The next day, he leaves a bowl of meat scraps in its path, and comes back to see it rotten and swollen with insects. He tries a trail camera and only catches shadows of movement - spends three days in the archives trying to find a map of the building so he can find its other lanes of travel without stomping all overs it’s personal space - and the fourth time he tries to slip out of the mess with half a raw fish in his armor Tucker catches.

“Surprised you didn’t try shoving that in your codpiece,” he snarks. Wash gives him a dry look. “… okay, but seriously, what’s with you? You’re all– twitchy. I’m worried you’re gonna start blowing up bodies or shooting Donut again.”

“No, I’m–” he looks around to see if anyone else is paying attention; when he turns back to Tucker, the sim-trooper’s expression is even more suspicious. “I found a cat.”

“… And? You scared of them?”

“No!”

Tucker looks down at the fish in Wash’s hands, that’s starting to smell and shed scales the longer it’s handled. “Ohhhh my god you’re trying to make friends with it. You’re trying to make friends with it and failing. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard–”

Wash spins on his heel and makes to storm off. He makes it two steps before a hand claps on his shoulder and he’s sorely tempted to slam the fish in Tucker’s stupid, beautiful face and grind the meat into it. “Fuck off.”

“Hey, man, I wanna help.”

Now it’s Washington’s turn to look suspicious. “Have you ever, wanted to help anybody, in your entire life?”

Tucker pokes him in the chest. “Happens as much to me as it does to you, jackass. You gonna let me or not?”

Washington gives him another once over, digging for ulterior motives in Tucker’s expression - he knows they have to be there, he just can’t find them yet - but the smell of the fish is getting obnoxious so he concedes.

“Fine. You can help.”

“Awesome! Lavernius Tucker, solver of pussy problems, is on the case.”

The winsome smile accompanying that does nothing to stem Washington’s immediate buyers remorse.

—

“And why the fuck,” says Grif, choosing Now of all times to take his job as supply supervisor seriously, “would I loan you the infrared surveillance equipment?”

“I swear, it’s for Washington!”

He snorts. “If you wanted to see him naked, you could probably just ask him.”

“I–” Tucker takes a second to process what Grif means, and then another second to imagine actually getting Washington to strip for him. “It’s not to look at Washington, it’s to help him out with– something.”

“So you’re helping him peep at the girls?”

“No!”

This apparently has exhausted all of Grif’s possible scenarios for the infra-red, and he stands staring at Tucker. If he wasn’t wearing his helmet, Tucker assumes Grif would be gaping.

“Why?”

“He wants to catch this cat or something, I don’t care, the point is, I’m going to be there as Agent Washington looks like a total sap cooing over feral animals and somebody has to record this. For blackmail.”

“Now now, Tucker, you know it’s polite to ask before you start recording!” Donut rounds the corner just then, sounding as chipper as ever. “That being said, Grif, I totally think you should give it to him.”

Grif clutches the crate of equipment closer to his chest. “Fuck off, Donut.”

“No, really! I think it’d be a great bonding opportunity for Washington to see Tucker in heat!”

“Uh… thanks?” Tucker ventures, reaching for the crate while keeping a close eye on Donut.

“Sure thing, Tucker. You know I love to play for your team.” His pink helmet tips in a perfect approximation of a flirtatious wink, and Tucker snatches the crate out of Grif’s hands and bolts.

Washington is waiting for him at the coordinates listed with a cooler in his hand (that Tucker is pretty sure was stolen from medical and was designed for organ transportation) and a mistrustful stare.

“I thought you stood me up,” the ex-Freelancer admits, making room behind the bench for Tucker to kneel. They’re across the street from an abandoned building a few miles away from the main base in Armonia, and there’s little signs of previous stakeouts; a scope, a food bowl with bits of dried meat stuck to it, a handful of towels.

Cute, thinks Tucker, and then comes back to the present with a shiver. Guess Donut rubbed off on him.

… Wait.

“What’s with the gear?”

“Oh, it’s infrared, that way we can spy, uhhhh, survey the cats without bothering them. Or something. That’s what you’re supposed to do with cats, right? Give them their space?”

Washington is already starting to set up the equipment. “Depends on the cat,” he says, pulling out the legs on a tripod. “The one I had in high school was a real sweetheart. Wouldn’t sleep on my bed but whenever I came home from school he wanted to be in my lap as I did homework.”

The mental picture of a young Washington - especially a young Washington with a cat - seems like another, fresh impossibility. Tucker checks the settings on the infrared camera and passes it over, letting Washington struggle attaching it to the base as he picks at the dried food in the dish.

“I never had any pets.”

“… Really?”

“I had a pet toad for like, a week. Then I had to let it go.” He’d kind of forgotten about that until now. Spikeball was a small, fat fellow who trilled whenever Tucker picked him up. (Later, of course, he learned that all male toads made this sound either in distress or as a mating call, but Tucker wanted to believe that his younger self had been gentle with the little bastard.) “Other than that, the closest thing I had to an animal in my house was one of my ex-girlfriends. Roxanne.”

“I was starting to feel bad for you,” Washington says dryly, “and then you had to ruin the moment.”

“What moment, dude? Not like I missed out on much. Pets are like babies, but they can’t talk and they die way faster.”

For a moment, he thinks Washington’s silence is because he saw something through the camera. But then his yellow-striped helmet turns Tucker’s way and he says, slowly and deliberately as loading a gun, “just because it’s temporary doesn’t mean you don’t remember it forever.”

Tucker stares. Washington goes back to working on setting up the infrared, and by the time Tucker finds his tongue the moment is long, long gone.

—–

He’d been skeptical about the idea at first, but after they’d found the little uneven spot of orange in one corner of a room, Washington had been riveted. It could be a sleeping cat, or two. Maybe even kittens. They’d just have to wait and see.

Between the two of them, they manage to keep up a near constant watch all day; tagging out to do their part in the Chorus rebuild and tagging back in for their free time. By now it’s evening, the pair of them together behind the stone bench and Tucker’s keeping his boredom surprisingly under wraps.

“So, obviously, you can’t kill Donut since you tried that once and failed, therefore marry and… maybe fuck Simmons? He’s part robot. I wonder if his ass vibrates. You into robots any? I mean, who isn’t these days, everyone lives in their armor anyway and aside from like a sense of identity robots are basically the same–”

“What if it’s kittens?”

Tucker stops gesturing with his hands. “… You’d fuck kittens?” he asks, laying on his back beside Washington in a pose that cannot be comfortable. In retaliation, Washington flicks him in the visor.

“No, the building. What if it’s kittens? What if their mom isn’t coming back?”

“Oh.” He rolls over then, resting on his elbows. “… Do you wanna go get them?”

“I don’t… know. We’ve been here for hours. I’d think the mother would have come back by now. I mean, it’s possible that– hey,” he cuts himself off as Tucker gets to his feet and starts walking away. “Where are you going?”

“We’re gonna go get your kittens, Wash. Duh.”

Washington stares at him for another moment, mutters a dumbass under his breath and follows him in.

Led by the lights on their helmets and guilded by the tracking marker Washington had set, they wander the abandoned building together. It looks like something out of a classic horror game; old advertisements ruined by water and sunlight until the ink runs, rust stains on the walls from hard water leaks, hungry holes in the floor with exposed rebar fangs that Washington more than once tugs a distracted Tucker away from. But it’s Tucker who spots the cats first.

“Shit, dude,” he says, and at first glance Washington assumes it’s from affection. There’s a half dozen of the things, moving slowly and weakly in the beam of their flashlights under the cover of an old box. But then he recognizes the still shape laying beside them as their mother’s body, wrapped around them even in death.

Part of the floor crumbles under his boots and distantly he hears Tucker’s voice spike with concern, but all that matters to Washington is getting to the cats. “Easy, easy,” he says, in a voice that belongs to a man who died years ago, “I got you.”

He pulls off his helmet and scoops each of the kittens into it, using it like a makeshift basket. They’re small and dirty and so skinny it hurts, but one of them hisses when he reaches for it and Washington feels his heart might burst.

“I can’t hold them all,” Washington says, scooping up the angriest of the bunch and holding it out to Tucker. “Can you take this one?”

“Oh. Uh… yeah, s-sure,” he stammers, accepting the little bundle with more care than Washington has seen him use for live explosives. “No problem.”

“Let’s get them back to base. We should be able to find some stuff to make food for them. I don’t think they’ll need formula, but we’ll see.”

Tucker is unusually quiet the long walk back, but that’s all right. Washington talks enough for both of them, keeping his voice light and soothing as he tries to think of things the kittens should stay alive for.

—-

Tucker has fucked up. Like, spectacularly fucked up. Fucked up in ways that would go down in history books, if anyone still wrote the damn things and if they ever covered anything other than how cool white men were. Not only had he signed away all of his free time in the foreseeable future, but he had to spent it wrangling with mewling, biting, shitting kittens.

The worst part? Washington adored them. The worst worst part? Seeing a badass ex-Freelancer use the laser on his sniper rifle to entertain a grey striped shitbag while using a cute voice made Tucker fucking hard. Like, really hard. Stomach cramps level of horny.

“Grey,” he laments one time as they’re watching Washington towel dry one of the kittens after she’d gotten into some spilled motor oil, “I think I’m dying.”

“Not yet, you’re not!” she pronounces, elbowing him - hard - in the side. “Your fluctuating levels of testosterone and oxytocin are a natural byproduct of the paternal bond.”

“God, not that shit again.”

“Speaking of again, do you finally have time to show me the scars left behind by your parasitic pregancy with–”

Tucker jumps off the crate he’d been hunched over and approaches Washington. “Hey there, you look like you need an extra hand.”

“Uh, I guess. Knifle’s just about dry, but I wanna take a look at Puma again. He’s not been eating as much as he should.”

Tucker does a quick head count of the kittens in the towel lined box. “Hey, where’s the really pretty one? The one with the two different eyes?”

“Yorkie’s with Carolina,” Washington says, nodding to the woman seated on the other side of the room, grinning as the black and tan kitten sinks her tiny teeth into the gloved hand, tail lashing back and forth. “And I think Grif ran off with Kirk again. Now that he knows all the girls love the kittens, he keeps making Simmons hold them or something.”

“Hahaha, dumb girls,” Tucker says, biting the inside of his lip as Washington gently cleans out the white and tan cat’s ears. He’s seen those hands pulls the pins on grenades, plunge a knife through a man’s neck, dislocate arms; but it’s holding a goddamn kitten that makes his palms sweat and his mouth water. Fuck me, he thinks as both a swear and a plea.

“You know, you still haven’t named yours.”

“Mine?”

Washington nods at the grey striped one curled up in an angry orb, obviously trying to sleep as his littermates walked all over him. “You carried him home. You get to name him. Never too late for a pet”

“I don’t want a cat, Wash.” No, it’s not the kittens that keep him coming back. … Well, maybe a little. Just a bit. Knifle is pretty cute like this, now that she’s stopped screaming.

“He doesn’t have to be yours. But you should name him. Caboose named the black one Sparkles,” Washington adds, in a voice that suggests that somehow, Tucker’s naming of the thing could save it from a fate worse than death.

“You realize I could name it something awful, right? Like Pussy Destroyer? Or Church?” Church at least would be accurate. God knows the fucker bit him enough times to remind him of his old, teammate-shooting friend.

Washington raises one eyebrow, and fuck if Tucker doesn’t get hit with need in the pit of his stomach again. Goddamn it.

“… Spikeball?”

The eyebrows scrunch together in confusion, which doesn’t make him that much less fuckable.

“You know, because he’s like… Full of teeth and stuff. And claws.” Tucker tries to mime the little bastard’s propensity for violence, but he’s pretty sure he just looks like a dumbass.

“Those are really your top three? Never mind, then,” Washington says with a grimace. “Figures. Forgot you named your kid Junior.”

“Here’s an idea, then,” and Tucker pokes Washington in the forehead, right between his stupid judgy eyebrows, “Recovery One. One for short.”

His expression shifts under Tucker’s fingertip. “You’re naming him after me?”

“Sure. Bitey grey bastard I helped rescue, why not?”

Washington blinks at him, as if searching his expression for something. Tucker forces himself to hold eye contact, even as the intensity makes him swallow.

“… I could live with that one,” he says at last, fixing his gaze firmly on Knifle. Now that it’s gone, Tucker wants his attention back, and huffs as he adjusts his kneel.

“Glad to have your permission, Dad.”