Persistance
So you own a fluffy pony. She’s not the first one you’ve had; you had a gelding back in college. He was cool; always cheerful, easy to please, easily amused, loved you unconditionally, and wanted nothing more than to be loved back. Like a dog, but able to talk and watch tv.
He got out of the yard last year and a dog tore him apart. He dragged himself a hundred yards back to the house with just his front legs and you didn’t open the door when you heard him crying because you figured he was just whining to get back in the house since it was so hot. You figured you’d teach him a lesson by leaving him out there a little longer.
Then you opened the door and saw his guts hanging out and a blood trail going down the sidewalk that the neighbors bitched about for a month before the rain finally washed it away.
He died less than a minute later. You felt horrible, having let him lay out there like that, begging for you to help him. You’d have felt even worse if you’d done like you originally planned and waited until he stopped crying to let him in.
After a month or so to mourn, you went to the nearest shelter to get a new fluffy.
You wanted to get a weaned foal, like he’d been when you first got him. Naturally, as soon as you approached the pen filled with foals, they all swarmed the glass and started screaming for you to be their “nyu daddeh” and to please take them home. The few nursing mares in the shelter were kept nearby, and a couple of them just wept quietly to themselves, but the others all begged you to take them and their foals home with you. A couple had no foals in the cages with them and instead poked their forelegs between the bars, reaching toward the foal pen, and screamed for their babies back.
A disinterested employee wandered over, asked, “anything I can help you with?” in the most bored way possible, and you shook your head. You started looking through the foals, picking up any that piqued your interest, then setting them down again. None of them really seemed right for you. One colt you picked up immediately broke into tears and begged you not to let the ‘meanie mista’ hurt his mother any more. At the time that just seemed weird and you set him back amongst the others, to his bitter disappointment, but now that you have a better idea of what goes on at some shelters it disturbs you.
Then you spotted her.
A little filly, in a box all by herself off to one side. Charcoal grey with black mane and tail and derped eyes. She looked adorable. She also looked sad, all by herself.
“Hey, what’s up with this one?”
“Oh, Sooty? Yeah, we keep her separated; the other foals tend to pick on her.”
“Why’s that?”
“'cause even for a fluffy, she’s dumber than a bag of hammers. That and she’s massively inbred, which explains the derp face and being a retard. We got her parents about a month and a half ago, city turned them over to us after they arrested their owner for kiddie porn. Turns out he was also into making fluffies commit incest; he made a stallion knock up his sister, then made the same stallion knock up his daughter, then made him knock up HER daughter, and that one was this one’s mother. So, yeah. Four generations, and dad was in three of them. Fun.”
You look at the little filly. She seems lost, and keeps wandering back and forth between corners of the box, not figuring out where she is or where she’s going.
“We adopted out the stallion and his sister, plus a couple of the others, but the rest all had to be put down because nobody in their right mind would ever buy them. Sooty’s probably gonna get the hammer at the end of the week. Derped fluffies used to be real popular because of the cartoon, but once people started to realize how high maintenance they were, now you can’t sell them at any price. Well, not the retarded ones, anyway. The ones who just have the googly eyes still sell pretty well, but they’re even rarer than the regular derps.”
Hammer? As in, beat her to death with a hammer?
Hell no. That’s fucked up.
“I’ll take her.”
“What, seriously?”
“How much?”
“Uh… she’s only a buck. 'cause, y’know, no demand for retards.”
The employee boxed her up, you handed over a dollar (plus tax, which ended up being another forty cents. Thanks, Obama Jr.), and took her home. She was out of the box for fifteen minutes before she realized she was someplace new. Then she was absolutely ecstatic and kept hugging your ankles, telling you how much she loved you.
You don’t regret buying her, but you do wish you’d known just how high maintenance she was going to be when you got her.
For one thing, she’s always getting lost in your house. Usually she’ll end up stuck in a corner or behind some furniture and start crying that she’s “stuck”. Other times she’ll simply wander the house, completely confused as to where she is and where she’s trying to go. For another, her tendency to get lost or “stuck” results in her having accidents more often than not. Most fluffy owners empty or scoop the litter box daily; you do so once a week, at most, and spend the rest of the time going through a shitload of paper towels and Lysol because she couldn’t find the litter box or forgot where it was.
She’s not too terribly retarded otherwise; slower on the uptake than most fluffies, you have to keep things simple for her so she understands what you’re trying to communicate, and anything you want to teach her you’d better prepare to spend weeks repeating the same thing over and over again so she finally gets it… until she forgets. But she’s not so retarded she forgets you’re in the room, can’t form a sentence, or drools all the time.
She’s a real sweetie though. Other than being literally retarded, she never gives you any problems. You’ve never had to use the sorry stick (and you’re afraid that if you did, she wouldn’t even understand she was being punished for something she did wrong and would think you were just hurting her for no reason.) or anything. She’s always happy to see you (walking into the room elicits the same enthusiastic reaction as coming home after being gone all day), always happy to just hang out with you, never begs for spaghetti like your old fluffy did, she isn’t always running all over the house (mainly because she can’t navigate across the room without getting turned around), and instead of irritating you with constant chatter she just sits quietly and hums to herself, off in her own little world, until you finish whatever you’re doing and pay attention to her.
Really, if she could just use the litter box and didn’t need you to reenact Marco Polo for her every twenty minutes, she’d be the perfect fluffy.
So you’re understandably confused when you get up to let her in after playing (or wandering aimlessly; whichever) in the backyard and see her cuddling with a powder blue pegasus with a tan mane and tail.
“Where the hell did you come from?”
“DADDEH!”
Sooty jumps up to greet you and trips over her own feet, faceplanting in the grass and then looking around confusedly. The other fluffy jumps up and buzzes its wings, dancing in place and tapping out a staccato beat with its leathery hooves.
“Hewwo, nyu daddeh! Mah name Bustew!”
“‘New daddy’? Seriously?”
Buster looks crestfallen, his dance coming to a halt and his ears, wings, and tail drooping in disappointment.
“… nu wuv Bustew?”
“Love? I don’t even know where you came from! How did you get in my yard?”
“Bustew wun fwom scawy munsta, fine howe in fence!”
“SOOTY WUB BOOSTUH!”
“Bustew. Den Bustew fine Sooty, she say wuv Bustew, wan be speshow fwends, shawe nummies. Say yoo gud daddeh.”
You cover your face with your hand and groan. Great. Sooty apparently invited this stray, or feral, or whatever to live with you. Yeah, that’s not happening. She once tried to adopt a sparrow that got in through an open window. Every now and then she goes looking for it in the house.
“Yeah, sorry Buster, but you’re not staying here.”
The pegasus stallion looks crestfallen again.
“Buh… nu wan be nyu daddeh?”
“No. I am not going to be your daddy. Now get out of my yard.”
“SOOTY WUB BOOSTUH!”
“Bustew. Buh nice mista! Bustew gunna be daddeh soon! Wan be wif speshow fwend an babbehs!”
Wait- WHAT?!
You grab Sooty and raise her tail… son of a bitch.
You kick Buster as hard as you can, launching him across the yard to smack into your wooden fence with a CRUNK sound, followed by the hollow thud of a body hitting the ground. Buster vomits all over the grass, voids his bowels, then gasps for breath. In that order. He’s just managing to stumble to his feet when you kick him across the yard again, hitting his ass and sending him flipping head over heels. This time it doesn’t wind him.
“Pwease, nu huwt fwuffy! Fwuffy sowwy! Nu know whu du wong, buh neva du agin! Nu huwt, nu huwt!”
“You come in MY yard, knock up MY fluffy, and you think I’m just going to invite you into my house?! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY YARD YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
Buster looks confused and tears are staining the fluff on his face.
“Buh- Bustew nu unnastan! Why angwy?”
You clench your fists and feel your face turning red.
“I just TOLD you, dumbass!”
He looks even more bewildered.
“SOOTY WUB BOOSTUH!”
“Bustew. Nu mean make nice mista angwy! Pwease nu mowe huwties! Bustew jus wan nyu home an famiwy-”
He yelps and cowers with his hooves over his eyes when you stomp toward him, grab him by the tail, and fling him over the fence as hard as you can. You hear a shriek of pain and a loud clattering as he lands in the pile of rusty sheet metal your neighbor piled against the fence in the alley behind the houses. Then you grab a paving stone from your walkway and use it to plug up the hole in the fence you hadn’t noticed before, pick up Sooty again, and carry the grinning idiot into the house.
It’s fifteen minutes before she bumps into your leg and asks, “WHEWE BOOSTUH?”
Fucking fantastic. Now she’s going to keep bugging you about that stupid feral, AND she’s probably pregnant on top of that. Assuming she doesn’t have some fucked up flipper babies from all the inbreeding in her ancestry (the song “I’m My Own Grandpa” comes to mind), you know for a fact she’s going to be a terrible mother because she’s FUCKING RETARDED. And getting a fluffy abortion is out of the question because not only do you find it morally questionable (why should innocent babies have to die because their parents are fucking idiots?), but also because it’s INSANELY EXPENSIVE. Veterinarians figured that since fluffy pregnancies are such a huge problem for some people and they had a monopoly on abortions that wouldn’t kill someone’s beloved mare in the process, they could charge an arm and a leg for the service. Your damn car payment doesn’t cost as much as aborting some damn foals.
You sit on the couch with your head in your hands, muttering to yourself and trying to calm down while Sooty bumps into the wall.
“WHEWE BOOSTUH? HEWWO? BOOSTUH?”
You’re nearly calm and clearheaded enough to think of a way to deal with this when there’s a soft knock on your door. Great.
You walk to the door, open it, and no one’s there. Damn kids better not be ding-dong-ditching your house, you’ll TP their lawn and blame it on them again so they get their asses grounded.
“Bustew sowwy!”
Son of a whore! You look down and Buster is standing on your porch, clearly favoring one leg and covered in bloody scratches and mud. One wing looks askew and the eye on the same side is swelling. His lower lip trembles.
“Bustew sowwy! Nu mean make nice mista angwy! Pwease, jus wet Bustew-”
He pukes again as you punt him off your porch and into the street, then lays there pissing all over himself. You wait for him to slowly get to his feet, legs shaking, and start crying before you yell at him. You want to make sure he hears you.
“If I ever see you again, you’re dead! Understand me? DEAD!”
He slowly hobbles away down the sidewalk, making that irritating huuhuu noise the whole way. Good. Maybe he’ll walk into a wood chipper or something.
You shut the door and head into the kitchen, only to find Sooty facing the corner.
“HEWP! SOOTY STUCK!”
The next day, on your way to work, you spot Buster asleep under your bushes. So you crank the hose up all the way, blast him with the pressure attachment, and when he bursts out of the bush in a panic you kick him again and send him rolling into the neighbor’s driveway.
He doesn’t move the entire time it takes you to turn off the hose, get in the car, and drive away. When you come home, you don’t see him again, so maybe he got the message.
The next week went by fairly typically, except at least half a dozen times daily Sooty would ask where Buster (who she seemed to think was named Booster) had gone, and when her babies would arrive. Her belly was already noticeably bigger and she’d gained more of an appetite.
Buster, it seemed, was also a slow learner because you kept catching him lurking around your yard. Whenever he realized he’d been spotted he’d try to hide or run away, but you always saw him again a short time later. You blasted him with the hose a couple more times, but you only managed to kick him once, while he was dozing in the neighbor’s wood pile. He didn’t seem to get the hint and just kept begging to see Sooty and his babies every time you caught him hanging around the yard.
Persistent little bastard.
It was late in the second week of Sooty’s pregnancy, when it really started to catch up with her (it distressed her that she couldn’t jump up on your couch anymore, and she seemed to think laying on her belly was bad for her ‘tummeh blabbehs’, so she was constantly fidgeting and trying to find a comfortable way to lay down without being on her belly.), that you started to feel a little sorry for Buster.
There was a major thunderstorm, over ten inches of rain in a single day, lightning strikes knocking out power all over town, flash floods at low water crossings, wind blowing lawn furniture and trash cans down the street, the works. Sooty, naturally, was scared shitless (literally; she shit herself in mortal terror every time the thunder rattled the windows and shook the house, at least until she ran out of ammunition.) and kept trying to crawl into your skin to hide from the ‘scawy woud munsta’. This was the sort of weather that wasn’t safe for people to go out into, much less something as terminally helpless as a fluffy.
Buster was huddled under your car, looking miserable. Water runoff flowing down your driveway meant he got soaked even though he was out of the rain, trash, leaves, and other debris kept blowing up against him because of the wind, and he freaked out every time the lightning flashed and thunder exploded. But he stayed put.
Once, you opened the door to get a better look at him, and, nearly drowned out by the noise of the wind and rain, you could hear him repeating a mantra to himself.
“Nu be scawed speshow fwend, Bustew hewe, pwease nu be scawed speshow fwend, woud munsta noise nu huwt speshow fwend, nu be scawed-”
Seriously? He was more concerned with Sooty being scared of the thunder than the fact that HE was scared of the thunder, and being soaked in ice cold water to boot?
You were touched, but just rolled your eyes and shut the door. Idiot.
The next day, you found him still huddled under the car. You thought he might be dead at first, but he was just sleeping. He probably stayed up all night while the storm kept raging.
You were tempted to chase him off again, but figure he’d suffered enough for one day.
After that, you kept finding things on your porch. Handfuls of grass, bouquets of wild flowers, a half-eaten Pop-Tart, a bag of crushed potato chips, and a tomato you suspect was stolen from your neighbor’s garden. It wasn’t until you came home from work early one day and heard a soft knock on the door that you figured out it was Buster leaving things on your porch as gifts for Sooty. You looked out the window to see who was knocking just in time to see Buster deposit another handful of grass and part of an apple on the porch and knock on the door with his hoof again.
“Speshow fwend! Bustew bwing yoo mowe nummies! Pwease haf nummies! Gud fow tummeh babbehs!”
After waiting a while with no response, Buster walked away, ears laid back and tail dragging on the ground. A few minutes later, Sooty wandered into the room, circled the entire room once, and headed out again. She had apparently devised the right hand rule of maze navigation in the last week or so and was on her way to the kitchen via every other room in the house, leaning against the wall and having difficulty following the wall and avoiding furniture at the same time. She was completely oblivious that Buster had ever been there or had left her ‘nummies’.
Finally, one month after you first laid eyes on that stupid, persistent feral, Sooty was too bloated from pregnancy to move. This distressed her greatly for some reason, though it made things somewhat more convenient for you. Stick the litter box behind her, no more accidents. Set her food dish and water bottle in front of her, no more of her wandering the house crying about 'tummeh huwdies" because she was too dumb to find her food. The only downside was her constant fidgeting and whining that she couldn’t move.
And then, the day came. You’d dreaded this day. You knew she would be a terrible mother, too stupid to raise helpless ‘chirpy’ foals and they’d all either end up dead or messed up. You’d have to give them to a shelter, except shelters weren’t taking foals that were still nursing unless their mother came with them. Not in your area, anyway. And you weren’t about to get rid of Sooty; yeah, she was high maintenance, but you still loved the simple ball of fuzz. She certainly loved you.
“DADDEH! BIG POOBIES!”
You rush into the den, which was where you’d set her up since you didn’t have a proper safe room in your small house, and spend the next half hour explaining to Sooty that she didn’t need to poop, she was having her babies. But you eventually get the message across just in time for the first contraction.
That’s when she starts freaking out.
So far as you can tell, it’s a normal birth. But she’s convinced she’s dying, and keeps screaming for “Boostuh”.
Finally, you decide that maybe having that stupid feral around will calm her down, so you open the door to find Buster.
As luck would have it, he’s in the process of depositing another pile of ‘nummies’ on your porch and freezes in mid-step, a handful of flowers dropping from his mouth as he meets your eyes. This is the closest you’ve been to him in weeks, and every other time you got this close you drop-kicked his furry little ass out of your yard. He closes his eyes and braces for another kick.
“Get in here.”
Peeking with one eye, Buster looks up at you, then opens both eyes and shifts warily.
“Whu…?”
“She’s having her babies. Get inside and help her out.”
Buster immediately shoots into the house, pauses, then runs toward the den and Sooty’s loud crying, limping badly. You may have done permanent damage with all those kicks.
As soon as he gets in the den, Buster hobbles over and hugs Sooty enthusiastically.
“Speshow fwend! It otay nao, Bustew hewe!”
“BOOSTUH!”
“Bustew. It otay, Sooty! Evewyfing otay, jus bweafe…”
Buster, it turns out, knows exactly how to calm Sooty down and is soon guiding her through the birthing process. You strongly suspect this isn’t his first rodeo. Little bastard probably goes around knocking up mares all the time. Why he chose to get fixated on this particular one is beyond you.
Sooty gives a loud grunt of exertion and something slimy slides out of her rear end. Buster grabs the little foal, starts licking it… then pauses. He slowly sets the tiny foal down and flops onto his rear mournfully.
“What’s wrong?”
“… babbeh ded.”
Shit, a stillbirth? You pick up the little foal, slate grey of indeterminate gender, and see that it is indeed a stillbirth.
Sooty sobs with pain and effort, bears down, and another foal, this one a deep indigo color, slides out. Buster begins cleaning it… then sets it down again. You pick it up and see that it’s another stillbirth.
Damn. You didn’t want a bunch of foals to deal with, but you also didn’t want this. Sooty will be devastated if her entire litter turns out to be dead. It must be because she’s inbred.
A third stillborn foal, a black unicorn, prompts Buster to start crying. Sooty is oblivious and bears down again.
A fourth foal pops out, brown, and after a few licks Buster starts cleaning it more vigorously. After a few seconds, the foal’s tiny legs wiggle and the cold, wet baby voices it opinion of the world with an indignant chirp.
“BLABBEH? WHEWE BLABBEH?”
Buster hands Sooty the foal and she finishes cleaning it. The afterbirth slides out, unnoticed by Sooty, and Buster passes it along to her. She gobbles it down like spaghetti, then goes back to licking the foal (you’re momentarily worried she’ll eat the foal too, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue.). Buster helps roll her on her back, then after seeing Sooty is still licking the foal, who is completely free of birthing fluids by now, he gently moves the foal to a nipple. Sooty lifts her head to watch the foal as it suckles, an exhausted grin of maternal pride on her face. Buster looks at the trio of dead foals sadly, then lays down beside Sooty to hug her and stare at their sole baby together.
You bury the stillbirths, each the size of a mouse, in the backyard. A single shovel-full of dirt is enough to dig out a grave for all three. Then you come back inside and see Sooty asleep on her back, tiny foal barely visible in her belly fluff. Buster is standing over them, just staring. Then he notices you’re back and flinches.
“Pwease nu huwt Bustew!”
“… I ain’t gonna hurt you. C’mere and talk with me, we’ll let them sleep for now.”
Buster hesitates for a moment, then limps away to join you in the living room.
“Buster, where are you from?”
He cocks his head to one side, then answers, “Bustew cum fwum mummah, wike aww fwuffies.”
You slap your forehead. You’re used to a fluffy so stupid that you have to dumb things down even more than usual for a fluffy, and this one was OVER thinking the question.
“No, I mean where did you live before now?”
“Oh. Bustew haf daddeh. Den wun away, cuz daddeh was munsta.”
“What do you mean, he was a monster?” If he’s like your typical fluffy, he probably got mad at his owner for not spoiling him rotten or some stupid shit.
“Haf speshow fwend. Speshow fwend haf tummeh babbehs. Buh daddeh was meanie, gafe huwties tu Bustew an speshow fwend.”
Then he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue. His tongue and lower lip are covered in little round scars you recognize from a highschool girlfriend who was into cutting herself; cigarette burns.
Ok, you kicked Buster hard enough to earn a field goal (ok, that’s exaggerating your physical prowess by quite a bit, but you get the point) a bunch of times to chase him out of your yard, but what kind of sadistic jerk grinds a lit cigarette into his own pet’s tongue and lips?
“Den daddeh gif speshow fwen big stompies. She make sickie wawas an booboo joose. She haf bigges poopies an Bustew twy hewp, buh… aww dah babbehs haf fowevuh sweepies. Dey gu skish when daddeh stomp dey mummah.”
He’s crying again. You’re a little disturbed. Geez, that’s fucked up. He stomped his own pet and killed her babies?
“Why did he do that?”
“Bustew ask why. Daddeh say… ‘cuz fugg yoo, dat why’. Speshow fwend haf fowevuh sweepies aftew dat, su Bustew wun away. Bustew haf wowstest saddies, jus wan speshow fwend an babbehs. Den munsta chase Bustew, but Bustew fine howe in fence and 'scape fwom munsta. An dewe Sooty! She teww Bustew she wan speshow fwend, haf gud daddeh who wuvs her and is vewy nice. Bustew… Bustew jus wan nice home. Nice daddeh. Wan babbehs. Nu wan heawt huwties an saddies nu mowe.”
You have no idea if Buster just happens to have the biggest sob story you’ve ever heard, or if he’s deliberately trying to sway you into letting him stay. Given what terrible liars fluffies are (your first fluffy once tried to tell you that the tv remote made bad poopies on the couch.), and what shitty, terrible lives many fluffies live, you’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his story is more or less true.
You sigh, stand up, causing him to flinch again, and carry him into the den where Sooty and her foal are sleeping.
“You know how to use a litter box, right?”
“Yeh.”
“There’s the bed, there’s the litter box. You hungry?”
He looks up at you with wet eyes, lower lip trembling, and asks disbelievingly, “Nyu daddeh?”
“Yeah. I’ll be your daddy.”
It takes several minutes for him to quit sobbing and hugging you as tightly as he can.
As it turns out, you were right; Sooty was a shitty mother. Oh, don’t get the wrong idea, she absolutely loved that foal with every fiber of her being and did her best to care for it. She was just her usual retarded self. If she left the foal in the fluffy bed for whatever reason (to find the litter box, eat lunch, whatever) and it started chirping for her because it was cold or hungry or something, she’d wander the house forever trying to find her baby and getting frantic while it starved because its mother was a retard who needed a GPS just to take a shit.
Buster solved that problem. At first, he either took the foal to its mother or led her back to the foal (he usually picked the first, since Sooty often got confused just trying to follow him and would make a wrong turn.), but then he started carrying the foal on his back like you’ve seen mares do with their foals. He gave up on Sooty carting the foal around, because if she tried to put the foal on her back she’d get confused and drop it several times (which would make it chirp in distress and then she’d get frantic and try even harder to put the foal on her back, which made her drop it more.), and if Buster put it there and it started chirping for milk she’d spin around in circles trying to find the foal so she could feed it. Eventually, Buster just took the path of least resistance and the foal traveled on his back instead of Sooty’s, and whenever it got hungry he’d find wherever Sooty had gotten lost and she’d nurse the foal.
He also solved her accidents. He freaked out the first few times she made ‘bad poopies’; apparently his previous owner had made him eat his own shit when he was being litter trained and was afraid you would take similar measures. Now, whenever Sooty gets that glazed look on her face (her ‘poopie face’, he calls it), he starts gently butting her rear with his head to steer her toward the litter box. He doesn’t always get her there in time, especially if he isn’t around when she needs to go, but at least now you’re only cleaning up shit once or twice a week instead of several times daily.
The foal, for his part, grew up happy and healthy. Sooty’s ‘mummah songs’ were even more nonsensical and musically challenged than most mare’s, but her baby (a colt, by the way) never knew the difference. He was loved, he was well fed, and that was all that really mattered.
Litter box training was a little difficult, because the colt didn’t understand why he always had to poop in the litter box when his mother often just crapped wherever she happened to be (he didn’t realize it was because she couldn’t find the litter box). Buster patiently explained that Sooty was “kinda dummeh” and didn’t mean to make bad poopies, and he should only make good poopies.
This apparently prompted the foal to chant that Sooty was a “dummeh mummah” when she had one of her accidents. Buster put a stop to that by smacking him on the nose with a hoof and telling him not to say mean things about his mother. Hybrid vigor apparently really does work in inbred populations, because the foal didn’t need reminding ever again. He was much quicker on the uptake than his mother.
Eventually, the colt was weaned and you sold him to a co-worker for five dollars. He was a gift for the guy’s daughter, who thought his brown fluff made him look like a teddy bear and named him Teddy. By all accounts, Teddy is quite happy and has been very well-behaved in his new home, which is something of a relief to you.
Five months later, and Sooty is still wandering the house shouting, “WHEWE BLABBEH?” Ah, well. You and Buster both tried to explain it to her. She isn’t upset, just confused.
You also had her spayed, to prevent any more pregnancies. Partly because you didn’t want more foals to deal with, and partly because you figured it was time to quit while you were ahead, before any fucked up flipper babies were produced. Once the drugs wore off, she went right back to wandering the house at random, completely unaware she’d even been to the vet. Buster seemed to know something was up, but never asked and you never explained. They occasionally have ‘special huggies’, but it seems that sex isn’t the important part of the relationship; simple companionship is.
Now they’re both laying on the couch next to you, dozing, enjoying the warmth from the fireplace while you enjoy the warmth from a glass of Knob Creek. You flip the page in your book and reach over to scratch both their ears.
Sooty stirs, mutters, “Wub Boostuh…” and goes back to sleep.
“Bustew. Wuv yoo too.”
He hugs her tighter, then opens one eye to look at you.
“Wuv yoo too, daddeh.”
“… yeah. I love you too, Buster. You’re a good fluffy.”
See folks? Sometimes, instead of life relentlessly fucking you in the ass sideways, a little persistance actually pays off and you get what you want from life.