"We tried writing you," Monty said after labouring to lower himself into a seat.
"You obviously weren't in any damn phonebooks," Dum Dum said.
So strange: His voice dipped into Bucky's ears and came out with a string of echoed conversations clinging to it. How do these people get through these goddamn hallways? Why's everything gotta be so narrow here, huh, Frenchie? S'like I'm tryin' to crawl through a dollhouse.
The full memory and context dangled just out of reach of Bucky's memory but was teasing a smile out of Bucky's lips nevertheless. He sat beside Gabe on the couch before his knees could go weak with comfort and nostalgia.
"You idiot, they don't print phonebooks anymore," Jim said. He was beside Dum Dum, orthogonal from Gabe and Bucky.
"The hell they don't! Turns up at my door every year!"
Jim squinted through his glasses at Dum Dum. "I forget how stupid you are every time I see you again. Phonebook's all ads and businesses—and you can look that crap up on the Internet. No one in their right mind is registered in the phonebook."
Bucky watched them like a tennis match, caught Steve smirking at him between the bouncing.
"The point I was going to make was that I've spent a fortune in stamps trying to correspond with you," Monty went on as if the other two weren't arguing. "I'd rather like a refund."
"Come on, Cap," Gabe said over the edge of the couch. He waved a hand in summons. "Ain't right until all of us are here."
It was automatic, it had to have been: Bucky smiled at Steve just like he knew wartime Bucky Barnes would have. Maybe it was something that the Bucky Barnes before the war would have done, too. Either way, it wasn't part of an act. Not this time. This time it was natural. This time, just for the breath of time it took to complete the action, all the different revisions of Bucky converged into one, united consciousness.
E pluribus unum.
Bucky jerked his head toward an open seat and more words shook free inside: "C'mon, Steve, we don't have all night. No one reads their letters or eats their dinner until we're all at the table. And we're getting damn hungry."
But they hadn't been at a table at the time. They'd been huddled around a fire in a wood that wasn't quite dense enough to hide the smoke from any potential enemies. Booted toes had tapped each other, shoulders had rubbed; back then it had been all familiar, unthinking comfort and touch. Mail had been distributed before they'd left base for the mission. They had eaten rations—were they K-rations? Or D?—around the fire while someone read a letter from home aloud.
Smile breaking his face, Steve ducked his head as he peeled himself off the wall he was leaning against and approached the men. The other Avengers conveniently dispersed around the room, though none of them actually left. Coffee grounds perfumed the air, originating from whichever direction Barton had gone.
Like an indicator activated during titration, the scent lit up Bucky's memory in full colour. Instant coffee was vile and an insult to the real thing, but out in the field, it might as well have been gold, a hug from one's mother. Bucky acutely remembered several meals of instant coffee, sugar packets, and cigarettes consumed in the damp and cold.
"Why not send an e-mail?" Frenchie was saying to Monty. "Much quicker, and it's free."
"Just not the same," Monty said, "might as well be sending someone a store-bought fruit loaf instead of making a proper one yourself."
"Enough with the baking analogies," Jim groused. "We all know you baked for the queen."
Bucky was sure his head would be straining at the seams in a few moments. Every memory was so intense that it left him giddy when a new one began just after the first.
"Yeah," Gabe agreed, "and you used my grandmother's recipe."
"Doesn't matter now, does it?" Dum Dum interjected. "Cap, why'd you have Jimmy on such tough lockdown, huh? I mean, I understand all the loonies running around these days, but it's us!"
All of them turned, as one, to Steve. Bucky swore that he saw all of them as he last knew them in 1945 just for a fraction of a second. Uniforms, colour in their hair, youth in their cheeks. And something else about all of them that Bucky couldn't describe. Perhaps it was something that made him distantly sad, like when he remembered the dog he'd had as a boy in Indiana. Gentle disappointment but not surprise or upset. Yearning, wistful for something long gone by…longing.
No.
"Oh, geez, I thought that would have been obvious," Steve was saying, completely oblivious to the flashback that had just happened, "We've been getting routine death threats!" (I'm a death threat to everyone, Bucky thought idly.) "Didn't you see those stories about people named Barnes getting all kinds of horrible things sent to them? Just because of their name and the slight chance they were related to Bucky! Tony's been having all of our mail scanned in case someone sends something dangerous."
"What, does anthrax work on your type of people?" Jim scoffed.
A snort and a scoff was issued from the avenging peanut gallery.
"He just didn't want Sarge to see something that would upset him," Gabe said. Dignity and a lack of shame twinkled in his voice.
Steve nodded and held out a hand toward Gabe in thanks. "Exactly. Obviously. So much was already going on with the trial, setting up security, trying to get Bucky to trust the security."
"What, the Avengers aren't good enough for ya, Sarge?" Gabe teased.
(They did have pretty inadequate security measures, according to Bucky's standards. Aside from the residents themselves.)
The words I don't want to talk about it were on the verge of Bucky's lips. But he found that he was comfortable saying, "It's not that. It's just that some things are hard to turn off."
Gabe nodded beside Bucky.
Frenchie murmured, "Vigilance."
All the others—all of them, eavesdroppers included—looked sympathetic. As if they possibly understood.
"If it makes ya feel any better, Sarge, we'd have never known you were cooped up here if wasn't for Natasha," Jim said. "The only one of you so-called heroes who's worth a damn! Before her, we just had to wander around and make scenes at any building we could think you might be hiding at. At least we knew where to send our letters and phone calls to get them ignored when she contacted us!"
It struck Bucky as so strange. The urge to whirl around in his seat and get eyes on the woman was hard to overcome. But Bucky managed to keep the reaction off of his face.
"Thanks for that, by the way," Steve said, presumably to the Widow.
The Widow appeared on the fringes of Bucky's peripheral. A smirk on her face that made ominous ripples in the back of Bucky's memory. Not something he wanted to investigate, those ripples. They…frightened him.
"Someone had to do something," the Widow said. "Sam was complaining about these guys marching on all of the VA meetings too often. It was dominating our Tuesday lunch conversations."
"Well I'd hate for your chats to go stale," Steve sassed.
She traded him a shit-eating grin.
Frenchie was shaking his finger toward Natasha with a sparkle in his eye. Sparkles like before his bombs, Bucky remembered. "Ooh, that Sam Wilson. He's good people. Is he around?"
"Not today," Steve said to Frenchie. To the room at large, "It's only been trouble and danger since Nat got into all of your lives."
There was a collective roll of the eyes and dismissive waves of hands.
"We may be old, but we're not dead yet," Dum Dum said. Turning to Bucky, "I tell ya, this girl can drive. And not those damn automatics they're shoving down our throats—she drives those coups the way they were meant to!"
A distant and disconnected part of Bucky mused about what it would have been like to live through the takeover of automatic transmission. Too passive, an older version of himself chimed in. Bucky thought he agreed. Driving wasn't meant to be a passive activity. Driving was action. He supposed he must have once liked cars.
Dum Dum was still going on, "We've been to the track a few times to go drifting. Whoo, she just smokes the track! I tell ya, best way to ruin a set of tires. You ought to come with us some time. You'll love it. Take a look under the hoods of these things, they're amazing."
"Who?" Bucky said at the same time that his brain popped the bubble the past had created in his head. Rusted fenders and greased hands faded from the surface. Undertows in the swirling of his head, pulling the images away. Distorting things again.
"What do ya mean, who? Me and Natasha!"
The Black Widow drifted sports cars with Dum Dum Dugan.
Another true smile, and Bucky said, "I sure have missed a lot, haven't I?"
Tbc
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