Tony has an early morning meeting when he finds T’Challa, not that he had any idea that he was looking at the Wakandan prince at the time. What he finds is a cat in the tire well of his car growling at him without even looking at him. “Okay kitty, you’re going to have to get out of there because I need the car, okay?” Tony asks, trying to reach out to the cat. The cat hisses violently, the hair on its back lifting as it hisses. “Look, I get that you don’t like me but its either you let me move you, you move, or I run you over and I’m not running you over so you’re either going to move or let me move you,” Tony tells the cat.
The cat glares at him for a solid thirty seconds before it slinks off the tire and into a bush near Tony’s driveway. He doesn’t think of the cat again as he drives off to work because he’s late and the Board was going to chew his ass again.
*
He wakes up to a loud meowing and the sound of thunder and rain and frowns. “JARVIS what the fuck?” he mumbles.
“Sir, that cat that was on your tire earlier appears to be meowing at the door,” JARVIS tells him. Tony was tempted to just leave the cat outside but a bolt of thunder lights up his window and he feels bad for leaving the cat in the rain and gets up.
When he opens the door the cat runs in, trailing mud and water as it does and Tony sighs. The maids were going to hate him more than usual. The cat stops in the living room and crouches down behind the couch and even from across the room half asleep Tony could see the cat shaking from the cold. He considers his options for a moment before he goes to his bathroom and grabs a large fluffy towel. The cat is where he left it, still shaking and Tony gently lays the towel on the cat, “I’m going to pick you up and dry you off, okay? I’d appreciate if you don’t eat me,” he tells it.
The cat obviously says nothing but it cooperates when Tony picks it up and it lets him dry it off. He ends up finding a small space heater he used a few winters back and turns it on low for the cat, leaving the cat sitting in front of it while he went back to bed.
*
T’Challa remains curled up by the little space heater the guy who let him in provided because he was still cold. He had decided that he hates America because it is wet, scary, cold, and it smelled weird. But the guy that let him in was nice at least, and he fed him bits of bacon when he ate breakfast. T’Challa was just grateful he did not have to eat cat food. He has smelled the things he feeds his own cat, he would not want to eat it no matter how much his cats seemed to love that wet food.
Tony, he learns the guy’s name is, when he comes home with a redhead trailing after him yelling about paperwork. T’Challa does not need his enhanced sense of smell to know that he is drunk but the redhead does not seem to care. He watches them yell at each other for a few minutes before Tony gives up and rolls his eyes, stomping away. The redhead pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs before she leaves.
This becomes a general routine, except Pepper eventually adds in that Tony is too irresponsible to own a cat. T’Challa disagreed. Tony had gone out of his way to make him feel welcome, he brought home several toys and a litter box T’Challa resented using and he fed T’Challa well. He took far better care of him than he did himself actually. And if he were an actual cat he would have been rather happy but he does not hold that against Tony. How was he to know that T’Challa was actually a shape shifter stuck in his cat form?
*
His cat was weird as fuck but Tony loved him anyways. He didn’t act like a normal cat at all given that he refused to play with his mice, he refused to go anywhere near cat food, Tony has never seen the cat in the litter box even if he knew the cat used it, and he really didn’t like when Tony drank. The cat has taken to cramming himself into any space he could find alcohol and knocking it onto the ground. Tony wasn’t sure the cat was aware that he was rich and could easily afford replacing the broken bottles but it was irritating nonetheless.
The cat was also fond of TV, that space heater Tony had used to warm him up that first night, and of all things showers. Boy had he been surprised when he had left the water running one day so he could grab something from the other room only to come back and find his cat rolling around in the hot water. Tony let him have at it and now he bathed the cat once a week because he liked it so much and it was the only time he could get the cat to purr. The cat was also fond of his big fluffy towels and windows assuming the weather was warm.
“I hope you know I think you’re a freak of nature,” Tony tells the cat as he gets ready for work. The cat meows at him, clearly offended but Tony just laughs. “What? You don’t even play with mice,” Tony tells him. Every cat he’s owned has loved those little mouse toys but this one? Barely even looked at them.
Later he regrets that statement because when he comes home from work he discovers that the cat had not only gotten outside, but he managed to catch five bats and two of them were still alive. Tony tells the cat that next time he felt like hunting he could leave his gifts outside.
*
T’Challa has grown fond of Tony and he disliked the man’s downward spiral every five minutes that everyone else seemed content to either ignore or shame him for. These people, his friends or so they claimed, needed a psychology lesson because this was not how to properly address someone’s drinking problems. So T’Challa took it upon himself to try and curb the habit by doing his best to ensure that there was no alcohol in the house and when he noticed that Tony was upset he spent time with him.
He disliked being treated like an animal given that he was not one, but someone had to do something about Tony’s alcoholism and no one else was doing anything so he guessed he’d deal with Tony petting him if it meant he was not drinking. It did not help that his friends seemed fond of pointing out how irresponsible Tony was, which was not entirely false, but there was more to it than that. Tony was drinking to forget something and no one was asking what that was, nor did anyone pay attention to the evidence that suggested Tony was not as irresponsible as they thought. There was the fact that his affairs were always in order no matter how much Tony hated paperwork, his inventions were always in production, and he took very good care of T’Challa. He even brushed him regularly despite his busy schedule.
There were many things that proved that Tony was not nearly as irresponsible as people claimed him to be but no one was looking at that. Perhaps that was because Tony was very good at being annoying and pushing people away, but it still annoyed T’Challa that Tony’s friends did not see the obvious manipulation. If his cat could curb his drinking surely they could too. Granted he was hardly a normal cat but that was besides the point. For now, and maybe forever at this point, he was a cat and he was somehow more effective in being Tony’s friend than the people who could talk to him.
*
Tony hardly expected to come home to find some random black guy curled up in front of his cat’s space heater but he figured if he managed to break through Tony’s considerably advanced alarm system he’s earned the nap.
He’s pouring himself a drink when he hears shuffling, “oh for gods sakes, stop drinking,” the guy says.
Tony turns around to squint at him, “you broke into my house and decided to take a nap by my cat’s space heater, who are you to judge?” Tony shoots back.
“It is three in the afternoon, there is no need for you to drink this early. Or at all. Can we have bacon for breakfast tomorrow, you make good bacon,” the guys says.
“Uh, I’m not cooking you anything and how do you know my bacon is good?” he asks. He was starting to wonder if he drank more in that limo than he thought he did because he was clearly drunk.
“You cook me breakfast every morning, Tony, I would assume I’d know what the food tastes like,” the guy says.
“I cook for cat every morning, I have no damn clue who you are,” Tony says.
The guy frowns for a moment, obviously confused until he looks down and grins, “I am not a cat!” he says happily.
“Yeah, figured being confused on what species you are isn’t popular,” Tony mumbles.
“No, you do not understand, I was a cat and now I am human again! Oh this is excellent, I need to call my father he probably thinks I am dead,” he says, sounding relieved.
“Um, what?” Tony was one hundred percent wasted if he was hallucinating. What the fuck did he drink earlier?
*
Convincing Tony that he was not a regular human had been as easy as convincing him that he was not a regular cat, but the video proof of him changing from a cat to a human was quite compelling. Especially when JARVIS informed him that the video was unaltered. Then he had been freaked out that T’Challa slept in his bed, which offended him because he only did that to ensure Tony didn’t get into a stash of alcohol T’Challa was sure he had in his room.
Tony had been far more surprised about his attempts to curb his drinking being deliberate and not him acting almost like a normal cat and knocking things over. He’d also been rather surprised to find out that T’Challa’s opinions on him were considerably different than Pepper’s or even Rhodey’s.
In the end they had a rather long conversation about a lot of different things and T’Challa got to call his father and inform him that no, he was not dead he was just a cat for awhile and he managed to change back again. Tony still looked like he was having a hard time believing that but that was fine, T’Challa knew the truth anyways. And Tony had a hard time finding reasons why T’Challa would know things about him that no one else would unless they lived with him.
*
Tony couldn’t believe of all the weird shit that’s happened to him he met his boyfriend by finding him in the tire well of his vehicle one day because he’s a freaking shape shifter thanks to that vibranuim in his home country altering the DNA of the things around it. But he wasn’t going to complain either because T’Challa was sweet, caring, and he saw things in him that most people didn’t. And, not that he’d ever tell T’Challa this, but he was super cute and soft as a cat, which was more than enough for Tony to want to keep him around.