Work Text:
Suguru had been clear the first time he and Satoru went to live together, whey they enrolled in university what felt like a lifetime ago. He repeated it again when they moved into a more decent apartment, now that they had a more decent job, and he told Satoru again when they moved into their forever home, after their engagement.
No pets.
About children, he wasn’t opposed. He and Satoru had decided to wait until they were thirty and their careers were on a better stage before discussing if they were in the right place to adopt one or two, but Suguru had always been adamant about not wanting any animal.
He liked coming back from work to a clean house and not having the responsibility to take care of another living creature.
(Even though, according to Shoko, he was already taking care of Satoru.)
After they’d gotten married, two years ago, Suguru had reminded to his newly husband that, while in three years he was open to discuss about adopting children, no pet would ever cross the threshold of their house. Just to be sure that he and Satoru were still on the same page, like every married couple should be.
Suguru hadn’t considered a simple, but trivial, fact: his husband was Gojo Saotru, and Gojo Satoru believed he was the exception to every rule.
Suguru would be reminded of that on an autumn morning. He woke up to an empty bed, which wasn’t unusual: regardless of the temperature outside, his husband went to jog at six a.m., before breakfast and going to work.
(In over ten years together, Suguru hadn’t been able to persuade the other man that jogging in the evening was far better, and it still was one of the few things he accepted they’d never agree on).
Like usual, he got up to prepare breakfast for the both of them. As he put on the table rice and miso soup, and turned around to grab the tamagoyaki from the counter, he heard his husband’s voice.
“Suguru, I’m back home!”
His husband arrived, wearing his running shorts and t-shirt, and kissed him quickly on the lips.
“Go get a shower, you’re all sweaty,” Suguru told him.
His husband smiled. That wasn’t suspicious, per se, but Suguru had been with him since they were seventeen and he could recognize the telltales of the man he loved.
There was a slight, almost unnoticeable difference between Satoru’s joyful smile and his mischievous smile, and what his husband was addressing him was the latter.
Alarm bells started blaring in Suguru’s mind. “What have you done?”
Satoru’s grin became wider.
Shit. He’d done something really bad.
“Well, Suguru, do you remember what you always say about pets?”
Suguru glared at the other man. He knew already what he’d done, but he wanted to deny it to himself because maybe, if he denied hard enough, he would discover his husband hadn’t done what he thought. “Please, don’t tell me you—”
“I’ve found a cat!” Satoru proudly announced. “I was jogging, and he started following me. I asked the neighbours and apparently he is a stray cat, and you know how the cat distribution system works.”
Of fucking course.
“Absolutely no, that cat won’t enter our house.”
Suguru had just finished speaking when he heard a faint meow from below. He looked down and saw a white cat with blue eyes.
He was sure that, if gazes could kill, his husband would be laying dead on the kitchen floor.
“Come on, Suguru, he is so cute,” Satoru said. He picked up the cat and said, “He looks a bit like me, don’t you think? I was thinking about calling him—”
“Firstly, we’re not keeping him,” Suguru interrupted him. “Secondly, the next word out of your mouth better not be Catoru.”
Satoru put the cat down and Suguru stared at him as he walked on his pristine floor in horror. The worst thing was, he could see the similarities with Satoru, and not just because he had white fur and blue eyes.
The cat walked around as if he owned the place, exactly as the man who picked him from the street did.
Gojo Satoru was unbelievable.
He’d always told him one thing about their future life together, and, of course, he had to do the exact opposite.
His bad mood had to be even more obvious than he thought, because Satoru walked to him and kissed him on the cheek.
“Come on, Suguru, you will love him. Trust me.”
Suguru sighed. He knew, better than Satoru probably did, that he will always give in to his husband’s whims.
After all, there was a reason why they had been together for so long.
“You will deal with all the vet appointments, and you’ll take him right now,” Suguru said. “If—and I emphasise again, if—we’re keeping him, I want to be sure he is healthy and vaccinated. And we’re going to have him sterilized, I don’t want to have a hoard of cats.”
Satoru looked like a child who’d been gifted his favourite toy. “Thank you, Suguru! I’ll take him to the vet as soon as possible, I have class at ten today. I will clean the floor, do the litter and wash all the dishes for the next two weeks.”
“Two months,” Suguru replied. “And maybe then I’ll forgive you for bringing a pet into our home.”
Satoru grinned and kissed him on the lips. “I know you love me enough to accept the cat.”
What annoyed Suguru was, his husband was right. He would forgive him anything.
“We’ll see,” he conceded. “And, please, have a shower before breakfast.”
“I’m going,” Satoru replied. “But I was thinking about the name—”
“Call him Catoru and I swear I’ll serve you divorce papers.”
***
Suguru adapted strangely well to the the cat who’d invaded their home. He was quiet and didn’t bother him, which was great since he worked from home for most of the week.
As long as he got food, and Satoru cleaned his litter as promised, Suguru had to admit the cat wasn’t terrible. He slept most of the day, and he loved Satoru’s attention when he came back home from university.
Suguru had to admit he was a little sad to leave home in the evening to jog, and the cat was staring at him like he was abandoning him. When he came back from his run, and rushed to have a shower as his husband finished preparing dinner for the both of them, Suguru always found the cat waiting for him out of the bathroom.
It was both annoying and endearing. The cat then patiently waited outside the bedroom as Suguru put his clothes on and followed him into the dining room, where Suguru had put the food on the table already and was waiting for him.
Only then the cat seemed to get more interested in the food that Satoru had prepared for him than in Suguru, and went to eat from the bowl.
They only had an issue with the cat: they hadn’t chosen a name for him yet.
With Sugutu’s veto on Catoru, his husband shot names at a a machine gun speed.
“Biscuit? Mouse? Hamiltonian?”
Suguru put his chopstick down as he looked at his husband strikingly blue eyes. “Satoru, I love you and I always will, but I must tell you all those names are hideous. We’re not calling the cat any of that.”
Satoru made a pouty face.
“Why do you even care? You didn’t want the cat in the first place.”
Suguru, who didn’t want to admit that, despite everything, he was getting fond of cat, replied, “I have to live with him, too, and I want him to have a decent name. Nothing related to food or quantum physics.”
His husband couldn’t argue with that logic, and, if he suspected his true feelings about the cat, he didn’t show.
The cat often followed him around and, when Suguru worked, he climbed on his chair to rest on his lap.
(He was happy that Satoru, as a university professor, had to work in presence or he wouldn’t stop tormenting him saying “I told you so”, and that would be a worse torture than having meetings all day).
Suguru distractedly petted the cat as he attended excruciatingly boring meetings, and the cat purred. It made him smile, and he had to hide it from his colleagues.
Whom he couldn’t hide it from, was his husband.
“It’s unfair,” he complained on the fifth night, sitting next to him on the couch. “I’ve taken him home, but he is more attached to you.”
Suguru chuckled at the irony of the whole situation. The cat, curled on his lap, was purring as he petted his head.
“You know, I was thinking about his name,” he said. “We could call him Kage.”
“Why do you want to call a white cat Shadow?”
“Because he follows me like a shadow—why are you looking at me like that?”
Suguru expected his husband to be upset and complain nonstop about the fact that he’d chosen the cat’s name, but instead Satoru was grinning.
“I knew it!” he exclaimed. “You love Kage, Suguru.”
He had no way to deny it. Satoru sighed, then turned and reached out to kiss him.
It was a soft kiss, because he had the cat on his lap still and didn’t want to upset him by moving too suddenly. It was one of those he and Suguru exchanged when they needed the other to forgive them, or when they didn’t want to hear the other say I told you so.
After so many years, Suguru was in love with his husband like when they were teen and they kissed behind a tree. Sometimes Satoru drove him insane, but still he couldn’t imagine his life without the man at his side.
He could kiss Satoru until he forgot his own name, but a noise attracted their attention. Kage had started meowing loudly, probably upset for not being at the center of their attention for a full minute.
They separated and Suguru said with a grin, “He may prefer my company, but he’s just like you.”
Satoru laughed and reached over to pet Kage.
“I know, he is handsome like me and he knows his own importance.”
Suguru shook his head. He was glad that his husband had decided to take a cat home, despite his initial aversion.
But he’d wait to tell him out loud. Maybe two, or three months.
Suguru loved his husband more than anything in the world, but that didn’t mean he’d give up so easily to the fact that he was right all along.