Chapter 140
Wisps of red chaos magic came together to form a portal in front of me. Bucky was standing on the other side, dressed casually in jeans and an ash-grey tee that clung pleasantly to his body. He looked good.
I grinned and gave him a little wave. “Hey!”
“Hey,” he responded warmly, then peered around me, catching a glimpse of the bright space on the other side of the portal. “Australia?”
“Yep,” I confirmed, stepping to one side and gesturing for him to come through.
Bucky took a step off to one side—reaching out of frame for something I couldn’t see—then stepped over the threshold of the gateway, joining me on red-orange earth under a clear, blue sky. My eyes went wide and round as I saw what was in his hand: a small handful of asters, thin-petalled bright pinks and purples, gathered up into a basic bouquet and tied with a ribbon. He offered them to me. “Here.”
“Bucky?!” I tentatively took them from him, staring at them for a long moment before looking back up at him. “Thank you!”
He smiled and said nothing.
My eyes dropped to the bouquet in my hands again and brought it closer to my face, inhaling the citrusy, mildly spicy aroma. “I…” I hesitated for a moment. “I don’t even know what to say. Sorry. I really wasn’t expecting… No one’s gotten me flowers in years.”
Bucky gave a small, nonchalant shrug. “It’s nothing fancy. They grow in a couple of places near the compound; we run past them. Made me think of you.”
I processed this, lowering the flowers and looking at him once again with a slightly flabbergasted expression. “You hand-picked these?”
“It’s not a big deal,” he said, though the smile tugging at his expression told me that he was extremely pleased with my reaction.
“It is. This is really sweet. Thank you. Although… now I feel like I’m not really dressed appropriately for this. I should be wearing a nice dress or something.” I held the bouquet off to one side, out of the way, letting go with one hand so I could use it to gesture to the clingy, white sleeveless top I was wearing, ‘I MAY BE A HANDFUL BUT SO ARE MY TITS’ in bright red lettering across the chest.
Bucky grinned and let out a small snort of amusement. “You look good.”
A little bit of colour touched my cheeks. “Um. I should put these…?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
The flowers felt like an extremely positive sign that the relationship talk was probably going to go well. Provided that was the case, there was a good chance that this man was going to get his dick sucked before we even made it back to the compound.
I dismissed the portal leading back to his room with a gesture, then spun up a new one, opening back out into the lounge of Natasha’s apartment, not really registering much apart from the presence of Yelena and Pietro still on the couch, the TV playing quietly in the background.
“Yelena!” I said excitedly. “Look what—” I stopped short of stepping into the room, my eyes going wide again. Yelena wasn’t just sitting on the couch—she was straddling my brother. They’d been making out. They were still clothed, but…
Yelena glanced briefly over to me, lips quirked in a small smile. “Yes, they’re very nice. Nat put a vase on the table for you. Behind,” she flicked a hand toward me, indicating that she meant the dining table behind where I’d conjured the portal. Then Pietro leaned forward, catching her lips against his, hands on her hips as he pulled their bodies a bit closer together.
That… seemed like that was going to be the end of the conversation. I blinked and hesitated, feeling a little bit awkward at the intrusion.
Yelena broke off from the kiss again—her cheeks a little redder, her breathing a little heavier. “You should probably go,” she told me, then shrugged. “Or don’t. Your call.”
“Get a room,” I muttered back at her.
“Hey, that’s actually a good idea!” Yelena responded brightly, straightening up. Pietro looked a little surprised as she extricated herself from his lap. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up after her. She shot me an absolutely devilish look as the two of them breezed past the portal, heading down the hallway toward the bedroom.
“Wait! No! That’s illegal!” I said, sudden horror in my tone. “I sleep there!”
The only response was the sound of the bedroom door closing behind them with dreadful finality. Welp. That was certainly a thing that had just happened.
It took me a moment longer to collect myself, then I walked around to the other side of the portal—the ‘back’ of a portal was, of course, just another portal, facing in the opposite direction. Through this side, I could see that Nat’s dining table had a small glass vase on it, ready and waiting. Wisps of red chaos magic carried the bouquet through the gateway and carefully put them in the waiting container, then I flicked my hand, dismissing the portal.
“Everything okay?” Bucky asked.
I took a deep breath as I slipped off my sling ring, tucking it away in my pants’ pocket as I did my best to force away the knowledge of what was currently happening in the bed that I sleep in so that I could refocus on the here and now. “Yeah. Everything’s… really great.” I turned to him, my eyes suddenly narrowing in suspicion. “There was already a vase. Are you conspiring with Nat?”
He gave a small, sheepish smile. “I just asked her if you liked flowers. That’s all.”
I ‘hmm’ed, still looking at him suspiciously. Taking a step in towards him to get right inside his personal space, I gave him a playful bump with my shoulder, tilting my head upwards challengingly to continue looking into his eyes.
Bucky met my gaze evenly. Our faces were pretty close together. It wouldn’t take much for him to lean down and kiss me. I wanted him to. My tongue darted out briefly to moisten my lips. Hint. Hint.
Instead, after a few seconds, Bucky took a slow step back. He still had a little bit of a smile on his face—he knew exactly what I wanted and was deliberately not giving it to me, the jerkface. Breaking eye contact, he turned slightly to look around, taking in our surroundings properly for the first time. “So this is Gilgamesh’s place?” he asked, his tone innocent.
We were standing just inside the low stone fence that encircled the weathered homestead, a short way from the front door. It was early morning, with only a few errant puffs of white marring the clear blue of the sky above us. My enhanced hearing picked up the faint scrape of metal on metal as the blades of the ancient windpump nearby turned slowly in the light breeze, but aside from that it was still and quiet.
I glared at him a little—just to let him know I was onto his game—then my expression softened and I nodded. “Yep.”
“It’s nice out here,” he commented, starting to wander toward the front door.
“Yeah,” I agreed as I fell into step beside him. “I can see why they picked the spot. I think Gil actually built the place himself, too.”
Bucky nodded toward the door of the homestead as we reached it—solid wood with thick rope threaded through, braided into a loop instead of a handle, with a worn keyhole below it. “Got the key?”
“No…?” I frowned, then reached out and gave the door a tentative push. “Huh. I didn’t actually think it’d be locked.”
Bucky shot me a quizzical look.
“I mean…” I swept out a hand, vaguely indicating the general area around us. “I still don’t know exactly where this is, but I’m pretty sure we’re out somewhere near the Percival Lakes? The Great Sandy Desert or Gibson or somewhere like that. I don’t think there’s anyone else within at least a hundred Ks. Thena and Gil wanted to be far away from other people.”
I pressed a hand against the door, feeling the dry grain of the wood under my fingertips, and summoned a touch of magic. Faint, barely-visible wisps of power entered the lock and I felt it out with my telekinesis. It was hard to tell the actual shape of it without seeing it—my magic wasn’t that precise—but I applied a little bit of pressure, willing it to open. There was a click, and the door moved under my hand. “Queen of Doors, bitch,” I murmured to myself.
Bucky snorted. “That’s a neat trick,” he said, following me inside. “I was just about to ask if you wanted me to pick it.”
“No need,” I told him. “I’m a pro.”
There was plenty of light filtering in from the windows, so there was no need to switch on any of the electric lamps as we moved into the central living area. Bucky looked around curiously, his eyes roving over the shelves stacked with souvenirs and keepsakes, an eclectic mishmash of bits and bobs from various eras.
My own eyes were drawn to a cheap Spirax notepad that was sitting open on the long wooden dining table that sat in the middle of the space, a single, slightly rusted key sitting on top. Stepping over to it, I picked up the key, my fingers toying with it absently as I read the words scrawled on the open page of the pad: ‘My home is yours – Gil’.
“Do they have a generator we need to top up?” Bucky asked. He had stepped into the open-plan kitchen and was looking at the appliances. “I didn’t see any solar panels outside.”
I turned to face him, leaning my butt back against the edge of the table. “I have no idea, actually. That’s a good question.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that it was weird that they had electricity, given how isolated the place was—they weren’t exactly on the grid. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see one, at least. It might be a Phastos special.”
Bucky nodded. “How long have they been here?”
“I… don’t know,” I said, once again brought up a little short by the question. “The Eternals split up about five hundred years ago, I think, but I don't know how long ago Thena and Gil ended up in Australia.” It struck me how little I actually knew, all things considered. Maybe I was a little less curious than I really should be, taking most things at face value rather than questioning them more. “I need to poke around a little bit, in any case. I don’t actually know where everything is.”
“Okay, sure.”
I hesitated. “Before that… we should probably talk. Right?”
Bucky turned to face me properly, giving me a tight smile. “Yeah. We should.”
There was a long, drawn-out moment where neither of us said anything. I cracked first. “I was kind of hoping that you might start,” I said, giving him a rueful look. “But yeah, that’s fair. Um. I’m sorry things got a little weird at Kamar-taj. I wasn’t feeling great and I put you on the spot because we’d had sex the night before and it wasn’t very cool of me.”
“It’s fine,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t need to apologise for that. A lot had happened.”
“Oh, good. Well…” There was a nervous flutter in my stomach, my heart beating a little faster in my chest. If the straightforward approach had worked when Natasha and I had had our relationship talk, maybe it would work here, too. “Do you want to be my boyfriend?”
Bucky didn’t answer right away. I waited, feeling a little bit like I might throw up. “What does that mean?” he asked after a couple of agonising seconds.
I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘what does that mean?’?”
“It’s like we talked about before. I’m just not really sure how you see this working. I know you’re not asking for a normal—” he winced as he said it, correcting himself. “The type of relationship I’m used to. I don’t know what you’re asking me to be. What does being ‘your boyfriend’ mean?”
“It means…” I hesitated for a moment, swallowing my nervousness as best I could. “It means exactly what it normally does. Just without the possessiveness. The exclusivity.”
Bucky was quiet, just listening and processing my words.
“Calling you ‘my boyfriend’ isn’t me staking some sort of claim on you. ‘Mine’ as… as a promise of protection. Not possession. Like, um. I don’t know. Like a wildlife ranger would call her wolf pack hers. Mine like I want you to feel content and safe and cared for. Mine like you being happy makes me happy. Not ‘mine’ like something I own or control.”
“…I can’t really promise that I’m not going to feel jealous, sometimes,” he said eventually.
“That’s okay,” I told him. “You’re allowed to feel how you feel. I can get jealous, too! It’s how you deal with it that matters, and we can work through it together. It’s just… there’s this idea that romantic feelings are somehow only ‘real’ if you’re the exclusive recipient of them, and who decided that? Not me. But it’s a big, oppressive idea and I grew up with it as well. I just don’t let it control me, because the world I want to live in is one where it’s okay to love freely.”
My mouth had gone a bit dry. I had no idea how any of that had landed with him and my stomach was twisting itself in knots while I waited for him to respond. The worst he can say is ‘no’, right? Well, yes, but also if he said ‘no’ I would still be upset because even though we’d still be friends I wouldn’t get to kiss him again or have him take me the way he’d taken me the other night or—
“I don’t know if this is something that can work,” Bucky said with a small shrug. “But I do care about you, Wanda. And if it can work, then yeah. I want to try.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding in, long and loud. “Okay, well, you can stop doing that now, then.”
The comment seemed to catch him off guard and he looked a little puzzled. “Stop doing what?”
“All that. It’s distracting.”
“I’m just… standing?”
“It’s… all this cute stuff you’re doing. Up here.” Stepping in a little closer to him, I waved a hand vaguely in front of his face. “This stuff.”
Bucky smiled. “My face?”
“Yes. That. Stop it.”
“I’m not sure I can.” He chuckled, a low, warm sound that made my chest feel pleasantly tight.
I gave him a playful glare, fighting back my own smile, then deliberately turned my back on him to focus on the task at hand, moving over to one of the shelves next to the kitchen and casting a critical eye over the series of mysterious, unlabelled bottles that were lined up there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bucky step over to a squat bookshelf that was covered in knick-knacks and pick up a small brass trinket shaped like a horse, looking at it closely for a few seconds before setting it back down again.
For the next few minutes, we took a bit of a look around in companionable silence, each of us occasionally drawing the other’s attention to something we’d found. There were so many things that were at least passingly interesting here—a huge collection of souvenirs and keepsakes that the two Eternals had accumulated over literally hundreds of years.
Beyond the main living space was a short hall with a pair of cramped bedrooms off it, their doors wide open, as well as what I had assumed, at first glance, to be a linen closet. When I opened it to peek inside, however, I was a little surprised to find myself standing at the top of a set of rough steps that had been cut into the earth, disappearing into a darkened space beneath the homestead. “Oh. I didn’t realise they had a basement,” I said, glancing over at Bucky.
“Wanna check it out?” he asked, coming over to join me. I nodded and started down the stairs.
A black cable strung along the wall led to a dangling electric lamp that clicked on with a twitch of my fingers. Much like the house above, the basement was packed pretty full—a series of steel shelving units made maximum use of the space, cardboard boxes and plastic tubs of assorted belongings stacked alongside heavy clay amphoras and even more bottles of alcohol. A couple of makeshift wooden pallets had crates of homebrew beer bottles stacked on top of them, blocking access to the shelves at the back of the space.
Right next to me as I reached the foot of the stairs was a waist-high chest freezer. I glanced at Bucky, then lifted the lid. Inside were even more bottles, including at least a dozen of the tall, half-litre flip-tops of unlabelled beer that I was pretty sure were Asgardian-style ale. Ice cold and ready for drinking.
“These,” I said, pointing to them. “Good.”
Bucky nodded, casting an eye over the contents of some of the shelves. “There’s a lot of stuff down here,” he commented.
“Yeah, I didn’t realise just how much crap Gil and Thena had accumulated. I’m going to have to come back later and have a bit of a proper stickybeak.”
“Stickybeak?” Bucky echoed, glancing back at me with a raised eyebrow.
“When in Straya,” I said, giving him a small smile and shrug in return.
Moving toward the nearest set of shelves, I had a bit of a casual poke around. Something seemed a little bit off, and it took me a while to realise that there didn’t seem to be a single speck of dust on anything down here—even craning my neck to try to get a better look at the stuff crammed in the shadowy reaches of the basement, everything was seemingly spotless. The air down here felt cool and dry, but surely some of the stuff back there had to have been sitting in place for a while, right? And no dust had accumulated anywhere? Hm.
Something on the shelf nearest to the stairs caught my eye. An irregularly-shaped game board, made up of distinct squares arranged in two blocks connected by a narrow, two-square bridge, the corners worn perfectly smooth with age. It felt ancient and oddly heavy. The core was carved from a rich, dark wood, but the squares themselves were inlaid with vibrant mosaics of geometric patterns and delicate, eight-petalled flowers, with blue lapis lazuli contrasted against white marine shell and vivid red stone. The larger side of the base contained a sliding compartment. Opening it up revealed a small stack of discs or coins—playing pieces of some kind, again made of carved shell and lapis—nestled alongside a set of d4s, dice shaped like three-sided pyramids, their tips faintly marked with white inlay.
It felt a little like I’d just unearthed an ancient copy of Jumanji. This was the Royal Game of Ur, right? And if this was Gilgamesh’s personal board… Damn. What a cool find. I ran a thumb over the cool, blue stone of one of the flower squares.
Carefully putting the board game back in its place—something to revisit later, maybe—my hand wandered over to the last thing on the shelf, a tall leather folio tucked away in the corner. Sliding it out, I undid the small leather strap holding it together and peeked at the sheaf of crinkled papers inside curiously. When I realised what I was looking at, a part of me kind of wished that I hadn’t.
I closed the folio again and let out a little sigh, closing my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, Bucky was looking over at me curiously. I gave him a tight smile and, hugging the folio to my chest, headed back toward the stairs. Once I’d made it back to the main living room, I laid the papers out on the dining table and sat down, so that I could take my time looking through them.
They were Thena’s drawings. One depicted a red shape with six circles inset like the pips on a die, outlined against a black backdrop. Another showed a set of tall fluted towers, green against blue. The next was an explosion cast in stark relief, chunks of material blasted away from a central point, looking almost flower-like if you didn’t know what was being depicted. There were dozens of them. They weren’t super pretty—Thena wasn’t exactly a master artist. Even so, they were just detailed enough to communicate scenes. Flashes of actual events, or at least the parts of them that she had remembered.
“What’s that?” Bucky asked. He’d followed me, stepping in close to look over my shoulder.
“Just… Thena’s stuff,” I said, then let out a heavy sigh. “Bits of the memories that were leaking through. Her Mahd Wy’ry. I guess she tried to capture what she could. To try to understand it better, maybe.” Bucky put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and I leaned back into him a little.
“You helped her,” he said. “Like you helped me. You did a good thing. Everything that happened after that wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah…” Everyone kept saying stuff wasn’t my fault, but it really didn’t feel that way. My fingers traced the edges of the papers in front of me. After a moment, I stood back up, shooting Bucky a quick glance as I jerked a thumb toward the back door. “I might actually go out and… I don’t know. Just see her. If that’s okay?”
“Take all the time you need,” he said gently, a sympathetic expression on his face. “I can wait here.”
I winced. “You can come, if you want? I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
We headed out onto the back patio together, Bucky quietly falling into step beside me. As we passed through the gap in the stone wall at the boundary of the property, I tentatively reached for his hand. Our fingers threaded together and he gave me a little squeeze as we traced a path across the rugged ground, toward where Gilgamesh and I had left Thena’s pyre to burn itself out.
As the spot came into sight, I straightened up slightly. Instead of the single set of remains I’d been expecting, there were three low heaps of grey and white ash, flecked with black charcoal, all in a line. Two of them had slightly sharper, more defined edges, the wind not having had as much time to erode them away.
“They must have come here and burned Druig and Phastos, as well,” I said quietly. Disentangling my hand from Bucky’s, I took a few slow steps over to one of them and hunkered down next to it, staring at the ash and charcoal. After a minute, I held out a hand, hovering my palm just above the surface. I could still feel a little warmth emanating from it.
I stood back up, my eyes slowly drifting between the three sets of remains. Absently, I wondered if the pyres had really been hot enough to fully cremate the Eternals—I couldn’t see anything recognisable as bits of bone or anything like that. I wasn’t an expert on this sort of thing; it just felt like the sort of thing they’d be resistant to. Oh well. Not really important, I supposed. Gil, at least, had seemed like he’d known what he was doing when we’d stacked the pyre for Thena.
“You’re alright?” Bucky asked after a few minutes had passed.
“Yeah,” I said. And it wasn’t even a lie this time. Not completely. I turned toward him and gave him a half-hearted smile. “Sorry, we can go back. There isn’t anything else here for me.”
He held out a hand, offering it to me, and I took it gratefully.
As we returned to the homestead, I frowned at a patch of dirt just behind the half-wall that partially enclosed the back patio, where some wooden markers had been driven into the earth, their ends marked with chipped paint. “I think there might be some stuff buried there,” I said, nodding toward it. “No idea what, or how long it’s supposed to be in the ground, though.”
“We can dig it up at some point?” Bucky offered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Not tonight, obviously. But yeah.”
“Do you know what’s in those?” he asked as we stepped onto the patio itself, nodding toward the set of massive, six-foot-tall sealed terracotta pots that were lined up against the inside of the wall.
“No idea,” I said, shaking my head. I let out a soft snort of amusement. “I’m going to have to open literally everything, aren’t I? Going through everything here would be a lot easier if Gil actually bothered with labels.”
“Speaking of,” Bucky said as we stepped back inside the house, closing the door behind us. “Have you decided what you want to take for tonight?”
“Right! Yes. Okay.”
We got to work, retrieving half a dozen Asgardian ales from the chest freezer in the basement and placing them on the dining table alongside a clay amphora of sweet wine. Next, I nabbed a heavy, handled jug made of thick yellow ceramic and patterned with triangular designs, and sealed with a wax stopper—I was pretty sure this was the mixed stuff that Natasha had liked, when we were here together last. Finally, I turned to Bucky and showed him a pair of large, sealed bottles, each about two litres of something. The liquid inside of one was a warm, dark amber in colour, while the contents of the other was an almost sickly greenish-yellow. “Mystery liquor one or mystery liquor two?” I asked.
“One,” he said, pointing toward the liquid amber.
“Done!” I put the chosen bottle on the table with everything else, and returned the other to the shelf. As I turned back to say that we were done, Gil’s fancy hookah, sitting in the corner of the room, caught my eye. “Ooh, shisha,” I murmured, walking over to it and brushing my fingertips reverentially against its metal neck. Gil had the good stuff. “Not tonight, though. We’ll save that for later.”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t. Well, I mean, not cigarettes.”
“I used to have a tobacco pipe,” Bucky said reflectively. “I didn’t really use it much, though.”
“A pipe?” I asked, surprised, and mimed puffing on a corncob. “Like a pipe pipe?”
He chuckled. “Yeah. More Tolkien than Popeye, though,” he clarified.
The comment made something click into place in the back of my mind, summoning memories of an article I’d read once, a really long time ago… I turned to face him more fully, a glint of something dangerous in my eye. “That’s right, you’re a Tolkien fan, yeah?”
“I read the Hobbit,” he said with a small shrug.
“In 1937, when it first came out,” I echoed his words to Sam in the original timeline.
Bucky nodded, forehead creasing a little bit. “Yeah.”
“Didn’t it only come out in the UK, originally?”
“It might’ve been ’38.”
“But a first edition, right?” I pressed.
“…I was a literature major,” he said, a little evasively. From the look on his face, he must have realised what I was getting at.
“Colleges back then definitely didn’t consider fantasy literature, and Tolkien wasn’t Tolkien when the Hobbit first came out. He was just some guy. Oh my god, Bucky, are you actually a massive fucking nerd?” I asked excitedly. “Did you buy a pipe because of the Hobbit?”
“Maybe?” This was the first time I’d really seen Bucky look properly embarrassed and it was adorable.
My eyes gleamed and I poked him firmly in the chest. “Do you know what Dungeons & Dragons is?”
“Heard of it,” he said, guardedly.
“We need to play,” I said, excitement creeping into my voice. “I haven’t played in ages. You’ll play with me, right? Say you’ll play with me, please?”
“Okay, okay! I’ll play with you.”
“And then once you’re done, we can play D&D,” I said cheekily, poking out my tongue at him. The finger touching his chest started lazily tracing a slow path downwards, tracing the contours of his body.
“That, too,” Bucky agreed, chuckling.
“Do you think Steve would play?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’d probably give it a try.”
My hand had reached the top of his jeans and I hesitated, torn between really wanting to do something naughty with him and the sudden excitement at the realisation that I might actually be able to run a D&D game for the Avengers.
Who else would play? I could almost certainly rope Natasha into it—one of the perks of polyamory. And what would I run? I probably shouldn’t start out homebrewing a grand campaign. I needed to be realistic. We should probably just start out with a one-shot of some kind. Or I could try to run a published module? Was Curse of Strahd out yet? I had no idea. I needed to research.
Okay, no, that was a problem for future Wanda. Current Wanda had other needs.
I stepped forward, putting myself right up inside his personal space, my chest lightly pressing against his as I tilted my head up toward him. A brief look of surprise flickered across his face, but he went with it almost immediately, leaning down to catch my lips with his, his hands going to my waist. I leaned into the kiss, my tongue slipping into his mouth as I tasted him greedily.
I broke off after a minute or two—we were each breathing a little harder, now, and some colour had risen in Bucky’s cheeks that matched the heat I felt in mine. Pulling back slightly, I gave him what I hoped was a sultry, seductive look as I reached down and unbuttoned his jeans. He let out a small huff of amusement.
“Oh?” I paused. “And what are you laughing about, hmm?”
His smile got a little wider. “You’re just… very eager.”
“Uh, yeah. I am,” I said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You fucked me real good the other night Bucky, and… look, I know I flirt and make a lot of jokes and stuff, but just to be very clear: I am horny. I am always—there is not one single moment of the day when I am not at least a little horny. I dunno if it’s like a brain malfunction or what, but…” I stopped, not really sure what else to say. “I guess that’s the end of the sentence?”
“Okay,” he said, still looking amused. “That’s good to know.”
“Now, shut up and let me suck your dick.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The safe word’s my name.”
Bucky’s smile faded slightly, replaced with a look of a minor concern. “Uh. Why do I need a safe word for…?”
“Because,” I said, maintaining eye contact as I slowly lowered myself to my knees. “I’m not going to stop until I hear you whimper my name.”