I would like to see anyone, prophet, king, or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time. – Neil Gaiman.

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"Steve, your so-called buddy is giving me the stink eye," Sam declared.

Steve waved him off, absorbed in the yellowed text of a book Dr. Strange had sent them to help. "He's a cat. He can't give you any kind of 'eye'."

Sam whole-heartedly disagreed. The cat in question, an overlarge and over-fluffy thing with a metallic limb in place of his front left leg, stared Sam down from the kitchen table with such intensity that Sam took several nervous steps back, effectively abandoning the glass of orange juice he'd just poured for himself.

Somehow Bucky Barnes managed to be just as terrifying as a house cat as he was as a human.

All things considered they were pretty lucky. It wasn't even anybody's fault as far as they could tell. Nobody except the ancient Nubian sorcerer who put a spell on that exact set of artifacts that Barnes and Natasha just so happened to be guarding from an attempted robbery.

The would-be thieves were caught up in the ancient booby trap same as the Soviet soulmates, and were currently locked several floors down in the Tower in what Stark had dubbed "Al-Cat-traz". But they couldn't exactly stand trial as cats, and Bucky and Nat probably didn't want to change species permanently, so…

"Don't worry Bucky, we'll find a way to change you both back," Steve promised.

"Steve, you can't read hieroglyphics," Sam pointed out. "What are you even doing with that book?"

"I just need to be doing something. I can't wait around for Strange and Wanda to figure something out," Steve replied, impatient.

Sam turned back to the fluffy cat on the table. Bucky-cat locked eyes with Sam, held his gaze, and promptly knocked over his abandoned glass of juice.

"Ok, now he's just being a little shit," Sam said, watching streams of orange juice drip off the counter onto the floor.

Steve had looked up in time to see Bucky's pettiness. "C'mon man," He sighed. Bucky-cat turned to him but only flicked his ears, uncaring and maybe even a little bit smug. Was that what that look was? Cats were too damn hard to read. Sam preferred dogs any day.

"To be fair, Sam did steal Barnes' last beer the other night. Maybe he's just getting even finally?" Clint chimed in. He had a tablet open in front of him, but not one that was going help turn their teammates back into humans. "I think maybe you're a Korat?" He said to the other cat peering over the web page with him, eyes zooming across pictures of countless felines.

To everyone's surprise, Natasha wasn't turned into a red or orange cat. Her coat was, instead, a sleek gray so steely it was almost blue. Clint was having fun trying to figure out what breed of cat Natasha was. If Nat-cat's insistent paw was anything to go by, she was sure she had the answer already.

Clint was less convinced. "Russian Blue? Come on, that's too obvious. What about a Chartreux? That sounds fun, right?"

She tapped her paw at the original picture, impatience obvious even without words.

"Fine. Be a Russian Blue. See if I care." Clint crossed his arms in an attempt to look intimidating, an impossible task in front of any cat. He stared Nat down and said, "We're still making tons of cat videos."

Nat-cat blinked at Clint for a moment, then promptly turned tail and walked away.

"Aw, come on! It'll be fun!" Clint tried to explain. "You get to star in your own Russian-cat meme!"

Natasha had already joined Bucky at the other end of the table, brushing up underneath his chin in a way that had Barnes purring loudly and Sam looking away.

Sam distantly wondered how much of their mentality was still them and how much was purely feline. He didn't honestly know if there was a real difference. A lot of the stuff that Bucky and Nat did as humans was cat-like; the near-psychic communication, general sneakiness, the menacing auras and silent threats of bodily harm…

Ok, so maybe it was still them under all that hair.

"Clint, you could take this a little more seriously," Steve said.

"And you could relax a bit, Cap," Clint replied easily. "Everyone's in the Tower and we're already working on fixing this. Plus, this isn't even in my top ten for 'weirdest-shit-ever'."

"And that makes it ok to joke about?"

"It makes it ok to not freak out over. Trust me. It could be a lot worse," Clint said.

That just made Sam think of all the cat-owner horror stories he had ever heard. All the scratched up furniture, hoarding things under said furniture, surprise hairballs, and all those tiny rodent bodies.

"I'm with Steve," Sam said. "Maybe there's no ticking doomsday clock for this thing, but the sooner we get Barnes and Romanoff back to normal, the sooner we avoid dealing with any hairballs or litterboxes."

From the wide-eyed way both Steve and Clint stared at him, Sam realized they hadn't actually thought of that. Steve immediately turned to his now-feline friend and told him firmly, "You're cleaning your own damn litterbox."