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Buck doesn’t plot as often as he used to. He also doesn’t do as many reckless things anymore, both spur of the moment ones and planned out ones. If he wants to do something, he does it, and if he needs ‘permission,’ he asks for it, like a normal, functioning human person does.
Sometimes, however, he has to work for it.
If Eddie says the organic food Buck wants to buy is too expensive, he pouts a little bit, and lets his voice get wet as his sighs and agrees that the health of their family isn’t that important, until Eddie finally gives in and tosses the food into the shopping cart with a wordless grumble.
If Buck wants to trick Eddie into picking a movie he wants to see, he will talk about it throughout the day with his shorts pulled up a little too high, so Eddie isn’t fully paying attention to what he’s saying. All the information gets sent straight to his subconscious, which will make him blindly choose the movie when it’s time to pick something to watch after dinner.
If Eddie claims it’s too hot out to cuddle, Buck will sigh softly and turn away with a flourish, slowly pulling the blanket tighter around himself. When the blanket only has an inconvenient portion of it left for Eddie to use, he will suffer in silence, and eventually worm his way underneath to cuddle him.
But trying to get Eddie to adopt a cat, after he’s already firmly stated several times over several occasions that it will never, ever happen, Buck has to get creative.
He was already thinking about it for months, when the opportunity literally presented itself in the form of a cat wandering onto their back porch one night while Buck was watering the plants—he read that watering at night would mean less evaporation, but he also read that it could lead to fungal issues so he doesn't do it every night.
That means that it is fate that he was out there that night. Any other night and he might have never found her.
She had meowed once, softly, emerging from the bushes soaking wet. Buck gasped at the sight of her—his heart already sworn away for the cause of her love and protection.
Buck named her Nightcrawler one-point-five nanoseconds after he saw her. He had no choice really, she’s all black, appeared at night, crawled out to find him.
Perhaps the best thing about her is her missing fourth limb. She rubbed up against Buck’s prosthetic leg like she knew. Knew they were connected in this special way, knew that they were meant to find each other.
Buck had smiled, a bit manically, as he realized this was the way he was finally getting his cat. Eddie had absolutely no chance of saying no anymore.
Some light manipulative tactics couldn’t hurt, though.
Over the few weeks it takes Nightcrawler to warm up to him—sneaking out to feed her at night, hiding the food and some catnip and treats in the back of the cabinets, working his way up to petting her and eventually picking her up—Buck starts leaving subliminal messaging around the house.
He brings home little trinkets from the farmers market—soaps in the shapes of cats for the bathroom, farm animal figurines that of course feature the always loyal barn cat he leaves sitting on the table in the entranceway, cat and dog plushies he claims are for Jee and Nash, but he conveniently keeps forgetting to bring them over and they’re left propped up on the couch.
He plays shows and movies with black cats in them—Hocus Pocus, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Coraline. He plays some movies just about animals in general—Marley and Me, The Secret Life of Pets, Hotel for Dogs, Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
He drops random, and some possibly made up or embellished, facts—black cats have a lower chance for adoption but a higher euthanasia rate (true), they are abused or even killed because of superstitions, especially leading up to Halloween (true), they have nicer and calmer personalities compared to other cats (embellished), and are more likely to lose another limb if they have already lost one (made up).
One night, he might take things a bit far, and whispers into Eddie’s ear once he is deep asleep. Things like, “I want a cat,” “My name is Eddie Diaz and I want a black cat with a missing leg,” “I’m going to wake my boyfriend up with a blowjob tomorrow.” That last one may have been unrelated.
Now, Buck isn’t entirely sure if it’s been working or not. Eddie uses the soaps until they are shapeless, black blobs, brings the plushies over to Jee and Nash himself—and probably claims the thanks and praise for it—and tears up whenever something sad happens in the movies Buck puts on.
But that’s part of the beauty of subliminal messaging, it’s subliminal. There’s no way of knowing if it is truly working or not until it’s time for those subconscious thoughts to become conscious. Maybe it's working so well that Eddie will be the one bringing Nightcrawler home.
About a month after Nightcrawler crawled, at night, out of his garden and into his heart, Buck decides that the time to act is upon him. Eddie’s not completely oblivious—seems to have a sixth sense for when Buck’s up to something—and he’ll probably wake up one night to his whispering, or get suspicious when the cat soaps somehow reanimate for the third time.
Buck buys a cat carrier one day, making a quick, possibly illegally fast, drive to the pet store while Eddie’s taking Christopher to school. He knows exactly which one he wants, having already picked it out weeks ago when he first found Nightcrawler and started trolling the local pet stores so he could plan out everything he needs—wants—and could be ready to buy it the second Eddie says yes.
He may have bought some more treats while he was there, and some toys, and a collar, and one set of bows that can be added to the loop of a collar, and a tag to also be added to the collar with Nightcrawler’s name and Buck and Eddie’s phone number, all hidden in the back of his trunk under shopping bags. He may have also set up an appointment to get Nightcrawler tagged with a tracker.
On the day of the attack, Buck gets up early—before Eddie, even—and coaxes Nightcrawler into the carrier. He leaves Eddie a note saying that he has to swing by the station to grab his duffle bag, wincing slightly when he remembers that Eddie was the one to carry both their bags to the car after their last shift because Buck was sleepy.
He continues on with his mission anyway, bringing Nightcrawler to the vet to make sure she doesn’t have any fleas or pressing medical issues. Eddie would absolutely wring his neck if he infested their house with bugs. Again. But to be fair, the ladybug infestation was not entirely his fault. How was he supposed to know letting a couple ladybugs stay in the attic for the winter would lead to hundreds of them by spring?
Nightcrawler is given a clean bill of health, because she’s a perfect little angel, of course. She isn’t happy with him when she gets her vaccination shots, but Buck’s able to regain her love and affection with a few well-timed treats and pets, and soon enough he’s given the all clear to head out and bring her home.
Eddie’s in the front lawn watering the plants when Buck pulls into the driveway. They’ve gotten a bit dry over the past weeks, Eddie says it must be getting too hot at night, but Buck’s just gotten too busy petting Nightcrawler that he’s forgotten that he was supposed to be watering them.
Eddie smiles at him as he walks up to the porch, not even noticing that his duffle bag looks different. He even opens the door for him, because he’s so trusting and helpful. So manipulable.
The carrier meows suddenly. “Shit,” Buck mumbles. He coughs in some feeble attempt to cover the sound. He hasn’t even fully made it into the house yet, hasn’t been able to lay his final level of manipulation.
Eddie eyes him suspiciously, all trust flying out the window. “What’s in that bag, Buck?”
“Nothing.”
The carrier meows again. Buck and Nightcrawler are going to have to have a serious conversation about timing later.
“No! No, no, no, no,” Eddie exclaims, arms shooting out to block the doorway.
“Oh my god, Eddie, at least let me into the house!”
“Absolutely not. How many times have I said we’re not getting a pet?”
Okay, fine, maybe Buck was embellishing when he said Eddie's only said no several times. Maybe the true number is at least a dozen, or two dozen. Maybe he's asked for a cat, or a dog, or a bird, or a fish, or a snake, or a turtle, or a frog, or a gecko, or a lizard—he went through an amphibian phase—or a spider, or a ferret, or a raccoon. Hell, even just an ant colony.
Honestly, Eddie’s lucky all Buck’s brought home is a cat. One cat, on top of that. He could have brought home an entire litters worth of kittens.
“Will you just hear me out?”
“No.”
Buck ducks under his arm, forcing his way into the house. He resists the urge to let Nightcrawler out and get her to run further into the house, hiding somewhere Eddie can’t get to her. Maybe he should have looked up the squatters rights for animals in California.
“This is an ambush!” Eddie cries a bit frantically.
He’s sort of right, because now that both Buck and Nightcrawler are in the house, there is a very, very small chance of getting the cat back out. Eddie would have to either set the place on fire, or literally pull Buck out to get him to leave, then incapacitate him, run back in, and get her out and shipped halfway across the country, all before Buck woke up.
By the time Eddie would resort to that, Buck would have already set into place a plan to worm Nightcrawler away to somewhere in the house that would be hard to access and only he would know where she was. Perhaps the walls. He could cut a hole into the back of a cabinet and place a false wall in front of it.
“This is Nightcrawler!” Buck counters happily, pulling Nightcrawler from her carrier. She cuddles against his chest and paws at him until he pets her.
Eddie takes a step back, hands held out like Buck is holding a bomb and a detonator, threatening to take the whole block down with them. “That is a cat we are not keeping.”
“I thought you said you would hear me out?”
“I said nothing of the sort.”
“Anywho, this is Nightcrawler. Do you want to know why I named her that?”
“You named her?” Eddie groans in horror.
It took him a week to convince Buck to get rid of the mice chewing through their birdseed bags in the shed, because he had already named them, developed an attachment to all of them, and could either actually tell them apart or was making it up as he went.
It then took Eddie trips to four different hardware stores to find a humane, nonlethal way of getting rid of them. Which turned out to be lining the back of traps with peanut butter, waiting for all of them to be lured in and stuck, and driving them five miles away and releasing them into a park. All with Buck nearly in tears throughout the whole process.
“Mmhmm. Do you want to know why Nightcrawler?” Buck repeats pointedly.
“Not really.”
“Because I found her—or, she found me—at night! She literally crawled out of the bushes, Eddie.”
“Wow,” Eddie says dryly.
“And look!” Buck holds Nightcrawler up. “She’s missing a leg. Like me! It’s like we were meant to be.”
Eddie shifts, eyes flickering around the room as he tries his very best to not look at Nightcrawler head-on. He’s a weak, defenseless man. “That’s nice, Buck,” he says, but his tone is suddenly a lot softer than before. “But we’re not keeping her.”
Buck turns Nightcrawler around so he’s facing him, lifting her up and looking her right in the eye as he gives his strongest pout he’s ever pouted. “I’m so sorry, Nightcrawler, I forgot that Eddie hates cats with three legs. Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten hit by that car.”
He’s pretty sure he can hear Eddie’s jaw drop open. “She did not get hit by a car,” he sighs, but there’s a bit of doubt in his voice.
Buck’s lying, of course, but he can’t truly be a hundred percent sure she didn’t get hit by a car. Crazier things have happened. “You don’t know that. She could have pushed a baby out of the way of an out-of-control car, for the price of her leg.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would you rather a baby be hit by a car?” Buck barrels on, tucking Nightcrawler against his chest and staring Eddie down, blinking rapidly to force tears into his eyes. “Just so you wouldn’t have to see her unseemly lack of a fourth leg?”
“Buck,” Eddie says incredulously.
Time for the finale. “Should I leave, too, Eddie? Since you clearly are so disgusted by amputees, I wouldn’t want to make you live with such filth.”
Eddie runs a hand down his face, and Buck knows he’s got him. He feels bad. Almost. But then again, Eddie sort of forces Buck to trick him. If Eddie would have let him get a cat, Buck wouldn’t have had to spend weeks manipulating him. “Oh my god, you’re evil.”
“I’m evil? Me, the amputee, with my amputee cat, getting kicked out of my— of our own home, I’m the evil one.”
Maybe Buck should have pursued acting.
“I love you,” Eddie murmurs, his eyes soft and happy as he presses a kiss to Buck’s cheek.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes, you psycho.”
Buck beams. “Your psycho.”
“Mmhmm,” Eddie hums, “my psycho.”
“Do you want to hold her?” Buck asks, shoving Nightcrawler into Eddie’s arms before he’s even finished.
Eddie cradles her like a baby, running a hand gently over her head. “There are rules for her, Buck, and she is going to follow them.”
“Uh-huh,” Buck says, already plotting loop holes and work arounds.
“No going on the counter.”
“Sure.”
Buck’s going to designate a small sliver of space for Nightcrawler on the very edge of the counter, where he can kiss her on the head while he’s cooking, and slip her bits of food. But she won’t be allowed further than that. Unless her paws are clean and she wants to explore the kitchen. But not while the stove is on, and she could accidentally hurt herself. Unless it’s off and cooled down, and the knobs have covers so she can’t accidentally turn them on.
“Not too many treats.”
“Nope.”
Buck’s already spent at least fifty dollars on cat treats, the bags that are maybe three dollars each. But, to be fair, that has been over the course of a month, and Nightcrawler was probably so weak and feeble and starved when Buck found her, so he had no choice but to show her love and nourishment. And he’s kept a bag in his car in case he saw any other strays, and put some in the engine at work in case they got a classic cat-stuck-in-a-tree call.
“No more than one cat bed and one tower.”
“Reasonable.”
Per room, Buck’s mind fills in. She’ll need one for the kitchen and living room, one in their bedroom, one in Christopher’s room, one for the back porch, maybe one for the entranceway so she can be comfortable if she wants to wait for them to come home. She also has to have one of those window seats in case she wants to watch outside if it isn’t weather permitting to go out.
Eddie pauses for a moment. “You're lying, aren't you?”
“Yep.”
Nightcrawler’s purring is loud enough to drown out Eddie's groan.