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There’s a cat on top of the fridge.
Sam and Bucky don’t own a cat. Sarah doesn’t own a cat. None of the neighbors own a cat. And yet, there is a cat on top of the fridge. And it’s quite possibly the ugliest fucking cat Sam has ever seen.
It’s… white? Or at least it was, at some point. Now its long hair is more dirty-newspaper-gray and matted to all hell. Its eyes, huge and bulging out of its head like balloons ready to pop, are bright green and both facing different directions. It’s also got an underbite from hell, and two bottom teeth that jut out over its top lip and basically poke it in its own nose. Sam’s not proud of the scream he lets out upon seeing this… thing after fishing the creamer out of the back of the fridge, but sweet Jesus above, he was not expecting this at seven o’clock in the goddamn morning. On their day off.
Bucky comes charging into the room, shirt half on and only wearing one sock, to find Sam bent over the kitchen table trying to settle his racing heart.
Bucky actually startles upon spotting the monstrosity on top of the fridge. “What the fuck,” he says, and the cat makes the worst noise either of them has ever heard from an animal that wasn’t actively dying.
“MREHHH,” it… well, screeches, is the best word for it, and jumps down onto the kitchen floor. Jesus Christ, and now that it’s up and moving, Sam can see too many toes on one front paw and even double that amount on the other. What the fuck.
“Why is there a cat in the kitchen?” Bucky asks, and whether it’s rhetorical or not, Sam shudders and throws his hands up.
“How should I have any idea?!” he exclaims. He’s not upset with Bucky, just still confused as hell and a little embarrassed at how high he’d screamed because of this Muppet reject that’s now made itself comfortable on the kitchen table.
Bucky puts the cat outside with minimal protest. In the time it takes for Sam to brew coffee, somehow it’s made its way back inside again. Bucky puts the cat back outside, even telling it to “stay, damn you,” to Sam’s amusement, and makes a sweep of the entire house to see if he can find how it keeps getting in. If it were anyone else doing a check like that, Sam would roll his eyes and say they’d probably missed a spot, but it’s Bucky. If Bucky checks the house, he checks the house.
And still, the cat is back in the kitchen by the time breakfast is ready.
Fuck it. Sam is too hungry for this shit, and by the look of it, so is Bucky. They ignore the cat, for now, and start eating. That is, until the cat jumps back up on the table and just stares at Sam. Or at least, stares directly to the left and right of Sam, with those fucked up eyes.
It hasn’t blinked once since it’s been here, and now Sam finds himself having a staring contest with the goddamn cat. “Blink, motherfucker,” he hisses, and as if on command, the cat does.
One eye at a time.
As Sam is reeling over how creepy that was, the cat inches forward and sticks its face directly into Sam’s plate of eggs. Sam pushes the cat back, with no luck. He lifts his plate, and the cat follows. Stands up, and the cat stands on its back legs. Bucky, the prick, just watches Sam’s distress from behind his mug of coffee.
“Just give it some,” he grumbles.
“You give it some,” Sam snaps back. But he does put his plate back on the table and flick a bit of egg the cat’s way. Big mistake. It inhales the food, makes another one of those god awful noises again, and launches itself back at Sam’s plate.
Sam’s had enough. These are the last eggs in the entire house, and it’s their day off. Bucky appears to be no help either, so Sam sweeps both hands under the cat’s matted belly, fully intent on putting the damn thing back outside to at least buy him enough time to eat in peace, but the cat—the fucking cat—all twenty-seven fucking toes or however many it has, Jesus Christ , dig into the table cloth like it’s the last thing tethering it to this earth, and when Sam lifts the little fucker into the air, it takes the tablecloth and everything on it with it across the room.
Breakfast goes fucking everywhere. Cutlery, plates, mugs, even that dollar store plastic vase with plastic flowers Bucky had bought to spite his therapist when Sam had tattled that he had next to no possessions of his own go sailing across the kitchen. Bucky, Sam can’t believe he’s saying this, but poor Bucky sits with his fork halfway to his mouth, and as if to add insult to injury, the piece of egg he’d been about three inches from shoving into his mouth falls off his fork and onto the floor.
Silently, Bucky puts his fork and head on the table. Sam drops the cat and just… stares at his own hands. What the fuck. What the fuck.
The cat makes another one of those horrible sounds and helps itself to both Sam and Bucky’s breakfasts splattered around the room.
—————
They lose track of the cat for a bit after that. It would be kind of great if not for the amount of white hair they find all over the house, reminding them in literally every room that the little menace has claimed their domain as its own. And as if that isn’t bad enough, Bucky calls Sam into the bedroom a couple hours after the disaster that was breakfast to find a cat-sized hole chewed into the bottom of their closet door.
Their wooden closet door.
“What—the fuck,” Sam says, and at this point those words are starting to lose meaning with how often he’s said them today.
Bucky scrubs a hand over his face. “I know,” he says, sounding more tired than he’s sounded in a long time. Because of a cat.
“I’m calling the vet,” Sam groans. “If it belongs to somebody, it’s gotta have a chip or something. Then they can deal with it.”
“Good luck,” Bucky replies, and God help him, Sam may actually need it.
The vet can’t see the little fuck until tomorrow morning. Sam starts counting the minutes.
The rest of the day is tense, both Sam and Bucky walking on eggshells as they try to go about their day while also keeping an eye out for other things the goddamn cat could’ve destroyed. It eats everything Sam and Bucky try to eat all day. Sam almost shits himself when he sits on the couch and, like something from a horror movie, the cat’s face appears from between the seats. Bucky glares hard enough to give himself a headache as the fucker slowly pushes his beer across the table and almost onto the floor. Four times. On the fifth time, the cat just punches the bottle across the table and runs off.
“Do you think it’s not a real cat?” Bucky asks, pressing a towel to the new puddle on the carpet. “Like, what’s her name, Carol, she’s got an alien cat or whatever, right?”
Sam lifts his head from his hands. “Man, I don’t know,” he replies. “Wouldn’t be surprised though, with our luck.”
The cat chooses that exact moment to zoom by like an absolute maniac and knocks over two of Sarah’s potted plants. Bucky leaves the room.
—————
THE CAT CAN OPEN DOORS. Sam and Bucky are officially in hell.
The bedroom door swings open gently, and it really says a lot about the day they’ve had that Bucky doesn’t immediately jump to attention like someone’s broken in, but merely groans and rolls onto his stomach. It’s taken months to get Bucky to sleep in an actual bed, and while it doesn’t happen every night, he’ll be damned if he lets that fucking cat ruin this too.
Sam curls a protective arm over Bucky’s shoulders and nuzzles into the crook of his neck. “Maybe if we ignore it, it’ll go away,” he whispers.
Something clatters on the other side of the room. “I think we’ve passed that point of delusional thinking,” Bucky groans back. The cat makes that horror movie monster sound again, and then mercifully, Sam and Bucky fall asleep.
—————
It doesn’t last. Sometime in the night, Bucky shoots out of bed in a panic, just barely managing to contain a scream, and locks himself in the closet. Sam actually falls out of bed in his attempt to follow, but by the time he wakes up enough to figure out what the fuck is going on, Bucky is essentially gone.
Sam knocks gently on the closet door, whispering comforting words and reassurances, recites what has become an unintentional ritual on nights like this, begging without actually begging Bucky to come out. Nights like this, the two of them will probably sit on either side of the closet door until the sun comes up, but Sam has to try. For both of them.
“Mrehh,” comes from somewhere in the dark, and Sam jumps so hard he hits his head against the wall. He’d forgotten about that goddamn fucking cat. Sam gently kicks out with his leg, fully intent on shoving the little shit away with his foot, but it jumps over him entirely and slips into the hole it had fucking chewed into the closet door earlier.
Sam holds his breath.
Bucky shakes, curled in as small a ball as he can put his body in, unable to really hear any of what Sam says over the panic in his mind. But when he sees those two fucked up eyes approach him, he blinks for the first time in what feels like the entire time he’s been awake.
The cat blinks back, one eye at a time again, and climbs into the hollow space between Bucky’s knees and chest. It makes that horrible sound again and presses the top of its head into Bucky’s chin. It’s… soft. Bucky had been so busy trying to get the thing to fuck off that he hadn’t really even registered it. The cat ‘meows’ again and Bucky buries both hands into its fur. And—oh—it starts purring. It’s the only normal sound the little abomination has made since it’s been here, and it’s… Bucky feels the racing of his heart start to calm. His frantic breathing starts to slow. The cat presses its head into Bucky’s chin again and distantly, Bucky hears Sam’s voice gently calling out to him.
After a few moments of deep breaths, Bucky unfolds his body, reaches out, and unlocks the closet door. Slowly, he nudges it open and finds Sam looking stricken on the other side.
“Hey,” Bucky says hoarsely. The cat is still in his lap, purring away.
“Hey,” Sam says back. He offers Bucky a hand, but instead of pulling him out of the closet, Bucky gently pulls Sam in. They sit side by side, shoulder to shoulder, as Bucky’s shakes subside and the purring grows louder.
—————
The vet takes one look at the cat and chokes. “Well,” he says, “let’s see what we’re working with.”
They find several very interesting things right off the bat. The cat is a girl, and she is a real, earth cat, thank God. The look the vet gives Sam when he asks would be hilarious if not for how fucked up the past day has been. The cat flinches violently away from the vet every time he goes to touch her, tries curling into Bucky’s jacket at every chance she gets. She’s fucking terrified, and despite all the fur hiding her actual size, she is severely malnourished. It becomes evident when the nurse shaves all the matting away.
“Poor girl is all skin and bone,” the vet says, and Sam and Bucky give each other matching guilty looks. It only goes downhill from there. The vet continues. Her… appearance, for lack of a better word, is most likely from a lot of inbreeding. There’s signs of abuse, too, bones that had broken and either didn’t heal correctly or were splinted incredibly shoddily. She physically can’t retract her claws, but whether that is from the abuse or the genetic problems is hard to tell. The sound she makes, that horror-movie-monster screech, is a direct result of physical, untreated trauma to her throat, too.
The whole time the vet is talking, the cat has her head pressed into Bucky’s chest and just shakes. Bucky, whether he realizes it or not, keeps at least one hand on her back, gently rubbing small circles with his thumb. Several things are starting to make horrifying sense: the desperation for food, the Houdini-rivaling escapism, the terrible, terrible sound she makes—
Sam crosses his arms. He can’t look at the vet. “So what’re we looking at, here?” he asks.
“Well,” the vet sighs, “best guess is she managed to escape a pretty terrible illegal breeding situation. She’s really, really lucky to have found you two. We’re going to take good care of her.”
Sam and Bucky look at each other, down at the cat, and then back at each other. It isn’t even a question.
—————
Several hours, an extensive vet bill, numerous medications and appointments scheduled, and the longest trip to PetCo Sam has ever even heard of later, the newly-named Alpine sits perched on Bucky’s chest from where he’s sprawled across the sofa, eyes closed, purring her little head off.
Sam walks over to the couch and taps Bucky’s head. “Get your ass up,” he says playfully, and Bucky sits up just enough for Sam to sit down before he sprawls back out again over his legs. Sam buries one hand in Bucky’s hair and the other in the cat’s. She makes that horrible—maybe not so horrible—sound and stares to Sam’s immediate left and right in that way she does.
“Sarah’s gonna kill us,” Bucky says.
“You tell her, then,” Sam replies. “She likes you better than me.”
Alpine chooses that exact moment to let out the most strangled sounding cough Sam and Bucky have ever heard, right into Bucky’s face, and maybe it’s because it’s so horrible and smells so bad, but neither man can help but laugh.