Romancing McShep

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

We are kind of in between pets at the moment. Both of my cats have somewhat recently passed. Romeo in 2021 at the age of 15 and Kamikaze in 2023 at 16 1/2. We do plan on getting more cats, it just hasn't worked out yet.

Now, I said kind of because there is the matter of Tuxedo. Going on 6 years ago, a next door neighbor moved away and left his kitten behind. This was very much a kitten and not a full grown cat. The reasons the cat was left behind are unclear, as there are too many versions of the story, but what we know for sure is that while the old man who owned the cat was in the hospital, whoever was caring for it did something to it and it has been terrified of people, including those it used to be fine with, and will not come indoors. He has never left the neighborhood and has survived all this time. Not knowing his original name, my mother and I have always called him Tuxedo. We have sense learned that his name was Quiz.

In the first 2 years, my mother and I both spent quite a lot of time trying to trap him to surrender him to the local animal shelter with no success. He is crafty. The local neighborhood children speak of him like a local cryptid. Everyone in the neighborhood has tried to capture him at one point or another. Eventually, we gave up. All it did was encourage Tuxedo to spend more time in our front yard which royally upset our inside cats.

But in April of 2024, my mother came to a realization; we have no longer have cats. She thus began her campaign to convince Tuxedo to live with us.

After 20ish months, there have been mixed results. He appears for food 1 to 5 times a day. He now shows up everyday fairly consistently, whereas before it wouldn't be uncommon for him to disappear for up to 3 weeks at a time. When the weather is nice, he will spend the vast majority of his time either in our yard or side garden, though he still "checks his trap line," as Mom puts it. During bad weather, he holds up in our garage. (He has several nice beds and boxes in the yard and the garage.) He understands the various things we call him as names that are in reference to him. He understands the words Mom uses for food time as meaning food time. While, he still run from the sight of me, he also seems to understand that when I say, "no stop" he doesn't need to leave the garage and "I'll get the old lady" means he's going to get fed. I feed him too, just not nearly as often. He also actually ran to my mother when she called him for lunch time the other day. We've never seen him run in his life.

He has also learned to get my mother's attention by staring at her through the screen door window, if the front door is open. He's done it exactly twice.

All that said. He is very much still his own cat. No one can approach him without him freaking out. He hisses at my mother when she puts food down for him. And after accidentally getting locked in the garage for an hour one morning, he wouldn't go in it for 2 weeks. (He did still expect food, just brought to his general vicinity outside. )

Though with the Christmas tree and several boxes of holiday decor down, he seems to have decided to winter in the newly free space in our attic loft.

Is he our cat? No. But we feed him and sometimes he kind of lives here.

I was also going to write a bit about our muder of crows and my 12 virtual pets on Subeta, but this got kind of long. I will add more upon request.