Chapter Text
Steve and Bucky shifted inside the closet, squirming around boxes and pushing hangers back and forth along the rod above them. Steve’s scales scraped across the wood lightly, not hard enough to scuff the finish off the white oak, but enough that the sound of rustling filled the bedroom. Bucky sniffed along the thick slats in the door, huffing out heavy breaths intermittently as the scents of baby powder and milk got stuck in his nose. There was a child on the other side of the door. It had been so long since they’d gotten the chance to frighten a child. They’d had to move so often these days, only staying in one place for a month or two at a time.
This place, though, had a plethora of unused rooms. They had enough closets and storage rooms to stay in, could move around under the cover of night to move to areas less used or just cleaned to stay out of the humans’ ways. When they’d first slithered in, they’d expected the place to be full of people, like an apartment building. But there were only a handful of people who lived there full-time, and it was easy to avoid the people who came in to do the cleaning.
They were excited—there was something a lot more amusing about scaring a child than an adult. It had been so long since they’d gotten to do something fun. Steve slithered out first, low to the ground, scales rasping over the plus carpet. Bucky followed slowly, paws silent as he padded around to the opposite side of the crib from him. They gave each other a giddy smile under the crib, then both leapt up to full height, hands up, claws out, sharp teeth on display, knowing they’d only have a moment before they had to duck back down out of sight.
But they didn’t realize how young the child was until it started sobbing.
Steve and Bucky scrambled back into the closet before its parents could come in to see what the problem was. Steve felt awful. He liked scaring children, but not when they were this young and everything was scary, and their first response was to cry instead of scream. Bucky didn’t have the same guilt Steve had about making children cry, so it took an extra moment to scuff out Steve’s tracks in the carpet, make sure the closet door was shut the same amount it had been before they snuck out, before he hunkered down with him by an unused dresser. They waited with bated breath for the parents to come bursting in, see what was wrong with their baby that it was crying like this, but as time went on and no came to comfort the child, Bucky did start to feel a little guilty. When they scared children, they weren’t supposed to stay scared. Their parents were supposed to come and take care of them and soothe their tears away.
For some reason, though, that wasn’t happening. Not this time.
They crept back into the room—the walls were a pretty pale blue, and there was a changing table and a rocking chair and a crib. But aside from that, the room was mostly bare, so there was nothing for them to hide behind or duck under if the door to the hallway suddenly burst open. It was nerve-wracking. But if no one had come for the child yet, it was quite possible that no one would be coming at all, so they swallowed down the anxiety and fear. They figured it was fair. The child had been scared, and now they were scared too.
The child was bawling too hard to even see them again, it looked like. Its head was tipped back, face scrunched up, mouth open to let out ear-piercing sobs. It was… so small, they thought, standing next to the crib. Just a little, pathetic thing.
Little, pathetic things needed parents to take care of them. Where were this child’s parents? Why didn’t they care?
Steve took the little toddler into his scaly arms. “Shhh, I’m sorry, honey,” he soothed, tongue darting out to scent the air momentarily; it tasted like salt and despair. “Don’t cry. I’m sorry I scared you, sweetheart.”
“What the hell kind of human doesn’t respond to a baby’s cry?!” Bucky hissed, hands fluttering around the child helplessly before he curled them against his chest to hide his claws. He wasn’t fast enough—the toddler started crying louder, at a piercing pitch now. “Isn’t that a biological imperative, that they have to look after their whelps?!”
“Shh!” Steve whispered sharply, glancing up at him with narrowed eyes as he began to gently bounce the toddler up and down like he’d seen mothers do on the occasions they did come to soothe their crying children. “You’re scaring it.”
“Steve, my face is scaring it,” Bucky snapped in response, motioning at his lupine face, his jaw full of sharp teeth, the rest of his body covered in dark fur. He’d never been ashamed of his features, and he wasn’t now, either, but he wished for a moment he could make a human face like Steve had, so the child would perhaps not be so afraid of him. “The Big Bad Wolf literally came out of his closet and scared the bejeezus out of him.”
Steve frowned down at the child, licking his lips, forked tongue fluttering anxiously. “Aw, hell. Come on, baby,” he cajoled, lifting a hand to trail the back of his index finger across one chubby cheek. “You need to stop crying! Shh!”
“Just—just give him to me,” Bucky snarled, wincing when it came out more animalistic than he’d intended, because the child’s shrieks grew in volume in response to it. He saw Steve hesitate and growled at him. “Give him to me,” he repeated sharply, and wrapped his furry arms around the child when Steve didn’t immediately move to give it up. He had the benefit of fur protecting him from what must have been the odd feeling of Steve’s scales; the child’s sensitive skin didn’t. His cheek already looked a little red from Steve’s finger across it. He began to pace, curling the child toward his chest gently. “You’re cold, Steve,” he finally explained, scowling. Babies were especially delicate when it came to temperature, he thought he remembered, and Steve was not a particularly delicate monster. “You shoulda picked him up with a blanket.”
Steve frowned down at his scaly hands. “You’re probably right,” he lamented. His scales had probably felt really uncomfortable against the child’s fragile skin, too.
They eventually quieted the child, soothed it back to sleep. The lack of noise was better, but its face was red and puffy and wet, and there was nothing they could really do about that beyond Bucky licking it clean, and he wasn’t quite inclined to do that. Unfortunately, in its sleep, it clung to Bucky’s fur and didn’t let go. Bucky struggled to detach the child without ripping out tufts of his own fur. It was harder than he’d like to admit, but he did eventually free himself and set the child back in its little bed.
“Can’t we just keep it?” Steve asked hopefully, staring down at the child.
“No, we can’t just keep it,” Bucky hissed, glaring at him. It was the stupidest thing that Steve had ever suggested in their lives. “It’s a human, Steve. We—” He stopped, frowning, and looked back down at the child. No one had come to soothe it, even when it had screamed and sobbed in terror. He reached out to delicately tuck the blankets around the child’s shoulders and quietly finished, “We’re not.”
Steve looked disappointed, but he nodded. “You’re right.” He reached out, hand trailing over the pillow next to the child’s head, too afraid to reach out and touch for fear he might wake it back up. “We wouldn’t know how to raise it, anyway.
They took a moment, watching the child sleep, before returning to the closet. They didn’t close the door all the way though, just—just in case. Steve coiled up near where the doors met, the sliver of light shining in on his pale face and almost making it glow. Bucky thought about telling him that he could maybe be seen if someone came in, but he doubted Steve would get any sleep after what they’d just witnessed, so he simply laid his head over one of Steve’s coils and closed his eyes to rest.
.-.
When the morning came, they heard shuffling feet against the carpet. They peered out the crack between the doors they’d left the night before to find a woman coming into the room. Despite how exhausted she looked, they could tell she was a very beautiful woman—she must be stunning when she didn’t look like she was one wrong move from falling apart. The child had inherited the curve of her lips, the roundness of her eyes. It reached up for her silently, and she reached back with shaking hands to lift it out of the crib. She curled the child against her chest, looking at him with—not the wonder or the joy they’d come to expect on mothers’ faces after years of watching humans in their most intimate moments, but a sort of bewilderment and sadness. It gave them chills.
The woman turned to walk out of the room as if her feet were sunk into buckets of cement. Bucky didn’t growl, but only by the skin of his teeth, and Steve couldn’t quite swallow down an angry hiss. There was a demon hanging off of the woman’s back, its claws sunk in so deep that they were almost visible through her chest when she turned. They thought they’d heard, somewhere, that humans called it ‘Depression.’ Bucky remembered his mother growling about ‘baby blues’ though, so maybe the name had changed? But regardless of what it was called, it sucked the life out of humans slow and steady, like a leech, making the humans too sad and hurt to shake it off, and only skulking away after they’d grown fat and left the humans as mere shadows of who they’d been before the parasites had gotten to them. It attacked when humans were vulnerable, and humans were always so vulnerable.
The child looked up at its mother, still quiet, before it carefully stuck a thumb in its mouth and leaned in, hiding its face against her chest.
Steve and Bucky waited for night to fall before sneaking into the mother’s bedroom. They almost skittered right back out when they realized the man in bed beside her was emitting such a dark aura that even the demon on the mother’s back was stunned by it between greedy suckles at her energy. But the man slept. He didn’t rouse even when the mother let out a quiet sob beside him.
It pushed Steve and Bucky back into action, and Steve lunged forward and back with the speed of a mouse trap, tearing the demon’s claws free of the child’s mother, quick and efficient, like ripping off a bandage. It might hurt her a little to begin with, but in the long run, it was better to do it fast—it could have injected its poison into her, made its effects linger, and she had a baby she needed to take care of. Steve tossed the demon across the room, and Bucky started chasing it before it could figure out how to get back at the humans, all sharp fangs and glowing eyes. He intended to chase it off, so it could be a warning to others. But he knew if it staggered even a bit, he’d also have no qualms eating it in two bites.
This was their new home, they’d decided, and they wouldn’t take kindly to intruders. The message would be the same whether or not he ate the imp. The news would just travel faster if he didn’t.
.-.
The woman was much livelier now that the demon that had been hanging from her back was gone.
More demons tried to come into their new home, into what they learned was called the ‘Stark Mansion.’ Steve and Bucky fought them off tooth and nail, eating what demons were too foolish to take the chance the two monsters gave them to flee. The woman’s husband’s tortured soul called out to demons, like flames to moths, and Steve and Bucky used it as chance to prove how they’d protect their new home.
Part of it was because they were selfish, and didn’t like to share; the other part was that the child, little Antonio, little Bambino, the sweet boy, was too precious to even let demons have a glimpse of him.
.-.
Bucky thought they were just going to stay hidden again, because they both felt kind of shitty over scaring Antonio and his suffering alone for so long by himself before they got him calmed down. It only made sense. Steve was the bleeding heart of the two of them, and his guilt over the child’s despondent wails hadn’t faded yet. But then, one night, he noticed that Steve was only pretending to fall asleep. The rise and fall of his coils didn’t slow like they usually did in deep sleep, and his eyes fluttered more than they usually did.
Bucky wasn’t an idiot, so he feigned sleep as well to see why. If Steve wasn’t going to be mature and tell him, he’d just find out himself. He felt Steve’s scales shifting against him, testing, as if he was only adjusting his coils, but he knew Steve was checking to make sure he was asleep, wouldn’t stir if he moved away. Steve waited a beat, then adjusted himself into a more upright position, before slowly sneaking out of the closet. Bucky gave him a few minutes, just so he wouldn’t notice movement behind the closet doors, then shifted himself to his feet and peeked out of the slats in the door to see what the idiot was doing.
And there Steve was, playing with blocks with Antonio, who should be in bed.
“Steve!” Bucky exclaimed angrily, shoving the door open, and the basilisk squawked in response and flung one of the blocks in surprise. Then he gawked as the wooden block lodged in the wall near the door.
Steve gaped at the block as well, then turned, angrily hissing, “Look what you made me do!”
“Me?!” Bucky exclaimed, remembering last-minute to quiet his voice; Antonio’s mother was more likely to come check on odd noises now, with the demon gone. Then he scowled, getting to his paws and walking over to scoop up the giggling toddler. “Antonio is supposed to be in bed!”
“He was just lying there lookin’ all sad,” Steve complained, looking aggravatingly unrepentant. He did reluctantly start to pick up the rest of the blocks and put them away, though. Antonio was a very neat and tidy baby, always picking up his toys and putting them away. ‘A fastidious little man,’ the servants had called him fondly. His mother would notice if his toys were out in the morning.
Bucky rolled his eyes and tucked Antonio back into bed. Or, he attempted to, letting out a quiet hiss of pain when the boy refused to let go of him and, as a result, yanked some of his fur in each hand. “Ow!”
“Serves you right,” Steve mumbled to himself petulantly.
“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky snarled back, then looked down at the boy and scowled sternly. “Take your hands off me, human, and go to sleep. You need that to grow.””
“Bubby!” Antonio cooed in response, gummy smile wide as he tugged at the lupine monster’s fur.
Bucky stared back, unimpressed. “…Were you trying to say ‘Bucky?’ Because that was awful.”
“Pretty sure he was sayin’ ‘puppy,’ but alright,” Steve said, smirking, as he finally slithered over to see what was going on. He laid his crossed arms on the edge of the crib and laid his head on them, watching as Bucky tried to wedge Antonio’s pudgy little fists open without hurting him.
“Shut up,” Bucky repeated, then let out a soft noise of victory when the boy finally let go, only yanking out a few pieces of fur. It hurt, but the sting of pain was negligible compared to the victory he felt. “How do we get him to go to sleep? He’s going to be small forever.”
Steve frowned as he sat up straight, peering down at the human happily babbling up at them. “Um. Sometimes his mother sings to him?” He tried to sound as if he hadn’t been peeping in on their nightly routine since they’d chased that first demon away. He failed. When Bucky just stared at him stonily in response, the blond sighed and pointed at a thick book over on the rocking chair. “Or she tells him stories from that big book over there?”
“Neither of us can read,” Bucky reminded him. He thought he sounded pretty patient about it, even.
Steve scowled, twisting his coils thoughtfully, like he did when he was thinking about an especially difficult trek between pieces of furniture. Finally, though, he snapped his fingers, a smug grin spreading across his face, and he curled down into his coils so that his face was lower, beside the mattress inside of the crib instead of hovering up above his head. “Antonio, lie down, and I’ll tell you all about how Bucky and I fought Nazis in the second world war.”
Bucky stared at him, stunned stupid for a moment. He watched Antonio lie down obediently and begin sucking on his thumb, staring at Steve expectantly, and finally asked, “…Won’t that be too bloody for a human child?”
“Have you heard some of the fairy stories that humans tell?” Steve sneered, even as he patted the spot next to him. “Now are you gonna correct everything you think I’m telling wrong or not?”
Bucky sighed and sat down where he indicated. It probably wouldn’t be any worse than the story he’d overheard about birds pecking out a girl’s stepsisters’ eyes, anyway. “Fine.”
“So in the trenches, the Nazis were hallucinating,” Steve began, turning his attention back to little Antonio, who curled closer to the spindles of his crib and stared up at him with wide eyes. “Typically adults will try to rationalize what they see. But during wartime, when everyone’s tired and afraid, anything can spook ‘em!”
.-.
“My sweet bambino,” Maria cooed, scooping him up, and pressed a loud, wet kiss to his cheek that had the boy giggling. She spun him around in a circle before heading toward the door. “My beautiful boy, my wonderful little what the fuck!?”
Bucky and Steve jerked awake, fully alert and shocked. Maria never swore in English, even when Antonio wouldn’t go down for a nap, because he was a little sponge that tucked words away and then belted them out when everyone least expected it. They peeked out of the closet and grimaced when they saw the woman gaping at the wooden block still sticking out of the wall. Bucky kicked Steve because why wouldn’t you grab that one you idiot and Steve kicked him back because she still would have noticed the hole, jerk!
“I…” Maria began helplessly, then stopped, lips pursed. It was obvious she had no idea how to continue. She stared at the block. It was wedged pretty deep into the dry wall, almost like it had always been there. She had no idea what could have caused that. Surely not Antonio, right? She stared at it a little longer. Well… her child was incredibly clever. He could have rigged something up. She looked down at him and smiled. “I guess you’re going to be a baseball player when you grow up then, my beautiful Antonio.”
“Bubby,” Antonio replied cheerfully, pointing at the block.
“A puppy? A puppy did that?” she chortled, because no puppy would have been strong enough to do that, either, and Howard had forbidden animals in the mansion besides. She paused in the doorway with a confused frown when she heard something like a growl. She turned and stared into the room for a few long moments, even though she knew there was no dog inside—nothing under the crib or rocking chair, nothing behind the changing table or the trunks for Antonio’s toys. Her eyes lingered on the closet door, but then she shrugged, shaking her head to try and wave away the sound. It must have just been the house settling. She’d know if there was some sort of dog in the house. “Time for breakfast, tesorino!”
Steve waited for the sound of her footsteps to fade down the hall before he gleefully whispered, “He did call you a puppy!”
Bucky growled again and punched him in the face, snarling, “I wasn’t even the one who threw that fucking block!” But to his great annoyance, Steve somehow continued to radiate smugness at him even as he cradled his cheek.