#u put sunglasses and bell bottoms on with that shit

[buttered-toasty]

Your honor in my defense he and I have the Exact same hair type and color. What was I supposed to do with that information. Not this? I don’t think so

Or: eddie in hairstyles I’ve had over the years

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I let these sit on my phone for three days weeks (! Jesus fucking Christ) because I just thought really hard about posting and gaslit myself into thinking I did when. I did not, in fact. And then writing alt text took a hot minute

[imaginetonyandbucky]

Bucky leaving his cat at Tony's place for a few days and when he takes the cat back it takes every opportunity to run away to Tony's house. Tony spoiled it buying expensive toys and food during the days he took care of it. Solition: move in together.

A/N: Title and idea taken from Old 97’s song bythe same name. Dear prompter, sorry I switched the character relationshipsaround, but @27dragons recently wrote a story with Bucky’s cat that liked Tony,so I didn’t want to copy that. Also, the idea got away from me, so this story will be divided in three parts (like all of Rome)

Murder (or a Heart Attack)

Part One

When Bucky Barnes ran out of food, he did it in style. There wasliterally nothing in his pantry that wasn’t an ingredient (chicken stock orflour or sugar) or a condiment (capers, pimentos, mustard, vinegar) but nothingto 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 tothe pot and dosed the whole thing with butter and grated cheese and called itfood.

“Fuck,” he said. He was going to have to give up, put on pants andshoes 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’twait for take-out hungry.

He couldn’t possibly go to the grocery like that, he’d end up withfifty boxes of Twinkies and a 20-pack of ramen. And an apple, if he was feelingparticularly guilty about his terrible life choices, that he wouldn’t rememberhe 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 ofthe way. He’d had some plans – he always made plans, and he just never fuckingfollowed through – of making an apple tart. Which meant– Aha! Yes! Score! Acan of apple-pie filling.

He didn’t have the time or inclination to actually make a piecrust, although he did know how, and he had some butter in the fridge. Maybenext time. He dug around in his utensil drawer and opened the can of piefilling. He was still chasing the overly sugary and cinnamon-spiced fruitaround the bottom of the can when the doorbell rang.

Bucky shuffled over to the door. No one ever came to visit andrang the bell; Steve had a key. The UPS driver often did a ring and run, andwhile Bucky couldn’t remember ordering anything off the internet recently, hehad been known to do depression-based insomnia-fueled Amazon Prime therapysometimes. That was always kinda like Christmas, because Bucky never remembereddoing 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 coveredhis scarred left arm, tee, boxers, and his stuffed animal shark slippers thathis 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 outof town, and I don’t have anyone else I can ask, and um, I don’t have time tomake arrangements for kenneling, and I was wondering – it really is anemergency – if you could just feed my cat for a few days while I’m out oftown?”

Bucky stared at the guy. He was gorgeous, in an upper crust sortof way, with a fancy-trimmed little goatee and a pair of pale orange sunglassesthat should have clashed with the three-piece button up he was wearing andsomehow didn’t.

Mobile readers, more below the break. You can read all of tisfan’s stuff on A03 eventually

“Do I know you?” That probably wasn’t the best question in theworld, because no, of course Bucky didn’t know this guy. Bucky didn’t… dopeople for the most part.

“Um, probably not?” the guy said. “I’m Tony. Tony Stark. I live inyour neighboring unit.” He pointed to the door next to Bucky’s. There weretwelve units total in Bucky’s building, but Bucky usually kept his ball cap onand his head down whenever he left the building at all, so he mostly didn’trecognize his neighbors, except by their footwear. Speaking of… he let his gazedrift downward. He didn’t know those shoes, but he’d recognize those legsanywhere. Yep. Next door neighbor. The one with the great ass.

“Bucky Barnes,” he introduced himself, because that’s what you didwhen someone gave you their name. It was automatic. Instinct.

Shit. Now he’d actually spoken to a neighbor, which meant saidneighbor would probably want to talk to him again, and while this particularneighbor 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, maybeSteve could help him get a new place.

Bucky deliberately didn’t think about the fact that Steve wouldprobably not help him get a new place if he said he wanted to avoid talking tohis neighbors. Steve had been adamant that Bucky wasn’t going to leave the cityand live somewhere as a hermit out in the middle of nowhere where Stevecouldn’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’thave to talk to the neighbor – the incredibly hot, exactly Bucky’s typeneighbor – was just pathetic.

Bucky wasn’t quite willing to admit, even to Steve, that he’dmoved 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,” Buckycommented idly. “What if I turn out to be a psycho?”

“First, you are a perfect stranger,” Tony said, and Bucky was leftblinking 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 thispart, but I know where you live.”

“Well, yeah,” Bucky said, reasonably. “And there’s probably notenough stuff in your place to make it worth the effort of robbing you and thenmoving out.” Wasn’t he just thinking about moving out, though, because he wastalking to the neighbor? Except there was something kinda nice about talking tothis 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’vealready 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 grabbedBucky’s wrist, which under most normal circumstances would have had Buckyyanking backward to retreat into his unit. He might even have pushed the deskin front of the front door for a while; forget food, retreat into his sanctumand shudder.

But Tony didn’t set off all those alarms in his head, and just thefact that it didn’t made Bucky’s breath come a little faster.

Bucky got the fastest tour of Tony’s place imaginable. “Here’s thekitchen, there’s the food, here’s feeding instructions. Don’t worry about thelitter, I have an automated scooper, a total piece of shit, ha ha, that was apun, but I did some upgrades to it and now it’s quite efficient and doesn’tscare her.”

“Does she need company?” Bucky asked. He didn’t know much aboutcats, but Steve’s boyfriend had a dog, and the dog got lonely enough during theday that Clint had eventually had to get a pet-walker to come by the apartmenttwice a day while the two of them were at work, and on date night, Clint tookthe dog to a doggy day-care.

“Well, U won’t mind. She’s a lap kitty, but if you don’t want toget 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 calledher Hey You while I was waiting for something to occur to me. She’s got anofficial name on her vet records and stuff – Butterfingers – but I just stillcall 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 goingto be back, business can be tricky sometimes, but it shouldn’t be more than aweek, okay? Okay. Thank you very much.”

Tony had said the cat was orange, but what Bucky was expecting andwhat he got were two entirely different things.

Bucky was expecting an orange tabby, what his Ma had calledmarmalade, like Garfield was, theoretically.

What he got was a plush, red Abyssinian cat with huge green eyesand fur the color of the edge of sunset, dark orange, almost red, with blacktips. The cat pounced on him almost immediately when he entered the house byhimself, grabbing hold of his calf with fat, soft paws, claws absolutelynowhere 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 enoughanswer, 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 Buckyread slowly. U did not appreciate the delay at all, batting at the end ofBucky’s bathrobe and yowing piteously at the delay.

Finally, directions interpreted, Bucky gave the cat her half canof 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 wassoon eating noisily, but when Bucky turned to leave the kitchen, she cried andchased 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 catdoesn’t want to eat.

U got between Bucky and the door, stropping against Bucky’s legsand 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 youhave 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 kitchenand pulled out a chair. Satisfied, the cat went back to her bowl and startedeating, 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? Peppersays it’s good for me, I wasn’t eating much before I got the cat. Therapy, Iguess.

Bucky looked around Tony’s kitchen, then curiosity got the betterof him and he found himself peeking in the cabinets and fridge. You could learna 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 chickenand tuna, peaches, pears, and jars of chunked pineapple, canned slicedpotatoes, jars of pickles, a veritable mountain of jarred spagetti sauces,plastic containers of individual servings of pudding (chocolate andbutterscotch), multiple packages of bread-maker breads, individual microwavablemug-cakes, four flats of bottled water.

Okay, I know I’m being nosy, but what the hell? Are you expectinga shortage in tinned tuna?

New text from Tony:

I have anxiety. Buying food seems to help. There’s some leftoverpizza 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 herdinner. Then washed her paws and face. Then jumped in Bucky’s lap and turnedaround a few times, eventually falling asleep with her head on Bucky’s knee.

He took another picture and texted it to Tony. Help. I’mtrapped.

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 asquirrel at the window.”

The cat was up and out of his lap the instant the word squirrelcame out of his mouth. She raced across the kitchen and over to thedouble-window in the living room, making a little chut-chut sort of noise, taillashing.

Huh. Neat trick.

New text from Tony:

You should see it when there’s actually a squirrel there.

To Be Continued