margotkim:

My best friend pet sat a cat named Lenny who was so spherical that if you ignored his legs, you could calculate his exact volume and surface area from his circumference. Like literally, this cat was so fat that he was a geometric perfection, less of a body and more a mathematical diagram. So fat. So so fat. A black basketball that meowed. And he moved with an aristocratic grace. If he wanted to jump up into your lap, by god he would jump up into your lap with the blithe self-assurance of a cat who has never considered he might fail. He balanced on his feet with a ballerina’s poise. He was a cat who looked like he should have been wearing a top hat and a monocle, and he should have had 12 children whom he loved dearly, and if he spoke, it would be the posh kind of English and he’d say “right-o” without any irony as he died of gout. I met this cat once, and I love him so much it hurts just to think about it. 

So. 

Some time when he is on the run doing the whole Secret Avenger thing, Sam Wilson picks up a cat. Maybe it’s a stray, a scrawny sort of sorry beast you find in back alleys and under bushes, the kind of animal that demands you drop everything and attend to this little rag of helplessness, and maybe that’s exactly what Sam did and he kept attending to it and look at how beautiful his cat is now. Or maybe Sam stole (borrowed) a car one day and neglected to see the cat carrier in the back, and oh my god, he just stole someone’s cat, he just stole someone’s cat, and Sam is feeling like the worst person in the world, until Steve finds some paperwork that says this cat was about to get dropped off at the pound, at which point Sam switches over into pure rage because who would ever get rid of this cat. Or maybe Sam just goes to the pound one day, and when Steve comes back to their apartment, they own a cat now. Steve rolls with it; he knows Sam’s lost a lot. And. Well. It is a hell of a cat. 

(“I’m just saying, this cat could have fed a family of twelve in the Depression,” Steve says as he pets the sheer mass of feline opulence in his lap, and Sam’s like, “We get it, Cap, you’re old.”) 

And Sam realizes that he has to name this cat. And he looks at this creature, this pure and perfect cat of unparalleled majesty, and there’s only one name that he can think to give it. 

And at some point, during some crisis, they team up with T’Challa once more to take out, I don’t know, a evil space robot or something. And when they’re done and the world is saved, Sam is like, “Hey man, you oughta hang out with us before you head back,” and he says this because 1) hell yeah T’Challa should come hang out with them, that would be so fucking cool, and it would feel almost like being back at the Compound, a bunch of good people hanging out together after doing good things, and all of a sudden Sam misses the Avengers in a way he can’t talk about with Steve because Steve will just apologize again and, like, that’s not it. That’s not the point. 

“Sure,” says T’Challa, who looks too good for a man standing there in half a cat costume. 

Maybe Sam’s a little too rah-rah American to pay much head to royals, but damn does he remember that T’Challa is a king as Sam opens the door to the shitty apartment they’ve been hiding in. It’s secret, which means it’s terrible, which means that there’s barely anything that Sam would want T’Challa to touch, let alone sit in, and Steve’s already peeled off to claim first dibs on the shower, and Sam’s just standing there trying to think of something to say that’s not incredibly awkward.

“Boy, you should have seen where I was staying before you helped arrest me,” Sam says. “That was a cool place.”

Nailed it. 

T’Challa looks like he is trying to think of something to say too, something that’s like probably along the lines of yeah sorry I helped arrest you, thought your friend was a murderer lol by the way he’s still fine in our freezers, when they hear the soft thud that means the cat’s woken up. It sounds a bit like thunder from far away. And then there’s the cheerful tinkling of his bell as the cat trots merrily out into the living room. If you put him next to a 19th century country gentleman named Lord Faulteroy of Missionhillwestshire, Sam is not sure he could say which one is which. 

“My god,” T’Challa says, which is what most people say when they see Sam’s cat for the first time.

“Yeah,” Sam replies, and then as T’Challa kneels and reaches out a hand, Sam realizes something he probably should have realized before he brought the King of Wakanda here. “Ummm,” Sam manages to get out before T’Challa reads the tag on the cat’s collar. 

There’s a brief silence. 

“There are two ‘l’s in my name,” T’Challa says as he pulls as much of Lil T’Chala into his lap as he can manage. 

“Petsmart fucked that up,” Sam says. “That’s not on me.” It was in fact on him. Sam was too sure that he knew how to spell T’Challa’s name without checking. He’d own up to the mistake, because yeah, he feels like a dick about it, but he’s already lied about it being Petsmart’s fault to Steve because otherwise Steve will just give him that grin and be like, have you heard of this thing called Google? Answers all your questions. Sam couldn’t handle that. 

T’Challa smiles. Then he bows his head. He solemnly takes his namesake’s front paw, and says with a grave voice that Sam will learn to recognize someday as T’Challa’s joking voice, “Nice to meet you, your highness. Are you also the greatest warrior in your land?”

And in this universe, in this place, that’s the moment Sam lowkey falls in love.