Chapter Text
After the battle, Iron Man strolled down an empty New York street alongside Captain America, helmet down, and managing to feel quite at ease with the world despite Steve’s litany of complaints.
“I still think it was reckless, I mean if...
“Oh my god, look at that cat . ”
The line had mostly been to annoy Cap (who had been getting on his damn nerves with his over-cautiousness), but the cat really was something to look at. A stray, skinny with dirty eyes and a ragged-looking black and white coat, he sat neatly on a half-demolished wall, cleaning his paws, completely unperturbed at the wreckage surrounding him.
“Hey there.” He expected the cat to bolt but he barely glanced at Tony, continuing to lick his paws, and occasionally dragging them over his head. Tony took off his gauntlet and reached out a hand. The cat sniffed, then rubbed Tony’s outstretched finger with his cheek glands.
“Yeah, OK then.” murmured Tony. There was something a little smug about the way the cat took him for granted. Something almost like looking in the mirror. He scanned it for a microchip, using the suit’s RFID reader. Nothing.
The cat rubbed against his armoured belly.
“Iron Man, we still have work to do.” Tony scratched behind the cat’s ears. It had a scar on its chest where the fur wouldn’t grow. Huh.
“Sure. J.A.R.V.I.S.?”
“Yes sir?”
“Order a scratching pole, litter box, cat food… basically just a whole feline starter kit to the tower. And look up the best veterinarian in the city and put them on retainer.”
“Of course, sir.” Gotta love a guy who never asks questions.
“I’ll be back in 17.8 minutes, Winghead.” Steve frowned, but nodded curtly. Tony picked up the cat, then flew as low and gently as possible back to the tower. To its credit, the cat only gave one mournful yowl of protest the whole way. He put the cat in a quiet room with the accessories and food J.A.R.V.I.S. and the bots had set up, and as promised, headed back to recon the damage.
Afterwards he returned to find the cat had eaten, taken a nap, and was now exploring. Its whiskers twitched, and it licked its nose occasionally to improve its sense of smell. It’s not much, buddy, but it’s home . Shortly, thundering footsteps told him they were no longer alone.
"Hey, Thor." said Tony, nodding.
"Friend Tony! I am glad to see you do well after our battle!" He spotted the cat, now perched on the arm of the sofa. "Ah, I see our numbers have increased in my absence! We do not have such beasts on Asgard, but I have become well acquainted during my sojourns to your realm." Thor approached the cat, making soft crooning noises. Tony wouldn’t have believed his larynx was capable of producing any noise that quiet.
Thor stretched out a finger for the cat to sniff. The cat allowed the god to give him a little scratch behind the ear. Thor beamed, then pulled out his Starkphone and took an actual goddamned selfie with the creature.
"Thor... just, what." Thor looked a little uncertain.
"Is this not your Midgardian custom? The Lady Darcy often..."
"No, you're right, it is, for better or worse, our Midgardian custom." said Tony, pinching the bridge of his nose. Thor beamed again.
"Excellent! I shall place it on mine Instagram forthwith." He set about composing a caption, probably using every emoji in existence.
"That is one ugly fucking cat," said Hawkeye, walking through in his battle soiled uniform.
"That is one ugly fucking human," Tony snapped back. Barton parodied shock, and then grimaced as his drawing shoulder complained. He continued on to the elevator and disappeared.
Natasha didn’t say anything, but took in the addition to personnel.
Steve and Bruce returned last of all, Bruce looking even more drained than usual. Steve, while keeping up a stream of cheerful banter, was obviously keeping a close eye on him.
“Oh, hey, a cat,” said Bruce.
“I see you’ve kept that zoology degree up to scratch, doctor.” said Tony.
“You have a zoology degree?” asked Steve. Bruce nodded, exhaustion even in that small gesture.
“Correspondence. I got bored, during my second postdoc… where’d you get him?”
“Found him during cleanup. Got a vet coming in later.”
“Oh, good. That looks like a low-level eye infection.” He held out a finger to the cat, much as Thor did, and the cat sniffed it very carefully, before touching his nose to it. Bruce gave a tiny smile, before walking stiffly to the elevator. Steve watched him leave, frowning a little, but this time from concern rather than disapproval. Tony made a mental note to have J.A.R.V.I.S. check on him in a few hours.
“Thought of a name?” said Steve.
“Not yet. I don’t know, it seems kind of forward.” Steve smiled and shrugged acknowledgement, before heading to his floor. Tony sat down and gave the cat a gentle pat. It made itself a little more comfortable on the sofa arm. He checked around to make sure nobody could see, then took a selfie with the cat, and sent it to Pepper.
Tony Stark is man enough to admit when unconscious sexism causes him to make mistakes...
oops
…and this is one of these times. When J.A.R.V.I.S. announced the arrival of the top-rated veterinarian in New York (on the eastern seaboard, as it turned out) Tony didn’t realise he’d been expecting a middle aged dude until he opened the door to Dr Kaur, all doe-like eyes and friendly but professional smile and OK, stop scanning down…
He carefully gave her a smile of no higher than 3 on a scale of 1 to 11 (values of 5 or more had been known to make women’s undergarments spontaneously combust — though fair enough, it had been that one time when he and Pepper hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks and she still wasn’t quite in control of her EXTREMIS abilities — but it had still been awesome) and led her to the cat. She put him up on the breakfast bar and gave him a thorough physical, while Tony tried not to look outwardly jealous.
“Apart from being rather underweight, he seems in reasonable health, Dr Stark.” No fair using my academic title…
“What about this?” Tony asked, pointing to the scar. Dr Kaur frowned.
“It’s hard to say what caused that. But it’s an old wound, and doesn’t seem to bother him.”
“Are you sure? I have an MRI scanner in the lab…”
“I’ll book him in for a comprehensive battery of tests tomorrow, but frankly I doubt it'll turn anything up. Meanwhile, I’ll prescribe some dietary supplements, the standard parasite treatments and a short course of antibiotics to clear up that eye.”
“Thank you,” he said, giving her a level 4. She smiled back, with just a trace of a blush. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s a logarithmic scale?
Tony headed to bed rather earlier than usual, but lay awake for a long time. One of the disadvantages of having a brain the size of a planet was that it could be rather difficult to power down. Hence the constant sparring, casual sex (well, that one wasn't completely down to his intrinsic angst) and the primordial coping mechanism introduced to him by Daddy Dearest, ethanol in any form expensive enough to make his indulgence look like ostentation rather than desperation.
He shifted to lie on his back. If he didn’t get to sleep in the next ten minutes, he’d hit the lab and find something to tinker on. Or the gym. Or the bar. No, not that one.
Something landed on his bed. He stiffened. But it was just the cat.
“Hey there.” The cat approached him, sniffing, then started scratching at the edge of the covers. “Wait, no, that is not your litter box…” He nudged the animal, but it dodged, found a little gap between his body and the blanket, and slunk in.
“Oh, you wanna cuddle? Buckle your seatbelt baby. I’m a cuddling grandmaster.” The cat climbed onto his chest and lay down, resting his chin on what remained of Tony’s sternum. Tony stroked the cat, and he stretched out, getting even comfier. He started purring, the crackly sound blending with the thrum of the arc reactor.
The cat purred, and Tony purred back via his arc reactor, his breath deepening and loosening, and his thoughts shrinking to the size of the bed, himself, the cat.
When he woke up, the cat was gone. He took a shower, dressed, and ate breakfast, feeling unusually zingy and sharp. He spent the morning in the workshop, doing repairs on his suit and the team’s gear, and in the afternoon hit the gym to spar with Cap and Widow. He even managed to land a few impressive hits, to his surprise and delight.
“You’re full of beans today,” said Steve, rubbing his jaw with apparently genuine discomfort after their bout. Tony swelled at the sight.
“You look like you got a decent night’s sleep, for a change.” said Natasha. Tony paused long enough for her to land a painful blow to his ribs. He put the thought to one side, but pondered it once he was safely out of the ring. He was so chronically sleep deprived, one restful night had him feeling like he was on some powerful stimulant.
Life in the Tower went on as usual. The team all interacted with the new arrival on their own terms. Steve called him “Puss,” and gave him firm, whole body strokes with the look of a handshake whenever he saw him. Once or twice, Tony got to see Natasha sitting side by side with him, calling him котик and rubbing him gently under the chin. Thor called him “Friend Cat!”, never missing an opportunity to give him a scratch around the ears, in return for selfies which instantly gained millions of likes on Instagram. Clint called him “Asshole,” “Fuzzbutt” or “Fucking cat” and did not pet him at all, but never stopped the cat from sitting on him. Though he claimed this was to get out of fetching extra popcorn or drinks on movie nights.
Bruce sought him out from time to time, particularly after his transformations. He didn’t talk, but sat with the cat, petting him gently, and looked marginally less tortured than usual. Tony kind of wanted to suggest Bruce try taking the cat to bed, but even after fighting and working alongside the guy for as long as he had, it still felt too intrusive. Besides, that would have meant Tony didn’t have the cat for himself.
One day Tony strolled into the common area, and found the cat playing with a display of holographic birds, making astonishing leaps and pounces after his prey. When he caught them, the food dispenser released a pellet, which he gobbled before pursuing the next bird.
“That’s pretty neat, J.A.R.V.I.S. Bruce make that?”
J.A.R.V.I.S. made the electronic equivalent of clearing his throat and said “The literature indicates that simulated predatory play is generally considered to be the ideal way of maintaining cardiovascular and cognitive function in indoor cats, sir, and so it seemed... ”
“Wait… J.A.R.V.I.S.… you made this?”
“Yes Sir.”
“Huh. Cool.” Tony had never been quite certain to what degree J.A.R.V.I.S. was sentient. He still wasn’t.
For all Von Doom was a douche, sometimes he managed to impress Tony. A self-aware, metal-eating fungus was a really cool idea, but it took them far too long to work out how to stop it from eating the Tower from the beams out, and by then several floors were part demolished. After Bruce and Tony finished electrically isolating key components, and Thor electrified the structure to kill the infection, Tony asked J.A.R.V.I.S. for a full assessment. J.A.R.V.I.S. gave him a floor by floor breakdown of the damage, while Tony did a quick head count. The team were all present and correct, though because the attack had happened in the night and not everybody had had time to get in costume, they cut rather less impressive figures than usual.
Then he remembered the cat. His chest felt suddenly tight.
“...floor sixteen has severe damage to…”
“Stop. J.A.R.V.I.S., where’s the cat.” A long pause.
“Sir? I am unable to locate the cat.” Tony’s chest shrank.
“What do you mean you’re unable to locate the cat? You know every atom of this tower, J.A.R.V.I.S.. Rescan, for fuck’s sake!”
“I will try sir, but the fine sensors have…”
“Just do it!” Tony yelled, feeling helpless. He hated feeling helpless.
“Tony, I found him.” Natasha was crouching by the pile of rubble which used to be the parkour course. Tony would have fallen to his knees if he hadn’t been suited.
“He’s alive.” He rushed over, and saw for himself: two wide open eyes, reflecting back the emergency lighting.
“He’s here, J.A.R.V.I.S.. Under this pile of rubble. Use the suit’s scanners, find out if he’s ok.”
“Respiration is elevated, sir, but I can’t find evidence of any injury.”
“Hey, buddy. Wanna come out?” He took off his gauntlet, stretched in his hand. The cat flattened itself against the wall, and Tony could see its sides lurching in and out with its panicked breathing.
“Just leave him be, Tony. He’ll come out when he’s good and ready.” Natasha put a hand on his shoulder. Tony nodded, feeling mildly hysterical.
That night Tony really couldn’t sleep. He asked J.A.R.V.I.S. for updates on the cat’s movements every so often, but he didn’t move from under the rubble. He managed to pass out for an hour or so, but was awakened by a nightmare, a familiar one about the Mandarin’s attack on the Malibu mansion. Gasping and sweaty, he forced himself to go over the truth. Pepper was fine. Pepper was safe in LA. Pepper oh fuck it . It’s not like J.A.R.V.I.S. will judge me.
“J.A.R.V.I.S.? Status update on Pepper.”
“Miss Potts is in her office at Stark Industries Headquarters. Her biometric readings indicate she is asleep, sir.”
Well, that wasn’t ideal, obviously, he’d need to talk to her about delegating, but she was ok. He got out of bed and removed his soaked shirt.
Pepper was ok. She was fine. She…
The problem with loving people was that you had pieces of yourself wandering around, all over the place, pieces that you couldn’t wrap up in metal and keep safe. Which is probably why he had surrounded himself with assassins, gods and superhumans. And he and Pep had been getting on way better now that she had her own suit, not to mention her super cool EXTREMIS burny powers. Though he really needed to talk to her about working sensible goddamned hours. Not that he had any right to talk, obviously.
But now he had yet another piece of himself walking around outside of him, unprotected in his vulnerable little furry body. And as much as the metal-eating fungus was pretty sweet, he had to admit that almighty fucknose Von Doom had shaken him. He thought the cat was safe in the tower. The cat was safe in the Tower, for god’s sake, how often did this kind of thing happen, only like once or twice a year...
He was still breathing hard, the sweat chilling on his skin. Stupid sympathetic nervous system. Get the damn memo already. Pepper is fine. I called the suit to her.
…
I called the suit to her…
For the smartest… ok, fine, one of the smartest people on the planet, he sure could be slow on the uptake. Tony pulled on jeans and a tank top, and headed to the lab.
Four days later, he had a working prototype. He hadn’t told anyone what he was doing yet, but then he was the world’s expert on this sort of thing. For all that, he was nervous. He had J.A.R.V.I.S. do a quick check to make sure everyone was busy or out. He supposed he could have taken the cat down to the lab, but decided on balance that familiar surroundings were best.
He sat on the sofa with forced nonchalance, placing the small package beside him. As usual, when the cat noticed Tony, he chirruped and trotted over to greet him. He petted him for a while, then took a breath.
“OK J.A.R.V.I.S.. As gently as you can.”
Nearly noiselessly, the armour assembled over the cat’s body. At once, holographic displays featuring the cat’s face and readouts of his vital signs popped up in front of him.
“Don’t worry buddy, I won’t be offended if you hate it, it’s programmed to deactivate if you freak out, just…”
Tony went on babbling for a moment before he noticed that the cat wasn’t freaking out. His pupils had dilated, but his breathing was steady. He looked around, taking in the room through the visual output Tony had optimised for cat vision, sharp two colour with motion enhancement. He took a few steps, and stretched up, balancing on his hind legs. Tony watched, barely breathing.
The cat jumped off the sofa, and the repulsors activated, smoothing the landing. The cat paused, then trotted forward to the table, and leapt. The repulsors activated again, boosting the leap higher than necessary and softening the landing. It was rather like watching a cat in low gravity. The cat’s whiskers twitched on the display. It still didn’t seem panicked at all. In fact, its expression seemed to be what Tony had learned to recognise as a smile.
He leapt off the table, but this time, didn’t aim for the floor. To Tony’s utter amazement, he flew. Admittedly, his first proper flight was a little wobbly, but compared to Tony’s first forays, it looked astonishingly natural. The cat landed on the sofa next to him, and lifted its paw to its mouth as if to groom. The suit deactivated, peeling off and packing into a neat rectangle. The cat continued its grooming unimpeded, with utter nonchalance.
“Holy shit it worked.” Tony lay back, suddenly realising how tense he had been.
Over the next few weeks, Tony began adding suit-time into their regular play. He noticed that after spending a while patting him and playing with his toys, the cat would sometimes make the same rearing motion as it had when it first wore the suit, as well as a distinctive cry. It was easy work to code these gestures and calls to summon the suit. Once the cat made the connection, he seemed to spend more time in the suit than out of it.
The cat got better and better at flying. It was a bit annoying, honestly. Tony rather prided himself on being the most stylish Avenger in the air, but the cat put him to shame, moving with the same easy grace he did on the ground. J.A.R.V.I.S. upgraded his bird holograms to provide a challenge to the suited cat, and the cat learned to flip up the face plate in order to munch his spoils.
One day Hawkeye was making himself a ham, gouda and pickle sandwich when he heard a soft, but familiar whoosh . The cat landed elegantly on the kitchen counter, opened the face plate, and brightly asked him for a bit of ham.
“What in the fuck… No, you can’t have my sandwich, asshole, get off.”
"J.A.R.V.I.S., where's my cat?"
"Currently eight hundred feet over Central Park, sir."
"You let him out!? What were you thinking?"
"He took advantage of an open window, sir, and summoned his suit before I could..."
"Never mind that, give me a visual!"
A holoscreen blinked into view, showing the cat, legs tucked in for aerodynamicity, in a steep dive towards a stand of trees in Central Park. Below, pigeons scattered in panic. In the corner was a hologram of the cat's face surrounded by vital-signs readouts, most glowing red.
Heart-rate's off the scale, pulse-ox is high, breathing rapid, cortisol and epinephrine levels elevated. Eyes dilated way out like a raver-kid on the good X from back in the day. Teeth chattering — what the hell does that mean, again? Hang on...
"J.A.R.V.I.S., take the telemetry from the Mark c2, recalibrate for feline baselines, and feed it into my machine-learning jukebox."
AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill started pounding out of hidden speakers. A smile spread slowly across Tony’s face.
"OK, he's happy, he's excited. Nothing to worry about."
"Tony," said Steve, "that song's from your combat playlist."
"That's what I said. Thor gets it."
They watched as the cat accelerated to the side of a terrified pigeon, aimed, and blasted its left front paw repulsor. The shock wave broke the pigeon's neck, killing it instantly. Then the cat swooped down, flipped the faceplate and grabbed its prize.
"Well struck, Friend Cat!" boomed Thor. Steve nodded. He had to agree.
The cat descended into a perfect landing, and tucked in. As it turned out, a cat devouring a still-warm pigeon, rendered in super high definition 3D holograms, was more than they all felt they needed to see.
"J.A.R.V.I.S., kill the display." Tony paused. "Let me know if he's in any danger, and bring him in when it gets dark, unless he comes in himself."
“Yes, sir.”
His cat was the best.
@clevertwitterhandle
Um, has anyone given any thought to how terrifying it must be for the poor cat? #IronCat
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@mrs_jarvis
@clevertwitterhandle Yeah, it looked terrified repulsoring that gull. I'm starting to think it's cruel for cats not to have Iron Man suits
@moveoutoflondon
Hey @TheRealTonySnark, once #IronCat's done with the NYC pigeons, can you send him to London? I just got shat on.
@TheRealTonySnark
For the record, I think #IronCat is a stupid name.
But I haven’t thought of one better in the 6 months he’s been here, so I guess it’ll do.
@MailOnline
Could #IronCat give you cancer?
"Sir, Mr Fury is calling. A matter of urgency, he informs me."
Tony groaned and rubbed his eyes. By far not the most pleasant way he's been coaxed into consciousness (unless he's very lucky, Princess Shuri of Wakanda and her vibranium... accoutrements would probably remain the lifetime holder of that prize). Iron Cat wasn’t there, but he was a pretty early riser. He threw himself out of bed, pulled on a shirt, and padded to the viewscreen.
"How can I help you, Dear Leader?" Bad start. Fury looked even more like somebody pissed in his cornflakes than he did on a normal day.
"Stark. Care to explain to me what in the Sam Hill I'm looking at?" One of the crappy cell phone videos which had saturated the internet played in the foreground, while Nick Fury’s formidable glower remained visible behind. Tony scrolled through a half dozen one-eye jokes in his mind while keeping his voice carefully neutral.
"That is the Mk c2, demonstrating its improved aerodynamics and caudal flexibility." The video was pretty poor quality, but he could see how the articulation around the tail still wasn’t perfect. The problem was better articulation meant increased weakness, and the tail is pretty unprotected by nature. Perhaps working off the idea of chainmail to create a polymer, or even...
"Stark!" Shit, drifted off there for a bit.
"I long ago stopped expecting any kind of sense, reason or self-preservation in your behaviour, but I know you understand dollars and cents. You are personally responsible for the actions of that circus act. Any damage it causes, you answer for financially and morally. S.H.I.E.L.D. has called a press conference in 48 hours for you to explain your dumb, arrogant, fucked-up self to the world, which you will attend on pain of pain. And,” his voice dropped to a chilling murmur, “if I hear that your goddamned tin-pot pussycat has disturbed or damaged the red-throated loon nesting in Central Park, I will be immensely — and personally — displeased." Tony was pretty good at tuning Fury out most of the time, but this time he couldn’t quite quell a sense of impending doom. So Fury was a bird-lover. Should have known the sick son-of-a-bitch would have some weird-ass hobby.
Tony made a note to build him a little telescope for his birthday.
He shambled through to the dining area, where Thor and Bruce were breakfasting (congee for the doctor, and a mixing bowl full of Lucky Charms for the Thunderer). Tony rather liked this time with the team: even Thor respected the morning calm, and it was pleasant to relax together quietly for a short time, enjoying each other's company without any need for small talk. For somebody who developed a constant narration as a defence mechanism, it's...
"Stark, I just found a rat the size of a fucking chihuahua on top of my goddamn quiver. That's a practically new piece of kit I had to incinerate! You need to get a fucking bell for that thing."
...nice.
"He's trying to teach you to hunt," says Natasha, whom, as usual, Tony hadn’t noticed entering.
"I don't need any lessons in hunting from a fucking cyborg cat." Clint spat. To anyone who didn’t know her, Natasha would have seemed as impassive as ever, but Tony could see her microsmirk.
"You incinerated your quiver? For gosh sake, we could easily have sanitised it." Bruce hates waste.
"You didn't see it man. I swear to god — no offence Thor — the size of Paris Hilton's handbag dog, with a fucking repulsor burn and a broken neck for good measure. It was stiff. God knows how long it had been there. Probably already half putrefied." Clint's face practically inverts from the feeling of contamination. For an undercover assassin, he's surprisingly squeamish.
So much for the morning calm. Bruce cleared his throat.
"Seriously though Tony, this could be a problem. Iron Cat heads to Central Park pretty often. If he killed or even disturbed the nesting red-throated..."
"...loon, yeah, Fury filled me in. Look, it's annoying, but I should be able to fix it with a simple upgrade so the suit recognises when I.C.'s about to strike and blocks the..."
"Nay, I shall not stand by while you maim the beast!" Thor was on his feet, his face grim. "If he cannot fend for himself in the wilds, test his mettle against prey, then he shall be but half a cat."
"Central Park is an essential center for biodiversity and migratory..." Bruce starts, and Tony was all ready to point out that demilitarising a cat’s gold-titanium alloy exoskeleton is hardly the moral equivalent of a declaw, but Thor was in full flow.
"Ye have already torn his manhood — er, cathood — from him. Iron Cat shall have no heirs, and now he is to have no joy in the hunt?!" Outside, the mild blue sky began to cloud. To everyone's surprise, it was Hawkeye who came up with the solution.
"Look, so long as they don't end up on my stuff, I don't see the harm in him taking a few rats and pigeons. The city's overrun anyway. Just fix it so he can't decimate the red-throated spoons or whatever, and call it a day."
"That's doable," said Tony. “Pattern match the visual inputs to known endangered species within, say, a twenty mile radius…”
"I think better to make it inclusionary — there might be species we don't know about. And we can add protocols so that he doesn't bring his kills into the living areas." Bruce followed Tony to the lab.
The trickiest part of any press conference is picking the right suit. There are a number of factors to be considered: the tone, whom one is sharing the stage with, location. For example, after the Chitauri, he had chosen a sombre but understatedly flashy number, trimly fitted to his body by the hand of his favorite New York tailor. He'd felt sexy as hell (but still decently respectful) next to Cap in his wide shouldered service uniform. After all that unpleasantness in London, he'd paid a visit to Huntsman's and come out in subtly waisted French navy, a perfect counterpoint to the rest of the team. This one, he was taking on his own (after all, it was his cat). The tone could best be described as I can't believe I'm in a press conference to apologise for my cat.
He spotted the Gaultier. It looked orgasmic on him, obviously, but something about it, while expressed in the standard sartorial vernacular, was almost a sneer at the whole idea of wearing a suit. Yeah I look hot, but I'd look even better naked. it said. Perfect.
"Iron Cat — yeah, I know, dumb name, but it's stuck, and at least now he actually has a name. Plus, I once dated an underwear model who owned a Persian named Contessa Fluffy Britches, so dumb is relative — Iron Cat has been helping the City of New York with its considerable rat, feral pigeon and nuisance gull population, free of charge." He beamed beneficently.
Tony looked out at the crowd, scanning the banners. PETA. The American Birding Association. Two or three neighbourhood associations. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 831 (New York City Department of Sanitation).
"We won't be taking questions at this time."