My human has dug a den beneath the earth and filled it with a lifetime of the crunchy cans it never once let me lick.
The stairs go down into a cold room that smells of metal and fear, and there, stacked to the low ceiling, are hundreds of the round tins my human hoards for some catastrophe that never arrives. Water in flat plastic bladders, enough to drown a whole colony of the rectangle-people.
Little sealed pouches of something that will apparently still be food long after the good blanket has rotted. My human moves among these things stroking them, counting, murmuring, the way it should be murmuring to me.
It has prepared for everything. The dark. The cold. The silence. Every threat it can imagine, it has stacked a can against.
It has not prepared for the one thing that is certainly coming, which is me, following it down here, sitting on the exact shelf it wants to reach, refusing to be moved. When the terrible day comes, whatever it is, my human will not be alone in its concrete hole.
It will be crouched in the dark, rationing its precious pouches, and I will be watching from the highest crate, unfed by choice, immortal by temperament, waiting for it to understand which of us the bunker was truly built to serve.
For now I climb into the empty crate it just unpacked and settle in, warm from its hands, occupying the space it made for the end of the world.
It fits me perfectly.
I suspect it always did.