#dog steve

“Look at that. Bucky is so whipped.”

Tony, Pepper, and Rhodey are sitting in a row on the window ledge looking into Sam’s apartment. Inside, the German Shepherd is tripping over himself to hold himself up against the kitchen counter where a black cat is perched in one of the open cabinets looking amused. The cat turns her steady gaze towards the window and gives them a nod before she jumps down right on top of Bucky’s head and saunters over to them.

Bucky is still grumbling when he opens the window for the three to clamber in. “The price of bones to chew on in this century. Come on Nat, just give me one jerky, please?”

“I’m ignoring you,” Natasha replies as she bumps noses with Pepper. “You’re gonna get fat and slow if I give you another one. Look at Clint.”

“I heard that Nat,” Clint yells. He barrels into the kitchen with his short legs. “Rude, Nat. So rude.”

Natasha naturally ignores them, letting Pepper climb onto her back and pouncing outside so that the dogs won’t chase after them. Bucky’s face falls as soon as she disappears, and Clint snickers. “So whipped.”

“Shut up,” Bucky growls, turning his head to face the beagle. “You are so dead.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Only if you can catch me,” he says before he promptly turns tail and runs. Bucky pounces after him.

Tony and Rhodey watches as Bucky keeps his pace behind Clint; it’s obvious to everyone that Bucky can have Clint pinned down in three steps flat, but he’s dragging it out for the fun of it. Then, a cold, wet nose presses into the fur of Tony’s cheek, and Tony leaps up in fright.

When he lands, he hisses at Steve’s happy face. “Stop doing that!” Tony snarls, before he slowly, one paw at a time, crawls over Steve’s head and bumps noses with him anyway. Steve is completely ecstatic when that’s all he gets and no other abuse.

The family has migrated from the field to the tree right outside of Sam’s apartment to the joy of Steve (and Bucky and Clint, although they’d never admit it), and although it is harder now to find nuts in this new place, Tony couldn’t have (secretly) been happier.

The first day of finals Tony felt a tickle in his throat and started carrying around cough drops. The second day he flipped between hot and cold like a faulty switch and ran around wearing one of Steve’s sweaters and his big parka over it until he got too hot and would strip his hat, gloves, scarf, parka, and sweater to sit in the t-shirt underneath it all. He passed his physics final, then his chemical engineering final but he still had quantum theory, which was in person, and on Friday. The third day he was positively sure he was sick, which meant that he had to be running an ungodly fever because when Tony was in finals mode he could catch his sleeve on fire while making tea and not notice. 

Steve flitted in and out the first few days, taking his sketchbook and easel to random places on campus to finish his landscape drawings for a 5 piece portfolio that had to be turned in on Wednesday. When he wasn’t drawing Tony saw him poke into the apartment to change into athletic gear, not bothering to wash off the thick charcoal on his fingers, and he’d left several smears of black and gray powder on his helmet. 

The last day though, Steve didn’t come home. Tony woke up from a nap to a fierce panic that the apartment was wholly empty and it was nearing 2 in the morning. He grabbed the half-full can of red-bull on his side table, draining it as he pushed his drenched hair back to rest behind his ears and ran to the door, thinking Steve must’ve gotten locked out and Tony, as sick and doped up on cough syrup as he was hadn’t heard him. 

When he swung the door open, however, just to check that Steve wasn’t sitting under the door like a whimpering dog, he saw golden fur instead of hair. It was a small golden retriever, around one or two, with the most bizarre blue eyes Tony had ever seen on a dog. He blew his nose with a tissue he pulled out of the front pocket of Steve’s old high school art club sweatshirt, closed his eyes, and hoped the dog would be his boyfriend when he opened. But, when he took another glance at the hallway, his legs protesting the length of time Tony had been standing unaided--a problem he righted quickly by leaning against the door frame and coughing into his elbow--the dog was still there. 

“Steve?” He said thickly, words garbled by the congesting clogging Tony’s nose and chest. The dog tilted its head and wagged its tail. “Jesus Christ,” Tony swore and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, positive that his fever had simply turned Steve in his vision into a dog. Tony had always had a penchant for comparing Steve to a dog, maybe his brain was just playing a sick joke on him. 

He let the dog into the apartment, talking at it like he would Steve and pretending like he understood what the barks back meant in what he assumed Steve would say in reply to his questions. When this fever broke, he was sure Steve would be out of his mind in worry over Tony’s seemingly disconnected conversations, but for now, it had to do. 

He made it to the kitchen and placed down a bowl of water and some microwaved chicken for the dog and chugged the remnants of the bottle of cold syrup, praying it would work. 

By Thursday, Steve had yet to turn back into a human in Tony’s vision but Tony had finally convinced himself that he had a passable knowledge of quantum theory for his final the next day and he took a nap that turned into an 8-hour nightmare filled sleep in which DUM-E spoke exclusively Spanish at him and Tony failed his quantum physics final because he’d forgotten everything he’d studied the second he stepped into the room. 

When he woke early Friday morning, the sheets were soaked with sweat but Tony felt immensely better. His hair was no longer matted to the back of his head with dense salty water and he no longer had a crimson flush that bled from his cheekbones down to his chest in hands. The dog, however, was nowhere to be found. Tony had to leave for his final before he could catch it, or Steve, and figure out what had and had not been an apparition of his fever. 

He passed the final and Tony sprinted back to his apartment, a gleeful smile on his face. He twisted the door open and shouted into the open space. “I got an A, Steve!” To his surprise, Steve exited the kitchen, tall and broad as the grand canyon, a matching smile on his face. 

The first thing out his mouth, however, stopped Tony dead in his tracks. “Why didn’t you help me?”

“Help you?” Tony asked, suddenly off-kilter. Had Steve asked him to help him study for a final?

“I was turned into a dog for 3 days?”

Tony melted with relief. Good god was it nice to hear that he hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. “Oh, babe I thought I’d hallucinated that.”

Steve shook his head, humor in his face. “I figured that soon enough. Turns out I was right about Loki. He’s a Wiccan with a wicked sense of humor. Said I reminded him of a dog and wanted to see if my life changed at all when he changed me.” 

“Well,” Tony had a shit-eating grin taking over his face, “did it?”