“What,” Steve said, “are you doing,” and it was the serious voice, which made everybody sit up and take notice—well, everybody except Clint, who didn’t look like he’d be sitting up any time soon, and Bruce, who was quietly drooling into the carpet.
“Never Have I Ever,” said Bucky, who was sitting serenely on the floor with his back against the sofa, strategically just outside of drooling range. There was a glass in his right hand, and bottles in various states of emptiness were scattered across the coffee table.
Steve frowned at him. “Uh, it’s pretty clear that not only have you ever, you currently are, assuming the it in this sentence is ‘leading my team into drunken debauchery.’”
“I’m ashamed of you, Rogers,” Natasha said, with a gleam in her eyes that might have hinted at a little alcohol consumption of her own. “Thinking we need to be led. Never Have I Ever is a drinking game. The first player tells us something they’ve never done; anyone who’s done that thing does a shot. If only one person has done it, they drink double. We thought it would be a nice group bonding experience.”
“‘Nice,’” Steve repeated, raising an eyebrow. “You know Bucky and I can’t get drunk, don’t you?”
“Not with that kind of quitter attitude, we can’t.” Bucky raised his glass in a motion that was half-toast, half-salute. “It’s okay. They’re all playing against me. Any of them’s left standing at the end, they all win. Including their ringer,” he said, tilting his head toward Thor, who grinned back at Steve shamelessly. “Look at him, he’s the size of a goddamn house. He goes under the table before me, I’ll eat the table.”
“Now that’s my kind of side bet,” Tony said, swinging past Steve to occupy the nearest open couch. “Relax, Miss Trunchbull,” he said, when Steve’s eyes darted to the glass in his hand. “This is ginger ale. Rhodey and I are here strictly as referees. Well, he’s here to referee and I’m here for the lolz and potential blackmail material,” he amended, and Rhodey, sitting well back from the nearest bottle, met Steve’s eyes and shrugged in resignation.
“I don’t…” Steve shook his head. “What are we playing for?” he asked, knowing full well that Bucky had never in his life met a stake he wouldn’t raise on a pair of threes and a smile.
“I win, they buy me all the sushi I can eat for a year,” Bucky said, smirking when Steve raised an eyebrow. That was a hell of a bet. “They win, I pour ’em all the tea I’ve been holding on you. Did I use that right?” he asked, directing the question to Natasha, who gave him one of her eloquent shrugs. “Parker’s teaching me to speak young-person, but apparently I have a lot to catch up on.”
“Hang on,” Steve said, suddenly wary. “If you lose, I’m the one who gets punished?”
“I prefer to think of it as, ‘Either way, I win,’” Bucky said, his smile widening. “Whose turn is it?”
“Bruce’s, I think,” said Natasha.
“Gluuuh,” Bruce said, or something to that effect, anyway. Steve was frowning, about to call off the stupid game and tell them all to get their asses to bed, when he rallied just long enough to raise his head, say, “Never have I ever lost a body part that doesn’t grow back,” and plant his face in the rug again.
“Okay, that’s not fair, you’re obviously picking on Bucky with that,” Steve was starting to say, when literally everyone else in the room reached for a glass. He looked around, baffled. “What the hell.”
“Appendix, when I was a kid,” Sam said, tipping a shot glass in Steve’s direction.
“Spleen,” Natasha said, reaching for the vodka. “That was a bad afternoon.”
“Pinky toe,” Clint added. “I was in Budapest. Don’t ask.”
“And Thor lost his damn eye,” Bucky said, with a fierce glare at Steve, which, well, no, he shouldn’t have forgotten about the eye thing, but pardon him for coming to Bucky’s defense. “Pick your poison and grab a glass, Rogers. You want a seat at this table, you gotta earn it.”
“I remind you all that I had nothing to do with this plan,” Steve said, but Bucky was already shoving a bottle of whiskey across the table. He sighed and did a quick mental calculation: the rest of them had clearly been going for a while; there was, as far as he knew, no amount of ordinary human liquor that could topple him; and if he left, he’d just have to keep coming back to check on the others until they were all far enough gone to be carried to their respective beds. He might as well stay put. “Tonsils,” he said, “I think I was six. Satisfied?”
“Rarely.” Bucky picked up the bottle again, looking around the room thoughtfully. “Hmmmm,” he said, and the moment his eyes landed on Steve, he knew exactly what was coming. “Never have I ever put on a spangly costume and participated in a song and dance routine.”
“Excuse me, now who’s cheating?” Steve said sharply, just before his righteous indignation was ruined again by both Natasha and Thor reaching for their shot glasses.
“Red Room,” Natasha shrugged. “Mostly dancing, but once again, it counts.”
“And I had a brother who enjoyed putting on amateur theater productions,” Thor said grimly. “Captain, I believe the honor passes to you.”
Steve narrowed his eyes. He knew full well what Bucky was doing, and two could play at that game. “Fine,” he said. “Never have I ever hotwired and then crashed a flying car that didn’t belong to me.”
“‘Scuse you,” Bucky said, and to his great surprise, Steve recognized the surly expression that had characterized six-drink Bucky back in the old old days. Back then Steve had learned the hard way that five drinks was the ideal cut-off, or else Bucky would turn into the mouthy one and they’d both live to regret it. Maybe there was something to Bucky’s plan to overcome the four-to-one metabolic limit. “Now who’s picking on who?”
“On whom,” Clint said, reaching unsteadily for his glass and bringing it to the general vicinity of his lips.
“Jesus Christ, Clint,” Steve said.
“Jesus H. Philip Coulson, actually,” Clint informed him, “but Nat should do one too, since she was acces… accesh.. She helped. ” Natasha, Steve noted, was doing the thing where she slid her eyes to the side and said nothing. “We’re Avengers, Cap. Shit like that’s practically in the job description.”
“Katniss has a point,” Tony observed, in a carefully neutral tone. “We do eat weird for breakfast around here. What else you got, Barnes?”
“It’s someone else’s turn,” Steve started to protest, although he was increasingly aware that there was no reason to bother; everybody was ignoring him, and Bucky was already opening his mouth to say, “Never have I ever had a fight with my girlfriend because I thought ‘fondue’ was a fancy French word for ‘fucking.’”
Blushing, Steve slammed back a pair of shots in quick succession, while Clint howled and Sam shot him a look that promised no amount of alcohol was going to steal this piece of information from his brain. He coughed, feeling the whiskey burn its way down, and said, “Never have I ever taken two girls on the same date and consciously decided to bring them to a science fair.”
“For the record, if Tony was playing, I’d have a story about that,” Rhodey observed, even as Bucky glared at Steve and grimly downed two shots of his own.
“Never have I ever puked my guts out on a roller coaster at Coney Island.”
“Never have I ever had a teddy bear named after me.”
“Never have I ever been such a stubborn idiot that I tried to go out even though I had a hundred-and-three-degree fever and was so fucking delirious that I started a fight with a lamppost and lost,” Bucky said, and Clint really did let out a cackle at that one, and—
Jesus, Steve would think later, what was in that bottle?
“Never have I ever gotten shot in the Civil War,” he said, and watched Bucky’s eyes go wide as dinner plates with the knowledge that he was absolutely defeated.
There was a momentary silence, and Tony broke it, very quietly. “That was a little too soon, Cap,” he said, and Steve was surprised to realize there was, maybe, some actual vulnerability happening there. But Bucky was already shaking his head.
“He doesn’t mean that little dustup we had a couple years ago,” he said, almost sheepish. “He means the American Civil War, Stark, and he means it goddamn literally.”
Tony relaxed, marginally. “Okay,” he said, “I don’t get what just happened, but—oh, hell,” he said, because Bucky was quietly, determinedly, pouring himself two shots, and looking suspiciously like he was about to finish off the bottle. “Now this is gonna be a team bonding experience.”
“So it was 1941,” Steve began, and Bucky growled at him, actually growled, so fiercely that Steve leaned back, even with an entire table between them.
“If they’re gonna hear this story, they’re gonna get it from the primary source, Steve,” he said, and turned to address the rest of the group—well, as much of it as was conscious, anyway. “So it was 1941, and up till then, the U.S. fucking government had kind of been dicking around about the whole ‘maybe we should stop fascism’ thing. But then Pearl Harbor happened and all of a sudden the war felt like a real thing, and everybody had to ramp up for the actual fighting really fucking fast.”
“Yeah, thanks for the history lesson, Barnes, but year-dropping 1941 doesn’t explain why we’re talking about a war that ended in 1865, here.”
“I’m getting to it,” Bucky said, with a glare. “So the Army started reopening old forts they hadn’t used for anything in a couple decades. There’s this one in North Carolina, it’s called Fort Macon, right at the end of this long strip of island overlooking the ocean. Well, once we were in the war for real, the Germans thought it’d be loads of fun to send U-Boats to hang out off the coast and fuck with Allied naval ops.”
“They manage to sink any ships that way?” asked Tony, with an air of detached former-arms-manufacturer professional interest.
“Lots,” Bucky said tightly. “It was all real hush-hush at the time, because the government didn’t want to throw the whole East Coast into a panic. You could actually keep that kind of thing classified back then. Not like now, when people would be livetweeting the explosions. So help me if you’re over there Googling this shit because you don’t believe me, Sam,” he added, and even though he didn’t so much as shift his eyes in Sam’s direction, Sam guiltily dropped his phone back onto his lap.
“So this leads to you taking a minie ball at Antietam how, again?” Rhodey said skeptically.
“I never said it happened in a battle,” Bucky said, as if that was what made the whole thing ridiculous. “What I’m trying to tell you is that for reasons, the Army decided to take me and a bunch of other fresh recruits from the state of New York, stick us in this old fort that hadn’t actually been used to house troops for like forty years at that point, and tell us to watch the water for U-Boats, although what they thought we were gonna do about it if we saw one I still haven’t figured out. Now, you hear North Carolina and you think, oh, it’s probably real nice and sunny and warm there, right? Except we were in this shitty exposed earthworks fort at the top of a hill, in January, with the wind coming in off the ocean, and—look, since then I’ve experienced a lot worse, but at the time it seemed really fucking cold, okay? The only saving grace was that all the rooms had fireplaces so everybody could stay warm at night. You with me so far?”
“So far,” Tony said, raising an eyebrow.
“So me and my buddy Henry, we got this room where the floor was sloped a little bit, because earthworks,” Bucky continued. “Every time we built a fire, we had to be real careful or the logs would roll out. So one day Henry and I were out on patrol, walking around looking for U-Boats like we were supposed to, but what we found was a couple old cannonballs, just kind of lying out half-buried in the dirt. So, I sincerely don’t remember which one of us said it—shut up, Steve, this was seventy years and a lot of literal Hydra brain damage ago—anyway, one of us said, ‘Hey, you know what? I bet these things’d make good andirons for our fucking stupid fireplace,’ so we each grabbed one and took them back to base with us.”
“Okay, I’m gonna go out on a limb here,” Rhodey said, “and guess they didn’t work the way you wanted them to.”
“Well,” said Bucky, “one of them worked perfectly. The other one, it turned out to still be less a cannonball and more of a mortar shell. So when we put it in the fireplace, it did what you’d expect unexploded ordnance to do, which is it dried out, and then it heated up, and then it, uh, stopped being unexploded.”
The room fell silent for a moment, and Steve could almost physically feel his teammates’ blood-alcohol levels dropping as they absorbed this information. It was Natasha who finally said, “Well, obviously at least one of you survived.”
“Oh! No, Henry was okay,” Bucky assured her. “Spent a couple days in the hospital, but at the end of it he was fine. And I didn’t even get that much of a break; they just stitched me up and sent me back to base that night. But a couple days later, some funny guy at the local paper got wind of the whole thing, and he found out we were from New York, so he wrote it up as this whole thing about two Yankee soldiers getting got by Confederate munitions. So that’s why, technically speaking, Henry and I were the last two casualties of the Civil War.”
“That… that is… I don’t even know what to say,” Clint said, shaking his head.
“I do,” Tony piped up immediately. “Where’d you get shot, Barnes?”
“I told you,” Bucky said, frowning. “At Fort Macon.”
“No, see, you told us you got hurt enough that you needed stitching up, but you’re going real light on the details about the injury. And if I’ve learned anything about you and Cap lately, it’s that the only time you’re not oversharing is when it’s embarrassing for you. So, come on, out with it, Barnes. Civil War shrapnel scar or it didn’t happen.”
“You wanna see the scar?” Bucky said.
“Tony,” Steve said.
“No, no, let’s look at this logically, Steve,” Bucky said. “You and me both know when a Stark gets it in his head that he wants something, he’s not gonna quit until you give it to him.”
Steve sighed. “Fine,” he said, “but Tony, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” and Bucky stood up, turned his back to Tony, unbuckled his belt, and dropped his trousers.
There was a long moment of silence in the living room, and then Clint let out a low whistle. “Well,” he said, “that’s a scar, all right.”
“Not gonna lie, I’m pretty glad I was standing with my back to the fire when the explosion happened,” Bucky agreed dryly.
“Tony?” Steve said. “You all right?”
Tony was making a series of choking noises, staring at the large and distinctive shrapnel scar on Bucky’s ass. “That,” he finally managed to say, “is a hell of a thing to get a Purple Heart for.”