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The cat is Bucky’s idea.
The war is over. Thanos is defeated, blown away like the dust he’d turned half the universe into. Steve and Tony are both benched from their injuries sustained during the battle, likely permanently in Tony’s case. Steve’s injuries will probably heal, thanks to the serum, but he’s already announced his intention to retire and pass the shield on. And in the wake of the burials—Clint Barton and Peter Quill and Valkyrie and a hundred others beside—Bucky takes his boys home to the lake house Steve and Tony had bought while he had been dusted.
It's a good place to retire, he thinks once Tony and Steve are settled into the monstrosity of a bed in the master bedroom. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the east side of the cabin overlook the lake, and he’s sure that it provides spectacular views in the mornings. He imagines fixing a cup of the Wakandan coffee he’d grown used to over his time in Wakanda—he’s sure Tony would love it, little coffee fiend that he is—and sitting on the porch in the early mornings, reading whatever passes for a newspaper out here. The thought makes him ache in a good way.
He misses his goats, he realizes some days later. Steve and Tony sleep a lot, their bodies healing from the strain of sharing the gauntlet’s power, and in the meantime, Bucky is… lonely.
It’s strange. He’d never really thought of himself as needing constant companionship in the past. Truthfully, he doubts that he could handle nonstop human companionship outside of the two men he loves more than life itself. But he misses being able to take care of an animal. He misses the simple trust his goats placed in him and the bond they shared. And seeing as how neither Tony nor Steve are likely to be up and moving around in the next few months…
He brings it up the next time they’re both awake. Dinner is soup, chicken and rice for Steve, who’s healing at a much more rapid pace than Tony is, and a bone broth for Tony, who can barely keep his eyes open for longer than ten minutes most days.
“I could see us getting a cat,” Steve says thoughtfully.
“Get us a nice one,” Tony says drowsily. He keeps blinking, his eyes taking longer and longer to open each other.
“The nicest one I can find,” Bucky promises, brushing a kiss over Tony’s forehead. Tony is asleep less than a minute later. Bucky catches his bowl before it tips over into his lap and sets it aside to bring the next time Tony is awake.
“You know you don’t have to find a nice one, right?” Steve asks some minutes later. “We’d be happy with whatever makes you happy, even if it was the meanest old tomcat you could find.”
The woman at the shelter—Stella, her nametag says—is very polite and cheerful, giving him a big smile as she lets him into the back to see the cats. And there are a lot of them: black cats, tabby cats, fat orange cats with squished faces, a beautiful white Persian that Bucky spends a few minutes playing with. He’s seriously considering taking her home until he walks past a cage in the back of the room, and the cat inside hisses at him.
He's not sure what makes him do it, but he stops and backtracks, taking another look at the nametag.
Macavity.
“That’s a weird name for a cat, isn’t it?” he asks. Stella gives him a weird look, and he figures that he’s missing something that should be obvious, something that he would already know if he were actually from this time like he looks. He’ll ask Tony about it when he gets home. The way his eyes light up when he gets to share something new with the two of them is always one of the best things about learning about something he missed while he was on ice.
Macavity is a ginger cat, rail thin and long. His eyes are poison yellow, ears pressed back against his head as he hisses at them again. One of his ears is torn at the tip. His coat is unusually glossy until Stella explains that he’s incapable of grooming himself due to bone damage from a fire ant attack when he was still a kitten so the oils build up in his fur.
“He’ll require a lot of grooming,” Stella warns him. “And, as you can tell, he won’t make it easy on you. A lot of his owners brought him back because they thought they could handle it, but couldn’t. He’s not going to be an affectionate lap cat if that’s something that you’re looking for. You’d be better off adopting Alpine.”
Bucky glances back at the white Persian he’d been petting earlier. Stella is right, Alpine would be an easier cat, but…
“How long has he been here?” he asks, lifting his metal hand to the bars. Macavity dances just close enough to take a swipe at his fingers before retreating to the back of the cage again, a low growl in his throat. Despite himself, Bucky still flinches, even though the cat wouldn’t have been able to do any damage.
“Six years,” Stella says. “His first owner brought him to us when he was a little over a year old.”
That’s a long time to sit at a back of a cage, wondering if the people who try to take him on this time will actually be able to handle him. Fortunately, Bucky is stubborn and Steve is worse and Tony is… Well, he actually has no idea how Tony will react to the cat, but considering that Tony has a soft spot for hard luck cases, he suspects he’ll handle it well.
“I’ll take him,” he says confidently.
Stella gives him a dubious look. “You sure? You’re not gonna be able to pet him for a long time, if ever.”
Well, Bucky thinks, it’s not as though eternity isn’t stretching out in front of them.
“I’m sure,” he says firmly. “Where’s the paperwork?”
“It’s a reference,” Tony explains, blinking at the cat. “There was this musical back during the eighties.”
“You saw a musical?” Steve asks, giving him a surprised look. “You shredded those tickets to Rogers: The Musical and then ate them so we’d never be able to go.”
“Don’t judge me for what I do while I’m on painkillers,” Tony snips. “And yes, I saw Cats. It was the eighties. Everyone saw Cats.”
“So what does that have to do with Macavity?” Bucky interrupts.
Tony shrugs, which is a pretty odd-looking gesture when he’s laying down. “Cats doesn’t really have a plot per se, but there’s this evil cat who kidnaps one of the other cats. Macavity is the evil cat.”
“Why does he kidnap the other cat?” Steve asks curiously. Both Steve and Tony have been introduced to Macavity already. Tony had only been hissed at, but Macavity had seemed to really hate Steve and taken a swipe at his fingers before launching off the bed and climbing the curtains to perch on top of the curtain rod, hissing at the three of them.
“Because he’s evil, Steve,” Tony says in a tone that says Steve should already know this.
The thing is though is that Macavity—their Macavity anyway—really isn’t all that evil. Sure it takes a few weeks to find a food brand that he’ll actually eat, and in the meantime, he sends his dish—and the food inside it—flying across the room every time he decides it’s unacceptable. And he has a pretty nasty habit of leaving hairballs in people’s shoes when he thinks the litter box is too full (which is about twice a day).
But for the most part, he’s just… antisocial.
Which is fine because so is Bucky. And for that matter, so is Tony, for the most part. And Steve is only a big golden retriever because he’s with people he loves.
So the fact that Macavity likes to sit under the furniture and hiss at people walking by, swiping at their ankles when they get too close to him, isn’t nearly as much of a problem as Stella had inferred it would be. It is a problem that grooming him so his fur doesn’t get too oily is currently a process that requires the use of a mild sedative that Bucky gets from the vet three miles down the road, so he’s still working on better socializing Macavity, but other than that, he really doesn’t think it’s a problem that their cat doesn’t want to be petted.
Honestly, he thinks it’s a little funny that Macavity despises Steve with the burning passion of a thousand suns because watching Steve hop on one foot because Macavity got his claws into his other ankle will never not be funny. And what’s even funnier is that for as much as the cat hates Steve, he loves Tony—for as much as an antisocial cat can love anyone.
Whenever Bucky needs to find Macavity for a grooming session and he can’t be found under any of the furniture, all he has to do is check the bedroom to find the cat curled up on the windowsill, staring unblinkingly at Tony. He won’t come any closer, and if anyone tries to pick him up to move him to the bed, then he’ll bite, but Bucky has read that cats sometimes show affection by being in the same room as their humans, and he finds it pretty sweet that Macavity wants to be in the same room as Tony.
And when Tony is finally back on his feet and allowed back in the lake house’s workshop, Macavity can be found in there too, perched on top of DUM-E’s claw, looking like a feline monarch surveying his territory.
“You know,” Steve pants to Bucky as they chase the cat around the house, trying to corner him for a trip to the vet, “he might not be the nicest of cats, but you can’t deny he makes our life a lot more interesting than a lap cat would have.”
“Does that mean I made a good choice?” Bucky asks, keeping one ear out for the sound of Macavity’s paws on the hardwood floors. He’s been wondering about that since their last vet kindly informed them that she never wanted to see Macavity ever again and perhaps the vet further down the road would be a better fit. He adores their cat, but it’s been worrying him that neither of his partners do and would like him to take Macavity back.
Steve stops dead in his tracks, peering at him. Bucky keeps going a few more steps but then realizes that Steve is no longer with him and stops as well, giving him a hesitant look.
“Of course you did,” Steve says in that earnest, all-American good boy way that he has. “We all love him. I can’t imagine why anyone else wanted to give him back.”
“Give who back?” Tony asks, emerging from deeper into the house. His metal hand is holding onto a soft-side carrier, which is currently containing one yowling cat.
“You found him,” Bucky sighs relievedly.
“You’re acting like it was hard,” Tony says, squinting at them. “Why are you sweating? Were you having sex without me? You know the doctor cleared—”
“Never mind that,” Steve says quickly. “Tony, tell Bucky you love the cat.”
“I love the cat.”
That was a little too prompt for Bucky to believe him.
Tony rolls his eyes. “I don’t just let anyone into the workshop. Do you know how much trouble a cat could get up to in there? Really, Buckaroo, if I didn’t love him, he’d never be allowed in.”
“But Dr. Nesbitt—”
“Has the liability and her employees’ health to think of,” Steve interjects. “It’s got nothing to do with Macavity himself or our relationship with him.”
“Have you ever known me to be quiet about something I didn’t like?” Tony asks, which is true. Tony has been known to complain about gravity when he can’t get his repulsors to work right.
“Alright,” Bucky says, finally believing them. “Then I guess we should get this little guy to the vet.”
“I think your cat hates me,” Peter Parker complains, dangling a piece of chicken from his fingers to feed to Macavity—if Macavity were interested.
“Don’t take it personally,” Bucky says, washing a bowl at the sink. He passes it to Steve to dry. “He hates everybody.”
Tony glances up from where he’s fiddling with Peter’s webshooters. Peter, a frequent visitor to the lake house (along with Harley and Riri Williams, who had been MJ’s roommate at an MIT prep summer camp and immediately become best of friends with her), had brought them by, complaining that he’d been trying to improve the firing mechanism and wound up with way too hairpin of a trigger.
“I resent that statement,” Tony says mildly.
“He hates you sometimes too,” Bucky points out. Tony thinks about it and then concedes the point. Macavity probably does like Tony best—Bucky doesn’t even blame him—but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still growl when Tony gets too close to him.
“I just wanted to pet him,” Peter laments.
“Don’t take it personally,” Bucky repeats. “We’ve had him for nearly two years, and he still doesn’t let any of us pet him.”
“I got close a few weeks ago,” Steve comments.
“Wow,” Tony remarks, words garbled around a screwdriver in his mouth. “One giant leap for mankind.”
Steve throws the damp dishtowel at him, retorting with an unheated, “Fuck you too.”
“Hmm maybe later, darling.”
Peter wrinkles his nose. “Ew.”
The thing about Macavity is that when he decides to do something, he does it in a big way. He refuses to eat his dinner by tossing his food dish halfway across the room. He declares war on the other lake house’s dog by swatting it off their porch, sending it head over tail as it tumbles across the yard. He makes Tony’s workshop his own by claiming DUM-E as his perch instead of one of the many benchtops or the couch.
So when, after three years with them, he finally decides that he’s ready to be petted, he does that in a big way too.
They’re watching a movie that Tony insists is a classic (though Bucky is doubtful as to how any movie that features singing nuns can be considered a classic) when Macavity saunters into the room.
“Uh-oh, Steve. Better mind your ankles,” Tony comments, eyeing Macavity from the corner of his eye. Macavity likes to swipe at the ankles of anyone who is sitting on the armchair he likes to hide under, which is exactly where Steve is.
Steve takes one look at the cat and pulls his feet up onto the chair.
But to all of their surprise, Macavity doesn’t make for the armchair. Instead, he minces his way across the living room, eyes Bucky with his tail swishing behind him, and then jumps up onto Bucky’s lap. Bucky freezes, exchanging a wide-eyed look with Steve.
“What do I do?” he whispers, panicking. Macavity has never jumped into anyone’s lap before. Tony has theorized in the past that Macavity doesn’t even know how.
“Well, don’t move,” Tony hisses back.
He stays very still as Macavity kneads at his legs a few times, a rusty rumbling emitting from his throat that Bucky eventually realizes is the cat purring. Macavity has never purred once in his entire life. They’d even talked it over with the vet, worried that that meant Macavity wasn’t happy with them and needed a different family who would make him feel safe.
Macavity turns around twice and then settles down, tucking his paws underneath him and wrapping his tail around his body. He looks up at Bucky and slowly blinks at him. Bucky knows what that means, at least, and blinks back.
“FRIDAY, tell me you’re getting video of this,” he hears Tony say as thought from a distance and FRIDAY’s faint affirmative.
Slowly, he lifts his hand, certain that it’s about to get shredded, and lowers it on top of Macavity’s head, gingerly scratching when the cat doesn’t unleash his claws. Macavity’s purr grows louder, sounding like an old lawnmower.
“Well,” Steve says after a moment, sounding as shellshocked as Bucky feels. “I guess we know who his favorite is.”