Work Text
The floorboards start to creak when Sasha hears a knock at the front door. Dragging himself out of bed, he pats the doorframe on his way out, having grown begrudgingly fond of this old house. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Sasha grumbles half awake at the third knock, hopes that the visitor gets it. Taking a step his foot lands in a miniature marsh, a frog croaks, and Sasha rolls his eyes. “Zhenya, behave,” he says, and the floor goes solid with a heaving sound of complaint. The knocking persists, and Sasha makes it to the door at last, pressing a kiss to the fingertips of three fingers and holding them to the doorknob; Zhenya can be picky about letting newcomers inside in the absence of residential tribute. That, or he just likes to fuck with Sasha.Sasha stays at home at 23, because what need does a witch have to leave the safety of his mother and the cursed man of her house? It’s been a point of confusion for Sasha, the few times he’s stayed in a hotel, the concept of a peephole. If Zhenya doesn’t want someone coming in, they won’t make it to the front porch. There’s no need for Sasha’s opinion of visitors, aside from Zhenya’s occasionally and frequently misplaced judgement. Nevertheless, if a guest can make it to the porch and hold up to the scrutiny of the front door, Sasha figures they could warrant a moment of his time. It’s a matter of much debate between himself and his retired mother, who praises the qualities of Zhenya’s legs in keeping strangers out of her house. Mama’s out right now. Sasha could use a passtime.Of course, Sasha is stricken speechless when he finally convinces Zhenya to open the front door, the sight before him too much to handle. It’s merely the field they’ve been stopped in for months, the elevation of the house enough to make the view spectacular, but it’s the man on the porch that stops Sasha’s mind in its tracks. He’s wearing more black clothing than Sasha has seen in his centuries, knit cap pulled down over flashing golden hair, almost glowing in the subtle morning light. Sasha has seen immeasurable beauty in his brightly quilted life, but the man before him outshines it all.His features are sharp and soft all at once, a gorgeous face full of contradictions, pale eyebrows and pale eyes and a scowl that could move mountains, and Sasha never wants to stop looking at him. Sasha wants to know his name, his story, every food he doesn’t care for, why he’s here on the front porch suspended a dozen feet in the air. Oh. “You need help?” Sasha asks, ever so eloquent in the face of so much beauty. “Are you the witch, ah, Ovechkina?” the man asks, thickly accented and stumbling over the syllables of mama’s name, bless him. “No,” Sasha replies, succumbing to the urge to pause for dramatic effect. It’s an effective conversational device, to say the least. “You looking for my mama. She’s retired.”“Oh,” the man says, his scowl deepening. Sasha smiles.“I can help you,” he says after a moment of admiration of the display of disappointment, tucking his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. “Not so powerful as mama, but, I can try.”“Okay,” the man continues, glancing at the front door with a degree of distrust. The discomfort inherent in having someone’s front door stare at you. It took even Sasha due time to acclimate to Zhenya’s eyes. “Take me inside, then.”Sasha obliges, if it takes a moment to convince Zhenya to let him back in. “My name is Nicke,” the man, now Nicke, says across the crooked legged coffee table. He’s in the newer of the sitting room chairs, the one that just appeared last night with the floral cushions on it. The couch is tacky, flashy, obnoxiously bright and Sasha loves it. His tea stirs itself on the table, and Sasha nearly smiles at the gentle confusion plain on his face. “Alexander Mikhailovich Ovechkin, son of the great Tatyana,” Sasha says, offering his hand to shake. Nicke’s hands are delicate. Fragile. Sasha wants to kiss his fingertips, feel every ridge of his knuckles. “You call me Sasha, it’s alright. What you need?”“I think,” Nicke says, turning the tea cup in his hands. “I have a curse on me.”“You want curse broken? Easy,” Sasha says with a smile. “What kind of curse? You have bad luck? Evil presence always behind you? Love curse?”“It’s,” Nicke starts, reaching a hesitant hand to the brim of his hat, and Sasha thrills at the concept, the vague idea of seeing more. “It’s more like I can do things. When I - if I want things, or things are bad, they change. It’s dark in a room, no lamps, light comes in anyway. I haven’t lost my wallet in days. I think, oh, I need coffee, go into the kitchen and the coffee pot’s full.”“Maybe you have a ghost?” Sasha suggests, because it’s poltergeist antics, really, and contrary to popular belief ghosts can be very helpful, thank you very much. “Not a bad ghost, good ghost, makes you coffee, puts lost wallet on the kitchen table.”Nicke scoffs. “Do you really think ghosts are real?” “You’re talking to a witch,” Sasha points out. “Sitting in a house, on chicken legs, full of magic. You really don’t think ghosts are real?” Nicke shakes his head, and Sasha is ready to call him a lost cause, if his foolish heart isn’t. “We have a ghost at home growing up,” Sasha starts, and Nicke blinks at him slowly, as if ghosts are really the most ludicrous thing in the world. That’s ghouls, Sasha thinks, but it’s a controversial opinion. Ghosts are fine. “Very helpful ghost babysitter. Kept me from falling down stairs when Mama was out.”“Ghosts don’t do this,” Nicke says, tucks his left foot under his right knee, and starts to float three feet above his chair for seven seconds before dropping back into the upholstery. Sasha has never been more in love. “Okay, no ghost,” Sasha says, scratching ‘ghost’ off his mental checklist of supernatural diagnoses. “You do anything else?” “My house burned down,” Nicke says calmly, taking a sip of his tea, which refilled itself some time in the past minute. “With me inside it.”“Did it burn you?” “I only felt cold,” he explains, and Sasha grins. “Nicke,” Sasha says, and Nicke scowls, pronunciation jumbled. “Are you a witch?”“I think I’d know if I was a witch,” Nicke says, and the floorboards creak. “Nobody in my family has magic, and nothing happened until last week, and I’m not a witch.”Sasha’s about to object, because no, you don’t need a familial history of magic to be a witch, and not everyone is born magic, hell, Sasha himself didn’t start showing until he was twelve, and then -Then, Nicke pulls the black knit cap off his head, tucks a piece of hair behind his ear, levelling Sasha with a look, and his hair is glowing even in the lamplight of the sitting room. It’s golden, it’s sparkling, it’s the most wonderful thing Sasha’s ever seen.“Zhenya,” Sasha says, tapping the stem of the floor lamp by his armchair, and the lights go out. Every light aside from Nicke’s hair, appearing nearly fluid in its gentle shimmering curls. “Oh.”“Do you know,” Nicke says in the dark. “Just how inconvenient bioluminescent hair is?”“Oh, Nicke,” Sasha says, pinching the couch cushion to convince Zhenya to bring the lights back. “You’re a witch.”Nicke walks out of the house, and Sasha goes back to bed. “Can you control it?” Sasha asks when Nicke finally comes back, two days later with the same black cap pulled down over his forehead. “Sometimes,” Nicke says, digging his fingertips into the arm of the chair. It’s a new one, similarly unfortunately upholstered in a bold red and blue houndstooth, making Nicke nearly impossible to look at. Sasha makes a mental note to talk to Zhenya about his couch selections.“What kind of things?” Sasha asks. “I can do the floating on my own,” Nicke explains, glaring at Sasha’s muffin on the coffee table until it hovers a few inches in the air. “The others, not so much. Obviously not the hair, or I would’ve stopped by now. I burned my house down again. I think I accidentally turned a telemarketer into a toad.” Sasha chokes on his coffee. “You have a crush,” Sanya says, when Sasha lays back on his couch and describes Nicke’s hair for the fifth time. “A crush on his magic is still a crush, so don’t start with me. You have a little crush.”“Help me,” Sasha says, muffled into a throw pillow. “Go ask your mother,” Sanya says. “Mama’s retired,” Sasha reminds him, rolling over on the couch to glare. The pillow in his arm turns into a pile of beetles, and he screams. “You’re a terrible houseguest,” Sanya scolds, watching disdainfully as Sasha tries to figure out whether or not to stomp on the beetles that pool on the floor at his feet. He decides against it. “You turned your throw pillows into beetles!” Sasha yells.“Or did I turn my beetles into throw pillows?” Sanya says with a raised eyebrow, and Sasha considers throwing a handful of beetles at him, but it would give Sanya too much satisfaction. He settles for moving to the other, beetle free couch. The one pillow on the couch Sasha moves to wiggles ominously. He sits on the floor. “Why do you need my help, anyway?” Sanya says, picking up his wine off the coffee table. Sasha thinks it might not be wine, but that’s none of his business. “I want to help him,” Sasha explains, watching a beetle scurry across the floor to the fireplace on its thready legs. “And I need your help to help him.”“You have a crush,” Sanya reminds him, waving a hand toward the couch, and Sasha watches as a dozen beetles fuse into one abominable throw pillow.“You’re a good teacher!” Sasha pleads, a stone’s throw from groveling. “Mama’s retired, and I’m inexperienced. You’re a good teacher, I mean, look at little Zhenya! You’ve taught him everything he knows,” Sanya hums, considering. “You flatter me,” he says, running fingers through his hair. “I never should’ve told you my weaknesses.”“As if flattery is one of them,” Sasha says, and Sanya rolls his eyes. “Flattery isn’t, but you are,” Sanya says. “Fine. I’ll help you.” As much as Sasha hates Zhenya, and as much as Zhenya hates Sasha, there’s a sort of comfortable cohabitation that comes from quite literally wholly living inside of somebody. Sasha cleans the baseboards and bathroom on Tuesday, and in exchange, Zhenya begrudgingly makes a phone (a landline, much to Sasha’s twenty-first-century dismay) for long enough to make a phone call. “Hello?” Nicke says, crackly over the phone, and Sasha can’t help smiling. “Hi, it’s me,” Sasha says, hoping to everything that Nicke isn’t getting calls from other Russians with no real phone number.“Where did you get this number?” Nicke says warily. “The house gave it to me,” Sasha explains, and he knows Nicke scowls at that. “Doesn’t matter. You want help being a witch?” “I don’t know if I want to be a witch,” Nicke says.“No way to not be,” Sasha says, and the coffee table bites his palm. “Might as well learn how to be good at it, yeah?”“Okay,” Nicke says, frowning even over the phone. “Okay, yeah, fine.”“Good, come over,” Sasha says before Nicke can hang up on him. Of all the people coming into the house at a given time, Zhenya has taken an inexplicable liking to Sanya and little Zhenya; Sasha thinks it may be spiteful, hatred towards himself in particular making Zhenya far more fond of anyone who’s rude to him. That said, it’s rude to be denied entrance to one’s own home, just to have Sanya greeted fondly by the door swinging open mere hours later. Zhenya likes anyone more than he likes Sasha, apparently. “When are you moving out?” Sanya asks when he walks into the sitting room, hem of his jacket kicking up little clouds of sparkling black dust at his ankles with each step. A cat slinks along behind him, darting past his feet to jump onto the back of Sasha’s armchair and rub against his face. Lovely. “No time soon,” Sasha says past a mouthful of cat tail, fur sticking to his tongue. “New friend?” “Not so new,” Sanya says wistfully, making himself comfortable on the lounge chair across from the fireplace. With a glance the fire is crackling, and the cat hops off the back of Sasha’s chair to settle into Sanya’s lap. The cat purrs something that sounds conspicuously human when Sanya scratches behind his ears, and Sasha resolutely doesn’t think about it. It’s a relief, as always, to have Sanya around, in all his bewildering stability; he fits into this old house like he’s a part of it, some connection between him and Zhenya that wraps around him like an embrace. He sits in this room with his velvet coat, always such a new creature settling into something he’s always been a part of, with his knowing smiles and second hand bones pierced through his ears in a dozen places. Sasha loves him more than anything. The couch under Sasha creaks, obnoxiously loud, and there’s a knock at the front door. And - okay, Sasha’s not proud of how eager he is to answer the door, but it’s not exactly fun to have Sanya and a mysterious cat laughing at him when he nearly falls off the couch in his haste. But it’s probably Nicke at the door, and so what, he’s excited. When Sasha makes his way back to the sitting room, Nicke following him, it’s a little surprise to see little Zhenya perched on the arm of Sanya’s chair, laughing at some horrible joke like a hyena. There isn’t a cat to be seen, just little Zhenya in sweats and an ugly shirt leaning his whole lanky frame into Sanya’s shoulder, draped over him just like - oh. Well. “Sanya, little Zhenya, this is Nicke,” Sasha says, watching with gentle bewilderment as Zhenya waves. “Are you -”“I needed to stretch,” Little Zhenya says, dropping back to lay across Sanya’s lap like he had before. “I get cramped. Stop calling me little Zhenya, I’m not a little kid anymore,”“Zhenya is a house,” Sasha says, resigning himself to fate as the floorboard under his left foot turns into a small marsh. Again. “Always gonna be bigger than you.”Little Zhenya groans, and Sasha sits back down, trying his best to dry off his foot and gesturing for Nicke to make himself comfortable across the room. “Are you a witch too?” Nicke asks, so forward, and Sanya nods.“Yes, yes. I’ve known Sasha for years. Zhenya is, ah,” Sanya explains, glancing down at Zhenya, who blinks lazily up at him. Sasha tries not to laugh, because they’re both fools, and so is he. He’s a proud hypocrite. “My apprentice, of sorts.” Nicke nods, pausing for a moment before reaching up and pulling his hat off, straight to the point. His hair is blinding. Sasha wants to touch it. That’s doesn’t matter. “Concentrate on the feeling of it,” Sanya says a half hour from sunset, flicking a glance at Nicke, who’s been levitating across the room for the past three minutes. Sasha’s bored, little Zhenya’s asleep in Sanya’s lap, all human this time.And Nicke - well. To say he’s powerful would be an understatement. To say he has any semblance of control would be far too generous. Sasha all but begs him to come back. As of their third session, Nicke sits on the couch with palms full of fire blossoming from his wrists. Zhenya watches intently from where he remains sprawled across Sanya’s chair, and Sanya very carefully transforms the throw pillow closest to Nicke into a frighteningly large and docile bushbaby. It’s something, some kind of progress when Nicke keeps the flames alight despite the distraction, and Sasha grins. In the course of his frequent visitation, Nicke continues to look so jarring in the clutter of the house, out of place amongst all this kitsch. Nevertheless, maybe there’s a place for him, the way Sanya and Zhenya clicked into place in Sasha’s life all too many years ago. “Can I kiss you?” Nicke asks apropos of nothing on the front porch, hands stuffed into the pockets of his black jeans, and the eyes on the front door blink shut.Sasha knows, however detached from rational thought, that they’re blocking the door, that Sanya and Zhenya are inside. They can wait. When Sasha gets his hands in Nicke’s hair it’s hot to the touch, and Nicke bites at his lips with all those little teeth of his, and Nicke grabs his hips and holds him in place here on the front porch, and Zhenya lets the ground split underneath them because he’s an asshole. None of it matters, the falling to the ground, the absence of any impact with Nicke mustering enough control to keep them afloat. Nothing is ever going to matter again. Sasha sits back and lets his hands burn. “Great,” Nicke grumbles at dinner days later, tugging a piece of his own hair loose from his hat to glare at it, as if his scorn will halt its incessant light. It only burns brighter. Sasha keeps his hand on Nicke’s thigh, squeezes a little bit just because he wants to. It’s all so much fun. “You’re such a pest.”“Make me stop,” Sasha says, grinning, and Nicke pulls his hand away by the wrist. When the clock strikes midnight, Sasha pushes Nicke into the mattress, and the bed goes up in flames. It’s alright. Nicke’s there. They can get a new one.