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“Don’t you fucking dare,” Bucky hissed at the poltergeist that was winding up to throw dishes at Tony. Tony himself was oblivious, wandering around the darkened, abandoned house with his digital camera on night vision, narrating the tragic history of the house for his online viewers. After a second the hovering dishes crashed sullenly to the ground instead, and when Tony spun around Bucky gave him a look of apologetic chagrin. “Sorry, that was me,” he said, ignoring the waves of affronted ire coming from the poltergeist.
Tony frowned at him in confusion. “Where did the dishes come from?” he asked, panning the camera around the room. “We’re in the den.”
Bucky kept his face bland and shrugged. “Some people used keep their nice dishware in the den or the living room to display for company and only used it during special occasions,” he said. “I think it was stacked in here and I must have tripped over it.”
“This guy’s always got a reasonable explanation,” Tony said to his viewers as he turned away. “So the stories say that the poltergeist in this house is particularly active because…”
Tony’s voice became muffled as he wandered into another room, and once he was gone Bucky said, “Here’s the deal – you can toss shit around in rooms where he isn’t, but if he gets so much as a bruise or a paper cut I’m sending you through the Golden Door whether you want to or not, got it?”
The 'geist didn’t answer, of course, because it was just a ball of spectral energy with malicious intent, but after a moment Bucky felt it move away and then there was a thunderous crash from the kitchen. Tony’s voice got loud with excitement, and with an internal sigh Bucky followed the sound as he picked his way through the decrepit rooms back towards the kitchen.
Bucky stared at the creepy, old-timey doll sitting in a display case in the corner of the room. The blank, staring eyes and wide, fixed grin were unsettling enough, but it was the waves of evil that filled the room like a toxic gas that was the really unnerving bit. Even without the stories that Tony had told him on the ride over here, Bucky knew that the evil would settle in peoples’ lungs and bones and burrow right into the heart of them, and then they would take that toxin away and commit atrocities because of it. As Bucky stared at the doll, he heard Tony call out, “I’m going to go get the cameras, I’ll be right back!”
“Okay!” Bucky called back, and as soon as he heard the footsteps recede he said, “I bet you think you’re real fucking cute, don’t you?” he said to the doll, and the evil inside laughed. Slowly, the head turned and the slightly askew eyes rolled until they were fixed on Bucky’s. “Get the fuck out of here, smart guy.”
The head of the doll turn left, then right. No.
Checking over his shoulder to make sure Tony hadn’t returned, Bucky rolled his shoulders and unveiled his wings, flexing them until the wingtips touched the opposite walls. The wings themselves weren’t visible because they didn’t exist in the third dimension, but the golden light of Bucky’s power was, and it burned away at the evil in the room like sunlight through morning fog. The evil in the doll hissed and writhed from the force of it before it finally slithered away in defeat. The doll slumped lifeless in the chair, empty of the demon-touched power that had animated it. Satisfied, Bucky put his wings away and the light faded, and he met Tony at the door of the old museum to help him carry the rest of his instruments inside to study the infamous haunted doll.
The ghost, draped in filmy white that drifted in an otherworldly breeze, decayed skin and empty eye sockets on fully display, noose around its neck and rope dragging the ground with a soft, uncanny susurrus, stopped when it saw Bucky. “Go ahead,” Bucky said with a wave of his hand, not even looking up from his crossword puzzle. “He loves that kind of spooky shit. He’s in the basement.”
Today’s excursion was one of the more low-key ones; it was a forest that had a reputation for either having a nasty witch living there or being haunted, so Tony had taken out his more delicate instruments to try to catch any kind of supernatural energy signatures. The truth was that centuries ago someone had done a summoning ritual in the woods and years of tourists visiting the site had reopened the door just a crack, allowing hellish energy to seep into the forest. At this stage, it wasn’t doing more than making people paranoid and prone to seeing things, but a few more centuries would create enough of a crack that a demon could wedge their fingers in it and push it open wide. So Bucky let Tony take his measurements, they sat around and commented about how creepy it was that the woods were so silent, and when it was time to leave he made sure he was the last one back to the car so he could firmly reclose the astral door.
“I got a lot of good readings on my instruments today,” Tony said on the ride home, sounding pleased as he scrolled through the data on his laptop. “The refinements I made to the EMF detector seem to be catching more minute changes in the magnetic field.”
“Sweet,” Bucky said as he hit the turn signal to pull into their driveway. Tony didn’t really consider himself a ghost-hunter, per se, but he did design specialized equipment for people doing supernatural investigations, and he liked to field test his own equipment before he sold it. He often filmed these observations as well as his conclusions from his equipment in a highly technical web series that had a small but enthusiastic audience. “Do you think it’s done, or are you going to do more changes?”
“Probably done,” he said, which really meant a few more changes. “Next I think I’d like to go back to the drawing board on the voice recorder,” he continued. “I bet I can get it to pick up lower decibels without catching all the background noise; I think if we use a digital recorder we could create an algorithm to automatically exclude sounds that are close to a pre-established baseline…”
Bucky listened with half an ear as Tony described the algorithm he had in mind; he liked being Tony’s sounding board for his ideas even if sometimes Tony veered a lot deeper into the underlying technical engineering aspects than Bucky could follow. Tony kept talking as Bucky turned off the car and they got out, and right when Bucky was fumbling for the house key Tony dropped this bombshell: “Oh, and we got invited to a summoning ritual next week.”
“Uh, run that by me again,” Bucky said, dumping the equipment from the ghost hunt by the stairs leading up to Tony’s lab.
“Somebody reached out to me the other day and said they were planning to do a summoning ritual and asked if we want to come and record it, see if we can help them figure out if it was successful or not,” Tony said cheerfully like that wasn’t the stupidest idea Bucky had ever heard.
“What are they trying to summon?” Bucky forced himself to ask calmly instead of shouting NO FUCKING WAY like he wanted to.
“Some kind of benevolent spirit to offer blessings. They told me the name but I didn’t write it down. I said we would go, I figured it would be an interesting chance to test our equipment against a novel phenomenon.”
Well, shit. If Tony was interested Bucky knew he wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of it without some a very good explanation – the exact kind of explanation Bucky was unwilling to give. An explanation like, if they said they were going to summon a benevolent spirit they are either idiots or liars, the only thing they are going to summon is a demon. But then there would be questions like “I thought you didn’t believe in this stuff” – which, to be fair, was true, but only because Bucky knew this stuff was true, saying that he “believed” in it would be like saying he “believed” in the sun – and “how do you know that” and “why didn’t you tell me” and maybe even “what are you” if the conversation goes really bad and then before you know it, Bucky’s whole life would be turned upside down and sideways and he might lose Tony altogether. “Sounds like a waste of time to me, but whatever,” Bucky said. “They can do their ritual, you can watch your instruments, and I will take a nap, if I can sleep through all the chanting and incense. These aren’t like, crazy summoners, right? Cult types?”
“I mean, they didn’t sound like crazy cultists over the phone,” Tony said with a wry smile, poking Bucky in the side when he rolled his eyes. “I think they are Wiccan.”
“Or so they say,” Bucky grumped.
“Well if you think they seem shady, you can nap with one eye open,” Tony said, like Bucky wasn’t planning to do that anyway. “I’m hungry, let’s get dinner.”
As soon as they walked into the room where the summoning was supposed to take place, Bucky knew they were in danger. Wiccan, my ass, Bucky thought as he looked at the setup they had in the living room of their house. They had done a lot of work to hide their true intentions, decorating the space with plants and crystals instead of skulls and upside down crosses, so it wasn’t surprising that Tony was fooled. But as they say, the devil was in the details – literally in this case: what should have been a salt circle to surround and contain the summoning space was useless sugar, and white chalk lines of nonsense sigils effectively disguised the true summoning sigils drawn in blood that blended cleverly into the dark wood floor.
While Bucky helped Tony set up the equipment, he eyed the people milling around the house and wondering which one of the cheerful, smiling idiots was secretly a sinister idiot. When no one was looking, he tried surreptitiously to smudge one of real summoning sigils with his shoe, but it had soaked into the wood, staining it; something more elaborate was going to be needed to break the spell.
“So when does the ritual start?” he heard Tony ask from in the kitchen.
“We’re waiting for one more person,” someone responded, and Bucky had just started to head for the porch so he could intercept this last person – probably the sinister idiot he’d been looking for – before anyone else saw him when the door opened. “Oh, that’s probably him!”
Bucky scowled at the new arrival, because it was definitely him. He looked normal enough, wearing a t-shirt over cargo pants and sneakers, but Bucky could see demon mark on him like a tattoo. Most people who met him would probably describe him as “nice enough, but has a weird vibe” and would avoid him without knowing why, but for whatever reason some people – like the smiling, cheerful idiots here – were attracted to the twisted energy that demon marks gave off.
He could tell that Tony was in the “weird vibe” crew when he introduced himself to the new arrival, because his smile was more of a grimace and after the handshake he saw Tony surreptitiously wipe his hand on his pants. “And that’s my partner, Bucky,” Tony added, and Bucky just jerked his chin in acknowledgement, still scowling.
“Sorry for running late,” Demon Mark said. “I don’t want to waste any more time, so let’s get started, shall we?”
The probably unwitting members of this little cult sat down around the summoning circle while Bucky and Tony took seats at the edge of the room. Bucky slouched in his chair so he could rest his head on the back and stretched out his legs, closing his eyes as if taking a nap. What he was really doing was closing his eyes in the mortal plane so he could fully open his senses on the astral plane, where the summoning circle was glowing a faint red like dying coals. As the ritual progressed, however, the red flared up and started turning gold, the coals erupting into flame. Above the circle, likely invisible to the human watchers, a crack appeared, a door opening –
And Bucky slammed it shut.
He heard Tony exclaim about something on his instruments and Demon Mark’s confident voice tripped over the words of the ritual. Bucky cracked an eyelid and saw Demon Mark staring at him. He raised an eyebrow at him and closed his eyes again, crossing his arms over his chest. Not on my watch, asshole, he thought, and to his surprise someone answered.
You can’t stop me, little angel, a demon’s slithery voice whispered on the astral plane. Bucky turned his gaze to where the voice was coming from and realized that Demon Mark, whatever his real name was, hadn’t just been marked by the demon, he’d been infested like a house with termites; the demon was riding along with him, seeing from his eyes and hearing from his ears. In the house back on the human plane, the ritual had restarted, the embers of the summoning circling flaring again on the astral plane.
Can’t I? Bucky answered, but this time, when Bucky went to slam the door closed he couldn’t; the demon was on the other side, pressing to keep the portal open so the ritual could continue. It was a contest of wills, now; if Bucky let up his pressure, the door would swing open wide, and if the demon relented, it would slam shut so hard it would likely burn out the demon’s human patsy. He heard the demon laughing and his lip curled into a snarl.
“Uh, Bucky?” he distantly heard Tony say.
“What?” Bucky said without opening his eyes; he couldn’t afford to be distracted.
“You’re, uh….glowing?”
Fuck. Of course he was, with the amount of power he was having to use on the astral plane. Well, it was too late now; he should have stopped the ritual before it had ever started, but in his defense, he didn’t think he’d end up in a metaphysical arm-wrestling contest with a demon. “Ok, I promise I will explain later,” Bucky made his body say, feeling like he was juggling with one hand while the other was trying to keep this damn door from opening wider. “But first, I need you to do something for me. You trust me, right?”
“Yeah, of course, but first, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” For now. If the demon succeeded in getting through this door, with no salt circle they were all fucked, which of course had been the point. Again, Bucky cursed himself for being overconfident; years of just dealing with ghosts and shit had made him complacent. “But I need you to go to the bathroom and see if they have any hydrogen peroxide. If they don’t there’s some in our first aid kit in the car.”
“Hydrogen peroxide?” Tony repeated, sounding very confused. “Uh, ok.” The chanting of the ritual was getting louder, and now Bucky was fighting against the demon and the power of the ritual itself; Bucky redoubled his efforts, but he really needed those idiots to stop chanting. “Ok, I have it,” Tony said a few minutes later. “Now what?”
“Empty the whole bottle over as much of the summoning circle as you can,” Bucky ordered, and smirked when he felt the demon’s displeasure.
“But that will mess up-”
“Sure will,” Bucky said tersely; the demon’s claws were starting to scrabble at the edges of the door as it tried to push itself through the small gap by force. Almost instantly, though, he could tell that Tony had listened. Voices went from chanting to shouting and cursing and the pressure from the ritual itself vanished as the hydrogen peroxide interacted with the blood sigils, making the blood bubble and fizz and destroying the integrity of the spell. There was still the demon to deal with, though, and Bucky wished that he had brought his sword.
“Ok, it’s done,” Tony said over the sounds of the commotion in the room. “Anything else?”
“Salt,” Bucky said. “Probably have to get itfrom the car.”
“Isn’t all this stuff on the floor-”
“Nope. Sugar.” He heard Tony mutter “what the fuck” but Bucky heard the front door swing open and the screen door slam as Tony went outside. Cracking an eyelid, he saw that Demon Mark was the only one still sitting with his eyes closed, surrounded by a deep shadow that seemed to swallow the light around him; the other ritualists were staring at them now, at Bucky’s glow and Demon Mark’s hungry darkness.
As the demon realized Bucky’s intention, it roared with displeasure and the pressure against the door increased as it tried to shove its way into the mortal realm by brute force, frenzied by being so close to its goal. Not today, motherfucker, Bucky said to it as he heard the screen door slam again.
“Ok, I have it, what do I do with it?”
“Pour it in a circle around Demon Mark.”
“Who the fuck is Demon Mark – oh probably that guy,” Tony said, seeing what everyone else was staring at, and as he poured the salt the demon shrieked loud enough that the people in the room put their hands over their ears as the salt circle closed around its host and the portal to its realm was sealed shut once more.
Heaving a relieved sigh, Bucky opened his eyes and stretched, and saw that Demon Mark was going crazy inside his salt circle, screaming and snarling and slamming his hands against the invisible wall created by the salt. Everyone was staring at him in confused horror as he hurled vicious curses and described all the ways it wanted to kill everyone in the room, slowly and painfully, eyes glowing red like fire. “Yeah, this is why you don’t play with summoning rituals, kids,” Bucky said as he joined the circle of spectators.
“Bucky! Are you okay?” Tony’s hands were on his arms and Bucky glanced down to see Tony frowning at him with concern. “What the fuck was that? Is that?”
“I’ll explain, but not here. Let me take care of this, first,” he said, nodding his head towards Demon Mark. "He's possessed. I mean, obviously."
“Wait, don’t-”
“It’s fine,” Bucky assured him as he reached past the salt circle and grabbed the man’s head in his hands. Demon Mark tried to escape, clawing at Bucky’s hands with his fingernails and trying to squirm away, but with a quick push of power Bucky burned the demon infestation out; so maybe it wasn’t so much like a termite problem as it was having a rabid racoon in the attic, Bucky reflected as Demon Mark crumbled to the ground. Otherwise it would be much harder to give demons the old heave-ho. “We should maybe get our stuff and go, though.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Tony said, and they turned away to start packing up.
“You son of a bitch!” Someone yelled, and Bucky turned just in time to duck as Demon Mark swung a decorative crystal the size of a football at his head. “It was going to make me rich! And famous! And you took that away!” Demon Mark screamed at him.
Bucky shoved the man away from him, sending him stumbling backwards. “The only thing that demon was going to do was turn you into a human sock puppet,” Bucky said. “After it devoured everyone in this room first.”
“What the fuck do you-” There was a loud thwack and then the man fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Tony looked at the hefty book in his hands, the man's ritual book, and tossed it aside with a grimace.
“You guys will want to probably call somebody now, like police or something. This guy had a psychotic break,” Bucky said helpfully, gesturing to the unconscious Demon Mark while the ritualists just stared at him, speechless with shock. “He also just tried to kill all of you, so.”
Bucky and Tony made their escape while the ritualists were still trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. But one of them did grab their cell phone and was keeping a wary eye on Demon Mark while the rest were sort of milling about and wringing their hands, so Bucky figured it was all under control. Probably. Either way, not his problem anymore; judging from the way Tony kept studying him when he thought Bucky wasn’t looking, Bucky had a whole different problem to deal with.
To his credit, Tony waited until they were on the highway before he said, “Ok, so what the fuck was that?”
“You helped me stop that guy from summoning a demon that was going to kill everyone and then probably go on a murderous rampage,” Bucky said after a moment, flexing his hands on the steering wheel and sneaking a glance at Tony.
“Right, yeah, that was…” Tony scrubbed his hands over his face and let out an explosive breath. “Something else, alright. And I got it all on film,” he added suddenly, brightening. But then he looked over at Bucky. “Except that my part in all of that involved hydrogen peroxide and salt and yours involved glowing and apparently exorcising a demon, so you’re going to need to give a little more explanation.”
Bucky sighed. He had thought of how this conversation would go and had concocted a whole series of half-truths and misdirections to dance around the truth, but instead of all of that he said, “I’m an angel. Kind of. I mean, not really like angel in the tradition of Abrahamic religions, with God and stuff, but I, uh, do have certain powers. And wings. Not that you can see them in this dimension unless you are on some really perception-altering drugs, but you know, in like other realms.” Bucky knew he was babbling but with Tony staring at him that way, not talking, he just kept nervously filling the silence with words. “Did you know that lots of religions have winged warrior-like figures? Garudas, Lamassu. Huitzilopochtli. The Thunderbird. Angels are just the most recent manifestation or attempt to describe-”
“So you’re not human.”
“Um. No. No, I’m not.”
“So, this whole time I was looking for supernatural creatures, and I was living with one?”
“Yes?”
Unexpectedly, Tony laughed. A real laugh, and not a bitter, angry laugh. It might have had a slightly hysterical edge to it, but Tony was probably also still processing the fact that he had come face to face with a demon and almost died. “Pepper and Rhodey are never going to let me live this down. If we tell them, of course.”
Bucky felt a tiny sliver of hope at that we. Tony fell silent after that, just staring out of the car window, and Bucky tried to let the silence ride for as long as possible before he couldn’t handle it anymore and burst out, “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
Tony looked back at him and blinked, thoughts clearly far away. “Well, no, of course not, I’ve got a million questions, I’m just trying to figure out what to ask first.”
And strangely enough, that made Bucky feel better, because it was such a very Tony thing to say. “But you’re not…mad?”
“Oh, no, Bucky, I’m sorry, of course I’m not mad,” Tony said, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing. “I can understand why this is something you would hide. I’m a little sad you were forced to say something, instead of deciding to say something, but it’s pretty clear to me that you are the same person you were yesterday, and I like that person.”
“But I lied to you. A lot.” Bucky thought about every ghost and paranormal dickhead that he’d warned away from Tony while pretending not to believe in the supernatural. “For years.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Tony reflected. “Then just don’t do that anymore. Besides, I’ve been lying to you too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Bucky said skeptically. “About what?”
“I’m not really a broke postgraduate student. I mean, I am a postgraduate, duh, that’s where we met. But uh, my dad is Howard Stark. Of Stark industries.”
“What?”