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Nat is not really a cat person, or a dog person, or a person person, although for fairly obvious reasons she’s okay with birds sometimes, but she likes to look at cats, at least. They're interesting. They live with humans but they haven't forgotten themselves like dogs have.
One day she’s going to ground (Nat doesn’t really go home anywhere tbh) and she hears a cat.
Now if you know cats, there is a sound they make when they’re impatient and irritated at human stupidity. It’s not a distress signal, it’s just like WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO ME, STUPID HUMAN, somewhere between a yowl and a chrrll. It’s like the sound they make just before they jump on your lap, the “ready or not, make me a fuckin pillow” one, only, you know, banshee-ized. It sounds a bit like a baby yelling for attention because bored, come to think of it, which I hear is something cats actually evolved to deal with us. “Huh the infant human makes that noise and gets attention. Huh.”
She turns around and a scrabbly looking tabby with a bum paw limps up to her, scolding vigorously, and Nat looks around to see if anybody might have a claim to this small creature that doesn’t seem scared of her at all, and then she squats down, and the cat stops casually just out of reach and they look at each other for a while out of the corner of their eyes. The paw looks pretty bad.
Natasha puts out her fist, still not looking at anything in particular. The cat sniffs it, thinks about it, and rubs the side of her head against it, casually keeping an eye on Nat in case of any sudden moves.
“You don’t have a home,” says Nat, finally. “I am going to pick you up, cat, and take you to the doctor.”
The cat lets her pick her up.
--
A day or two later Nat arrives at the Tower with the cat riding her shoulder like a mobile attack tower. The paw looks a lot better, and the cat has been bathed (under protest) and bathed herself. She has gleaming white fur with tabby patches and her tail is curled around Nat’s neck.
“What,” says Tony, “what the fuck is that, why is it coming into my tower.”
“It’s a cat,” says Steve, looking up from his paperwork. He has a lot of paper work now. More than you would expect, although Steve has spent a lot of quality time, just him and his Army paperwork and Bucky Barnes snoring gently amongst the bedbugs. Bucky Barnes is in Brooklyn today, staring at a therapist and refusing to say anything. “Felis cattus, a small, domestic animal kept as --”
Tony says, “I know what a cat is, I just want to know why the cat is here.”
“She is going to live here,” says Nat, calmly. The cat eyes both Tony and Steve and then leaps from Nat’s shoulder to Steve’s desk, skidding across the papers and landing so she can bludgeon Steve’s jaw affectionately with her hard little head.
“Ugh,” says Tony.