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1.
The first time it happens Steve is just lying on his couch re-reading the first Harry Potter book. He might be 26 years old but he likes to remind himself of his roots. His roots being his twelve year old skinny small self running around the apartment and pretending to help his mum do the dishes with a self-made wand whilst wearing a blanket for a cloak. (Or not doing the dishes whilst wearing a blanket for a cloak and insisting that ‘no, mum, you can’t see me, this is an invisibility cloak!’.)
So yeah, he’s just winding down from an eventful day at work and his evening run, the window to his fire escape slightly open to let in some chilly September air, when-
“Meow.”
Steve freezes for a second, then looks up from the pages and over the back of the couch. And sure enough, there’s a slender cat squeezing its way through the gap between window and wall into his living room. It looks like most of the cats he sometimes sees on the street, except that its white short fur is so clean it's close to shining and she looks all around well-fed and not flea-infested. So, a domestic cat then. Breaking into his apartment.
Slowly, Steve puts the postcard from Natasha he got last week between the pages of his book and lays it on the coffee table. It’s not like he’s an expert on cats but he’s pretty sure that sudden movements scare them and lead to them running off and he’d prefer knowing the location of this cat so he doesn’t have to crawl around on all fours looking under furniture if it decides to hide from him.
Apparently, he’s being unnecessarily cautious, because the cat walks through his living room on silent paws and with its tail raised horizontally as if it owned the place. It only comes to a stop when it’s reached Steve on the couch.
“Hello there”, he greets it, keeping his voice low and almost involuntarily hunching in on himself a little, trying to make himself as unimposing as possible. Which is probably a futile attempt, considering he’s ‘200 pounds of golden all-American beefcake’. Peggy’s words, not his. He carefully outstretches his hand so it can sniff at it before deeming him a friendly human being worthy of its affection. Because that’s what it does, pressing close to Steve’s hand and starting to purr as soon as he begins to stroke her warm and soft fur.
Steve’s not sure what to make of this situation, but he’s been in worse so hey, this is cool and all.
Just as the cat makes to jump up on the couch to possibly settle on his lap and indulge in more thorough petting, the doorbell rings.
Suppressing a sigh, Steve gets up which causes the cat to move a foot away from him. Steve considers picking it up just so it won’t run off, but seeing as it doesn’t make an attempt at moving again (and his lack of knowledge about whether picking up a cat that you’ve only known for a few minutes is according to cat etiquette) he decides against it. It doesn’t keep him from looking over his shoulder a few times while he makes his way to the door.
He’s not sure what he expected but it sure as hell hadn’t been ‘stranger who looks inexplicably attractive in loose grey sweat pants and a black t-shirt’. Said stranger also looks pretty nervous as he rubs the back of his head with one hand and tapping out an anxious rhythm against his leg with the other. When he sees Steve open the door, the corners of his lips turn up into a small but tense smile.
“Hi”, he says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Uhm, sorry to bother you, but you wouldn’t happen to have seen a cat? White fur, green eyes, about this big?” He shows the approximate size of the cat in Steve’s apartment with his hands. “I, uh, wasn’t paying enough attention and I’m pretty sure I saw her basically climbing down the fire escape and I thought that maybe she got into your apartment?”
Well, that explains it.
Steve smiles in what he hopes is a reassuring way. “Yes, coincidentally, I happen to have such a cat sitting in front of my couch.”
He sees the man close his eyes and take a deep breath. “Oh thank god.” Then he looks back at Steve, this time with a crooked smile that makes his face look strangely adorable. “I only just moved here last week, but I didn’t think it would take this little time for her to give me trouble. Oh, I’m sorry”, he stretches out his hand, “I’m Bucky. As you might’ve guessed, I live in the apartment above you.”
Steve takes the offered hand and shakes it with his usual firm grip. “Nice to meet you, I’m Steve.”
“Yeah, I-”, Bucky points at the name sign next to the door, “kinda… got that.” He cringes. “Sorry. Uhm.”
Steve tries not to laugh, sure that Bucky would interpret it as making fun of him even though that would absolutely not be the case.
“Don’t worry. So I guess you want your cat back?”
Bucky gives a relieved nod. “Yes, that would be great.”
“Well, then please follow me.” Steve turns around, experiencing a brief moment of panic about whether he’s forgotten about any embarrassing items lying around on display, but then relaxes. He hasn’t been home enough since his last cleaning session to trash his place in a way that would be too much out of the ordinary. Except maybe for the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, but Bucky doesn’t have to see those, so it’s all good.
The cat is still sitting in front of his couch, calmly cleaning her paw as if this was just an everyday event and not her running away from her owner who obviously loves her very much.
Out of the corner of his eye, Steve can watch how Bucky lights up when he sees his cat, and when they are maybe two steps away from her, he crouches down. To Steve’s surprise, she immediately forgets about cleaning and gracefully stalks over to Bucky, letting him scratch her lightly behind her ears while purring.
“There you are, little devil”, Bucky murmurs. It’s not the same tone that Steve will hear when meeting pet owners, the one that adults use when speaking to infants. It’s only a little higher than his normal voice, and despite the insult, it’s laced with fondness.
It feels so much like an intimate moment that Steve’s almost too afraid to say a word, unwilling to disrupt it. But then Bucky picks up his cat and stands up again and the moment ends on its own.
“Is ‘little devil’ her name?” Steve asks. It’s starting to get weird to call her ‘the cat’ or ‘Bucky’s cat’ in his head.
It might just be a trick of the light but Steve’s fairly sure that Bucky’s cheeks redden a bit.
“Uh, no, it’s… Winter”, Bucky says and if he wasn’t carrying a cat in his arms, he’d probably go back to twitching. “I made the mistake of allowing my niece to name her. She’s four. Her first choice was ‘Blackie’.“ Steve snorts. “I think some horse in her favourite book is called that, but I put my foot down on that one. For obvious reasons.” Bucky smiles.
“Could be worse. And Winter is nice, I mean it definitely fits”, Steve replies, and before he can hold himself back he reaches out to run his hand over Winter’s soft fur once more. It takes a moment for him to realize that Bucky and him are standing really close. If he looked up, he could probably see Bucky’s eyelashes. Oh dear. And there’s silence, and it’s beginning to stretch and becoming awkward and weird and why is Steve not better at handling these kinds of situations?
Bucky clears his throat. “Uh, I should probably bring her back upstairs, before she starts realizing she’d rather stay here and fights tooth and claw to get her way.” He smiles apologetically.
“Yeah, sure, of course”, Steve agrees.
He accompanies Bucky to the door. In the doorway, Bucky turns around again. “Again, thank you. And... see you around, I guess. I’d wave, but-” he jerks his head towards Winter.
“That’s okay. See you around, Bucky.” Since he doesn’t have an armful of cat, Steve does wave, trying not to think about how dorky he surely must look. He lingers at the door for a bit longer than, if anyone asked, he’d admit. But the view is too nice to miss out on, he decides. And he gets to overhear Bucky’s hushed ‘don’t do that again’, except the way he says it makes it sound like ‘I wouldn’t mind you doing it again’. Steve silently agrees.
2.
Much to Steve’s amazement, it does happen again.
It takes a bit over a week, a week in which he greets Bucky whenever they run into each other in the hallways, elevator or staircase. There’s also that one memorable occasion where after baking cookies to try out a new recipe Sam strongly and very excitedly recommended to him, he decides to give some to Bucky. As a sort of house-warming gift or something. (“No, Peggy, I didn’t make too many on purpose. I didn’t plan this! It’s a new recipe, how was I supposed to know that i’d get enough to feed a small army!”)
Steve would probably be even more amazed if he was more awake. As it is, his alarm clock shows 2:13 am and it takes him a moment or two to find out what’s woken him up.
There’s a light weight on his feet and when he props himself up on his elbows he can see a small shape draped over his covered feet. The bit of light that comes in through the blinds makes the shape glow in an eerie white and just as Steve’s about to wonder if maybe the glass of water he drank before going to bed did smell a little funny and he’s starting to see ghosts, the shape emits a soft “meow” and begins to purr.
For good measure and just to make absolutely sure he’s not seeing things, he sits up properly, careful not to move his legs, and slowly reaches out. Nope, he’s not seeing things. The cat’s fur is just as soft as he remembers it and the purring definitely intensifies.
“Hey there, Winter”, Steve whispers, voice slurred with sleep. The answer is more purring, the vibration tickling his feet a little.
With his only half-awake brain he tries to think about what to do. It’s the middle of the night and Bucky’s surely asleep, he’s most likely not missing Winter right now. Is it worth waking him up at this hour? It’s not like Winter is bothering Steve. Actually, it’s quite nice.
In the end, he decides that it’s better to simply go back to sleep and wait until a more reasonable time to return his new bedfellow to its rightful owner.
Five hours later he opens his eyes to a white furry cat lying on his chest, paws tucked under her body, eyes closed and looking for all the world as if she won’t ever move again. The first thought that crosses Steve’s mind is ‘this is nice, I could get used to this’. The second though is ‘shit, I have to be at work in half an hour’. Needless to say, he’s a bit disappointed that he won’t get to indulge in this new waking up situation.
To his surprise, Winter doesn’t even make a lick of noise when he picks her up, and she doesn’t even struggle while he carries her out of his apartment and up the flight of stairs until he’s standing in front of the door of the apartment above him. The sign next to the door bell reads ‘James B. Barnes’ and Steve is momentarily confused until it occurs to him that, ‘Bucky’? Whose parents would actually name their kid ‘Bucky’? He’ll have to ask how that nickname came about. Later. After he’s dropped of the increasingly fidgety cat in his arms and got himself ready for work.
When Bucky opens the door, his hair is a disarrayed mess and his eyes are barely half open. And apparently he sleeps shirtless. Steve files that away for later, too.
“‘llo?” Bucky mumbles, rubbing eyes. Then his gaze becomes more and he takes in the sight before him. “Oh no.”
Steve can’t help himself. He starts laughing. Much to the displeasure of Winter, who twists and turns in his arms and he has to hand her over before she turns him into a living scratch post. Bucky just grins, and their hands touch when he takes Winter, and all in all it’s a pretty good morning. Even if Steve is five minutes late to work.
3.
“Seriously, I am so sorry, I don’t even know how she got out this time”, Bucky assures him, cheeks flushed, as he presses Winter to his chest. She’s not thrilled.
“No, it’s okay, don’t worry. Battle scars are back in style, or so I heard.” With his right hand Steve is dabbing at the lightly bleeding scratch on his chest, with his left hand he’ trying to keep the towel around his waist.
He had been taking a shower until the doorbell forced him to interrupt it. He’d just left the bathroom, towel hastily slung around his hips, when he discovered the reason for the interruption. On his couch sat a smug looking Winter, calmly cleaning herself.
Without much thought Steve had picked her up, which she had immediately and loudly objected to. In the ensuing struggle, her sharp claws had dug into his bare chest, leaving him cursing under his breath just as he’d opened the door for a slightly distressed looking Bucky.
When Steve looks up from the scratches, he catches Bucky staring at him. At his currently naked torso, specifically. And, okay, the thing is, Steve knows he’s fit, he knows he’s attractive, and people have told him so, more than once. But his mind hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be small and skinny and always the one no one wanted on their team in gym class, if he was able to participate at all, that is. So he doesn’t know what to think about Bucky staring at him like that. Is it because he’s interested in Steve in a different way than ‘my cat keeps breaking into your apartment so I obviously have to talk to you to get her back’? Or is it more a look of horror because said devilish cat has just injured the one person whose kindness Bucky has to rely on to get his cat back alive?
Bucky’s flush deepens as soon as he realizes he’s been caught. He clears his throat, looks at his cat, then at Steve.
“How can I make it up to you?”
Steve makes a dismissive gesture. “You don’t have to. Really. It’s not a big deal.”
“My cat has basically committed burglary and mangled you. The least I can do is invite you to coffee or lunch or something.”
“Well”, Steve smiles, “if you insist.”
4.
A week has passed since their coffee… meeting? date? rendezvous? Steve isn’t sure what exactly it was, only that he enjoyed himself a lot, and so must’ve Bucky, judging from the amount of times he laughed and how relaxed he had seemed. They’ve met almost every day, exchanging quick ‘hi, how are you?’s in the elevator and that one time when they’d both been about to go running and spontaneously decided to go together, since Steve was much more familiar with the area. (He’d been surprised to find that Bucky could keep up with his pace, quite easily even.)
It had taken a lot of encouraging words from Peggy and Sam and a small pep talk from himself, but eventually he’d worked up the nerve to ask Bucky to come over to watch a movie. Finding out that Bucky hadn’t watched any of the Star Trek movies might have also played a part in that.
However, when Friday night rolls around and he opens his door to Bucky holding Winter, he is a little taken aback.
“Figured I’d just take her with me, since she’d just find her way in anyway”, Bucky says, crooked smile on his face.
“Huh”, Steve says. Then: “good thinking”, and lets both of them in.
While they make popcorn and get beer and get everything ready, Winter sniffs excitedly around his apartment, no doubt looking for more spaces she can lie down and claim as her throne. Or whatever cats think about their favourite spots.
They’re five minutes into the movie when Winter stalks over to where they’re sitting comfortably on the couch, elegant and nearly inaudible as always. With a graceful leap she jumps on to the couch and, instead of settling in the small space between them or maybe on Bucky, as Steve expects her to, she comes to him and kneads his legs for a moment before getting comfortable in his lap.
“I can’t believe this”, Bucky grumbles without taking his eyes away from the screen. “You little traitor. You have disappointed this family.”
Steve chuckles and begins running his free hand, the one that isn’t holding a beer bottle, over Winter’s fur. She relaxes even further, her purring quickly picking up in volume.
“Guess she likes me more than you. I’m basically the cool uncle. Let her visit more often and I’ll spoil her rotten.” He can’t keep the smugness out of his voice.
“Don’t encourage her”, Bucky warns.
“Sorry, can’t help it. Clearly, I’m irresistable.”
Bucky snorts, then bites his lip, as if to keep himself from blurting out words he might regret.
“You know”, Steve says after a short silence. “I could get used to spoiling both the cat and its owner.”
Bucky freezes. Then breaks out into laughter. “That was terrible.”
“Maybe.” Steve shrugs, unable to keep the grin off his face. “Still true, though.”
“I’ll keep it in mind”, Bucky says, and quickly leans over to scratch Winter behind her ears. She’s exhilarated.
Leaning back and focusing on the tv again, Bucky frowns. “Okay, sorry, but what happened during the last five minutes? I’m completely lost.”
+1
They’re on Bucky’s couch, the DVD menu of the fourth Star Trek repeating itself over and over, and Steve’s not really sure how they got here. Not how he got here, in Bucky’s apartment and on the couch, he knows how that happened. What he can’t really remember is how he ended up half-lying on Bucky, one leg between Bucky’s, bodies flush together. Or how Bucky’s mouth ended up on his, or how his fingers found their way into Bucky’s hair. Not that he’s complaining. Hell no, he’s not complaining.
Someone else is though.
“Meow”, comes the urgent protest from somewhere on the floor and then there’s a sudden weight on Steve’s back.
Bucky breaks the kiss. “Oh God”, he groans. “You are the literal worst, you demon cat. What is wrong with you?”
Steve lets his head drop onto Bucky’s shoulder and tries to stifle a laugh when the only response is an even more offended sounding “meow”. He fails.
“Et tu, Brute?” Bucky says, and pokes him in the side. “And here I thought you were totally on board with this making out thing we’ve got going.”
“Oh no, trust me, I am”, Steve reassures him, voice slightly muffled from Bucky’s shirt. Winter starts kneading his back, claws digging through his clothes and into his skin. “But you have to admit, it’s a little funny.”
“The day I find my cat interrupting quality make out time funny is the day I die, Steve.”
Naturally, Steve has to laugh again, Winter on his back meowing disapprovingly.
“Okay, here’s an idea”, Bucky begins, “my bedroom door has a lock. Sound good?””
“Sounds amazing”, Steve confirms, lifting his head and smiling brightly.
“Bedroom it is”, Bucky declares, reaching around Steve’s upper body to shove Winter off.
Just as they close the door, they catch a glimpse of Winter trying to get comfortable on the couch. Steve’s not sure if cats can frown, but if they could, Winter definitely would be frowning in disapproval.
Neither Bucky nor he find it in themselves to care, though.