Liho's Human

by greyduckgreygoose

Summary:

It took Liho three months to train the exceptionally difficult human. But then again, she’d always been one for a challenge.

It took Liho three months to train the exceptionally difficult human. But then again, she’d always been one for a challenge.

—

The cool of November was nipping at Liho’s fur. Soon there would be frost, and long darkness. Licking the ice from between her cracked and bleeding paws.

Liho knew that she would have to find a human to bunk down with for the winter. But she was picky.

Night after night she prowled the three city blocks she’d staked as her territory, snaking around ledges and peering into windows. This one was too loud. This one was disgustingly messy. This one had children.

One night, Liho found herself on the third floor of an unobstrusive brownstone with an empty flower box and double-enforced windows. In the glowing light of the kitchen was a single woman with blazing red hair trying to stuff noodles into a water boiler.

Liho found herself amused and sat down to watch, her tail twitching.

The woman was hurt. Liho could tell because she wore those little strips of cloth that humans did when they bled and needed something to keep the blood inside of their bodies. Her left wrist was taped up and there was a big gauze square on her cheek.

The water boiler started sputtering and hissing, jumping around like a live thing. Alarmed, the woman pulled it out by its plug.

Liho’s ear twitched with her instinctive desire to pounce on the animal-like kettle.

The woman moved to the sink to wash her hands and caught sight of Liho. Walking to the window, she made some ineffectual ‘shooing’ gestures in Liho’s direction. Then she narrowed her eyes and just stared.

Liho stared back. When she finally had to blink, she yawned instead, trying to make her closing her eyes look purposeful.

The woman snorted, and tugged the window curtain closed.

—

Liho decided. She wanted this human.

—

Liho’s human never left her window unlocked, but she did open the curtains for sunlight every day. So every night for a week, Liho went to paw at the glass, looking imploring and meowing loudly.

Sometimes Liho’s human wasn’t home. Sometimes she was. She successfully ignored Liho’s yowling for few days, then,

"Look," she said one night, opening the window and setting an open can of tuna on the sill. "If you’re hungry, eat. But you can’t come inside."

Liho ignored her in favor of gulping down tuna chunks.

"You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here." Liho’s human said sternly, before her lips pulled into a quick smile. "That was from a song." She watched Liho eat for a while, then closed the window but did not draw the curtain.

Liho finished the rest of the tuna and started cleaning her whiskers with her paws.

—

The nights were growing long and cold. Liho kept pawing at the window. She got cans every night the woman was present. Tuna and wet cat food. Occasionally the leftovers of the woman’s dinner, although Liho knew well enough to sniff them before trying a bite. Liho’s human was not a good cook.

Liho has yet to be allowed inside.

On the first day of snow, Liho awoke to the steam of her breath in the morning air. The corner of the dumpster she was curled up against felt like a block of ice at her side. She stood, giving a full-body shiver, specks of snow sluicing off of her sleek fur.

It used to be thin and matted, but with regular meals it was plumping up to its former glory. As Liho traveled to a warm vent on the other end of the block, she thought of whether she’d be able to survive the winter after all, if the woman never let her in.

The vent, however, was packed. Maybe a dozen cats all crammed together, trying to share the small square of heat. Two mewling kittens. Five scarred toms eyeing each other warily and taking up too much space. Liho turned on her paw, disgusted with them all.

More snow fell as she padded to her human’s apartment. If she wasn’t home, then Liho would need to find food elsewhere, but she wanted to take one more crack at charming her way into the warmth.

Most humans, Liho had noticed, left their dwellings empty during daylight and occupied them during nightfall, where they ate and slept in scheduled succession unfamiliar to those of Liho’s kind. But Liho’s human kept more cat-like hours. For days at a time she would vanish, only to return scarred and fatigued, collapsing to sleep for an entire day. Sometimes she binged, filling the coffee table with Styrofoam shells and white boxes that smelled like the food Liho would occasionally pick from the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant down the block. Sometimes she wandered around the apartment, opening cabinets and picking listlessly through the offerings before grabbing an unappetizing looking bar. Sometimes she drank her day’s meals in coffee.

These were the things that Liho noticed, things that made Liho’s human unpredictable, and therefore, intriguing.

Today, in the swirling cold, she had left the window open.

Liho cocked her head, hesitating on the edge of the window box. The light was not on in the kitchen and Liho could hear no movement from within. Quietly, she slipped inside, landing on the counter, then the floor. Her black fur melted into the darkness.

A sudden, staggered breath made her ear twitch. Liho followed the noise to the living room, padding noiselessly on the kitchen tile.

The faint smell of fresh dirt and gunpowder hung in the air. Liho wrinkled her nose, her eyes flashing green as they swept the living room.

There were two men. Unfamiliar smells. One was pressed against the wall beside the door, the other curled behind a couch.

Liho could … sense the aggression. Like a tom hunkered down, snarling, his tail sweeping slowly behind him. A queen with her back arched and claws unsheathed. Up to no good.

Liho found herself an unobtrusive little corner and sat with her tail curled over her paws, the third in this waiting game.

Perhaps an hour later, the lock on the front door turned with a loud click. Everyone in the room, including Liho, tensed.

The door swung open with a slow creak, revealing Liho’s human, framed by the light of the hallway. She was yawning, pulling her hair out of a complicated updo, her peacoat gaping open to reveal a sleek black dress underneath that was lightly splattered with blood.

Liho slid her eyes to the man behind the couch. She could see the exact second he took a breath, his leg muscles tensing as he prepared to spring upwards.

Liho yowled loudly.

The man behind the couch swore, swinging his gun in Liho’s direction before he jerked, suddenly, and collapsed. In the door, Liho’s human was holding a gun, stance defensive.

"Cat?" she asked, as the man behind the open door made his move.

More shots rang out and Liho ran to the kitchen to hide. She heard the clatter of guns hitting the ground. Low grunts. Then silence.

Liho peeked her head out to see her human standing over the crumpled man, pointing a gun at his head.

"Natasha Romanova-" the man snarled, and she shot him.

—

Natasha, ah. Liho supposed that that was a good a name as any.

—

"Cat?" Natasha called, picking her way around the bodies. Liho padded out, purring, and wound around her ankles. She was, after all, a very useful and heroic cat. Her human would have to be dense not to adopt her immediately. "I’m glad you’re not dead." Natasha said, picking her feet out of Liho’s embrace. "But that doesn’t mean we can become too familiar."

Liho sat, perplexed, as Natasha disappeared into the bedroom, then came out a few minutes later clad in black, with boots on and a duffle slung over her shoulder.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

"I’ve been compromised." Natasha said, by way of explanation. She slid a look in Liho’s direction as she crossed to the door. "Sorry."

She kicked the second man’s legs out of the way as she walked into the hallway, closing the door behind her and leaving Liho with the cooling bodies.

—

Strange people walked all over the apartment. Yellow tape was put up. A man in an expensive suit walked around and waved papers and scared everyone away. The bodies were zipped up. Everything else was sealed and boxed and vanished one by one.

Natasha didn’t return.

After three days of returning to the door, Liho decided that her human was extraordinarily rude. And that she would need to track her down, after all.

—

"Oh," Natasha said, opening the window. Her new building had narrower ledges, but very accessible fire escapes. She lived on the fifth floor now. "Cat?" Natasha asked, making no move to stop Liho as she brushed under Natasha’s arm and pushed inside. "You are the same cat, I guess.”

Liho yowled at Natasha resentfully, shaking out her fur so that the snow slid off and puddled on Natasha’s bedroom carpet.

"Points to you for finding me," Natasha said quietly, crouching down but not lifting a hand to pet Liho. "Let’s hope you never go to work for the people who want to kill me."

Liho daintily licked her paw.

Natasha stood, turning to walk out the bedroom door. “And I suppose you want to be fed as well.”

—

Natasha never pet her. Never bought her a collar. She didn’t even keep the window open, meaning that Liho was either trapped inside or outside when Natasha was gone, given the state she was in when Natasha decided to leave.

In the blustering New York winter, though, Liho was more than happy to remain indoors.

Natasha’s apartment was spartan, but so pristine in its starkness that it suggested an unpainted canvas rather than an empty life. Her furniture was minimalist. Utilitarian. She did not have, to Liho’s chagrin, any vases that Liho could knock from the shelves.

Liho was forced to take her nails to the drapery in protest. Natasha was not pleased, but she purchased a carpet-covered block of wood for Liho to amuse herself with.

Slowly, one cabinet of the kitchen became filled with cat food, litter and toys.

Liho was content.

—

Liho’s mother had been an owned cat, fat and happy with an old couple on Long Island. Humans, she’d taught her kittens, might be fickle, but the names they gave held power, a soft formation of identity. A cat without a name was not to be trusted.

After a month, Natasha gave her a name.

Liho, Natasha called her. Evil. Bad luck. Though she said it with an ironic twist to her mouth.

So Liho she was. Liho she had always been.

—

Natasha talked to her sometimes, sprawled over the couch half-asleep with the TV droning on in the background, sitting on the edge of the bathtub as she taped up her injuries. Once it got warmer, Natasha would sometimes walk up to the roof with a bottle of wine and Liho would follow, enjoying the mild spring night in the city.

"I’m not adopting you," Natasha would say, watching Liho chase buzzing insects around the roof. "You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you."

"I think you understand," Natasha would say another day, opening the cat food can and upending it in Liho’s bowl. "What it’s like to be a stray."

"We’re both strays," Natasha would sigh, yet another day, as Liho rubbed her face against Natasha’s thigh and purred. "Don’t lick me."

Sometimes she’d go off in soft Russian, presumably about her job, or her past, or some other fool thing Liho wouldn’t be able to understand anyway, as she was a cat.

—

Just once, a man crossed the threshold of Natasha’s front door. He was supporting her limp body, her head lolling on his shoulder as he hauled her to the couch.

"Oh," he said, spotting Liho hovering at the bookshelf. "You have a cat."

—

His name was Clint and he spent fifteen minutes making kissy noises at Liho while Natasha tossed and turned feverishly on the couch, occasionally calling his name.

"There’s a good girl," he said, when Liho’s worry finally overcame her apprehension and she approached him to get a look at Natasha. Clint trapped her, and held her, petting her head as he raised her above Natasha’s curled body. "See?" he said, juggling Liho like she was a baby. "Mommy’s gonna be just fine. She’s just burning off some hallucinogenic roofies."

Natasha opened one eye irritably. “Jesus, Clint, I’m not a cat mother. Go get me some water.”

“Grumpy,” Clint whispered against Liho’s head, before kissing it and heading towards the kitchen.

—

In a couple of hours, Natasha was on her feet again, shaky as that was. She kept staggering to the bathroom to throw up as Clint sprawled on the couch, drinking beer and watching a movie about giant spiders attacking Manhattan.

He kept trying to feed Liho little crackers shaped like fish. But did not taste like fish. Liho did not appreciate this.

After the movie was over, Clint turned to Natasha. “You want me to stay? I could sleep on the couch.”

"I’ll be fine," she said, shaking her head. She looked pale.

Clint looked at her for a minute. “Okay,” he said finally, getting to his feet. “If you feel like dying in the middle of the night call me first.”

Natasha grunted at him as he grabbed his jacket and exited the door. Liho watched as Natasha did a visual sweep of the mess in the living room, then made a gesture of futility and headed towards the bedroom, stopping at the front door to check the three locks.

When the lights snapped off one by one, Liho sought her own bed, a pile of towels at the foot of Natasha’s nightstand.

—

It was the cry that woke her. Sharp, alien. Even when she was sewing up her own wounds, Liho had never heard Natasha make such a sound.

Liho blinked herself out of sleep and leapt onto the bed. Under the sheets, Natasha was twitching, her skin beaded with sweat and glowing under the moonlight. Her features were contorted, as if she was losing some tortuous fight.

Meowing, Liho pressed her paw against Natasha’s cheek, batting at it roughly until Natasha’s eyes snapped open. In a violent motion, Natasha flung out her arm, and Liho jumped back just in time to avoid being smacked into the wall. She zipped under the bed as Natasha scrambled for the gun under her pillow.

Eventually, the light snapped on, and Natasha’s ragged breathing slowed.

"Liho?" she called, sounding contrite. Liho considered not responding out of vindictiveness, but eventually she crawled out.

She and Natasha looked at each other for a moment, then Natasha slid out of bed and gently scooped Liho into her lap.

That night, Natasha broke all of her own covenants, stroking Liho over and over as she pressed her tear-stained face against Liho’s fur.

And though Natasha smelled sour and sick, and she was holding Liho too tightly to be comfortable, Liho still sat patiently and licked the salt from her cheeks.

Because she was Liho’s human, after all.