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Sam got his nieces a guinea pig for Easter, which backfired on him less than one week later when his sister called him a two o’clock in the morning and demanded he come pick the fucking thing up before she flushed it down the toilet. Sam knew she wouldn’t actually do that (when he’d gone overseas, she’d taken in his elderly bird, and had cried harder than Sam had when he’d passed away) but he got out of bed and drove an hour to pick the thing up anyway.
Guinea pig noises, Sam discovers very quickly, are super adorable for all of five minutes before you start audibly asking God what he was thinking giving any rodent the ability to talk. He puts the thing’s cage in his kitchen and sleeps with his head shoved up under his pillow. It doesn’t help much.
He’s had Taco for about a month when Natasha gets back from her latest extended mission. Her hair is cropped short but already growing out, soft locks tufting awkwardly over the top of her ears, and Sam notices but doesn’t comment on how she’s thinned out a little. They don’t talk about Nat’s spy work any more often than they talk about Sam’s tidy collection of prescriptions, which is to say, not at all unless it’s relevant.
“Who’s this?” she asks when she sees the wheeled cage.
“That’s just a mistake I made,” Sam snorts as he starts making lunch. Heavy on the grease, because Natasha’s comfort food preferences are beautifully in sync with his own. “Don’t get too close,” he warns when she crouches in front of the cage, “You wake him up and he’s not gonna shut up for an hour.”
Natasha’s answering smile is wide and antagonistic, and she immediately starts sticking her fingers between the thin bars, leaning lower as she coos in an overly feminized voice, “Who’s a cute little pig?”
At first Sam thinks she’s just trying to rile him up, and that’s true to an extent, but when Taco butts out from under his flimsy plastic castle and starts chittering back, Natasha’s eyes fill with something Sam usually only sees directed towards himself when he’s shirtless or bad guys about to get their heads knocked: pure, unfiltered delight.
“I’m not keeping it,” Sam tells her immediately, impulsively, because she’s never home for long and the thing’s been driving him up the wall, but as soon as it’s out of his mouth he knows he’s propping a lie on his tongue. “He’s noisy,” he adds crossly, because fuck.
Natasha loosens the latch and scoops the squirmy ball of orange, white, and black fur up against her chest, nose immediately nuzzling into its head. “He’s cute,” she argues in the same tone she uses to encourage Steve not to shower alone forever.
Sam adds more butter, and heaves a long-suffering sigh. “His name’s Taco,” he says.
“Hey, Taco,” Nat croons smoothly, moving around Sam to steal a baby carrot from the bag on the counter and try to foist it off on her little chatterer, “Want a snack?”
Guinea pig noises are super adorable for a time period greater than five minutes when cuddled in the arms of your mission-worn and arguably underfed Russian girlfriend. But Sam draws the line at guinea pigs being cuddled at the table with the same hands you’re eating with. (It happens anyway.) And it turns out that as ineffective as having the cage all the way in the kitchen and sleeping with a pillow over your head is at muffling a particularly exuberant guinea pig’s chittering, it’s still preferable to having it in bed with you, carrying on a wordless conversation with a cheerfully wide-awake Natasha. (It happens often.)
Still, Sam wouldn’t call Taco a mistake twice over. A double miscalculation at most.