Title: Chapter 2: The Wall's Been Down Awhile
Summary: It may have been seventy years, but Bucky hadn't lost his knack for sniffing out the best places to get the rarest ingredients. It was the everyday stuff that was tripping him up. Thankfully, Rebecca's there to help.
"Grocery shopping is not how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning, Jamie."
"You were just complaining about how you never get out of the apartment. Why'd you agree to come with me if you're just gonna whine the whole time?" Bucky groused, walking arm in arm with his sister through the bustling pop-up street market.
Rebecca wrinkled her nose at him. "You didn't say you were grocery shopping. That was false advertising."
Rolling his eyes, Bucky deftly maneuvered them around an ironically dressed hipster couple dillydallying in front of an organic juice stand.
"We're not grocery shopping," he corrected. "We're ingredient gathering."
Snorting derisively, Rebecca eyed another group of millennials taking up space with compulsive selfie taking. "What was wrong with my kitchen? I had perfectly good spell ingredients you could have pilfered."
"Your kitchen didn't have Xanthoparmelia, obsidian, or running spring water," he responded dryly.
"Well, if you didn't pick the most obscure healing spells to weave you could've gotten plenty of ingredients from my pantry." Rebecca leaned on his metal arm for balance as she stepped over a suspicious looking puddle.
"You're the one shoving spell books at me every time I come over. If you didn't want me to experiment you shouldn't be enabling me," Bucky pointed out blandly causing her to pinch his side in retaliation.
"I try and do something nice and I get it thrown back in my face. See if I let you borrow my books next time you come up with some harebrained Frankenstein spell you want to cook up."
"If you stop complaining I'll buy you one of those sugary caffeinated abominations you love so much but your kids won't let you have." Bucky glanced at her slyly as they came to a stop in front of an oddball little herb stall.
Rebecca turned to face her brother and looking up into his smirking blue eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him. "Two sugary caffeinated abominations and I'll tell you the best place to get good obsidian."
With a beleaguered sigh, Bucky lifted his right hand. "Done."
Rebecca grinned, grabbed his hand and shook on it. "Pleasure doing business with you. Now let's get your groceries and get out of here."
Well aware he'd just been played, Bucky muttered, "Not groceries," and turned toward the stall to get his errand over with.
This stall, unlike all the other trendy nonconformist conformist hipster run stalls was manned by an older man with a coke bottle glasses and silver gray hair. His wares were packaged in repurposed jars and wrinkled sandwich baggies, hand labeled in loopy old fashioned cursive.
The magic emanating from the rickety wooden stall was very promising for Bucky's hunt for obscure ingredients.
The stall owner looked to be older than Rebecca by a significant number of years, but his heterochromatic ice blue and hazel eyes were piercing as he looked them up and down.
The siblings waited patiently for him to finish his examination. If he didn't like what he saw he wasn't going to sell to them. That was how the magical community worked. Snobby and insular as any other community out there, witches –and others like them- tended to be picky about who they dealt with. For good reason. They'd faced as much persecution and prejudice as any other group in history. And of course as secrecy was traditional, if no longer strictly vital to survival, certain levels of exclusivity were expected.
The old man's eyes swept over Rebecca without pause, but when he moved to Bucky his gaze turned intrigued. Humming in consideration, he adjusted his glasses and squinted. (For show, Bucky was sure. The man seemed sharp as the day he was born.)
"Now that's not something you see every day," the stall owner commented boldly.
Still arm in arm, Bucky could feel Rebecca bristle. "You got something to say?" she demanded belligerently, glaring at the man.
"Becca," Bucky scolded, gently squeezing her hand in warning.
Not in the least bit affected by Rebecca's attitude, the man just watched them amused. "I imagine you folks are looking for something in particular," he began, the previous few minutes seemingly forgotten.
Bucky's shoulders untensed and he pulled his list out of his hoodie pocket. Rebecca was still muttering sullenly under her breath from next to him.
"I need witch's witch-hazel, garden angelica, pennywort, and Xanthoparmelia, if you have it."
Eyebrow raised, the old man eyed Bucky again. "Not a lot of call for Xanthoparmelia these days. Most people have gone to modern drugs for that." He lifted a weathered wooden fruit crate onto the table between them, his expression sly. "You look a little young to be having trouble rising to the occasion."
Bucky chuckled and returned the smirk. Leaning closer he got a look at the contents of the crate. "I'm older than I look, but it's not for me."
"Ah," the man nodded knowingly still with an edge of mischievousness. "It's for a friend."
Bucky ignored Rebecca's annoyed huff and just grinned at the man, shrugging a shoulder. "More a friend of a friend."
"Well, friend or not this is all my stock of Xanthoparmelia." Standing behind the table, his posture relaxed, the old man gestured to a small brown bottle and watched Bucky pick it up reading the label carefully. "Good thing it's got a long shelf life, I've been sitting on that bottle about ten years or so."
The yellowed label was peeling off and the last three letters of the name were smudged, but the bottle was sealed air tight and had a feel of clean ambient magic to its contents.
"Looks good," he glanced up at the stall owner. "I'll take it."
The man nodded pleased to have it taken off his hands and shoved the crate back under the table. "The rest of the herbs you want should be set out already. Pick what you want. Tell me if you can't find anything."
Bucky and Becca moved along to the other mishmash of boxes, crates, and baskets of plants and herbs lined up on display. They spent another fifteen minutes perusing the selection and in the end Bucky got his witch's witch-hazel, garden angelica, and pennywort, and Rebecca refilled her supply of lime blossoms and bachelor's buttons.
Eyeing her purchases, Bucky shook his head incredulously. "I cannot believe you need to restock already. You enable your friends' sex lives way too much."
"What is it my grandkids say? Oh, yeah. Don't slut-shame, Jamie." Rebecca grinned unrepentantly in the face of Bucky's pained expression.
"Lime blossom and bachelor's button," the stall owner was nodding knowingly again as he wrote out a receipt by hand. "Fornication and celibacy. Making-love spells are my best selling ingredients."
Bucky just groaned and forked over $127.42 in Hydra begotten bills.
Transactions made, magical ingredients acquired and stowed away, the siblings stepped back into the flow of trendy foot traffic, arm in arm once again.
"Where to next, big brother?" Rebecca asked feeling happier now that she'd scandalized him a little.
"To the actual grocery store," he replied wryly, lips curving in good natured exasperation in the face of her self-satisfied expression. "I still need pumpkin seeds, almond seeds, cilantro, and spring water."
"And my sugary caffeinated abominations. You owe me two of them," she reminded him.
"I didn't forget." He sighed then mumbled, "I was hoping you'd forget."
"I heard that," Rebecca gave him an unimpressed look. "I'm old, not senile. You're not getting out of our deal that easily."
"Wouldn't dream of it," he assured her only a little sarcastically.
A ten minute walk later and they were wandering around the nearest grocery store. Rebecca sipping on a 16 ounce can of Monster Energy drink, five more tall black cans still in their plastic six pack rings dangling from her free hand. Bucky following along behind her lamenting the fact that he'd let his little sister wheedle a full six pack out of him instead of the two they'd agreed on.
They breezed through the nuts and seeds aisle, dropping bags of organic pumpkin and almond seeds in the handbasket hanging from Bucky's metal hand before moving onto the drink aisle.
"What's taking you so long?" Rebecca huffed, already halfway through her can of illicit beverage. "Just grab a bottle that says 'natural spring water' on it."
"There's like twenty different brands." Bucky scowled in frustrated indecision. "How's anybody supposed to pick one?"
"Welcome to the wonders of American capitalism. Where you can buy what you want, when you want, and you have many, many options to choose from." Thrusting her now mostly empty can at Bucky, Rebecca grabbed a glass bottle boasting "all natural pure mountain spring water" off the shelf and dropped it in the basket.
Snatching her drink back, she gave her brother a patronizing look.
"This ain't the Soviet Union and you weren't a Commie long enough to go Moscow on the Hudson on me. Now quit scowling and let's go get your cilantro. It's almost time for my stories to come on and I want to find out if Monica is having her second cousin's baby or if it's just cancer."
Bucky followed along in his sister's wake, slightly dazed and wondering if he should mention that he didn't understand that reference or if he should just ignore it. Coming to a stop in front of a selection of four different kinds of cilantro, Bucky sighed in resignation. The future was confusing and he had enough to worry about. He'll get around to pop culture later.
TBC…