Chapter Text
Fucking are you fucking even goddamn kidding me with this shit.
Bucky was used to being ignored. He was used to never getting porridge, or incense, or tobacco, or any fucking food at all. He was used to the family ruining the walls and floors and even the goddamn hearth, like the gods-less Christians they were. But this? Selling the home their great-great-grandparents invited him into practically the day they stepped off the boat from Russia? This was beyond the pale. This would have him up and banging around the house every night for the next year.
He’d been a little lax the past five years with no one really living here, let more things slide than a good domovoi would. Clearly the household had paid the price for his neglect. If by “paid the price”, you mean “turned into even more ungrateful shits”.
Even so, it was an embarrassing situation. It shifted quickly from an embarrassing situation to a crisis the day the moving trucks came.
Bucky had been in this family for seven upon seven generations, moving from home to home, village to village, province to province, till he took the long and tiring journey to America in 1911 to this very house.
He was comfortable here—or, as comfortable as a domovoi could be, neglected and insulted as he was. He wasn’t used to moving houses anymore, and he didn’t know this land as he had the last. He didn’t know the spirits in it, and he often wondered if he was the only one of his kind in the whole giant gods-forsaken country.
This family was all he had ever had. Though now it had dwindled to just these two poor modern idiots, and though they barely ever slept in the house anymore, Bucky stuck with them. He had trained worse humans into keeping proper house, and he was loyal. But…it chilled him a bit, their attitude. What if they forgot to invite him along to the new hearth? What would happen to him if they left him behind entirely? Could domovoi even survive without a house to guard? His thoughts spiraled into a fierce wind and the cupboards flapped loudly, pots rattling in their odd ceiling cage.
“Oh my god, Naomi, the domovoi is freaking out again. What did Mimi say to do?” called the youngest son, Aaron, a man of nineteen who in high school had regularly infuriated Bucky by leaving cold pizza slices on the floor of his room.
Bucky threw a broom at him for the rudeness of naming him outright, and Aaron yelped, dodging to the floor as soon as he saw it appear to float on its own.
“Naomiiiiiii!”
Bucky rolled his eyes at the dramatics. As if he would ever actually hurt his householder.
Naomi walked in with a stack of boxes and nearly tripped over her brother. “Aaron, get up off the floor and help me pack the truck.”
Aaron scrambled up and pointed at the broom, which had rattled to the floor. “What are we gonna do about the domo—“
Bucky pointedly picked up the dustpan.
Aaron backtracked with appreciable speed, “—the uh, him?”
Bucky set it back down, gratified. Both siblings watched it settle warily.
Naomi shoved a box into Aaron’s hands. “Nothing. We’re packing the place up. We don’t have to do anything with him anymore.”
“But—Mimi said—!”
“Mimi’s dead, Aaron, and the house is a burden. The house and everything in it. We need to move on.”
Well, fuck.
Bucky grimaced. That…did not sound good. He sent the tower of boxes in the hallway toppling out of principle.
———————————————————————————————
“I’m telling ya, Sam, this place is great. Got a covered porch and that classic early 20th century structure—”
Sam’s laugh interrupted his distracted babbling. Steve moved the phone to his shoulder, shifting the U-Haul’s gear into park. “20th century structure? So, it’s falling apart.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Ha ha. Sure, it’s a fixer-upper, but I got it for a steal, uh, given the condition…for its age.”
Sam groaned, but Steve could practically hear his teeth as he grinned on the other side of the line. “I can see the headlines now: ‘Ghost or Grout?’—subhead, ‘Local New Yorker Dies in Classic 20th Century Home’.”
Steve shut the truck door and looked up at the front of his new-old house, laughing helplessly. “Shut up, ya doof, I already signed the dotted line, so it’s too late anyway.”
He paused, breathing in the late spring air, and took the house in. It was a bit more than a fixer-upper: the paint completely worn away to gray wood, windows nearly opaque with rime, and the roof bald of its original shingles. Most people would call it barely livable, but Steve already felt a fondness for the character of the house welling up in him.
He’d always had a thing for old things.
“I can tell you’re there, because you stopped laughing at my hilarious jokes. I’ll let you go so you can settle in your grandpa house, okay?”
“Sure, sure. You know us old folks. We like everything to be just right. Bye, Sam,” he said, and hung up with his friend still laughing.
It took the better part of the day to get his things moved in, despite getting there at seven in the morning. His friends, the Wilsons, and his Ma had all offered to help him move in, but he’d insisted on doing this part alone. And anyway, all his heavy stuff—appliances, books, furniture—was still in a storage container waiting for the house to be closer to done. He’d separated what he could into smaller boxes when he packed them, so he took what felt like a million trips and more than a few puffs on his inhaler, but he finally got it all in. The feeling of pride and accomplishment at finishing on his own was worth the pain he’d wake up to in the morning.
The previous family had left all their very old lawn decor…kinda rude, but none of it was offensive enough to annoy him. No flamingos or large nude statues, just a birdbath and some broken stone benches peeking from under a veil of weeds and overgrown bushes. It did seem a little odd that he got it for as little as he did, but Steve Rogers was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Some people just didn’t know the value of what they had.
He took one step into the living room and stopped short.
There was a brown tabby cat on the pile of boxes by the fireplace. It was huge—maybe a third Steve’s size—and very, very angry. Steve didn’t remember anyone mentioning a cat as part of the deal. He took another step forward. The tabby hissed loudly, and lashed its tail like a whip.
“Hey, kitty, kitty,” he murmured, trying to appear as gentle as possible, leaning low with his thin frame and crouching below the box’s level. The cat did not appear appreciative, hissing again, tail standing straight up. It looked like it might attack at any moment, but was insistent against giving any ground.
Generally, when one finds an angry animal in one’s new house (for a given value of the word new, and also the word house), one calls animal control. Or, at the very least, a helpful friend, perhaps one who had that very same day expressed concern at the state of one’s living space (ahem).
Steve did not do this.
Instead, Steve watched it silently, keeping his eyes on its feet so as to avoid challenging it. He lifted his hand up closer to it and stayed completely still for enough minutes to get a charlie horse in his right thigh. The cat growled at him in a pitchy warble.
Steve stayed perfectly still, hands and legs shaking, feeling like an idiot, but also… Also he felt a weird warmth towards the cat. It was territorial, unapologetic, proud, and angry. Steve could respect that. That was the core set of emotions he felt about anything he really loved, whether it was his ma or his childhood neighborhood in Dumbo.
Slowly, the hisses and growls petered down to nothing. Steve looked up to find the cat laying down on the box tower and simply staring at his hand. Like it was a pouch of catnip. Or a bee. (It was difficult to tell, with cats.) Steve hoped for the sake of his fingers that it was the former.
He snuck them a little closer. No response.
Closer. A slight narrowing of the eyes, but no sudden violence.
His hand was very close now, and the giant cat (what breed was it? Steve didn’t know cats came in McDonalds’ Super Size) had to cross its eyes to keep staring at it. If he had to name the expression it wore, he’d call it a “what the fuck is this” face. He suppressed an inconvenient urge to giggle and bridged the last few inches to gently stroke its head.
It was very warm.
It jerked back to a sitting position, ears somehow conveying extreme offense had been taken, and disappeared up the stairs. Steve stood gradually, wincing at the ache in his back and legs from keeping the same position for so long. For a cat. Who hated him.
Great decision making, Steve.
Somehow, even though it hadn’t ended with happy purring, he felt oddly determined to keep trying. This cat had been abandoned, it appeared, with the same lack of concern the previous owners had felt for their furniture. Steve had bought the house and everything in it, cupboards to cobwebs. As far as he was concerned, he had a cat now.
Oh.
Oh, shit. Steve had a cat now.
Steve had never owned a cat. As a child he was allergic to pretty much everything, so Ma had avoided pets just out of hand as a safety precaution, and this was the first place he’d moved to where there weren’t any apartment pet policies to worry about. Suffice it to say, he didn’t exactly know how to take care of a cat. Let alone how to get one to like him, in order to then take care of it.
This called for expert help.
Steve: Hypothetically, how do I get a cat to like me? Also what are cat breeds even
Nat: steven.
Nat: did u purchase a cat.
Nat: is that what ur trying to tell me.
Steve: This is a hypothetical scenario
Steve: Answer the question
Nat: a hypothetical scenario that u need immediate help with 🤔
Nat: y do u think id know about cats anyway
Nat: I only know about pizza dogs 🍕🐶🍕🍕
Steve: Because you kinda act like a cat?
Nat: 🙀 thats offensive. Im offended. 😾
Steve: …you’re proving my point.
Nat: u get cats to like u the same way u get girls to like u
Nat: ignore them 😂😂😂
Steve: But I need to feed it and stuff. Right?
Nat: no steve cats live on pure spite do u know nothing
Steve: This is less productive than I hoped.
Nat: 😫 rude.
Nat: see if I ever give u my wisdom again
Nat: 😭😭😭😭
Nat: u ungrateful 🐷
Steve: omg, Nat.
Nat: just go ask the shelter people u doofus
Steve: Oh, thanks.
Nat: ✌️
Okay, less expert than expected. Time to google up some shelters. And maybe a PetSmart, because he did not want to think about where that giant cat was pooping.
The closest no-kill shelter he found was set up in an old theater and had “Meow Playing” lit up on the marquee. Steve didn’t know whether to hate it with all his New York soul or find it adorably clever, which was par for the course in the hipster parts of Brooklyn now.
It was surprisingly bright inside, and smelled like lemon Lysol and nail polish. The likely culprit, a receptionist with her name tag on upside down, was painting her nails a searing shade of aqua blue. Steve squinted at the tag. “Darcy?” he ventured.
She hummed, not looking up from the brush (Steve understood. She was on the pinky nail, which was always a tricky bastard to get right). “Yeah, dude, what’s up?”
“…I have some cat questions?” he said.
Darcy looked up, and startled a little, a few strands of black hair falling out of her messy bun. “Oh! Omg, you’re adorable.”
Steve’s mouth twisted to the side. He knew it was meant as a compliment, but it was the one that made him feel the least like himself. “Uh, thanks. Know anything about cat breeds? I found a cat in my house and I have no idea what to do with it.”
Darcy capped her nail polish and waved her hands around to dry them. “Hellzyeah. Draw near, all ye cat lovers, help me pick some pamphlets up, these babies are still wet.”
Steve laughed despite himself and walked around the desk. She was pointing to the middle drawer of a filing cabinet. He opened it and then looked up expectantly.
“Okay, little hunk, I’m not psychic. What’s your cat look like?”
“Uh, angry?” he laughed ruefully, and swept his hair to the side. “It’s a tabby. And really big, like maybe two feet tall. It’s got a bit of a mane…”
Darcy snapped her fingers. “A Maine Coon! Dude, those are so cool. Oh shit, my nails.”
She uncapped the bright blue polish again. “Look under M, there should be some stuff for Maine Coons. My uncle had one of those, it was like the chillest Mufasa-cat. Super playful when he got to know you enough; pretty much the best cat choice. So, you know, good job, and stuff.”
While she was talking, Steve flipped through the files—Munchkin, Minskin, Manx, Maine Coon. He took a copy of each brightly colored handout in the file. “That’s…I dunno. Doesn’t sound like my cat. He was really aggressive. Are they territorial at all? Or maybe—can cats get separation anxiety? I think the old owners of my house left him behind.”
Darcy paused on her last nail patch up, eyes narrowed. “That’s terrible. Have you asked them about it? Maybe they’re like, super forgetful. It’s still shitty though. They probably don’t deserve a cat.”
Steve wasn’t sure what deserving had to do with having pets, but he maybe should have thought to call the sellers before deciding he owned their likely very expensive purebred cat. The childish part of him that had felt a kinship with it the second he felt its fur, the part that had been wanted a pet at 5 years old and never understood the particular health complications that stood in the way…that part of Steve was not particularly interested in looking a gift cat in the mouth.
He sighed. Being a mature adult sucked.
Steve thumped into the house with his arms chock full of pet supplies, and felt like an idiot dropping them on the tower of unpacked boxes still blocking the fireplace. It looked like they had been used as a scratching post by a hellhound—or hellcat, more appropriately.
It had only been a day or two since moving in; still, he felt lazy and unsettled. His parents used to flip houses like this all the time, and they always said the first week was the most important to set a good work routine.
“Nothin’ for it,” Steve muttered to himself, and started on the boxes.
It took the rest of the day to unpack completely, what with all of the tools and paints his ma had donated to the cause. By the time he could sit down to mow through a few turkey and spinach wraps, his back was killing him and he had three missed calls and a text message from an unknown number. He unwrapped an icy-hot patch and scrolled through them.
A call this morning from his ma, probably wanting renovation progress pictures and/or selfies of him smiling (those requests were usually answered with selfies of him frowning aggressively, which caused his mother to send her own, usually frowning even more aggressively. It made both of them cackle and everyone else a little confused). Natasha had called at 2am, probably to regale him with another Clint-Barton-is-a-trash-fire tale. There was a voicemail from Pepper about a new furniture commission, and he wrote a note on his “Work Shit” checklist to call her with some ideas tomorrow.
The text message simply said: Meow
Steve: I would say ‘new phone who dis’, but it’s not actually a new phone. I just don’t know you.
Unknown: How wude!!
Unknown: There’s no way you, tiny hunk, forgot me, bodacious goddess
Unknown: And also we bonded over cats, so you know it’s real
Steve: Darcy?
Unknown: Ding ding!
Steve: How did you even get my number?
Darcy: I am an information wizard
Steve: Ah. So, Google stalking.
Darcy: Nah I’m old school
Darcy: How’s your furry friend?
Steve: Still acting un-Maine-Coon-like. Still hates me.
Darcy: Aw :’( you poor deprived soul
Darcy: You should give him some toys!!!
Steve: I actually bought some… He found them and followed me around to glare at me for an hour while I unpacked.
Darcy: Omg too cute
Darcy: If he’s following you it means he wants to keep tabs! Adorable
Steve: Or he wants to know where I am to murder me.
Darcy: >:( No way
Darcy: Give him time to get used to a new person in his space and you will be best buds!!!
Steve: Ok thanks
He tossed his phone on the card table with a grimace and stood up to stretch, the patch finally starting to loosen his tense muscles. Darcy was…a little much for Steve, all at once. He liked his privacy, though he liked letting the people he trusted in, but still—there was a fundamental step of choosing to do that, which she’d just decided to skip right over.
He heard the clatter of something metal crashing to the floor upstairs, and considered Darcy’s advice. All the handouts had said Maine Coons were playful, patient, and fairly friendly. He was beginning to think this Maine Coon had been dropped on his head into the river Styx as a kitten, because the closest thing to playful Steve’d seen from him was the time he tried to push over a ladder while Steve was trying to get on it.
He hadn’t figured out a name for the cat yet. It didn’t feel right to name something that hated you; it was presumptuous. But a name would keep. Steve would get this cat to like him. It would happen. They would be best. Buds.
Sam choked on his mocha, set it down, and waved his hands. “No, wait, wait, stop. Steve. Steven. You moved in to a shitty house one week ago, and now you have a fixer-upper cat too? Tell me how this doesn’t exhibit a deeply flawed hero complex.”
“No one appreciates a psychoanalyzer,” he said.
Sam made a buzzer noise. “Wrong. I’m loved and appreciated by all.”
“Oh, did your momma tell you that?” Steve asked with a mock show of pity, eyebrows tented in concern.
“Steven Grant Rogers, did you just Yo Momma my mama? Tell me you did not just. Darlene Wilson is a respectable woman.”
“With a mean uppercut, too,” Steve added, grinning.
Sam nodded with a theatrical grimace. “The meanest in Harlem. She’ll have to show you some time. But we were talking about you, and your broken ass old house, and your broken ass new house cat. So what, you just, found it in your bushes and decided he was the one?”
“Ahhhh,” Steve hesitated, and felt his mouth twist to the side. “More like…he confronted me from a tower of boxes. I think my first reaction was like, dear God, who let that bobcat in.”
“Jeez-us, how big is the motherfucker?” he asked.
Steve estimated with his hands. Sam swore loudly.
“Okay, so how did you take the leap from ‘unwanted bobcat’ to ‘personal responsibility’. Is this like. That scene in the kids dragon movie, what’s it called, the one you wouldn’t shut up about—”
“How to Train Your Dragon,” he provided. Sam snapped and pointed in confirmation.
“I can totally see you doing that dumb trusting head touch the kid uses. Tell me you did not do this.”
Steve felt very seen. It was extremely uncomfortable. He twisted his mouth to the side and shrugged, “In my defense, it worked.”
“You asshole!” Sam yelled, delighted. “I can’t believe you used cartoon movie tactics to get close to a rabid bobcat instead of calling animal control.”
Steve counted off on his fingers. “It’s not rabid, it’s not a bobcat, and there’s no guarantee that animal control would take it to a no-kill shelter. I’m not gonna send a cat to die just because he’s a little angry.”
Sam raised his hands, placating, “I gotchu. That’s admirable, but honestly—aren’t you allergic to cats?”
Deadpan, he replied, “That was never proven.”
Well, shit. Now Steve had a cat and a ghost.
At first he thought it was just shitty drains and the like. He had grown up in old apartments in Brooklyn, the kind of pre-war buildings that fostered a fondness for old architecture in any small, art-obsessed boys and girls who happened to live there. He was used to cold spots from poorly maintained HVAC systems, flickering lights from old electrical patch jobs, cupboards slamming from drafty windows and doors.
Most of the signs of ghosts that people talked about were easily explained if you knew anything about old houses. So when the kitchen sink drain clogged and spewed up red-tinged liquid, he nodded and thought rust, and added ‘plumber…copper pipes?’ to his growing to-do list.
When he finished stripping off all the layers of horrendous wallpaper and finally got to painting his bedroom walls (a soft blue with the unfortunate name ‘I Blue You Away’), he was a little disturbed to see what seemed to be phantom paint seeping forward. It bloomed into the likeness of an angry man dressed in rags.
It was the gradualness of its arrival that was most unsettling—he dismissed the initial dark shapes as his own careless paint job. (He wasn’t a careless man, but it was late, and his eyes hurt, and his shoulders were sore.)
But then, the next morning, the shadow shape of a portrait was undeniably present.
He’d never seen its like—as if someone on the inside of the wall had dropped india ink and it, like water, had spread naturally into these striking features. The tense jawline, the piercing eyes, the strong line of elbow to clenched fists, the gentle curve of a bottom lip and evidence of tiredness in the gauzy suggestion of his clothes.
Steve sat on the floor and stared up at it for a while, creeped out and puzzled.
He went and got his sketchbook and a pillow to sit on. That night his back was killing him for it, but he felt full and satisfied from capturing the weird ethereality of it with just charcoals.
In the morning, the cat woke him up two hours early to hiss in his face before darting off. It was freezing, and it made his joints ache to think of grouting the upstairs bathroom. And it looked like he needed to check the HVAC too.
Ugh. First breakfast, then meds, then coherent thought.
He was working his way doggedly through a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios at the card table he’d set up in the kitchen, staring into nothing as he mentally went through his task list, when he saw movement in the corner of his eye. He looked behind him, but nothing. Probably a bug. God, he hoped this house didn’t have an infestation the inspector had failed to find.
When he turned back to his cereal with a sigh, there was something inches from his face—he shouted and fell out of his folding chair. It was a butter knife. Hanging still in mid-air. Steve squinted at it, breathless.
“What—the fuck,” he said, and dug into his pants pocket for his inhaler. He took a puff, unable to look away from it, for fear it might move or disappear. It did neither, but there was a kind of quivering energy in the room that Steve did not think came from his own internal panic.
He got up and waved his hand above the knife. “No strings,” he muttered. He looked at the underside of the card table, feeling foolish when he found no reasonable explanation there either. He climbed up on the table and looked at it from every angle, but it remained, stubbornly and inexplicably real.
He poked it. It was solid, but did not move. He grabbed it by the handle and tugged.
“Hey, asshole,” he grunted, then pulled with all his might. “Gimme my fuckin’ butter knife back.”
The quivering tension snapped, and Steve fell ass over heels from the table, knife in hand.
“Wow, thanks,” he groaned.
The next day it happened again, the prickling feeling of someone nearby, the butter knife stopping inches away and sticking in its improbable place—but this time Steve simply moved his cereal and chair over and continued eating. He couldn’t stop himself from flinching at it, but he would not let whatever this is get the better of him again.
The kitchen fan slowed in its turning and the air turned thick and hot as bread pudding. Steve chewed his cereal to paste, tried not to dart looks at the knife, tried to swallow through the air, the growing feeling that he needed to leave, run outside, get away, get out—
He took a deliberate sip from his red Solo cup of orange juice (more like pink juice, since he had tritanopia, but whatever. He liked oranges). “I ain’t running,” he announced.
He wasn’t. But he did need intel, and there’s nothing shameful in a tactical retreat.
Steve stuffed the manila folder of legal documents in his bag with one hand while he locked the door. It was time to give the old homeowners a call.
“Hey, Wanda,” he said into the phone he held to his ear with a shrugged shoulder, since he was using both hands to google ‘scientific reasons for floating objects’.
“Listen, this is gonna sound—I better just show you. I need some help with the house. Might be up your alley. Text me when you’ve got a free hour, okay? Thanks.”
A barista brought over his coffee and ham and cheese croissant. “Thanks,” he muttered, and continued trying to weed through the surprising number of magician-centric results for anything useful.
“You’re super welcome, tiny hunk,” the barista said, and Steve’s head snapped up.
“Darcy?” he asked, because there she was, in a red beanie with purple, glittery nails this time. “Your name tag is upside down again.”
She patted it. “Yep, yep, that’s, you know, my thing. My shtick. I like to make ‘em work for it, you know?”
Steve did not know, and made a face to display this.
“Whatever, it totally works, but what I really wanna know is, how is your kitty cat? I demanded weekly photo updates and you did not provide.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, and took a long sip. Darcy set her hip against the table, getting comfortable, and made grabby hands at his phone.
“I don’t have any photos. He’s very quick. Sticks to the shadows and pops outta nowhere—can’t tell ya how many times he’s tripped me. Refuses every kinda cat food I’ve tried and I don’t know where the hell he’s shitting, but it ain’t in the litter box.”
“Your cat would totally be a rogue in D&D. Idk about the litter, though. Kitties love burying their shit, it’s an instinct thing. That’s super weird.”
She actually spelled out the acronym, eye-dee-kay, instead of just…saying the words. He was kind of done with his whole generation at that moment.
“Understatement,” he muttered, and bought an exorcism kit on Etsy.
What the hell, he figured. When it doesn’t work, I can put the herbs in a soup.
Steve meant to keep out of the house all day, but now that plan seemed a little extreme. Darcy kept stopping by his table to ‘drop off napkins’ or ‘refill his latte’, and from the way her coworker was reacting, this was the most attention she’d paid to her job ever. Also, he was pretty sure this cafe didn’t normally do table service.
When he stepped back in the front door, he paused to see if the house still held that air of menace, but there was nothing. Just the usual smell of must and old wood varnish. Steve dug through the slightly squashed manila folder, found the homeowners’ contact page, and dialed.
“…Hello?” a young woman’s voice sounded through the line.
Hey, is the house you sold me haunted? Steve thought hysterically. How the hell am I supposed to ask this?
“Uh, hey! How are you?”
“…?”
“It’s uh, I bought your house. This is Naomi Barnes, right?” he asked, suddenly sure this was the wrong number.
“Oh. No, yeah, that’s me. I just didn’t expect…is something the matter?”
He laughed, and winced at how strained it sounded. “No! It’s a great house. Good bones. Gonna look great when it’s done. I grew up flipping houses like this with my parents, fixing ‘em and moving to the next project, ya know. So I can tell it’s gonna look great,” Steve said, slapped his forehead and rubbed down over his mouth.
Shut up, oh my god, you idiot.
“Okay?” said Naomi. “Sorry, it’s just, if nothing’s wrong, I’m not sure why you’re calling.”
“Right. I had a few questions I wanted to run by you. Did you leave a cat here? Big fella, I think it’s called a tabby.”
“Oh,” Naomi said, for the first time sounding engaged. “You’ve seen Princess Peach? Is he okay?”
Steve felt like he was dissociating. That nightmare cat cannot be named Princess Peach.
“That can’t be his name,” he said. Oops, I said that out loud.
“We were kids. I thought he was a girl and I liked Mario games. So you’ve seen him?” Naomi repeated.
“Yeah, here and there. I thought he was a stray who snuck in since he was acting real feral. But the cat shelter said he was a Maine Coon,” he said, and headed up to his room. If he was going to ask a near stranger about ghosts, he might as well be comfortable.
“You gave him to a cat shelter? How did you even get him in a carrier?” she asked.
“I didn’t. Thought he was yours, wasn’t gonna give someone else’s cat away. So…d’ya want him back?”
“No, no,” Naomi said hastily. “I can’t. My apartment doesn’t allow pets. And anyway, Princess Peach has been in that house since forever. He probably wouldn’t do well leaving it. I actually have no idea how old he is, ‘cause he wasn’t a kitten when we were kids.”
He squinted. “But…that would make him, what. Eighteen, twenty? He looks barely four.”
She laughed. “Yeah, me and Aaron had all these conspiracy theories about how he was an escaped government experiment. But really, you oughtta keep him. If he lets you see him at all, he probably likes you.”
Steve thought about the number of times he woke up with the cat hissing in his face and hummed dubiously, “Maybe. If it’s alright, I had a few other questions about the house.”
“Sure.”
He took a deep breath and got out his sketchbook to keep his hands busy. He’d have to go about this…delicately. God. Steve had never once been accused of being delicate. Where was Natasha when he needed her?
“I’m not sure how much the realtor told you about my plans for the house—”
“Nothing. You were one of the first bids. To be honest, our Mimi kept this place way longer than was good for her. Sentimental, probably, since it’s been in our family forever. She was in a nursing home and we’re in college, so no one really lived here the past few years anyway. We were just happy we got as much as we did for it, since it’s like, basically falling apart.”
“Right. Like I said, I grew up flipping houses, so the condition’s not a problem. But this house was built in 1907 and it’s still got most of the original moldings and doors. It’s history. I’m restoring it, not renovatin’ it. I dunno if it’ll qualify to be a historical landmark when I’m done. I’m no professional. But I would like to know more about uh, the family history, since that’s a big part of the house’s history too, ya know,” Steve finished.
He wasn’t a good liar and he didn’t like to do it, besides, but he was a little proud of how plausible this excuse was. He almost believed it. Natasha always did say the best lie was a secret from yourself.
“The family history,” Naomi said, flatly. All the friendliness he had earned asking after the cat disappeared.
Oh boy, he thought.
“Right. Uh, I really think it would help.”
She sighed heavily. “I don’t know much. Mimi was your best bet for this stuff and she’s dead now, so. What kind of stuff d’you wanna know?”
Steve glanced down at his sketchbook and realized he’d been drawing a caricature of himself, looking at a cartoon ghost with comically overwhelmed eyes. Me too, buddy. Me too.
“Uh,” he cleared his throat. “How about, where your family’s from, mysterious deaths, any big family achievements, people or…events history should remember, things like that.”
There was a long silence down the phone line. Steve added little feet to the ghost, like it was a person under bedsheets. He gave them wingtips.
“Weird, but whatever. We’re Jewish and we moved here from Russia before World War I, I’m pretty sure. I don’t remember anyone mentioning like, Olympic athletes or musicians. Always been teachers or mechanics or mailmen, you know, regular jobs. Although,” Naomi said, and paused.
“Yeah?”
“I mean, pretty much every generation of Barnes’ has at least one soldier, I think. My uncle, my Baba—uh, that’s what we called my grandpa—and he was always proud about his uncle serving in World War II even though he died just before Baba was born.”
“Oh?” Steve asked, hopeful. “How’d he die?”
“Did something heroic and didn’t make it back. They gave the family his medal and the flag; I’m sure it’s in storage somewhere.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. I dunno. James, I think.”
Naomi sounded pretty done, and he felt suddenly guilty for making this poor girl dig through her family tree right after her grandma died. Ma would kill him when she found out. Why didn’t he just fucking google it?
“Thank you, Naomi. Really. I’m sorry to ask all this,” he said.
“It’s whatever. Is that everything?”
“Yeah. Thanks again.”
“Okay,” she said, and hung up.
Steve couldn’t blame her.
He labelled his cartoon ghost ‘James Barnes?’. Then he grabbed his dust mask and kneepads, loaded up an audiobook, and headed to the bathroom for more grouting.
Wanda texted him back that night and told him to bring the butter knife and any other weird stuff over to her place. He put it in a ziplock bag, feeling like he was bagging evidence at a crime scene.
She drew it out with a carefulness that made him feel a lot less foolish about that, and inspected it for several long minutes. Steve’s seen her do this before—brows heavy over a dark sloe-eyed stare, her ordinarily light sweetness dipped into a well of solemnity—so he knew to keep the silence till she broke it.
Her eyes flashed to his and he straightened. “No one else has touched this?” she asked in her musical, accented English. He nodded.
She hummed, “It is—what is the word—” she made a buzzing noise and waved her hands “—but in a lonely way. Angry. But not empty.”
“You’re saying it’s definitely supernatural.”
Wanda laughed, “Oh yes. Definitely ‘my cup of tea’. But I have not, ah, tasted this flavor before. It may take a while for me to have a better idea of what it is. All I can tell you is that it is not an empty echo of a life. Not a ghost, I do not think. It is, it has a, present mind. Living emotions.”
Steve rubbed his face. “Damn. None of this was on the deed,” he said wryly, and her kind eyes crinkled in amusement. “Thank you, Wanda. I appreciate you going through the trouble.”
“No trouble,” she waved. “It is a fun puzzle. I will tell you if I solve more of it. Until then, it is best you avoid interacting with it as much as you can. And tell me if something new happens.”
He nodded and made to leave. “Steve,” Wanda called. She had her serious eyes on. “If it hurts you, or you feel threatened, my couch is free.”
“That’s real kind,” he smiled. “But my Ma has a pull out couch if it comes to that.”
If it hurts me, he thought on the drive home, I’ll kick its ass to Queens.
———————————————————————————————
This motherfucker, Bucky thought, with a grudging respect, does not scare easy.
He didn’t look like much, this motherfucker—thin and slumped, pale and huffing, with joints jutting like protractor angles and a full, delicate mouth. His nose took up most of his face. Bucky thought uncharitably that you would think nostrils that size would keep the huffing and puffing to a minimum, but you would be wrong.
Every morning he took as many little pills as the elderly members of Bucky’s family used to, pricked himself with a palm-sized device, injected his side with some liquid from the mini fridge, and often drank orange juice straight from the carton. (This last thing was not a weakness as much as it was abominably rude.)
But. He had to admit that motherfucker seemed to have endless endurance, like he possessed a source of energy totally separate from his body. A spring, somewhere. A deep swelling river spirit.
Whatever it was, it stalled Bucky’s angry moods to watch him struggle through a breathing attack, pull himself slowly and grimly back up, and continue working like nothing at all had occurred. It might be why none of Bucky’s warnings were working—who feared a knife who walked with death in their lungs?
Still, it couldn’t hurt to try, and he was still steaming from yet another orange juice infraction. That night he threw all the spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck—if by ‘spaghetti’ you meant ‘the entire silverware drawer’.
The messy motherfucker yelled and ducked to the ground in an extremely gratifying display of self-preservation, and shielded his head from the hailstorm of spoons.
He looked up at the sight of all his butter knives and forks embedded, vibrating, two inches deep in the fresh drywall. He just got it installed after a huge troupe of men in masks had torn out and replaced the stuffing behind all the old walls, for some inexplicable human reason. “Goddammit!” he growled. “That is it!”
He stomped into the living room and rummaged in a delivery box. He came back up with two black candles, a white bundle of dried leaves, five small colorful stones, a piece of chalk, and a piece of overly decorated printer paper labeled ‘Simple Exorcism Kit Instructions’.
Are you…actually that dumb?
Once Bucky got over his initial shock, he found the whole thing hilarious. Here he was, dealing with an interloper in his family’s home, and the interloper was trying to kick him out. Motherfucker thought he was a ghost.
Bucky watched, unable to stop smiling, as Motherfucker drew circles and symbols on the wood floor with the chalk, eyebrows pinched and muttering about varnish. He didn’t think this guy expected it to work at all. It looked like he was too angry to care. It was…charming.
He brushed his hair out of his eyes, lit the candles with sarcastic melodrama, and read from the paper, “Begone, bad spirit. I cast you and your negative energies out of this house. You are not welcome here. Begone, begone, uh, begone.”
He referred to the paper again, and then set the herb bundle on fire. No doubt it was a smoking herb, the kind that swallowed fire into red coals. It was probably the end of the whole production.
But Bucky was having so much fun watching this; he couldn’t help wanting to tease back. He flexed his fingers and the little dying flame flared up into a bright four inch column.
Motherfucker, eyes huge, let out a frog’s croak of an alarm. He blew at it. Bucky cackled and sent it another inch higher. He felt himself start to sweat and his hands shook with the effort—more fallout of an empty hearth—but gods, was it worth it.
Motherfucker threw the flaming herbs like a baseball from a pitcher’s mound at the floor and stomped on it with his big brown worker’s boots. He kept stomping long after Bucky let the flame die.
Bucky almost wished that he was allowed to let people hear him, because he hadn’t laughed this hard in decades. As much as his family’s absence was a throbbing hole in his chest, if his house had to be invaded by anyone—well.
Motherfucker wasn’t all bad.
Bucky had figured out the trick of training Motherfucker—or, well, no he hadn’t. He had figured out that classical conditioning was not the way to go.
Most of the Barnes’ were straight-forward, hard-working folk. Immediate negative reinforcement when they were messy or lazy hadn’t been necessary until the last thirty years or so. Before that, they were finely attuned to their household and their domovoi’s needs and moods, so that refusing an offering or pointedly leaving soot around the hearth was enough to get them to sit up and take notice. Even when one or two of the family felt that belief in a supernatural creature was childish and backwards or even heretical, there was always a grandmother to keep the whole flock in line.
When little Dicky Barnes came back from the Persian Gulf War, short a brother and half his right leg, insisting on being called Richard and hiding darkness in a smile, things changed.
Richard woke everyone with his night terrors and took to limp-stomping around the house on his prosthetic when he couldn’t sleep. During the day he drank to keep his phantom pain at arm’s length and smoked to keep his hands from shaking. The drink worsened his mood swings—equal probability that he slapped at his wife or reeled her in for a kiss. Bucky had to work harder to make the house feel comforting and safe. The family began to focus outwards, and needed more obvious nudges to take care of themselves and the house.
The problem was not that Richard Barnes had brought the war home with him—Bucky had seen it before, and it took a while for everyone to heal from it, even with his help. The problem was something he didn’t expect: the war had warped Richard like metal around a tree, glass in a kiln. His spirit was altered on some atomic level Bucky couldn’t reach.
For the next twenty years, Bucky turned every effort, formerly aimed at keeping the pipes from rust and the wood whole and supple, towards keeping the family safe from Richard. Even as they offered Bucky less and less, forgot him more and more, and let the house bald with age, he kept the house supernaturally comforting on bad nights and turned as many blows away as he could. On nights when no comfort could keep Richard’s demons dormant or the others from their terror, he opened the windows so the neighbors could intervene for him.
His binding not to harm Richard complicated matters. He longed to eject him permanently from the household, but only they could do that, and they were too terrified to try. It showed a profound lack of belief and trust in their domovoi protector. Bucky tried not to take it too personally.
They never did kick him out. Richard died in a drunk driving accident when the children were still school-aged, and their mother left them with their grandparents to start fresh with a new husband. He did his best to retrain them to keep the house properly, but found he had to resort to a blunt hammer method—and none of it, it seemed, had worked. The house looked like an old man. The kids had gotten rid of him and their childhood home as soon as they were legally capable.
Bucky almost didn’t even blame them.
Motherfucker wasn’t his family, but he did live in his house, so he would abide by Bucky’s rules. Now he had to figure out how to make Motherfucker do literally anything he didn’t want to, which so far had been impossible.
Negative reinforcement just made Motherfucker more defiant and stubborn. Bucky supposed he had started out rougher than necessary—throwing silverware was pretty dangerous—except he’d been furious at being abandoned, and hearing Motherfucker’s shocked yell was cathartic. That he had then gotten so mad that he tried to exorcise Bucky, like he was the invasive presence in the scenario—well.
He still found it hilarious. But it did make him reevaluate his methods.
Positive reinforcement for good things—putting his dishes away, sweeping drywall dust, making up the sheets on his cot, which he was very neat about—was, so far, a hit or miss. Mostly it seemed to confuse Motherfucker, two lines appearing between his eyebrows as he examined the carefully arranged gift of charcoal sticks before carefully packing it into a ziplock bag and never fucking using them.
The problem, Bucky decided, was that he didn’t know much about Motherfucker at all.
These were the facts he knew about Motherfucker: He drew, he was brave, he was sickly, he went about alternately destroying and fixing the house wearing a bulky face mask, and he liked making lists. But Bucky hadn’t watched Motherfucker grow up like all the Barnes. He couldn’t reward him with a favorite childhood candy or a new ball of expensive yarn.
Bucky didn’t even know his name. No one who’d come into the house had really addressed him, either, so he had no way of learning it.
Although…maybe. There was something—in his animal form, he could directly interact with Motherfucker. It wouldn’t be the same as a conversation, but obviously domovye weren’t meant to do much of that.
He tested this new avenue that weekend, when Motherfucker’s plan for the day appeared to be: sit on his cot and watch cartoons while drawing.
Bucky, in his cat form, pawed open the door and walked in front of the bed, tail waving high like a white flag (but only metaphorically. Bucky preferred being tabby). He did this a few times. There was no response from the cot, only the ceaseless scritch-scratch of graphite on recycled paper. The laptop playing the cartoon shrieked, “Everyone! She-Ra has come to save us all!”
Come on. Look up, Motherfucker.
He did not. Bucky peeked over the end of the cot, ears twitching. He was trying not to be frightening this time, but it didn’t seem Motherfucker responded to subtlety. More direct intervention was required.
He leapt up. Still nothing. Just more drawing in a weirdly large sketchbook, and occasional breaks to watch this She-Ra character save everyone.
Bucky had never liked being ignored, but he liked it even less from Motherfucker. He hooked a paw around the top of the laptop screen and peeked over it into his boarder’s startled face.
“Cat!” he said, and dropped his pencil.
Bucky resisted the un-catlike urge to roll his eyes.
Motherfucker was giving him a wide stare and holding his hands still in the air, probably afraid he would strike at sudden movements. He wouldn’t, this time. Probably.
Now that he had the man’s attention, Bucky padded around the laptop and sat just within arm’s reach. He glanced at the sketchbook, but even upside down he could tell there was nothing so convenient as a legible signature. A large part of the page was taken up by sharply defined designs of a madman’s definition of an armchair deconstructed, notated with numbers and small handwriting in all capital letters.
More interesting were the margins, where Motherfucker had grown bored of angles and drawn a variety of round cartoonish figures. Bucky tilted his head a little closer…they looked like costumed baby dolls? Weird, but admittedly much more pleasing to look at than the chair parts.
“Hey, there. You’re being real friendly today. Did you finally decide to be friends, huh? D’you want some food?” he asked, but made no move to stand.
No one wants your wet fish mush, Motherfucker, Bucky thought, tail ticking against the quilted bedspread.
“Well, let’s see how long I can get you to hang out. Gonna let me pet ya?” he asked, and reached a testing hand forwards.
Bucky hopped off the cot, letting his tail bat the hand playfully as he went. No luck today, then. He’d check again when he saw more papers.
This’d be a lot easier if Motherfucker ever brought any friends over. Or told people his name when he called them or invited them in, like a normal human.
When he’d heard him say Naomi’s name, it was like a punch to the gut. But at least now he knew that Motherfucker had grown up abandoning places like this—despicable behavior, though in this case it worked in Bucky’s favor. Once he was done ruining the house, he’d leave. There was an end to all this. Bucky was determined to see that as a good thing, no matter how his gut twisted at the thought of being left again.
Over the next week, Bucky used his cat form to snoop every time he saw Motherfucker handling papers, including:
- Eight times he was drawing—mostly more of those deconstructed furniture monstrosities, though once a pair of white lilies held in calloused hands, and none of which he signed. Humble asshole.
- Once he was making a grocery list. Boring. Too many tomatoes and no pudding at all.
- Eleven times, usually in the morning and night, he wrote in a leather-bound journal. The pages had some kind of grid he filled with organized lists. Lots of dates but no name, unsurprisingly.
- Twice towards the end of the week, Bucky sat on the newspaper and refused to move while Motherfucker was trying to read it, but that was just for fun.
He didn’t bring in any mail. Bucky was beginning to wonder if he would have to wait till tax season rolled around. For some reason, this small curiosity had, with every day that passed without learning his erstwhile boarder’s name, become an intolerable grievance.
But more than that, there was something about him. He was such an unknown, but so clearly full of somethings. There was an extra feeling about his presence in a room, a buzzing bigness, that Bucky had never seen before. It made him feel itchy.
Finally, nine days into this, Motherfucker had someone over who had some sense of how introductions were supposed to work. He felt them cross onto the property—large, Nordic heritage, meant no ill will, carrying a toolbox. He ran in cat form to the door, too impatient to wait for the knock that came a minute later. Motherfucker gave him a curious look as he opened it to greet the man.
“Hi. You Thor? A&E Systems said you wouldn’t get here for another hour,” he said, and held out a hand.
The man grinned and shook the offered hand with the kind of firm hold and hearty backslaps that only the truly friendly could pull off. Bucky barely held back a laugh at Motherfucker’s expression.
“It is good I am early! And you must be Mr. Rogers,” Thor boomed.
“Steve, please. Mr. Rogers is on PBS. Come in. Do you want something to drink? I have water and…water,” he finished, mouth twisting wryly.
“A difficult choice, but water would be fine,” Thor smiled, and carefully stepped around Bucky to set his tools in the living room.
So Motherfucker’s name was Steve Rogers. Steve. Such a…normal, solid name.
Somehow it was not what he’d been expecting.
Somehow he was so focused on finding out Steve’s name that he’d forgotten why he wanted to know it, to know everything he could about his new boarder. It was all supposed to be about training him to be a good member of the household, a good reflection of a good domovoi’s family.
But there was no household to make proud. Bucky didn’t have a family to be good for. All he had was the husk they’d left him in, the house that was as much a part of his body as his tail or his fingers. A shell of a thing with no purpose.
Just something to be sold and torn apart by the new inhabitant.
Why was he doing any of this? Training Steve, hiding from sight, protecting the boundaries—what was the point of being what he was, doing what he always did, following the instinctual rules that kept him bound together? He was what he did and he did it because it was what he was. But now—there was no hearth, no center.
When Naomi Barnes was growing up, she was always chattering about outer space. Often, he was the only one listening, and he remembered how she would read aloud from her books about the gravity of large bodies, small finger carefully tracing below polysyllabic words.
That’s how it was with him—a moon treading its orbit around its planet, revolution after revolution, turning in on itself. Always keeping its face to the planet and its dark side to the cold hostility of space.
What happened when the planet’s gravity disappeared and there was nothing holding the moon to its path? Was a moon still a moon without a planet?
Is there anything more pathetic, Bucky thought, than a moon circling the same empty point in space when nothing remains to hold it?
———————————————————————————————
Steve took his own advice and fucking googled it.
He found record of a Sgt. James Barnes of Brooklyn, NY, dying on August 8, 1944. Because libraries are awesome, the Brooklyn Public Library website had years and years of Brooklyn Daily Eagle issues digitized and organized by date. He started with August 1 and went forward from there. He couldn’t exactly ‘Ctrl + F’ the paper, but at least now he wouldn’t have to spend hours crouched over one of those awful microfiche machines straining his eyes in a dark back room. He was on page 14 of August 5, 1944 when he found it, on a page headlined ‘Stories of Brooklyn Men and Women in U.S. War Service’.
Steve noticed his picture first.
He was handsome—and not just in that classic way soldiers always looked handsome in their military dress, further exaggerated by the black and white contrast of newspaper ink. James Barnes was handsome in a way that took your heart for a spin and dipped you low with a wink. His hat surely wasn’t meant to be placed so, crooked and tilted back so he could grin at the camera through slanted eyes, but he seemed exactly the kind of man that would get away with it. Cocksure and jovial and so, so young.
The second thing he noticed was that it was also, without a doubt, the same man as the one that’d shown up painted on his bedroom wall for a brief two days before fading away sulkily, a photograph sinking to the bottom of a pond.
Beneath the caption, the subhead read “Mother Learns of Barnes’ Capture”, with the brief story as follows:
“A letter that Mrs. Barnes of 4520 12th Ave. received from her son, Sgt. James Barnes in Africa this February, showed that he was determined, though not as cheerful as usual. That aroused her suspicions that all was not well. In March she received a telegram from the War Department reporting him missing in action. A second Government notification informed her that James had been taken prisoner by the Germans Feb 25.
Sgt. James Barnes entered the army July 16, 1941, and spent two months at Camp Wheeler, Ga., and four months advanced training in Madison, Wisc., before being sent overseas. Because he was missing on Feb 25, his mother thinks he was taken in Tunisia. In his last letter to her, he said he was “not kicking off yet” and that he was thinking of home and his sisters and asked her to send “all the socks you got and even more cigarettes than that.”
Mr. Barnes fears the worst as Sgt. Barnes was not among the names very recently reported to be confirmed living in German prison camps. But Mrs. Barnes has faith. “He graduated high school with honors. At 20, he was a manager of a grocery store. He’s smart and strong and he told us not to worry a whit.”
There was no obituary published later in August that Steve could find—the government must have switched his ‘missing in action’ status to ‘killed in action’ months later, when the bureaucratic dust of war had settled.
“Shit,” he said aloud to the young dead man on his screen. “You poor bastard.”
Now that he had a working electrical system—one that he didn’t have to worry would burn his house down or short out suddenly—he could start getting it up to fire code. Thor had installed the smoke alarms already, so they just wanted some batteries and a test run.
His ma was over to help, since it was Sunday, and even though he pretty much only went to mass for Christmas Eve once a year, he and his Ma still kept the Sunday dinner tradition. Said tradition being, ordering as much Chinese food as they could handle and watching whatever they wanted. Ma always referred to it jokingly as ‘guilt therapy’. “We got our weekly dose of guilt this morning,” she would explain cheerfully, “so now we’ll have some guilt-free guilty pleasures to balance it out. Moderation, Stevie. That’s the key.”
He set up a ladder underneath the kitchen’s smoke alarm first, and Ma passed him a 9V battery. One by one they put them all in, chatting about what show they would normally feel the most guilty watching and arguing the relative flaws of each. They figured he could test them tomorrow. What Steve had forgotten in his many years of living in dorms and apartments was that smoke alarms, once activated, have absolutely no fucking chill at all.
He was just twisting the last smoke alarm into its casing, shoulders burning and neck killing him, his Ma giving him a concerned look at the way he winced with the movement, when a piercing chirp rang from the kitchen.
It went off in the hallway and seconds later in the living room, starting a chain reaction that led all the way through the house to the attic above him.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
“Ugh,” he sighed.
His Ma laughed incredulously. “What on earth?”
He turned off his hearing aid and moved to climb down, only to see the cat—to see Princess Peach—staring up at the smoke alarm with extreme suspicion. The hallway alarm sounded off, and he darted out with his tail fluffed aggressively to glare at it. Steve smiled despite himself, meeting his ma’s sparkling eyes, and they followed after him. He folded the step ladder, intending to carry it under his arm, but Ma grabbed it, pointing at him sternly till he gave in.
And then something truly horrible happened. The beeps began to overlap, like some hellish and inharmonious choir. His ma was reacting like they were drilling straight into her forehead. Steve was, for once, glad to be half deaf.
Princess Peach ran to stare daggers at each alarm as it shrieked—very much like a guard dog who hears someone at the door. It would have been sweet if the overlapping noises didn’t result in a relay race of scrambling from room to room, with barely a pause granted for Princess Peach to glare. It was instead YouTube comedy gold, and Steve tried to keep his phone steady to keep the cat in frame as he recorded. Currently, his ma was calmly walking down the stairs with the ladder, shaking her head fondly at him as she passed. At the very least, Natasha would enjoy it.
Eventually, though, even with his hearing aid off the noise was too much for him to handle, and besides, his poor ma had to work tomorrow and he’d hate to give her a headache. She went back around with the step ladder to help him reset them all. By the time he finished and Ma went to coo at the new bathtub he’d had installed in his master bathroom, Princess Peach had clearly decided this was all his fault. Steve re-entered his bedroom to find the cat sitting on his cot, eyes narrowed to slits.
“Hey, pal. Rough day, huh?” Steve smirked.
Princess Peach stared pointedly at him and began slashing his pillowcase to ribbons.
“Whoa, hey! No!” he yelled, and lunged for the creature.
Despite the speed at which he darted out of the room, Steve thought he saw a distinctly triumphant sparkle in Princess Peach’s eye before he vanished around the corner.
From the bathroom, his ma called, “Steven Grant, are you okay?”
He sighed. “Yes, Ma. Just the fuckin’ cat.”
“Oh,” she replied, amused, “well, if it’s just the fuckin’ cat.”