Yu loved Tomo.
Yosuke couldn't see why. Tomo left the house smelling like shit and kicked up a fine spray of tiny rocks that dug into his feet if he didn't wear socks. Tomo dropped a mess of fragmented kibble bits around his bowl that left a thin layer of sticky oil on the kitchen floor even if you picked it up. Tomo liked drinking from the toilets and then sticking that same mouth in Yu's face in the morning while kneading incessantly at his hair. Yu didn't even like it when Yosuke touched his hair, so Yosuke didn't understand why this earned the cat a kiss on its toilet-wet nose.
Despite Yosuke's protests, Yu let Tomo have the full run of the house. This meant that the laundry had to be folded and put in drawers right away unless he wanted a layer of cat hair on his shirts and intimates alike. It was a minor blessing that Tomo did not chew on cords, or pee on any soft unsuspecting surfaces. But it did like to attack Yosuke's feet if he wiggled them, which trained him within a very short period of time to stay still while listening to music. (Yosuke had never been this still before in his life.)
Which Yosuke felt was completely unfair. Yu should have trained Tomo not to be a little vicious creature that attacked people in their own house. But Yu would just chide it with a single interjection of "Tomo!" which Tomo never took to heart.
It was all this power and lack of discipline, Yosuke thought, that led Tomo to believe that it outranked him and was duty-bound to protect the natural order through ritualized displays of aggression.
One night in the middle of the week, when he had to get up as early as always the next morning to plaster a giant smile on his face while talking to people about preparing for the possible death of their loved ones, Yosuke suddenly awoke to something on his chest. He opened his eyes in time to see Vladmir Putin snake-hissing in his face, and yelped a half-asleep, "What the fuck!" as Tomo hopped away.
"Tomo!" Yu sighed, turning over slightly to look at where Tomo leapt off the bed, before making himself comfortable again and falling back asleep.
And perhaps it wasn't very realistic to expect Yu to defend Yosuke's honor at hell-o-clock-in-the-morning, but by now he was feeling frustrated and on edge, so he rolled over, taking slightly too much of the blanket, and pointed ignored Yu, who probably didn't notice on account of being asleep.
Work sucked when he hadn't gotten enough sleep. Then again, being home with the cat wasn't much better.
If loving that cat were just one of Yu's eccentricities, Yosuke thought that he might have been able to get their old friends together and talk to him about keeping the cat under control.
The problem was that everyone else loved Tomo too.
"He's so—pfftt—ugly!" Yukiko laughed over Skype, each little peal completely adoring. "I love ugly animals. They're so cute! Chie, come here. Chie! Come look at Yu's cat." Chie came over and poked her tiny nose on screen to take a look at Tomo—being held up to the webcam and looking thoroughly unamused—and Chie broke out into fawning sounds too. "Lookithim!" Yukiko went on. "Isn't he so funny looking!? Snnrrkkk—"
"I think he's a handsome cat," Yu said very seriously, which sent both of the girls into hysterics.
"No," Chie said between gasps, trying to calm herself down, "no, I'm sorry, he looks fine, it's just... doesn't he look kind of like Yosuke!?"
Yu said, "Hm," and turned Tomo around to have a nice long look at its face. Yosuke wished that Inaba never gained access to high-speed internet.
He may have spent a little longer in the bathroom that night, staring at himself in the mirror and convincing himself that he didn't look like a Russian politician, nor an ugly cat.
(Dammit, Chie. How did she always manage to kick him right where it hurt most?)
When he came out of the bathroom, he found Tomo lounging in the middle of their bed. And since workaholic Yu always came to bed late and wasn't around to hear him, Yosuke said, "I was here first."
Tomo didn't seem to care. Yosuke edged into the bed, trying not to offend it. The cat seemed suitably pleased with his meekness as he folded up one corner of the blanket and wrapped it around himself without pulling it from under where Tomo laid. Fuck you, Yosuke thought to himself as he turned off the lamp.
And then aloud, for good measure, "Fuck you." Tomo did not respond, and Yosuke felt foolish for bothering. He laid very still facing the edge of the bed for fearing of offending his feline overlord.
When Yu came to bed, Tomo got up and let Yu take his space, because Tomo loved Yu, and that was probably why he didn't understand how frustrated Yosuke was with the cat.
Yu made himself comfortable under the covers. All was silent for a moment, and then he said, "You're all the way over there."
"Your cat," Yosuke grumbled by way of explanation.
A few more moments passed before he heard the slither of blankets and felt Yu's hand on his arm. "Come here," Yu whispered, barely audible. Still feeling wronged, for a moment Yosuke considered pretending to have fallen asleep. But ultimately, it was the middle of the work week and he missed Yu too much to spite him. He rolled around and wormed greedily back into the middle of the bed, sharing one of their nightly check-in kisses.
How did work go today?
Meh. Work is work. I'm happy to see you.
If it had to be put into words, Yosuke imagined it meant something like that, exchanged beneath the feeling of Yu's warm breath against his face. Yosuke only realized in that moment how much that the absence of this small routine (thanks to the usual suspect) had made him feel on edge. They didn't say "I love you" often—Yosuke might have said it once, many years ago, in the form of "I love you, man," when they first reunited after Izanami and he was feeling particularly sentimental, and once a few years later, just to see how it sounded. Otherwise, it was one of those things they knew well enough without having to speak words so embarrassingly open and overloaded with a style of romance they had never belonged to.
So instead Yosuke needed these fleeting daily gestures to prove that they were all right, that he hadn't done something unbelievably stupid when he first croaked out to his best friend that he might like like him, in a series of events that led to where they were, frighteningly and wonderfully close, walking through a minefield strewn with things like where to live and how to spend their money and what counted as tired as opposed to pissy, and sometimes Yosuke feared that what it all amounted to was the slow and painful discovery that he and his partner were people not meant to live together.
But with Yu trying his best to make things right for him, it seemed much more likely that it was just something anyone in their circumstances would have to sort out. Suddenly, Yosuke felt so warmly toward Yu that if he weren't so tired, he would have liked to throw back the blanket and shove him on his back. But it was the middle of the week and somehow, falling asleep sounded better. Being an adult was weird like that.
