Delacroix Days
"You used to play baseball." Bucky observed. He was staring at the photos plastered on the front of the Paul and Darlene, photos that Sam had nearly forgotten about. They had been there so long it had become part of the scenery, imperceptible.
It was true through. Sam had played baseball back in the day, in fact, there had been a time when it had been the most important part of his days. Back then those youthful practices late in the evening light had seemed like life or death, a concern that now seemed almost comical.
He looked at the photos. His whole life arrayed on a wall. And there it was: in between a picture of Sam with his maroon beret and Sarah on her wedding day was a snapshot of him dressed in his middle school baseball uniform. He was holding a trophy and in the photo he was smiling broadly. It was a pure and uninhabited smile, bright as the Louisiana sunshine, lips curled up to reveal a pearly white grin. In all the other photos he was close-lipped. He had been so happy that day that he had forgotten to worry about hiding the gap in his front teeth. He had loved baseball then.
"Yeah," said Sam, "That's the day we won the parish championship.
"Parish champions. Wow," said Bucky, whistling, “Do you still play?”
“Nah. Little busy these days.”
“Yeah, same. I used to play a lot though. Well, not baseball, strictly speaking. Stickball, or handball. Stuff on the street, ya know?”
Bucky was a quiet person. This had always been Sam’s impression of him. He was quiet, generally sullen, except for when he decided to be incredibly obnoxious (which happened more often than one might think). He was not at the moment, thought Sam, trying to be obnoxious. He was explaining to Sam the nuances of stickball and handball, delineating the difference between them, the main difference being that one was played with a stick and the other with your hands.
It felt uncharacteristic of Bucky, this semi-awkward rambling, out of sync with the image Sam had built of him in his head. The silent Winter Soldier, glacial and cold. Bucky, the former Winter Soldier, sullen and staring, never replying to any of his text messages, glaring and never speaking.
And yet hadn’t Steve tried to tell him this? That once, Bucky had been talkative.
“So you’re a baseball fan,” said Sam.
“Sure,” said Bucky, “I mean, I watch it sometimes.”
“Catch any good games lately?” asked Sam.
---
They talked about baseball.
The Mets game last night was incredible. The Nationals have been doing well this season – think they’ll make the series?
Sam told Bucky about the legendary community baseball games of his youth, how people traveled from miles away to attend. It had been a full reeling festival, those games: brass-bands playing and the girls dressed to the nines. Bucky told him about the games of stickball in the street with the other kids in the block, standing with their brooms over round manhole covers, spaldeen balls flying through the air. All the little boys in Brooklyn had dreamed of one day playing for the Dodgers.
“You know they’re in LA now?” said Sam.
“It’s a real shame.”
"A real shame," repeated Sam, shaking his head. He looked at the wall again. "We gotta take these down." he said. He tore down the photos and put them in an envelope.
---
Later that afternoon, Lou came by with a couple of cans of paint. Percy came by with a certain type of belt that was used in a specific type of machinery critical to the functioning of the boat, difficult to obtain, that had long since worn out on the Paul and Darlene. Old man Murphy came by with a great big helping of unsolicited advice. Lizzy came by with her little daughter, who shyly said hello. Charles came by with a pack of beer, then lingered to complain about local politics and the state of the world in general, only diverted when his cousin arrived to go shrimping. Beulah came by to try and get him to buy into her latest multi-level marketing scheme. Sam tried to change the topic by asking after her daughter, only to get an earful about some good-for-nothing boyfriend in Shreveport.
Bucky watched bemusedly from the cabin as Sam held council, catching up, giving advice, each conversation playing out almost the same: the weather (hot), the catch (not what it used to be), yes he’s back, no well we’ll see. No sign of the Flag Smashers yet. Yes, he has heard about Julie’s grand-child and he thinks its brave of her, in fact. And none of your business what she wants to call herself. Of course it’s awful what happened to Therese – have you visited her yet? Yes it’s a shame about the fresh-water diversions, of course he’ll bring up the matter to whomever he can. Sure, he’ll ask the president as soon as he gets the chance. The guy in the boat? Oh, that’s Bucky, he’s visiting from out of town. Yes, the boat’s coming along nicely, isn’t it? Yes, he misses them too.
---
“Who’s Paul and Darlene?” asked Bucky.
“Hm?” said Sam. He was fiddling with the multi-meter.
“The boat. It’s called the Paul and Darlene. They’re your - ?”
“Yeah,” said Sam, “My parents.” He looked over at the spots on the wall where the photos had hung, where they had hung for so long they left dark patches on the wall. An entire lifetime, torn down just like that. How brief it all was, sometimes, the time that you have with a person. It could be contained within an envelope.
“People keep talking about them,” said Bucky.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “They were good people.”
“How did they…?”
“My dad, he died of a heart attack round… 2013, I think it was. My mom – Well, it was during the blip.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bucky.
Sam stared at the empty spots on the wall. Then he picked up the envelope of photos and wore it in his hands. He spilled out the photos and looked at them one by one, and showed them to Bucky. There was one of Paul and Darlene, looking unbearably young, standing in front of the newly christened Paul and Darlene with a baby in their arms.
“That you, or Sarah?” Bucky asked.
"Sarah."
"Too cute to be you huh."
"Hey now. We can't all be Brooklyn's Most Beautiful Baby."
Bucky actually did a double-take. His head banged against the top of the boat.
"What?!" he exclaimed, a faint flush blooming on his cheeks, "How’d you find out about that?"
"Don't think I haven't seen that photo," Sam laughed, wagging his finger, "You were a precious little angel."
He had looked up the photo in the Brooklyn Eagle archive. He had thought that maybe Steve was pulling his leg, but no, it was really there. James Buchanan Barnes and a photo of a cherubic little child with dark wavy hair in a pretty little gown. He was, in fact, a very beautiful baby.
“You should wear lace more often,” teased Sam, “It’s very becoming on you.”
"Don't you start too," muttered Bucky, "Geez. Did Steve tell you about that? He never knows when to shut his mouth."
“No but,” said Sam, “Seriously. It’s nice. Your parents must have loved you very much.”
“Well,” said Bucky, “I don’t really remember.”
He crossed his arms and looked out over the water.
“So what is this?” he asked abruptly, “A bayou? Is that what’s it’s called?”
“Sure,” said Sam, “I mean, this part is a technically a canal, it’s man-made. You go up a few miles there – then you’re really into it.”
“How far does it go?”
“To the ocean.”
It was not far from here, the ocean. The bayous spilled into it and the bayous became it, and in some ways already was. There was no line that you could straddle, fresh-water on one side and salt on the other – rather they mixed, simultaneously ocean and river and lake. It was here that America ended, or perhaps where it began. Sam thought about memory, about remembering and forgetting, and the indiscrete line between them. He stared over the still waters of the canal, to the rows of rushes rustling and he imagined the bayou beyond it which he had once known intimately, like a photograph. He had known in his childhood every canal and stream and marsh. That had been his first taste of flying, then: the glide of the boat over the water, underneath his father’s guiding hand, taking out the boat farther and farther until all land fell away and there was nothing but the waves and the sky and the boat. He had loved that feeling, buoyed up in infinite blue. But now he is no longer sure if he can find that path again, to the ocean, and when had he forgotten? The same moment the river turns to sea.
“They say the coast is disappearing,” said Sam, “Did you know that? All these islands around here, the ocean is washing them away. Every time I come back, a little bit more is gone. This might all be ocean one day. It’s amazing how much can change in a few years.”
“Yeah,” said Bucky, “I know what you mean.” And surely he did.
“I can hardly imagine. It was hard enough when it was 2018, then suddenly it was 2023. That freaked me out, man. I came back to Delacroix in the first time in years and suddenly my mom was dead. Sarah had already done her grieving, years ago. But me…? God. How do you even deal with something like that? It ain’t easy.”
Bucky nodded slowly. “Does it ever,” he asked, “get any easier?”
“No,” said Sam. Then he said: “Yes.”
---
They finished cleaning up the boat. They sorted through the parts that had been given to them and prepared to replace them.
“This boat was my father’s,” said Sam, as they worked, rhythmically,“Bought it himself. And I know it looks a bit rough round the edges right now but it was… a big deal for us back then. You gotta understand, my family's been fishing here for generations. But my grandfather - he was working on a white man's boat. That’s how it was back then. So when my dad bought his own boat, started his own business – it was a big deal, you know? He was so damn proud of it. And he wasn’t just – he helped the whole town out. He put Delacroix on the map. He had this great business sense. My mom too, really. They built up those connections, expanded the market. Not just for us but for everyone. People were eating Delacroix oysters in New York and New Orleans and all across the eastern seaboard. They were – Man, there was always people at my house. I used to think these kids were my cousins or something, they were always eatin’ dinner with us, but nah. My mom just never could turn no one away. And well… They’re both gone now. My parents. But the things they built, the things they believed in? It’s all still here. I’m still here. And maybe the grief doesn’t get any smaller. But the world does get bigger.”
---
It was summer and the days were long, long as the sky above them. The marina bustled and the people passed by.
The water reflected the blue of the sky and sunlight weaved its way through nets and riggings to shimmer over the surface of chocolate depths. The wind played over the distant rushes, knocking the grass together like wind chimes, ringing out in every direction.
Sam and Bucky sat on the deck of the Paul and Darlene and listened.
Fresh paint gleamed on the railings of the boat and the water was still and flat and stretched out, out, out, to the sky, to the far away marshes and the sparkling sea.
---
"Welp," said Bucky at last, "Gotta catch my flight tomorrow. Got a hotel room for the night... Gonna crash, you know?"
As if there was a hotel room anywhere in Delacroix. As if there was a hotel anywhere near Delacroix, and Bucky wasn't going to slink off and sleep in the dirt or the ruins of an abandoned building or whatever it was he had done in all those mysterious years on the run, when Sam had looked but could not find him.
"So you're just going to set me up like that, huh?"
"Well,” said Bucky, “I don't want to make it weird for your family."
"Just stay here!"
And for once, Bucky stayed.
---
They made their way through Delacroix – not that there was much of Delacroix to see. “That’s the Missisippi River,” said Sam. They stopped to regard the muddy waters, the ferry churning its way slowly to the other shore. The Mighty Mississipi, which began as a glacial lake in distant Minnesota, at this point had nearly reached its ultimate destination, traveling over 2,000 miles across America indelibly forming its landscape and psyche. Here in Delacroix it was nearly the end – soon it would become the sea. Or it was the beginning; the gateway to America. It all depended on how you looked at it. The waters flowed straight within the high banks of the levees on either shore.
"You'll have to sleep on the couch," said Sam,"Is that alright?"
"It's fine," said Bucky. "I don't even need the couch. I can sleep on the floor."
"You don't have to sleep on the floor," Sam pointed out, "There's a couch."
"It's fine."
"Come on man," said Sam, "What kinda host you think we are? Sleep on the floor, my ass."
"Well I don't see you rolling out the guest room for me."
"I’m in the guest room."
"Really?" exclaimed Bucky, "When there's a perfectly good couch?!"
---
They arrived just as Sarah was setting dinner. AJ and Cass were talking excitedly about something called a "Splatfest". Apparently it was a contest where you picked a side and played a video game about squids and competed to see who could cover the most ground with ink. The sides were "Ketchup vs Mustard vs Mayo" - a rehash of two previous Splatfests. Sarah gestured for Sam and Bucky to come in and grab some food.
"Team Ketchup is going to win for sure," said Cass, as they all sat down at the table. He and AJ both appeared preemptively outraged by Team Ketchup's imminent victory. Ketchup, AJ explained for the sake of the newcomers, had won the previous Splatfest. Mayo had won the first, but only due to gerrymandering. Ketchup would have won if they counted the results properly, as was proved by the second Splatfest. But how would the addition of Mustard tip the scales?
"I see," said Bucky, but when the boys weren't looking he turned to Sam with a bewildered expression on his face.
"Don't look at me man," said Sam, "I don't know none of this video game stuff neither."
"But you've played a video game before, right?"
"Yeah, well - "
"So you're doing better then me."
"You've never played a video game, Mr. Barnes?" exclaimed AJ.
"I don't even know what a video game is," Bucky admitted.
"What?!"
"Mom, we've got to show him!"
"Finish eating first," said Sarah and they reluctantly reapplied themselves to their food.
Sam asked the kids which team they'd be supporting - mustard, mayo, or ketchup. It's a tossup between mayo or ketchup, Cass informed him, since nobody in their right mind would support mustard, the worst tier condiment. So, in solidarity with the underdog, Cass and AJ were supporting Team Mustard.
"That's the way to do it," said Bucky. He told them how, back in the day, his friend Steve would always pick the side of the Indians, when they were playing Cowboys vs Indians. Sam told him you weren’t supposed to call them Indians anymore.
"Why not?"
"Well, they're not from India, are they?"
"That's true. But you know," Bucky told the boys, "I think you're seriously under-rating mustard here. We had this place by our old apartment and I tell ya, best mustard I've had in my life."
“But I don’t think it’s there anymore,” he added as an afterthought.
---
After supper, AJ and Cass wanted to show Bucky the video game they were talking about earlier.
"Sure" said Bucky, "We gotta defend the honour of Team Mustard, now don't we?"
"Oh," said AJ, "No, we're not gonna do the Splatfest. We don't have Splatoon 3."
The Splatfest was for Splatoon 3 only.
"There are three of these games?" asked Bucky.
Indeed, there were three games, and it turned out that the Wilsons owned none of them.
"We only have a Wii," said AJ. "But Splatoon is for the WiiU. So we can’t play it here."
Although they did not have a WiiU, the boys explained that their best friend Darron Lecroix, did. He lived a few doors over and they often went over to play video games at his house. So what they wanted to do was go over to Darron's house right now and play Splatoon.
"That’s Emile and Lulumae's kid," Sarah told Sam. He had gone to high school with Emile. They decided to all go over and visit.
"Sam, darling" announced Lulumae grandly, "Where the hell have you been?" She embraced him, and then tried to embrace Bucky too, but he shied away.
They escorted the group to the living room, where the children introduced Bucky to the WiiU. They showed him how to use the gamepad, how to move and how turn into a squid and how to shoot, and demonstrated the different types of ink guns you could use. They had sniper rifles, which seemed to Sam the obvious choice, but instead Bucky paused on the paintbrush.
"A paintbrush," he said, "Steve would like that."
"There's also a paint roller, and bucket!" said Darron, "And in Splatoon 3 they have windshield wipers!"
"They're like samurai swords!" AJ added.
"Windshield wipers? Gee whiz. Ain't that something."
Bucky tried a game with the paintbrush. He immediately fell off a ledge and died.
He swore, before realizing he was surrounded by children. "I mean... Gosh darn it all to heck."
"You can't go into the water," said Cass, "You'll drown."
"Nuts," said Bucky, "You're pulling my leg, kid. Squids live in water. And now you telling me I can't go in the water? These squids gonna drown in their own damn home? Get outta town."
He gave the controller to Cass.
"This game makes no sense," he said to Sam, who was laughing so hard he nearly fell out of his chair.
"God as my witness," gasped Sam, "I thought squids could swim!"
---
The adults left the kids to their video games and moved to the kitchen. Sarah talked to Lulumae talked about the Lecroix elder daughter, who was now in college. Emile passed Sam and Bucky a beer. The sound of squids splatting spilled frenetically from the living room. The walls were covered in posters – albums and music notation and pictures of people playing instruments – trumpets and saxophones and the like. There was a one of Louis Armstrong. “Is that Louis Armstrong?” Bucky asked.
“Oh you two are perfect for each other,” Sam laughed, “I should have introduced you long ago.”
Emile was crazy about Armstrong. And jazz in general. He had used to bring casette tapes to school and Sam would sit with him after class and they’d listen to the songs over and over on the cassette player, until the tape ran out with a definitive click! They’d talked a lot about music in those days. Emile had wanted to make it big someday, playing jazz in New Orleans. This he had accomplished, last Sam heard. Sam, in the meantime, had run off to join the Air Force. Their paths had diverged.
But here they were together again, talking as they used to so many years ago, about music. They discussed with Bucky the merits of jazz and listed its great forefathers. Sam had another beer. The world blurred pleasantly at the edges - the music and the conversation and the laughter of the children mixing in the space of the kitchen. A record player – of course Emile owned a record player - had somehow appeared and Bucky was putting in a disc. Sam had a dizzying sense of peering into the past – Bucky with his hair falling over his forehead, silhouetted in the evening light, carefully adjusting the needle like it was 1926.
Big band music began to play.
---
Sam let slip to Bucky that Emile was a musician himself. Emile, like his idol Louis, played the trumpet. Sam had only seen him perform once, when he had gone on a whirlwind tour of New Orleans in between his actual tours. “You should play something for us,” said Bucky. Emile was not opposed to the idea, however, he insisted that he was nothing special. His son, Darron, on the other hand, had just recently started learning the clarinet. Now that was something worth listening to. The boy was fetched from the other room and they all appealed to Darron for a song.
“Well, alright,” he said, and wetted the reed on his tongue. He played for them a squeaky solo. On the second verse his father took out his trumpet, and on the third verse joined in. He play quick notes over top of the melody, then Darron stopped and let his father take over. The clear brass notes echoed in the kitchen. Lulumae played the keyboard and sang, loud and lusty, as she had used to do many years ago in New Orleans clubs.
"When I was a kid," said Bucky, staring at Emile’s instrument a little wistfully, "I used to want to play the trumpet."
“Ain’t too late,” said Emile, “Want to try?”
“Oh, no,” said Bucky, “I wouldn’t be any good at it.”
“Don’t know that ‘til you try.”
“I did try,” complained Bucky, “Once. Didn’t work out.”
They demanded details.
Bucky reluctantly launched into a story about how he had finagled a meeting with the musicians of New York City’s third most unpopular jazz club. They listened with rapture to the rise and fall of his voice, which changed, as time went on, from hesitant and clipped, to an easy Brooklyn drawl.
---
“So why,” asked Sam the next morning, “Didn’t you try the trumpet?”
“What does it matter?” said Bucky.
They were on the deck of the Paul and Darlene and the sunrise had arrested them. The paint on their brushes paled as they watched the sky painting its own portrait far more subtle than their own. Golden light glowed over the bayou. It felt portentous. Birds chirped in the bushes. A new day was dawning and anything was possible.
“If you wanted to learn jazz, Bucky, you could. I mean, any of things you wanted to do when you were a kid, but never had a chance – I just think, now’s your chance to do them. You could become a famous jazz musician. You could go to university, get an engineering degree or something. Hell, you could even run for congress. If you wanted to.”
“You’re nuts.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Okay. Then let’s be serious. When I was a kid, I wanted to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Well, that ain’t happening. And even if - you really – you seriously think that they’d let someone like me on a baseball team? They have – they have laws against it, you know. Doping. In case you haven’t heard.”
“Ah,” said Sam, momentarily stumped. Bucky did have a point – he was basically the epitome of performance enhancing drugs. But Sam rallied.
“We can start our own league,” he said, “A superhero league."
“Oh sure,” scoffed Bucky, “A league. We gonna call up the - the talking raccoon?!”
“Sure! Why not! And we can – Ah, I’ve got it! Let’s invite Karli. She can be on my team, because I already know she can whoop your ass."
This at last, made Bucky chuckle.
“So that’s how it is?” he said, “Yeah, alright Sam. That’d be nice. I want that Spider-kid on my team. Whatever happened to him?”
---
The sun rose and Delacroix with it. The marina was slowly awakening. Lou and his uncle came by to take out their boat. After a lackluster catch yesterday today they were going to try even further afield, a three hours trip to the west where rumour had it there were shrimp aplenty.
“That’s a long haul,” said Sam, “Did you usually go so far?”
“Sometimes,” said Lou, but after further interrogation the answer turned out to be ‘more often than not.’ Sam could never remember traveling so far as a kid – the ocean had been like an orchard then, the fruits of the sea ripe for the picking, and you only had to reach out to pluck it. Or so it had seemed to him. But it wasn’t just nostalgia - Lou and his uncle also corroborated. Back then, they claimed, you barely had to leave the canal, and the boat’d be overflowing with fish.”
“It ain’t what it used to be.” sighed Lou, climbing into his boat after his uncle. Sam and Bucky wished them luck. The Paul and Darlene rocked up and down gently in their wake.
“What kind of fish do you get around here?” Bucky asked.
“Trout, redfish, flounder… all sorts. At least when I was a kid.”
But the traditional mainstay of his family, and many others, had been oysters.
In Louisiana, lakes became rivers became sea. And just like lies and truth, good intentions and cruelty, the boundary between them were often unclear. It is this brackish world of inbetweens, not quite fresh-water but not quite salty seas, that oysters thrive. His father used to take him out to the oyster beds, vast stretches of water whose muddy bottoms hid clusters of sleeping oysters, armed with a hammer and chisel, to pick away at the clammy clumps and collect them into buckets.
Then came Hurricane Katrina, leaving destruction in its wake. Then came the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, seeping its toxic chemicals into surrounding water. This alone was a problem, but the final stroke came from the solution – in order to clear away the oil they had broken the levees of the rivers, pouring in torrents of fresh water to wash it all away.
Oysters can’t live in fresh water, and so they began to die.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Sam had not even been in Delacroix at the time. He had been serving his second tour. He walked into the rec room one day. “Isn’t your family from Louisiana?” Riley said. “That’s right,” said Sam, and Riley gestured to the TV. A news report was playing. The spokesman from BP was apologizing for the accident. “Appropriate measures will be taken,” he assured them.
But when Sam finally got back to Delacroix the promised payout from BP had still not arrived. He rushed off immediately to fix this, only to encounter barriers at every turn.
“It’s structural,” said Sam, “They make it difficult. Everything’s set up for the bigger white-owned companies. Small time players get nothing.”
It had always been that way. Harvesting oysters by hand hadn’t even been legal until the late 70s. And if you can’t harvest the oysters on your own, you had to work for a company to stay in the oyster business– that’s how his grandfather ended up working on the white man’s boat. A sort of nautical share-cropping. Things had changed slowly – they managed to appeal discriminatory laws and business began to grow. Then came the hurricane. Then came the oil spill. The oysters had never really recovered – and might never recover, as the salinity of the water had now drastically changed.
“The coast’s disappearing,” Sam said, “And to fix it, the government’s been breaking the levees on the rivers, to let the fresh water flow back into the sea. They say they have to do it and maybe they ain’t wrong. We gotta get the silt from those rivers back into the environment, to build up that land again. Easiest way to do that is break the levees but then it changes the salt levels. It’s tough, man. We’re still hanging in there. People don’t want to leave. But man, it’s tough.”
“I had no idea,” said Bucky.
---
The sun, fully risen, was now blazing hot. Heat settled thickly over water and land. It was so hot that Bucky had finally taken off his jacket. He was leaning over the edge of the boat overlooking the waters in nothing but a t-shirt. He had rightfully fled the boiling heat of the cabin where Sam still toiled over the engine. From the inside of the cabin, Sam watched him. Bucky’s arms were crossed over the railing of the boat and the deep black of vibranium shimmered with iridescent gold, reflections shifting minutely with the rise and fall of the boat. He was staring out over Delacroix and the distant bayous.
The cabin door creaked, and Sam crept up beside him.
“How you doing?” Sam asked, and Bucky turned to him with a slight smile. He looked back over the waters.
“It’s nice out here,” he said, “Peaceful.”
“Hot though.”
“Yeah.”
Sam leaned on the railing next to him and watched the sunbeams scud across the surface of the water. The boat smelled of fresh paint.
“It’s looking good,” said Sam.
“It’s coming along,” agreed Bucky.
“I don’t know if I could have done all this without you.”
“Ah well,” said Bucky, ducking his head,“I’m sure you could have.”
He fidgeted with his hands for a few seconds, looking down at the waves lapping at the side of the boat. The boat bobbed – up and down. They listened to the ringing rushes and the distant splash of gators hidden somewhere in the bayou.
“Do you really,” Bucky asked suddenly, “have to sell the boat?”
Sam laughed. He looked heavenwards.
“Hoo boy,” he said, “Not this again. Look, I don’t want to sell the boat. Of course I don’t. But Sarah’s already made the decision, and Imma be a good brother and support her. She’s the one who’s done all the work here. I’m just… the one who left. I’ve always been the one who left. And look, Bucky, if I do take up the shield, if I do become Captain America… I’m not going to be able to stick around here. I won’t be using the boat. So I have no right to hold on to this.”
“You don’t have to,” said Bucky. He spoke carefully and deliberately. “I mean. You don’t have to become Captain America. If you don’t want to. If you’d rather stay.”
“That,” said Sam, “Will be my decision.”
“Yeah, alright,” said Bucky, with a small smile and a sigh, “I guess that’s fair.”
They looked out over the water, at Delacroix and the distant bayous. They were standing so close that for a brief moment the vibranium brushed against Sam’s skin. It was neither hot nor cold, a strangely neutral metal. The gold seams shimmered and shifted and it made Sam think of that moment in the warehouse so many years ago, when Steve had touched Bucky’s arm. “You’re really here,” Steve had said, his voice full of wonder. “You’re really here,” he wanted to say to Bucky, who stood there so close to him there on the deck of the Paul and Darlene. He had looked so far and for so long. He wondered if Bucky would ever tell him, where exactly he had gone. But he didn’t ask, not now, and he didn’t say “You’re really here,” even though he felt as if he had finally found what he had been looking for.
Instead he asked: "Have you ever read Twilight?"
Bucky blinked at him. "What?” he said.
"It's a book,” explained Sam, “About these vampires and they have uh, super strength. It used to be pretty popular.”
“Sam, what the hell are you talking about?”
“See,” said Sam, “they have super strength so they can only play baseball during thunderstorms. Because they hit the ball so hard it sounds like thunder. So I'm just saying. Our baseball league will have to play during thunderstorms."
“Seriously?” said Bucky, “You still going on about that?”
“Oh you better believe this is happening.”
“That raccoon's not even in the galaxy anymore.”
“It’s happening, man. Just accept it. No borders, only baseball.”
“...Alright, explain to me why the vampires are playing baseball?"
"Because vampires love baseball. Everyone knows that. Everyone loves baseball. It's the greatest game on earth. No - the universe. This is how we'll achieve world peace – any time a new super villain pops up, we’ll invite them to our league. We’ll settle our differences out on the field, like men. Or women. Or whatever. Because who doesn’t love a good game of baseball?"
Bucky laughed. He laughed bright as the Louisiana sunshine.
And they talked about baseball.