#my fellas in christ this one was on my wips for MONTHS at last i finish it jsajss

[atinymexicanbird]

"Got it! Now you can put me down now"

From the fic "(seep into the wounds) i've been mending" by @cozyqueerchaos

[onbearfeet]

WIP Wedneday? WIP Wednesday.

Road trip with the cast of Monster Mash. Imagine these dinguses playing yellow car.

--

Jack Russell had never been a fan of long car rides.

He didn’t mind driving, particularly. Being a werewolf often meant living somewhere new every month, and until the advent of cheap intercontinental air travel, that had mostly meant picking a continent and moving around on it as best he could. And for the last century or so, moving around in North America had meant automobiles. He’d driven everything from Model Ts to Rolls Royces, and none of it had been particularly difficult or uncomfortable.

No, it was being a passenger that he couldn’t stand.

Perhaps it was something about werewolf reflexes; he reacted to things slightly faster than ordinary humans, even in his own human form, so if he wasn’t careful, riding shotgun in a car meant he was constantly tapping an imaginary brake or gas pedal half a second before the driver did. Or perhaps it was lingering trauma from all the times he’d been shot or netted, trussed up, and thrown into the back of something with a snarling engine. Whatever it was, he didn’t enjoy being in a moving vehicle that he didn’t control. He sometimes wondered how Ted felt about it; after all, there probably weren’t any vehicles built for someone his size.

But Elsa Bloodstone owned the van, and Elsa did not give up her keys without a good reason, so Jack had gotten used to swallowing his pride and climbing into the passenger seat—or worse, the back after Bucky Barnes won the coin toss.

There was one positive to Elsa’s driving, though. Somehow, through whatever perverse alchemy made her the most remarkable woman in the world (at least in Jack’s thoroughly biased and entirely correct opinion), he could sleep while she was at the wheel. Something about the cedar-and-sage scent of her at close quarters put his hackles down, smoothed his bristling paranoia, and let him drift off to the thrum of the engine and the whisper of her breath.

And so he was mostly asleep, slipping in and out of a pleasant dream about running through high mountain forests with nothing chasing him for once, when he heard Elsa’s voice.

“Barnes.”

“Your majesty,” Bucky drawled from behind Jack, where he was presumably still strapped into a jump seat in the cargo area.

Jack felt the smile tugging at his lips. He hoped Elsa couldn’t see it.

Elsa huffed, and Jack could hear the eyeroll in her voice. “In my infinite mercy, I’ve decided to do you a favor.”

“Golly, gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said flatly. “I’m saving you considerable embarrassment. Not counting your years with Hydra, how long would you say you’ve been, er—?”

“Myself? Conscious? Human?”

Jack couldn’t suppress the small flinch.

“Yes. That.”

“A few years, now. I guess you can count it from 2014, if you’re going from when I got out. But it took me a couple years to, y’know, have a personality again. Why?”

“Did you spend much time catching up on history?”

“I puked for two days straight after I googled JFK, so no.”

“Right, then. There are facts you’ll need to know if you don’t want to make a complete arse of yourself.”

“If this is about Marvin Gaye, I swear to Christ—”

“Your Wikipedia page,” Elsa interrupted, “says you were raised Irish American Catholic. Is that true?”

“Near ’nough.” A faint Irish lilt drifted through Bucky’s voice. “My dad was, anyway.”

“Then you probably heard a few sermons in your day about the evils of homosexuality.”

Bucky burst out laughing.

It was loud enough that Jack gave up even pretending to sleep, opened his eyes, and sat up from where he’d been slumped against the passenger window. He stretched as somewhere behind him, Ted rumbled a question that sounded like What the hell?

“Sorry, fellas,” Bucky chuckled. “Old man laughs at history lesson, you know how it is.” He snorted.

Jack stretched and used the motion as an excuse to look back at the cargo bay. Bucky was, indeed, still in his jump seat, wiping tears from his eyes and grinning.

“Priceless,” he muttered. “Just priceless. Elsa, is this gonna be one of those ‘some people are queer now and you gotta be okay with it’ talks?”

“If by ‘okay’ you mean ‘on your best manners or I’ll stab you’, then yes, that’s what this is.” Elsa took her eyes off the road just long enough to glare daggers at Bucky.

“Ha.” Bucky scrubbed at his face with his flesh hand. “Okay, let’s save you some time. Quick show of hands—who in this van has, at some point in their life, done queer shit?”

He pulled his hand away from his face and raised it above his head.

Jack grinned and put his own hand up.

Ted urfed and raised his.

Bucky looked at Elsa and raised his eyebrows.

Grudgingly, Elsa raised her hand.

“That’s what I thought,” Bucky said. His voice gentled. “Doll, I’m from Brooklyn. Down by the Navy yard, no less. There’s not much I ain’t seen. If I use the wrong words or something, please do correct me before the ghost of my mother rises from her grave and hauls me off by my ear, but you don’t have to worry I’ll see two fellas kissing and get the vapors.”

“Good,” Elsa replied, turning her attention back to the road. “Because our client is an old friend of mine, and I’ve got barbed bolts in my crossbow.”