Dan Davis–Petronius the Arbiter relationship

Dan Davis and Petronius the Arbiter are bound by companionship, routine, and a responsibility Dan regards as a promise he cannot abandon. Their relationship gives domestic form to Dan’s loyalty: he accommodates Pete’s habits in ordinary life, seeks to preserve the cat alongside himself through the Long Sleep, and, upon waking decades later, immediately fears that Pete did not survive.

Identity and Daily Life

Before the Six Weeks War, Dan and Pete live together in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. The house’s lack of plumbing keeps the rent low, and its former dining room gives Dan the north light he needs for his drafting board. Its many exterior doors, however, make Pete’s weather rituals a recurring feature of their life together.

Dan has fitted a board into a window in an unused bedroom and cut a small cat opening into it, giving Pete a door of his own. Pete generally uses it, but he prefers to have Dan open one of the people doors for him. Snow changes the routine: Pete will not go out through his own door when there is snow on the ground, and he is convinced that one of the other doors must lead to summer. Dan therefore goes with him from door to door, opening each one while Pete discovers that the winter weather is everywhere. The ritual makes their roles legible: Pete expects Dan to manage the conditions of life, while Dan treats the cat’s expectations as part of the household’s ordinary obligations.

Pete’s outlook is established in kittenhood. Dan describes their arrangement as one in which he is responsible for quarters, food, and weather, while Pete is in charge of everything else. The comic balance rests on genuine familiarity: Pete tests Dan’s management, and Dan responds by accommodating him rather than dismissing his demands.

Dependence and Responsibility

When Dan faces upheaval in his own life, Pete’s place in it is not negotiable. Dan reflects that a cat cannot simply be given away as a dog might be; Pete has relied on him as the one stable presence in a changing world since being taken from his mother nine years earlier. Dan had even managed to keep him close during his Army service, an effort that required considerable maneuvering.

Pete is in good health despite being held together by scar tissue. Dan judges that, if Pete could correct his tendency to lead with his right, he could continue winning battles and siring kittens for at least another five years. The detail belongs to the particular history of this cat: Dan’s concern is not abstract affection, but attention to Pete’s condition and to the life he could still have.

Dan weighs the alternatives of paying for a kennel until Pete dies, having him put down, or abandoning him. He rejects each as incompatible with what he owes. In Dan’s understanding, taking a cat into one’s care creates an obligation to carry the commitment through; abandoning Pete would also betray the trust the cat has placed in him. Dan’s own disappointment and loss do not cancel that responsibility. The relationship thus becomes an ethical test of whether he will continue to care for someone who depends on him when his own circumstances have become difficult.

The Long Sleep

Dan carries that commitment into his search for cold sleep. He asks whether the procedure can be arranged for a cat, and when the prospect is treated with disbelief, he identifies Pete as his sidekick and insists on a direct answer. At the Mutual Assurance Company, he makes clear that he wants both of them to take the Long Sleep, objecting when Pete is referred to merely as a creature and giving his full name, Petronius.

Dan agrees to pay two custodial fees, but argues that Pete should not be charged as though he were a man. He proposes that they share a coffin and offers to pay something extra, while postponing negotiation over the price until he knows whether the company will accept them. His bargaining is practical, but its terms express the underlying relationship: Pete is to accompany Dan, and the cat’s status as a dependent companion must be recognized in the arrangements.

That plan is later disrupted. After the Long Sleep, Dan recalls that his careful arrangements to bring Pete along have been wrecked. The separation is especially stark because Dan had treated their shared sleep as a condition of his own decision. The plan could preserve Dan’s future, but it could not guarantee the future he had intended for the two of them.

Crisis and Separation

Before the sleep, Pete responds to Dan’s helplessness with determined attention. When Dan is left slumped and unresponsive, Pete jumps out of his bag, approaches him, and tries to get an answer. He rubs against Dan’s shins, climbs onto his knees, puts his forepaws on his chest, and looks directly at him. When Dan still does not respond, Pete wails, drawing Miles and Belle’s attention.

Belle proposes killing Pete. Miles initially resists, arguing that Dan would care more about the cat than about the loss of his possessions, and picks up Pete’s travel bag. Belle insists that she wants the cat dead and reaches for a fireplace poker. The exchange reveals the danger attached to Pete’s loyalty: even when Dan cannot answer him, Pete stays close, and that attachment brings him into the conflict surrounding Dan. The episode also sharpens the contrast between Dan’s protective responsibility and the threat posed by those who regard Pete as disposable.

Decades later, Dan’s first concerns on waking are directed toward the present, but Pete’s fate quickly cuts through them. Dan wonders where Pete is and whether the cat survived the Sleep, then remembers that his plans to bring Pete had failed. The realization is not a minor logistical disappointment: it confirms that Dan has awakened without the companion he had meant to keep beside him. His immediate response is to move Miles and Belle from the category of people he can deal with later to one marked urgent, explicitly linking their attempt on Pete’s life to his resolve to act against them.

Meaning of the Bond

The relationship makes care a recurring action rather than a declaration. Dan opens doors, adapts his household, considers Pete’s health, and argues with an insurer about preserving the cat; Pete, in turn, seeks Dan out when he cannot respond. Their exchanges combine comedy with dependence, but neither tone cancels the other. The weather ritual is funny because Pete’s expectations are so unreasonable and Dan knows them so well; it also shows how much of their shared life is organized around Dan’s willingness to answer those expectations.

The Long Sleep brings that loyalty into sharper focus by turning companionship into a practical and moral question: whether Dan can carry Pete with him into an uncertain future, and what it means when circumstances prevent him from doing so. Dan’s insistence that Pete be named, accepted, and treated as his companion establishes the bond’s significance; waking without him makes the intended togetherness a loss. Petronius is not simply part of Dan’s domestic past, but the dependent being whose welfare continues to shape Dan’s choices across the rupture of decades.