There are seven of them. Not one. Not two or three or even four. Seven.
Steve finds them in a cardboard box in a dumpster down the street from his apartment complex. They're tiny, little closed-eyed babies, wiggling over each other and crying.
When he was a kid, Steve found a little kitten just like this. Took it home, fed it milk out of a dropper. It died a few days later. Now, though, he's able to look it up on his smart phone. How and what to feed them, and how often. How to clean them, how to tell if they're basically healthy, and that they should go to the vet to be checked out whether they look healthy or not.
There's not anything about how to find the person who dumped them so he can punch them in the face, but then again, there usually isn't. And Steve hasn't been the greatest at finding people lately anyway.
***
He goes to the petstore for supplies, then goes back to his apartment. Mixes up the formula, but before he tries to feed the first one (with another dropper, but this one, like the formula, was obscenely expensive, almost $5), he starts second-guessing himself. Which isn't usually something he does, but--even now, he's not so much used to taking care of small, weak things as he is to being one. The internet said they could breathe in the formula, if he does it wrong; it said they could die, just from eating.
Steve googles it, then googles addresses. In the box beside him, the kittens keep crying. A little more plaintively now. He can smell the formula; so can they, probably. One of them peed in the box at some point, but Steve figures he can deal with that later.
The vet office Steve calls can't see him today, but the cat rescue says they can have a volunteer show him what to do. He can't bring them in the building, since they could endanger the other cats there; and the receptionist doesn't sound like she really believes he believes her when she says they don't have room to take them (which he never asked about in the first place, but it was the first thing she said anyway).
***
Steve gets there twenty minutes later, with a box of kittens and with the formula in the bag from the petstore.
He rings the buzzer on the front door, and after a few seconds, someone answers it. Not the woman who talked to him on the phone, but someone else. Someone with long, greasy hair, and a glove on his left hand, who freezes just like Steve does as soon as they see each other.
"...Bucky?" Steve says.
"Um," Bucky says.
"Mew," three to five of the kittens say.
Bucky looks at the box in Steve's hand. "You're the guy who called about feeding orphaned kittens."
"Yeah," Steve says. There should be so much more for him to say, but that's what he's stuck on. He's looked for Bucky for so long, and in so many places; he never expected to run into him this close to home. If he'd had to guess where he'd eventually find him, he would never have thought of a cat shelter (unless maybe the person who ran it was really Hydra; he makes a note to ask about that).
"Okay." Bucky steps out the door, lets it close behind him.
They end up sitting on the ground off to the side, the box of kittens between them. Steve's even less sure now about managing to feed them without hurting them. He keeps being sure his hands are shaking, only to look down and find that they're completely still.
As for Bucky, his right hand does seem to have the slightest tremor as it holds the example kitten; but his left hand is completely steady as he shows Steve what to do. Steve pays the best attention he can; maybe he feels like he just got hit by a truck, but even if Bucky gets up and runs in the next five seconds, figuring out how to do this is important, too.
Once the demonstration is over, Steve picks up the next kitten, and feeds it just like Bucky showed him.
"You've got it," Bucky says.
He stands up, and Steve does too, still holding a kitten, and it's the most surreal moment of his life.
There's so much that Steve wants to say. He wants to ask if Bucky's been here, doing this, all this time. He wants to ask if Bucky's okay, and what Steve can do. But somehow, what comes out is, "So what are you doing at a cat shelter?"
Bucky shrugs. "I'm not hurting anything." It's not until after he gets back to his apartment that Steve realizes he was being completely literal. "I--look, Steve, do you want to go to lunch sometimes?"
"Lunch?"
"We could do some catching up," Bucky says. If it costs him anything, and Steve is sure it must, it's impossible to tell by looking at him. "You could let me know how it's going with these guys."
"That would be so--that would be great," Steve says.
Two minutes later, Bucky's back in the building and Steve's on his way home, and he still can't really believe that really happened, or that after years of searching, he now has Bucky's number saved on his phone.
***
Steve ends up keeping all seven kittens, all of whom grow up into big, obnoxious cats. All of them want to sleep in the bed, too, which doesn't become too annoying until someone else needs to use the other side...but neither Steve nor Bucky ever really minds.