Gold Rings ⚜️ Bucky Barnes X Reader

4: Catching Up

Bucky looked around Bowman's - or, now, Song Bird's - home. The solid wood walls protected the few items littered throughout the inside. The small L-shaped home had three separate sections.

In one part of the L was a straw-filled cot with a bedspring made of rope and some beautifully woven blankets. Next to it was an oil lamp on top of a small wooden side table, and the bottom shelf was littered with a handful of old bound books.

The opposite part of the L had a basic kitchen setup with several shelves of baskets. Each was filled with different produce: maize, yams, sorghum (a cereal grain for the goats), and millet (a grain to sell to local breweries). There was also a wood-burning stove with cast-iron pans hanging from nails on the adjacent wall.

The central part of the home was a basic living room setup with several rugs to sit on and a short table in the middle. Shuri and Bucky had taken their seats at the table while Song Bird tried to scrape her burnt eggs from her pan with a wooden spatula.

"So, you built this place yourself?"

"With some help from the locals." She responded. "The men helped me build the structure, and the women helped build the furniture and baskets. They also gave me some goats and chickens to get me started."

"How nice," Bucky responded, sipping from his lukewarm tea that Song Bird has given him and Shuri.

"Oh yeah, the people here are wonderful," she smiled, finally scraping the last piece of burnt egg from her pan. With a smile, she reheated the stove and cracked a new egg from her basket.

"So, I believe you need a news brief?" Song Bird joked.

"You can say that again..." Bucky grumbled.

"I told him you're the one that put the folder together," Shuri explained. "So I figured you'd be the best person to go through the file."

With that, Shuri sat her tablet in the middle of the table. With the press of a button, all of the information from the home screen was projected into the air around them.

Song Bird nodded, looking at the swarm of documents flying around the room. "Okay, let's start with the new faces."

Waving her hands in the air, Song Bird flicked the files around before selecting a specific video.

The clip showed a boat that had been cut clean in half. Suddenly, a boy in a red and blue suit was flying across the screen, firing what looked like silk strings to pull the boat back together.

"This is Spiderman. I believe you've met him."

Bucky grunted.

"He's made a name for himself fighting crime in New York City, specifically Brooklyn."

Bucky took a sip of his tea, a smile creeping onto his face. "I knew that kid was gonna make a great hero when he kicked Sam's ass."

"And yours," Shuri corrected.

Bucky just sipped his tea.

Bowman giggled as she pulled up the next photo. It showed some news articles about an injured surgeon followed by photos of the same man in a red cape throwing golden sparks around.

"This is Doctor Strange."

"He looks strange."

"Well, he kinda is." Song Bird shrugged. "He uses the time stone for his... Magic? To be honest, I still don't quite understand it. It looks like magic, but he keeps insisting it's not."

Song Bird gave Bucky a quick run down of his story: his hands were badly damaged in a car accident, so Doctor Strange went East to see if he could find a different kind of treatment. He has now earned the title or Sorcerer Supreme and protects the world with "magic".