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“Well, this bites,” says Peter glumly, and he flops back down on the couch in the Darwin, Australia, airport hangar bay. It’s a questionable decision at best, because Bucky has long experience with couches left in hangar bays, and the experience is mostly that you don’t want to flop down on them.
Sure enough, Peter yelps a minute later and springs to the wall, where he perches and glares down at the couch. “That thing bit me. It literally bit me.”
“It’s broken, you got poked by a spring,” says Wanda unsympathetically, because she’s still glaring at the airport official who looks distinctly nervous now. “Explain to me again why we can’t leave. It’s a Quinjet. It is the most technologically advanced plane in the world. And that is a raincloud.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says the official. “And there’s an eighty-one percent chance of cyclones because of it, so—”
“Strangely,” says Wanda darkly, as her hands begin to spark, “that percentage isn’t a deterrent.”
Bucky sighs and pulls Wanda behind him. “It’s fine. We’ll stay here until the weather clears.”
“Couple hours, max, right?” says Peter cheerfully, jumping to the ground behind them.
“Uh—” The official looks frantically from Peter’s cheerful face, to Wanda’s murderous gaze, to Bucky’s Just-Agree-with-Him-If-You-Want-to-Live stare. “Yeah. Sure. Couple of hours. I have to go. Bye!”
And then he runs, just as the first drops begin to fall from the sky.
“He was lying,” says Wanda darkly.
“Of course he was lying,” says Bucky.
“Oh,” says Peter, his face falling. “But… it’s the last night of Hanukkah. And we’ve already been gone for a week.”
The rain starts to pour in earnest. If by “earnest”, one means buckets.
Bucky sighs and rubs his face. “Shit.”
*
Bucky would be lying if he said that he looked forward to Hanukkah every year. Sure, he liked the holiday well enough when he was a kid. The candles and the food and all the family coming around to laugh and play cards, kids running every which way. Aunts and uncles yelling about baseball and the latest fight results and all the kids burning their fingers on latkes straight from the frypan. Faces and shirts covered in powdered sugar but claiming they hadn’t grabbed the last sufganiyot.
“Yeah, Hanukkah’s gotten so commercialized now,” said Stark that first year in the Tower, somehow managing to combine earnest and asshole in the same breath. Bucky could have glared at him or ignored him; either worked on Stark, most of the time.
Except… well… the guy was right. Bucky didn’t remember Hanukkah being that big of a deal when he was growing up, outside of the family celebrations anyway. Christmas, sure, that was everywhere, couldn’t escape it, but Hanukkah? Hell, Stevie’d never heard of it before he met Bucky.
It isn’t as big as Christmas now, but still. It has tea towels. Whoever would have thought of Hanukkah tea towels? Bucky can’t decide if his mother would have scoffed, or bought every stupid tchotchke and towel she could find. Fill the yard with inflatable menorahs and spinning, light-up dreidels, drawn the line at a Hanukkah bush.
Bucky can’t think about it. Not without… well. He doesn’t buy the tchotchkes, anyway, and he doesn’t light candles, either.
It’s not the same, when he’s the only one left.
The rain’s so heavy, Bucky can barely hear anything but the drops slamming against the hangar’s metal roof. He finds the Spider-kid tucked in some back, dusty corner (figures, it’s the Spider in him), talking to someone.
Bucky’s got a knife in one hand and is ready to spring into action, before he realizes he can’t hear anyone talking back, because the kid’s on his phone.
“I know, Aunt May, I’m sorry, the clean-up took a lot longer than we thought, and—yeah, no, that’s the rain, not explosions. No more explosions, Mr. Stark promised… I thought cyclones were only in Kansas, too! I don’t know, another day? The weather doesn’t look too good, and Sergeant Barnes—yeah. I know. I know it’s not my fault but—okay. When I get home, we can—it’s not the same though. And I missed all the other nights—you should light the candles without me, though. It’s okay, they’re just candles, right? And we can do latkes anytime, right? It’s not like we can’t do them any other time, right? I mean, I eat jelly donuts every week—yeah. I know. I know. I’m sorry. Wish I could be there, too.”
Shit, thinks Bucky, and sneaks back while Peter’s still making his apologies.
He finds Wanda where he left her, doing some weird kumbaya shit, sitting cross-legged while floating in midair with a mighty frown, sparks dancing around her.
“Wanda,” says Bucky, and her eyes snap open. “We got a problem.”
*
“Hey, kid!” Bucky yells into the dark corner of the hangar about forty minutes later. The rain’s still coming down hard. “You back there? Dinner’s ready.”
There’s a yelp, a whoosh, and a crash as Peter falls from the top corner (again, the Spider in him, Bucky’s not even surprised) and onto a pile of boxes. He’s up on his feet a second later.
“Dinner?” says Peter, with all the hopeful hungry anticipation of a teenaged boy. “Is it kangaroo meat?”
“Is it… no,” says Bucky, because he isn’t sure that’s a thing. Well, a thing people would want to eat, anyway.
Peter trots along after him, non-stop talking about… something, Bucky doesn’t even know. Pokémon or southern hemisphere weather patterns or the types of venomous spiders found in dusty corners of Australian hangars, probably. Can the kid get more superpowers, if he gets bitten again? Bucky doesn’t know and doesn’t particularly want to find out. He’d have to explain it to Stark.
And then Peter stops dead in his tracks and stares. “Uh. What is that?”
“Dinner,” says Wanda, setting the last package down on the makeshift table.
“That’s a bag of potato chips,” says Peter.
“They’re fried,” says Bucky. “A couple are flavored with sour cream and red peppers, so, you know. Kinda like latkes.”
“And ramen,” says Wanda.
“Also fried, according to the package, I’m not exactly sure how. Or why,” says Bucky.
“And powdered donuts for dessert.”
“I think those are baked,” says Bucky, feeling a bit stupid now. “But they’re powdered. I couldn’t find jam.”
“Uh,” says Peter, staring with wide, vaguely frightened eyes. Bucky can’t even blame him.
But then Wanda takes his hand. “Here.”
And she leads him a few steps away, to an open area of the hangar bay. Still holding his hand, she starts moving her fingers in complicated patterns, and as she does, the red sparks dance around them, drawing lines and forming pictures, until the three of them are standing in the center of an elaborate, oversized, living menorah.
Not just a menorah, either: Bucky looks at every branch, and it’s like he can hear voices, and laughter, and music. He smells fried dough and feels the warmth of a warm sweater, the taste of thin, waxy chocolate snapping under his tongue and the press of a dozen bodies, as they hide in the closet for the next round of hide-and-seek.
Peter’s eyes are wide like saucers. “Wow,” he breathes.
“Do you remember the blessings?” asks Wanda.
“Yeah,” breathes Peter, and he recites the Hebrew while she lights the candles, one by one, until the entire hangar bay is lit by the glow.
The ramen isn’t half bad and Peter eats three packages. The potato chips have weird flavors and they trade bags back and forth until they find their favorites (there’s a rosemary version that Wanda commandeers immediately, but Peter’s got a thing for the roasted chicken chips).
Bucky and Wanda stretch out and watch the lights in the magic-menorah flicker against the sheets of rain outside, licking powdered sugar off their fingers, while Peter scavenges the hangar for something that will work for dreidels.
“Thank you,” says Wanda quietly, while Peter yelps and crashes in the background.
“For what?” asks Bucky.
Wanda wipes her damp fingers on a napkin. “Pietro and I lit candles every year, even in the orphanage. Even if we had to draw them out on a piece of paper, flames and all. When I came to the Tower, I didn’t… it didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel right. Lighting candles without him there made the loneliness he left me worse.”
Wanda glances over at one of the flames, blinking fast, but smiling a little. If Bucky concentrates, he thinks he hears a bark of boyish laughter from the sparking, quick-moving magical vines that hold the light aloft.
“This… it helps,” says Wanda softly. “It’s not the same, but… it helps.”
“I found something!” yells Peter, skidding past them, arms full of nuts and bolts and washers. “We can spin them, and draw the letters on the sides… but they’ve got six sides not four, so maybe we can add a couple extras?’
“Extras?” echoes Bucky. “What other letters do you want to use, kid?”
“A spider,” says Wanda with a smile. “And if you land on it, you put in eight.”
“A star?” suggests Peter, falling to his knees opposite them. “And if you land on it, you… uh…”
“You have to give me one each,” says Bucky firmly. “And if I’m the one who spins it, I have to give you one each.”
Peter brightens. “Yeah, I like that.”
The game turns surprisingly raucous and high-stakes, considering they’re betting washers, and the rain barely lets up.
“All we’re missing is the music,” says Bucky.
Peter snorts. “What music? All the good songs belong to Christmas. Adam Sandler doesn’t count.”
“Not true,” protests Bucky. “The Andrews sisters sang in Yiddish. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a Hanukkah song, but—”
“Wait,” says Wanda, and does something twisty with her fingers. A moment later, the notes are clear.
Rock of Ages, let our song…
Bucky’s mouth drops open. For a moment, he can’t speak. He can almost hear his sisters singing it, the youngest with a lisp, half the words wrong, bursting into giggles toward the end.
“I—” he says, stammering, and Wanda takes his hand and holds it tight, smiling at him.
“Someone’s singing on the other side of the airport,” she says. “Guess we’re not as alone as we thought.”
Peter leans back and sighs happily.
“This was the best night of Hanukkah ever,” he says, satisfied.