense only in Phil’s head. “It still needs a name.”
“Dil?” Dan suggests and he’s only half-joking, and for that, he gets a pillow in the face.
“Stop it. I think it needs a strong name, something like Christian. Or,” Phil excitedly jumps on the couch, “or Xander. Or Spike!”
Dan rolls his eyes for the second time in thirty seconds. “No Buffy-related names, Phil.”
“Growlithe? Pikachu?”
“Do you want our cat to be bullied?” Dan clutches his chest dramatically and then realises that he seriously is worried about their cat being the object of jokes. Their cat. Oh no.
After forty minutes of arguments Dan is ready to agree even on Winston if it makes Phil stop naming more and more obscure characters from more and more obscure shows. When Phil suggests that they name the kitten Moulder and almost gets up to get a piece of paper to write down all the cons of that name, Dan refuses to continue thinking and just mutters, “We might as well just name it Susan 5.”
The kitten looks at them with sudden interest, making Phil stop mid-sentence.
“Susan 5?” he tries again, face filled with the desperate hope that the kitten’s reaction was a pure accident.
The kitten lets out a quiet “meow” in response and jumps off the couch, disappearing somewhere in the flat to attend some kind of cat business. Phil looks like he has been betrayed and Dan can’t help but laugh, because, apparently, they now have Susan 5 living with them.
***
On the third day, Dan thinks this is a terrible idea.
He could put up with everything – inappropriately loud meowing at two in the morning, the complete lack of understanding of the term ‘litter box’, grey fur everywhere, but not this. This is crossing the line.
“Phil! Your bloody cat has left a fish head on our bed again!”
Phil enters the room, looking outrageously calm. Susan 5 runs after him, also oblivious to any kind of problem.
“Phil?” Deciding that he isn’t putting enough emphasis on the problem, Dan grabs the pillow, the fish head falling on the floor, and shakes it in front of Phil’s face. “What the fuck?”
“It means that she loves us.” Did Phil really just almost cover the kitten’s ears? “And don’t swear in front of the little ones.”
Dan silently asks whatever deity is up there for patience. “I love you too, but I don’t decorate your side of the bed with dead animals!”
“You also don’t walk on four legs,” Phil decides to remind him, still not seeing the problem, “you don’t have a tail and your ears aren’t fluffy, and…”
“Keep your kinks to yourself,” Dan mutters, and Phil’s face finally softens.
“She is really sorry,” Phil says, and Dan would’ve considered believing him if Susan 5 didn’t choose this exact moment to start munching on the fish head. “I’m sure she is very, very sorry.”
There is a strong fish smell in the air, and Dan looks at Phil, still unimpressed, as if saying really? Phil sighs and takes the pillow from his hands, going to the washing machine.
“I like to think that’s her revenge to you for naming her Susan 5!” he shouts a couple of minutes later. Dan laughs, thinks that he should have allowed Phil to name the kitten Growlithe so all the fish heads would appear on his pillow, and realises that he is not mad anymore.
***
On the fourth day, Dan starts to think that the idea wasn’t so bad, after all.
During these four days Phil managed to turn his twitter into the Susan 5 shrine and filled it with pictures of her from all the possible angles. After seeing a couple of thousands of responses like “aw it’s so cute! #catgoals” and “hey do you think Dan’s jealous?”, Dan decides that it is time to shoot a video and show the internet the true colours of this monster. The moment couldn’t be better: Susan 5 is sleeping on his bed, one of her legs hanging from the side, and Dan can’t help but think that this is the perfect metaphor for their relationship so far.
“It hasn’t even been a week, and this little ball of evil has already destroyed my life!” Dan informs the camera, making a mental note to insert some particularly dramatic music here, and glares at Susan 5, who still couldn't care less. “Do you want to know how much fur it leaves in my room on a daily basis? Do you want to? ‘Cause I do too, but it’s no less than ten thousand hairs a day! It sleeps on my Kanye t-shirt that has his Yeezus tour dates on it; and this, if I may note, is a crime against humanity,” he throws his hands in the air to make the point exceptionally clear. “Of course, I tried to point out how much emotional damage it costed me, but Phil had to ruin everything by saying that “cats have no concept of money”, which is why this beast,” one more exaggeratedly angry look towards Susan 5, “still sleeps on my clothes without a care in the world, turning it from black to… fluffy!”
Dan opens his mouth to start a long speech about how his aesthetic doesn’t allow him to wear t-shirts covered in grey cat fur, but Susan 5 yawns and turns his head to him. Cats, probably, have just as little understanding of human emotion as they do of money, but Dan can swear that in the eyes of Susan 5 he clearly sees will you stop already. She moves her leg slightly and turns her attention back to his black-and-white duvet, intended on taking another nap, and Dan suddenly realises all his desire to talk about flaws of cats in general is gone.
He sighs and turns off the camera. The world will have to continue looking at Susan 5 through Phil’s eyes.
***
On the fifth day, Susan 5 forgets about the existence of the litter box for the twelfth time, rips a giant hole in the couch when no one pays attention to her for the two whole seconds, scratches Dan’s hand when he tries to get her away from the poor couch, and absolutely freaks out when Dan opens the fridge and is greeted with a cheerful “Konichiwa!”
In the evening, she tries to catch a piece of cotton attached to a thread – one of the many Phil’s ingenious ideas – and when she succeeds, Phil’s smile is so bright that Dan fears for a moment that he might actually go blind.
On the fifth day, Dan thinks this was a brilliant idea.