Chapter Text
When Bucky Barnes ran out of food, he did it in style. There was literally nothing in his pantry that wasn’t an ingredient (chicken stock or flour or sugar) or a condiment (capers, pimentos, mustard, vinegar) but nothing to make an actual meal with. Even the half empty boxes of pasta were gone, sacrificed to a careful array of timers as he added different sorts of pasta to the pot and dosed the whole thing with butter and grated cheese and called it food.
“Fuck,” he said. He was going to have to give up, put on pants and shoes and go to the fucking store.
The worst thing was, he was actually freaking hungry. Like, stomach crawling out of his throat to go hunt down the wild cup o’ soup, can’t wait for take-out hungry.
He couldn’t possibly go to the grocery like that, he’d end up with fifty boxes of Twinkies and a 20-pack of ramen. And an apple, if he was feeling particularly guilty about his terrible life choices, that he wouldn’t remember he had and would go bad in his fruit bowl.
Oh, wait. Apples.
Bucky bounced up onto his toes and shoved the bag of flour out of the way. He’d had some plans -- he always made plans, and he just never fucking followed through -- of making an apple tart. Which meant-- Aha! Yes! Score! A can of apple-pie filling.
He didn’t have the time or inclination to actually make a pie crust, although he did know how, and he had some butter in the fridge. Maybe next time. He dug around in his utensil drawer and opened the can of pie filling. He was still chasing the overly sugary and cinnamon-spiced fruit around the bottom of the can when the doorbell rang.
Bucky shuffled over to the door. No one ever came to visit and rang the bell; Steve had a key. The UPS driver often did a ring and run, and while Bucky couldn’t remember ordering anything off the internet recently, he had been known to do depression-based insomnia-fueled Amazon Prime therapy sometimes. That was always kinda like Christmas, because Bucky never remembered doing it until the banana slicer or whatever it was actually arrived.
So when he opened the door to a man wearing a three-piece suit, Bucky didn’t quite know what to do.
“Um…”
The man looked him up and down. And then up again. Bucky might… not have been wearing pants. Yeah. Bathrobe with the long sleeves that covered his scarred left arm, tee, boxers, and his stuffed animal shark slippers that his sister gave him as a joke and he wore specifically to piss her off.
Bucky leaned against his doorframe. “Yeah?”
“Look, okay, probably a bad time, but my normal pet-sitter is out of town, and I don’t have anyone else I can ask, and um, I don’t have time to make arrangements for kenneling, and I was wondering -- it really is an emergency -- if you could just feed my cat for a few days while I’m out of town?”
Bucky stared at the guy. He was gorgeous, in an upper crust sort of way, with a fancy-trimmed little goatee and a pair of pale orange sunglasses that should have clashed with the three-piece button up he was wearing and somehow didn’t.
“Do I know you?” That probably wasn’t the best question in the world, because no, of course Bucky didn’t know this guy. Bucky didn’t… do people for the most part.
“Um, probably not?” the guy said. “I’m Tony. Tony Stark. I live in your neighboring unit.” He pointed to the door next to Bucky’s. There were twelve units total in Bucky’s building, but Bucky usually kept his ball cap on and his head down whenever he left the building at all, so he mostly didn’t recognize his neighbors, except by their footwear. Speaking of… he let his gaze drift downward. He didn’t know those shoes, but he’d recognize those legs anywhere. Yep. Next door neighbor. The one with the great ass.
“Bucky Barnes,” he introduced himself, because that’s what you did when someone gave you their name. It was automatic. Instinct.
Shit. Now he’d actually spoken to a neighbor, which meant said neighbor would probably want to talk to him again, and while this particular neighbor didn’t seem too bad -- especially when Bucky could watch him walk away -- that would mean other neighbors might start talking to him and… well, maybe Steve could help him get a new place.
Bucky deliberately didn’t think about the fact that Steve would probably not help him get a new place if he said he wanted to avoid talking to his neighbors. Steve had been adamant that Bucky wasn’t going to leave the city and live somewhere as a hermit out in the middle of nowhere where Steve couldn’t at least ocme drag him out of the house once a week.
Not to mention the fact that wanting to move just so he didn’t have to talk to the neighbor -- the incredibly hot, exactly Bucky’s type neighbor -- was just pathetic.
Bucky wasn’t quite willing to admit, even to Steve, that he’d moved all the way from bad-coping mechanisms to pathetic.
“So, can you? I mean, feed the cat?”
“You’re gonna let a perfect stranger into your house,” Bucky commented idly. “What if I turn out to be a psycho?”
“First, you are a perfect stranger,” Tony said, and Bucky was left blinking trying to figure out what that meant. “Second, if you were a psycho, you probably wouldn’t have brought it up. Third, and maybe you missed this part, but I know where you live.”
“Well, yeah,” Bucky said, reasonably. “And there’s probably not enough stuff in your place to make it worth the effort of robbing you and then moving out.” Wasn’t he just thinking about moving out, though, because he was talking to the neighbor? Except there was something kinda nice about talking to this guy. Not quite like talking to Steve, but nice. Not nerve-wracking, weirdly enough.
Tony checked his watch, then grinned. “Just the fact that you’ve already thought of that should worry me.”
You shouldn’t be worried. Bucky didn’t say that. “Okay, so what do you want me to do?”
“Come on, come over,” Tony said. He reached out and grabbed Bucky’s wrist, which under most normal circumstances would have had Bucky yanking backward to retreat into his unit. He might even have pushed the desk in front of the front door for a while; forget food, retreat into his sanctum and shudder.
But Tony didn’t set off all those alarms in his head, and just the fact that it didn’t made Bucky’s breath come a little faster.
Bucky got the fastest tour of Tony’s place imaginable. “Here’s the kitchen, there’s the food, here’s feeding instructions. Don’t worry about the litter, I have an automated scooper, a total piece of shit, ha ha, that was a pun, but I did some upgrades to it and now it’s quite efficient and doesn’t scare her.”
“Does she need company?” Bucky asked. He didn’t know much about cats, but Steve’s boyfriend had a dog, and the dog got lonely enough during the day that Clint had eventually had to get a pet-walker to come by the apartment twice a day while the two of them were at work, and on date night, Clint took the dog to a doggy day-care.
“Well, U won’t mind. She’s a lap kitty, but if you don’t want to get covered in orange fur, she’ll be okay for a few days on her own.”
“You named your cat… You?”
“U, like the letter. I dunno, when she was a kitten, I just called her Hey You while I was waiting for something to occur to me. She’s got an official name on her vet records and stuff -- Butterfingers -- but I just still call her U most of the time, so… eh, what can I say?”
“Fair enough,” Bucky said.
“Anyway, here’s a copy of the key, here’s my cell phone number. Text me or something right away so I have your number. Not sure when I’m going to be back, business can be tricky sometimes, but it shouldn’t be more than a week, okay? Okay. Thank you very much.”
***
Tony had said the cat was orange, but what Bucky was expecting and what he got were two entirely different things.
Bucky was expecting an orange tabby, what his Ma had called marmalade, like Garfield was, theoretically.
What he got was a plush, red Abyssinian cat with huge green eyes and fur the color of the edge of sunset, dark orange, almost red, with black tips. The cat pounced on him almost immediately when he entered the house by himself, grabbing hold of his calf with fat, soft paws, claws absolutely nowhere in evidence and a throaty, rusty sort of meow.
“Hello,” Bucky said to the cat. “Hungry?”
The cat gave an answering meow, which seemed like a good enough answer, so Bucky went in the kitchen and attempted to figure out the food. There were a lot of instructions written down on a sheet of paper, which Bucky read slowly. U did not appreciate the delay at all, batting at the end of Bucky’s bathrobe and yowing piteously at the delay.
Finally, directions interpreted, Bucky gave the cat her half can of food, plus two treats and a shake of “food seasoning and vitamins” on top. “You eat better than I do,” Bucky commented, putting the bowl down. The cat was soon eating noisily, but when Bucky turned to leave the kitchen, she cried and chased after him, following him all the way back to the door.
“What? I fed you,” Bucky protested.
“Yow!”
Bucky took a picture of the cat and texted it to Tony. Your cat doesn’t want to eat.
U got between Bucky and the door, stropping against Bucky’s legs and nipping at his ankle whenever he tried to open the door.
New Text from Tony:
She’s a social eater. Go keep her company while she eats, if you have time. Otherwise, she’ll eat when she gets hungry.
“You want me to sit with you while you eat? Seriously?”
“Yowwwwww.”
Fine, whatever. Bucky trudged back into Tony’s neat little kitchen and pulled out a chair. Satisfied, the cat went back to her bowl and started eating, making little pleased, purring noises.
Your cat is weird.
New text from Tony:
Like owner, like pet, I imagine.
You’re a social eater? Bucky texted back.
New text from Tony:
I eat with my cat almost every night, so yeah, I guess? Pepper says it’s good for me, I wasn’t eating much before I got the cat. Therapy, I guess.
Bucky looked around Tony’s kitchen, then curiosity got the better of him and he found himself peeking in the cabinets and fridge. You could learn a lot about people by what they kept in their kitchens and medicine cabinets.
Unlike Bucky, Tony was stocked for some unknown zombie outbreak. Tony had tinned varieties of just about everything, including tinned chicken and tuna, peaches, pears, and jars of chunked pineapple, canned sliced potatoes, jars of pickles, a veritable mountain of jarred spagetti sauces, plastic containers of individual servings of pudding (chocolate and butterscotch), multiple packages of bread-maker breads, individual microwavable mug-cakes, four flats of bottled water.
Okay, I know I’m being nosy, but what the hell? Are you expecting a shortage in tinned tuna?
New text from Tony:
I have anxiety. Buying food seems to help. There’s some leftover pizza in the fridge, if you want it. It’ll probably go stale before I’m home.
Well, so there was. Bucky grinned, delighted.
You eat pineapple on pizza.
New text from Tony:
Yeah, I’m a heathen, I know.
You’re my new best friend and I love you. He probably shouldn’t send that, so Bucky contented himself with, Nah, I like it. My favorite.
Bucky helped himself to the rest of the pizza while U finished her dinner. Then washed her paws and face. Then jumped in Bucky’s lap and turned around a few times, eventually falling asleep with her head on Bucky’s knee.
He took another picture and texted it to Tony. Help. I’m trapped.
New text from Tony:
Ask her if there’s a squirrel at the window.
“Um U,” Bucky said, hesitant. “Tony wants to know if there’s a squirrel at the window.”
The cat was up and out of his lap the instant the word squirrel came out of his mouth. She raced across the kitchen and over to the double-window in the living room, making a little chut-chut sort of noise, tail lashing.
Huh. Neat trick.
New text from Tony:
You should see it when there’s actually a squirrel there.