Chapter Text
“We’re not slaves to our biology, Sam,” Steve said. He wasn’t looking at Sam, instead he was scanning the park. How was it that a four-foot-at-the-shoulder-with-a-metal-front-paw fucking timber wolf could hide. In a park? In New York City? How was that even a thing.
“You might not be,” Sam said, his voice completely registering doubt and sarcasm, “but Tony is the most cat-like cat I’ve ever met. He comes into the room just so he can prove how much he’s ignoring you.”
“You’re just sore ‘cause he pounces on you,” Steve pointed out. Where the hell was Bucky? He shouldn’t worry so much, but the last time he took eyes off his best friend, Bucky had been dead for seventy years.
“Well, it’s a lot more annoying when he does it in his wyr form,” Sam said. “I still got claw marks on my shoulder.”
Steve blinked at that. “I would think it was more annoying in his human form.” Steve still found it weird to be claimed, the way Tony did it, rubbing up against his teammates from time to time. Mine mine mine. Except for that bit over there. You can have that.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said, brushing it off. “Point is, Tony’s feline, and Barnes is a wolf. It’s never gonna work out, and you need to tell him before Tony starts asserting himself and your friend ends up without a roof over his head.”
“Don’t be such a speciest, Sam,” Steve said. “After all, I’m feline, and you’re a bird.”
“Don’t give me that. I know what you were before Project Rebirth,” Sam said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re more avian than you like to admit.”
“Still am,” Steve said. Project Rebirth had done some interesting things to him, given him a much larger human form, and transformed his wyr from the scrawny little aggressive chickenhawk that he’d been born with into a cross between his and Stark’s DNA, making him into the first gryphon in living memory. Half lion, half eagle, his wyr was nearly the size of an SUV. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to pounce on your ass, from time to time, myself.”
Sam uttered a completely charmed and startled laugh. “You need to up your flirt game, man,” he said. “I don’t even know what to do with that.”
Steve ducked his chin. “That’s not what you said last night.”
Sam shoved him, which of course did absolutely nothing. Steve was a rock, even when he didn’t have his feet set.
“They’ll work it out,” Steve said. “Or they won’t. But I’m not gonna take Bucky aside and tell him that he can’t have Tony because of some ridiculously outdated notion of cats-and-dogs.”
Sam threw up his hands. “Cats and dogs, living together. Mass hysteria.”
“All right, all right, I get the point,” Steve said. “I’ll… mention it. Or something.”
***
Tony took the whole idea of catnaps to their ultimate expression. Mr I can fall asleep anywhere as long as it’s not bed was on the top of the fridge again. Which was all well and good for him, except he always snapped awake as soon as Bucky came into the room.
Bucky’d been trying, he’d really been trying to not be in his wyr whenever he was in the Tower. Four hundred pounds of timber wolf was intimidating to just about everyone, but when Bucky could have swallowed Tony by yawning, well, let’s just say that Bucky had been pretty depressed, watching Tony flee the room, his fur sticking up in every direction.
Even puffed up to full size, Tony’s wyr probably only weighed in at twelve pounds or so. Large for a housecat, but he was definitely a second-tier predator.
Tony lazily opened one golden eye as Bucky stopped dead in the kitchen door, the tip of his tail twitching. That flat, you-blink-first stare was disconcerting as hell and made Bucky want to check when he’d last taken a shower. He nervously ran a hand through his hair
“Hey, Tony,” Bucky said. He blinked, once, twice. Steve had told him that would help, a bit, even if he didn’t understand it. Tony’s eye slid closed again. “I just… was hungry.”
Tony made a dismissive sort of tail flick, stood up, turned aaaaall the way around in a circle and curled up again, facing the other direction.
Right.
Bucky sighed. Rather than opening the fridge and digging through it for something red and raw that would satisfy his inner wolf, he grabbed bread and some of those nasty nut spreads that the avians in the building liked so much. It was protein, it would fill him up even if he’d probably have to go hunting again. At this rate, he was going to have to drop in on a feral pack and see if he could join in on an elk run or something.
Tony stretched, arching his back. He licked one black-furred paw and wiped his face. His wyr form was tiny, adorable, with almost solid-black silky fur, save for the white patch at his chest and Bucky had the worst time with temptation. He wanted to pick Tony up and cuddle him, which Bucky was almost positive would not be well-received at all. Cats were like liquid; Tony finished his stretch and slid off the top of the fridge, landing lightly on all fours, somehow going through the shift in the half-second it took for gravity to catch him.
Tony’s eyes, golden-brown now, rather than luminous, flicked from the sandwich to Bucky’s face and then he shrugged. If Tony still had a tail in his human form, Bucky would have imagined the tip flicking as he strode out of the room. Bucky sighed. Once again, he’d managed to offend, just by existing.
Maybe Steve was right. Cats and dogs just didn’t get along. Depressing.
So was his lunch. He stared down at the utterly unappetizing sandwich. Hydra had fed him things like that, bean pastes and nutritional shakes that had no tang of blood, no hint of having ever once been alive.
***
Bucky stared down at his bed.
The door had been locked when he left; he’d had to use his thumb to open the door, same as always. No one else was allowed in his personal space.
And yet…
Bucky looked around, over each shoulder as if he was being watched. He never quite could get over the feeling that Hydra was just waiting. Nothing. Even in his human form, his nose was keen; he didn’t smell anything that wasn’t as usual. The various scents of the other Avengers who lived in the Tower… and now that he was concentrating. Blood. Meat, raw and still warm.
Bucky let his wolf take him, shaking into his fur and fangs. His spine rippled into the new form, a dark fire that burned and soothed. His head dropped, lengthened. Hips snapped and formed. His tail sprouted, claws popped out of fingers that curled up into paws. He finished the shift, sat down on his haunches, panting. With his mouth open, smell was even greater than normal and he was salivating at the taste of the air.
He checked his six again, then pounced.
The freshly dead bird disappeared in three bites.
God. Meat.
He hiccupped, spitting out a few feathers.
Usually after a meal, Bucky liked to curl up and sleep, but Steve was supposed to come by later and they were going to all go out to the movies, and Steve would probably be offended if he found evidence of dead bird in Bucky’s room, despite the fact that Steve hadn’t been avian for decades, and Bucky had to eat, right? Whatever.
He shifted back, feeling pleasantly full and sleepy. He dumped what was left of the carcass in his trash and changed the sheets.
Bucky bent over the fabric, pulled it right up to his nose. Mostly what he could smell was blood, but under it… cat.
Tony?
***
“Oh, my god, no licking, Bucky, no,” Tony exclaimed, shoving at the giant wolf that suddenly bounded into his workshop. He pointed to a spot on the floor just in front of him, rather desperate. “Sit!”
Bucky issued a short whine from the back of his throat and then sat the fuck down like he was a damn golden retriever or something, complete with the little paw twitches that indicated he wanted to move around but was too well-behaved to do so.
It should not have been charming. Really. Someone, somewhere, was going to take away Tony’s license to cat.
Tony heaved a great sigh, doing his best to look utterly exasperated and not like this was cute, because it was not.
Bucky whined again and dropped something, which landed on the floor with a clatter.
“We’re at fetch, now?” Tony rolled his eyes and prodded at the thing with the toe of one designer shoe. At least he’d put it in a ziplock before bringing it downstairs as some sort of concession to Tony not being thrilled, at all, about dog drool. He blinked, looked at the toy inside the bag, and blinked again. “Where did you get this?”
Bucky wagged his tail a few times, then shifted. He was a slow shifter, to the point where Tony could see the hair sinking back on his face, letting the skin show thought, until the gray and black furred wolf was gone and the man remained. He twisted his metal arm once as the quicksilver molded and reshaped itself. He probably had to shift slow, just to keep the limb from snapping off as it transitioned from one shape to the other. Could have been worse.
Tony pressed his hand to the spot where his arc-reactor had once been. The whole time he’d had the arc-reactor inside his chest, he’d been unable to shift at all; the palladium couldn’t transition with him and it would have killed him to try the shift. Four years of being without the bliss and ease of living in his natural skin and it nearly killed him anyway.
“Ebay,” Bucky said, and Tony blinked back to the conversation.
“This is a limited edition Robby the Robot,” Tony said, taking the slightly worn box out of the bag. “Like new.”
“Yeah,” Bucky said. “I missed that movie, first time round. Caught it on late night Syfy last weekend. Thought it might be somethin’ you were into.” He shrugged, trying to be indifferent, but it wasn’t a good look on him. He was too excitable for that and eventually leaned over against Tony’s shoulder to read the back of the box with him.
“Thank you,” Tony said, honestly, touched. “What did I do to deserve presents?”
Bucky tilted his head. Tony was a bad person, he was, because whenever a canine did that around him, he became unbelievably tempted to find a gramophone to shove under their ear. “You’ve been leavin’ me birds, haven’t you?”
Tony shifted his gaze to one side. “You don’t eat right,” he said. “I was worried that Hydra might have interfered with your ability to hunt.”
“Wolves are pack hunters,” Bucky said, soft. “I don’t have anyone to hunt with, anymore.”
“You live with the apexiest apex hunter in existence,” Tony pointed out. “Doesn’t Steve go hunting all the time?”
“I am not going to sit on Steve’s back while he flies off to some forest in the middle of Pennsylvania to eat half a herd of deer,” Bucky said. “I like keepin’ my feet on the ground.”
Tony finally looked over at Bucky, met those gray eyes. He blinked, slow and easy. “Well, if that dislike of travel doesn’t apply to cars, I know where there’s a really nice rabbit warren, just over the bridge on the far side of Jersey. I can chase rabbits right to you.”
Bucky lit up like someone had offered a kid an ice cream. “Oh, really? Would you, that would be swell!”
“No licking!” Tony took a hasty step backward, then, as Bucky’s face fell, he put a hand on the man’s arm. “Kissing is okay. I do that.”
So, the kiss was a little wetter and somewhat more enthusiastic than the ones he was used to, but Tony could work with it. Yeah. This could be good.