Pets

Xander had never planned to get a pet. With the life he'd led, when would he take care of it? Pets needed to be played with and cuddled and everything, and he was usually too busy to do that in between saving the world, hunting demons, working so he'd have money, and real life. And then he'd been flung into the past, and if he'd wanted a pet then what was he going to do? Adopt a velociraptor?

But if he remembered right, dinosaurs (which he'd had the joy of meeting) became extinct something like 65 million years before what he used to consider the present day, and humans were relatively new in the grand scheme of things, like having been around less than a million years new. He hadn't ever imagined he'd consider a million years old new, but living as long as he had had a way of putting things into perspective. And being alone for that long would make anyone feel lonely.

So when he saw an animal that looked something like a cat, in the way some of the animals now looked something like what their descendents would look like – he could see hints of them, but for the most part they just like completely different animals because it was so far in the past – he made overtures to it. Unless he had to deal with demons he was good enough that he always had enough food for himself and some left over to try to make friends by sharing it. And when the "cat" had kittens, he made overtures to them. And to their kittens as well.

It wasn't easy to make friends; these were no domesticated cats, or even feral cats; these were wild cats, and he had never expected to win them over in one generation. But if there was one thing he had, it was time, and with as much time as he had, he had learned to have patience. With every generation he was allowed a hair closer without being attacked. With each subsequent generation the cats were friendlier, even if they never acted like house cats.

And over the years he watched over his cats, keeping them safe from the demons which were a threat to every living being. He saw them change, so minutely with each generation that only by thinking back did he realize the changes that evolution had wrought. They interbred with a few of the more neutral demons, expanding their intelligence further than he'd thought possible and cementing their loyalty to him.

Xander no longer had pets, he had friends, even if they walked on four legs and couldn't speak any human language.