A/N: So this happened while I was trying to work on another fanfiction mutters about darned plot bunnies and it wasn't half awful so I decided to post it. Fanficion likes shippy things, right? . . . Right? Oh my goodness, I'm so embarrassed to post this. (My reputation as a non-romantic flies out the window NOW.)
The cover image is temporary until I can get my butt in gear and draw my own. All apologies to the creator of the image.
On the off-chance that anyone cares, this story is listed under Captain America instead of Avengers because Bucky was never in Avengers but Wanda was in Cap 3. It's set at some undefined point long after Infinity War, which will get the briefest mention here. As for warnings . . . kissing, I guess? Oh my word, no, I'm done. I'm just done, guys.
Chicken and Rice
"What do you mean, 'you're not cooking today'?" demanded Wanda, crossing her arms and failing to put up an offended front. She had been barred from the house's kitchen and was trying desperately to pretend that she was upset about it.
"Just what I said," retorted Bucky Barnes, pivoting effortlessly to address her from what looked like the very involved preparations of their dinner he had spread out over the counter. "You're not cooking today," he repeated. "It's been a week, I've let you have at it, and now it's my turn."
"A week," she rejoined, trying to make it sound like that wasn't ample time, instead of grinning at the fact that it really had been a whole week and this is real...! "You haven't got to try half of my Sokovian dishes."
"If I have to eat anything with tripe again, I'm going on strike," he deflected, turning his attention to dicing a chicken breast.
"That was once!" she cried, trying not to squeak from delight at the chance to raise her voice and sound angry. "Once! And I warned you, I asked if you would try, before I made it, and you said yes!"
She added a little shaking of her fists at her sides to punctuate her yelling. This was getting to be too much fun. Even he was starting to grin.
"I was under contractual obligation to try anything you put in front of me," asserted Bucky, seemingly without thinking about it. Môj bože, could he come up with them fast.
"Whose contract?" she spat.
"Mine."
"So you could revoke it."
"Not in good conscience." He shot her a winning, chivalrous grin with such a sparkle in those ocean-blue eyes that she wanted to smack him.
Wanda ground out what was intended to be an infuriated growl and had to cut it off halfway to keep from laughing. Even so, she wheezed a little when his back was turned, and the small crinkles that formed around his eyes told her that the knockoff serum's enhanced hearing had picked it up.
"This is an outrage," declared Wanda when she had breath enough. She marched to the kitchen island, which was unoccupied by Bucky's cooking utensils.
Wanda hoisted herself up onto it with gusto, ending up sitting with her arms crossed and a decisive and unladylike thump.
Bucky did nothing to hold back his grin.
"I am declaring sit-down strike until I am allowed back in my kitchen," she announced.
"You are in the kitchen," he pointed out with an equal expression.
"Until I am allowed to use my things in my kitchen!" she corrected immediately, not caring that the choice of words was awkward and ridiculous.
"Make up your mind," Bucky retorted at a half-whine, and went back to sawing away at the meat. Wanda thought that he turned away rather quickly and there could be no coincidence that she couldn't see his face.
"And for the record," he added shortly, "it's not your kitchen, it's ours."
"There is no record."
"Super-soldier memory. There's a record."
"It's your mind. That means you can make everything up in the record."
"Yep," he agreed.
"Inexcusable!" she cried, half fearing that she'd pronounced it wrong, but Bucky's smile told her otherwise.
"I beg your pardon," he began in a winning tone, but Wanda fired on.
"Banned from my kitchen, refuted at every request, not allowed to make food, and now there is a record and I have no say!" She shook her fists unthreateningly in Bucky's face. "This is a perversion of justice! I'm demanding compromises!"
Bucky put his finger up and seemed to seek counsel with some unknown entity in the ceiling for a long time. At least, his mouth tugged down into the jowly frown known of all gout-infested philosophers and he stared into the middle distance for a while. After that, he shrugged, looked her square in the eyes and answered, "Go on."
And that was just so endearingly stoic that she kissed him square on his nose—that got his face to scrunch up into an adorable smile—and decided to lay off.
"That I get to sit," she answered slowly, letting her head fall toward her shoulder and her hair cascade over it, "and watch my husband cook our dinner tonight."
She could have sworn she saw him swell up a bit at "husband", and sure enough, back he went to making the chicken breast into smaller pieces than it already was, and the backs of his ears were tinged pink.
"Of course you may," he answered her, and that maddeningly adorable Brooklyn drawl was back. "I'd be lonely without it."
She did not hold back a more womanly than girly giggle at this, and it heightened the hue of his ears.
Bucky spun on his heel again, his every movement lazy and comfortable, and gestured to the bar-stools. "But please, hon, sit somewhere more comfortable. We bought the cushioned seats for one reason and the counter for another."
Wanda laughed. She took his offered hand (even though the floor was only a few inches down) and eased herself off of her perch. "Sit-down strike has ended," she noted when her soles padded to the floor, and she sounded as amused as she felt.
He smiled and his hand left hers and rested at her waist, which wasn't sweet and playful at all.
"Good," was Bucky's comeback, looking those few inches down at her with eyes that sparkled enough to rival the Milky Way. "Though I wouldn't protest to the beautiful lady sitting on my counter."
The swinging jabs she took at his head were good evidence of why people like Bucky and Natasha handled the hand-to-hand combat and not Wanda. Bucky chuckled as he deflected them—chuckled, not all out laughed, and that was almost more contagious—and finally wrestled her, pinned her arms to her sides briefly until she squeaked, and then released her.
"Coulda used your red magic stuff," he remarked when she griped teasingly about losing.
"Wouldn't be a fair fight." She had by this time settled comfortably in the bar-stool, as requested.
"Good point," he teased effortlessly. "I'd definitely win."
She swiped a grape from the fruit bowl, aimed with her red energy, scored ten points for the head-shot, and watched it ricochet, bounce to the linoleum, and skitter under the fridge, and that was that.
Sitting up more attentively when Bucky opened the rice-cooker, Wanda remarked, "To be honest, I was surprised that you wanted to cook. I thought it'd be my job, so I'd best get started."
Wanda did not mention that it would never have crossed her mind that the man would take pride in cooking until she'd come to America and married an American, and that the dissonance gave her just the slightest pang and the feeling of being lost.
Bucky's grin was just as amiable, but the mischief was gone. "No worries," he replied, shutting the cooker's lid. "I just don't particularly mind it myself, is all. And anyway, not everybody is me."
And that banished all of her unsettled feelings away, but he went on, too lost in the story to stop talking, and she didn't have the heart to stop him.
"Steve and I did what we had to after his Ma passed. It was just a fact of livin'. Folks were gettin' laid off jobs left and right, but we kept at it, and whoever could put food on the table, he was the day's hero. I worked my back off at the docks most days, jumpin' between jobs sometimes, and he did what he could to fill a seat in a thread factory or something somewhere, but we made sure the other never spent a day hungry."
Bucky's ocean-blue eyes blazed with a stubborn, resilient pride, and they faced her down undaunted. "Not once," he declared for the world to hear, "you hear me, not once did Steve ever have an empty table in front of him, nor me. Not for the whole Depression could it touch us. We kept at it, and even kept a little cash jar in the cubby-hole behind the stove, in case things got tight for us."
For all his gusto, Wanda couldn't help the smile that spread on her face at the picture of her husband stuffing dollar bills into a mason jar, and Bucky gave a shrug that was equally charming and self-depreciating.
"I never did have much to work with, ruža, I'll be honest," he admitted, and to her surprise the steam he'd run on seemed to be lesser. "My cooking's not the fanciest stuff ever."
Then the little spark blazed up again inside him and he plowed on, "But I made it palatable enough that we could forget life was hard for about twenty minutes, and it kept me and him alive so we can stand here today. So there it is."
With that, he returned to his noble industry and held himself up straight as a general, and maybe more so.
Wanda couldn't resist a vibrant smile, nor the chance to give him one more hard time. "And the romantic dinner you are making for me is?" she teased, leaning forward.
He'd lost his gusto at some points in the conversation, but this was the first point at which Bucky almost seemed bashful. "Chicken and rice," he answered, his grin one that tried not to ask for pity.
Wanda let all the warmth of her affection for her husband flood to the front of her smile. "I'm sure it will be wonderful," she assured him, and was completely sincere.
Bucky rewarded her by sliding in head-on, putting his arm around Wanda, and placing a neat peck to her cheek. For an instant there was his smell of slight cologne, mild seasonings from the heat of the stove, and just the warm, human scent of her Bucky—and then, too soon, he was gone and back to his work.
"I'll do my best for sure, môj milovaný," he teased back, his voice unnecessarily gallant and happy. "Wouldn't want to disappoint you my first day on the job."
"You could not if you tried," she returned, grinning. "I made you eat tripe."
"And to be honest, it wasn't all that bad," he admitted, shrugging at some uninformed bystander in the ceiling. "You want to know what's the secret to a good chicken and rice?" he quizzed her, tossing the question over his shoulder.
"I guess you use chicken?" she asked. The joke was placed rather boredly, but she turned and barked a shrill yelp at the sight of the Winter Soldier's stony glare inordinately close to her face. Wanda burst into shocked laughter, rolling in her bar-stool.
Little crinkles tugged at the eyes in that impassive mask, and then Wanda's reaction made him break. "No-o-o," drawled Bucky, and swiftly stole a kiss from her lips before fleeing to the stove.
"Hey!" She sprang up, fists at the ready to avenge the peck.
Bucky pulled the lid off of a covered saucepan and remarked, "It's garlic and ginger."
Wanda put her plans for revenge on hold when she realized this new information he was sharing. "Really?" she asked, encouraging him to go on.
"Yeah." Wielding his weapon of a stainless steel turner in one hand, he went on to explain, "You dice it and throw it all together in a pan, saute it 'til it's crispy, and when the rice is done you mix that in."
She wasn't really listening as he reached for something in the spice cabinet overhead and kept talking. More impressive than the details of a recipe for rice was the man who was telling it, how strong and solid and confident he was, in spirit as well as in body.
Wanda Barnes-Maximoff—long before she had that name—had seen the best of this man and the worst of him, in meager times like after Siberia and in the greatest like in the War. That he could be broken, unstable, and lost in his own mind at the worst of times only made his confidence now all the more admirable.
She loved him, and she'd keep loving him—she'd already resolved it, to be by his side when he was weak and fractured and not the man she knew; when he needed her. She would never leave his side ('til death do us part), because she knew he'd never leave hers.
"To the end of the line" had unified two friends once, and the pact had endured centuries. Now that she knew the man who'd made it, she understood what it meant.
So when Bucky got to the end of his explanation and Wanda hadn't heard half of it, she decided to cover by putting her chin on his arm and answering, "To znie lahodný. When did you discover it?"
His smile was a small one. "I didn't. Bruce taught me this one, four years ago."
Wanda wanted to hug him, and she gave in, pressing her cheek into his back as she squeezed his middle lightly. "I love you," she murmured.
"Tiež ťa milujem, môj ruža," he answered, his voice rolling softly over the words.
Wanda knew she'd never be tired of hearing it.
She lifted her head from where she'd pressed it to the fabric of his shirt, and found that Bucky had half turned his head in her direction, that peculiar distance in his eyes suggesting that he wanted a kiss. She gave him three, sweet and brief, and each on the lips.
He smiled down at her, and for a moment Wanda found herself lost in ocean blue. The next thing she knew was a slightly more involved kiss, her hands tangled in his hair, and the counter against her back—not roughly, not ever, but quite enough for her to get the idea.
A/N: Their first son will be named Steven.
OKAY UM BUT HERE ARE THE TRANSLATIONS: ruža is "rose", môj milovaný is "my beloved", to znie lahodný is just "that sounds delicious", and Tiež ťa milujem means "I love you too".
(Reviews are a well-aimed grape at high speeds.)