Chapter Text
The kitten shows up the day after the funeral, a mewling little white and brown ball of fluff on Maria's welcome mat that she steps over with a sigh while deciding just how problematic this is going to be. Phil would at least give the poor thing a square meal before dropping it off at an overcrowded animal shelter to be euthanized. She thinks she kind of hates that her conscience is starting to sound like him.
She feeds the cat. It's not the kitten's fault that he reminds her of Phil and curls up into a tiny fist-sized ball of growly purrs that's too cute to give away to certain death.
"I'll find you a good home, but then that's it," Maria warns him. "You're out."
The kitten yawns, pink tongue lapping roughly against her hand, then falls back to sleep. It doesn't exactly help her resolve.
She takes the kitten to work and tries to foist it off on any poor, susceptible sap in the building, but SHIELD isn't exactly loaded with warm fuzzy types and she seems stuck with the animal, who has developed an alarming tendency to look reproachful when Maria doesn't file something properly or doesn't go to eat at her normal time to pick up lunch (she used to go with Phil when they were both in the building) or when she goes hard on somebody Phil would've been lenient with. When she starts ranting at Coulson for daring to die on her, the kitten sits up on its haunches and yowls.
She snatches up the cat and takes him out to her car long enough to get a grip on herself. "I can't take you anywhere," she admonishes.
He licks her cheek, and she remembers all the times she told Phil that in exasperation right before he pecked her cheek and told her everything would be fine.
"It won't, you know," she tells him before she thinks about the fact that this isn't Phil, isn't even human, but he just looks at her reproachfully and mews.
Life goes on. She knows that, but maybe for once, she wishes that it wouldn't.
The cat becomes Maria's cat and takes over her two desks, the one at home and the one at work. Fury raises the eyebrow over his good eye and she just tells him, "Don't start."
Cats are supposed to like windows and beds and couches and pillows, maybe even the comfiest chairs in the house (and her ridiculously expensive chair at work is very comfortable), but her cat likes the desk where he can survey her realm, shove important papers her way, and clamber between her and her computer screen to yowl whenever he thinks it's time for her to eat.
Remarkably, he seems to know Maria's coffee, work, and shouldn't-you-be-knocking-off schedule ('Aren't you being hypocritical, Phil?') like the back of his paw before she makes any effort to teach it to him.
He perks up at the names Coulson or Phil, unless she's currently reaming him a new one, in which case he usually argues with her like the stubborn cat he is.
"What's his name?" Sharon asks with interest a few months after he's claimed the office.
Maria hesitates a moment, then says on a whim, "Cheese."
He blinks, then meows piteously.
Sharon smiles. "That's cute."
It's not, but Maria just smiles back without explaining why she chose the name.
Cheese answers when called but always with a plaintive complaint and starts showing up enthusiastically and purring when she's complaining to Phil.
Something clicks in her head then about the oddness of the timing of her accidental kitten acquisition, and Maria has certainly seen crazier things in SHIELD, but she shakes it off. There is no way in any world that makes sense that her best friend and work husband was reincarnated as a cat.
"I refuse to call you Phil."
Cheese whines and begs with one paw.
Maria crosses her arms. "You're going to have to do better than that to change my mind."
Cheese runs off toward her bedroom, and she assumes that's the end of that.
It isn't. Of course, it isn't.
It's starting to give her a headache.
"Hill. You cannot fire my psychiatrist," Fury tells her while she's fuming over the reports Cheese brought her an hour ago and eating too much takeout and drinking coffee Clint Barton must have had something to do with because it tastes like swill.
"I do have hiring and firing power in the medical branch," Maria points out. She bats Cheese away from the last of the eggrolls, which he protests piteously. She is pitiless, as Phil had often pointed out. "Cat food or no food for you."
Fury leans back his head and sighs deeply. "He's my actual psychiatrist, Hill."
She pauses. Oh. Grudgingly, she takes the pink slip she's written up and runs it through the shredder. "Will there be anything else, sir?"
"Yeah, there is. Keep that cat off your computer or make him stop flagging agents."
Maria's caught flat-footed. "Sir?"
"He's been flagging agents that Romanoff or Barton don't like and several others for even more mysterious reasons. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Hill?"
She stares at Cheese who has made himself scarce behind the lone survivor of the potted plants Phil used to leave in her office to die. (He claimed he was saving them from his own neglect, but Coulson had hardly been the only workaholic in SHIELD headquarters.)
"I'll make it my business to know."
"Excellent."
Once Fury is gone, she glares at him and chases him from behind the plant. "Do not touch my computer, or I will never call you 'Phil.'"
A disdainful and very catlike meow makes her thinks she's going crazy again, but a week later, she hears Fury taking Barton to task for letting a cat play on his computer.
Maria makes a note to self that Barton has an office and she needs to know where it is, but otherwise lets it go.
Barton finds her twenty-five hours later looking harried and frustrated. "Did you know I had an office?"
Maria's eyebrows come up. "No."
"Yeah, well neither did I."
They get on the security cameras together to track down Cheese and what hidden room was Barton supposed to have been using to fill out reports and do busywork before he moved into the back corner of Phil's.
"Well, what do you know, Barton. You have an office."
Maria makes sure she's not present when Fury goes to give 'the talk' to Romanoff. She takes Cheese with her.
A cat lands on her back in the middle of the night, and all Maria wants to do is groan because she's had forty-eight hours with next to no sleep with a discussion with the World Security Council in the middle.
"What will it take to make you stop bothering me?" she demands and rolls over to get him off her back.
Cheese gingerly avoids her maneuver and lands on her stomach instead with a loud meow.
"Fine! Phil! Go to sleep."
For a long moment, the cat blinks at her, then he curls up on top of her and starts to purr.
She's not going crazy; she's already gone.
Cheese pushes a DVD with his nose across the coffee table on Thursday night, then lifts his head to check out her reaction. Maria takes one look and tries to unsee it. It's the movie she and Phil were going to watch after the craziness was over.
"How about when this is over, we watch one of your Italian movies and eat comfort food?"
"You just want my cannoli," she'd griped back. "And they're not Italian."
"We're saving the world from a demigod. You don't think some pampering is in order?"
"Fine. Sleepless in Seattle."
Phil winced but agreed. "As long as there's cannoli."
"I'm ignoring this," she says.
Cheese sniffs his disdain and heads for the kitchen.
"Why did I ever keep the cat?" she complains and goes to snatch him back.
They curl up on the couch in front of the TV and watch Sleepless in Seattle. Cheese only tries begging her three times before huffing a sigh.
The next night she makes cannoli and promises herself to see a psychiatrist before it gets any worse.
It gets worse.
He starts bringing her gifts, the kinds of things Phil would drop off at her desk from time to time—books, reports she wanted to wrangle out of this difficult agent (Barton) or another (Romanoff), and little flags on news items she wanted to keep an eye on. She was beginning to wonder if someone had given the cat a Starkphone, but after a thorough runthrough of all the security cameras for the day, she discovers that Cheese has simply been making friends and reading over shoulders and begging said friends until they figure out he wants some kind of note with the information on it, which he then takes to Natasha, who solemnly turns it into a tip, a slap on the back of her partner's head for a report, a report of her own, or a book.
It's scary is what it is.
"I think my friend was reincarnated as a cat," Maria tells the psychiatrist bluntly, who shows some amount of professional cred that he doesn't look even slightly taken aback. "Do I need pills or grief therapy or…"
"Pardon me, Deputy Director," the doctor interjects as her voice trails off. "But why do you think this friend was reincarnated as a cat?"
"Because he's anal-retentive, loves paperwork, knows everything, and wants me to call him 'Phil.'" Maria sighs in frustration. "Do you have something you can do about this? I have a job to do."
"Is this interfering with your job?"
Worrying that she might be going crazy is. She settles for shaking her head. "I don't believe in reincarnation."
The doctor smiles. "That must be a trifle uncomfortable."