Work Text:
Laundry day again. Fuck.
Bucky strode to his room with a gait that would make weak men weep from terror even with the empty socket hanging from his right shoulder and the towel wrapped around his waist. God, the towel. Pink with strawberries. A birthday gift from Steve, who was the only one of his friends allowed to have a sense of humor. It lived in the bottom of the linen closet and only came out when all the rest of the towels were in the wash.
Like today.
The best Bucky could come up with was a grey t-shirt that he swore would fit a very angry Bruce Banner and a pair of navy jeans with the tag still on. He winced; his legs would look positively cyanotic later form the exposure to excess dye. He stuffed his feet into his boots without bothering to lace them up — no need to risk random metal splinters between his toes again — grabbed his laundry basked, and set out for the trek down four flights of stairs to the laundry room.
Natasha had taken over the bathroom after him. He knew she would, with the way she’d practically banged down the door the second Bucky had been showering for longer than three minutes. That part wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was the ethereal voice floating out through the only-mostly closed door with the hot waves of steam.
Was she… singing?
Setting down his laundry with practiced silence, Bucky took up a spot leaning against the wall and crossed his arms, letting the words wash over him. Russian, naturally. Not a song he knew. The melody was creepy as all hell, though, and the words set his nerves on edge. It sounded like a children’s song. Who would sing that to a child?
Before he could come up with an answer to his own question, the shower shut off, the curtain slid back, and Natasha’s fist introduced itself to the wall at high velocity at the lack of towels, accompanied by a fanfare of Russian expletives. Even a simple soldier like Bucky knew well enough to make himself scarce at the sound of the angry Russian assassin facing a laundry crisis of her own.
She entered the laundry room shortly before Tony Stark’s Clothing Sterlizer 3000 dinged to tell him to collect his clothes. With serum-powered ears he could hear her footsteps on the stairs long before she actually entered and on reflex began to whistle the only Russian tune he could come up with quickly, a jaunty and awkward mix of Kalinka and Korobeiniki burned into his head from both his time in Russia on mission and the night Clint thought it would be fun to introduce Bucky to that funny little blocks game as a stress reliever.
(Tony couldn’t be bothered to resynthesize the right color of paint to cover the fist-sized patch over a fist-sized hole in Clint’s wall, and so the entire wall had gotten a recoat in Home Depot’s beautiful, soothing, Cornflower Vomit colorway.)
Natasha gave him a strange look as she set down her laundry, but didn’t say anything to him.
“Some, uh,” Bucky started awkwardly, pausing his (hopefully) non-threatening whistling. “Some nice washing machines we have here.”
Nice going. Brilliant conversation starter. Bucky could feel the blood rising to his cheeks.
She looked at him like he didn’t know he had a second head, but remained silent.
Figures. He deserved that.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but then the washing machine that could clean the whole city’s laundry in a single day dinged and he figured he should probably collect his clothes and leave. The awkward Kalinka-Korobeiniki mash-up resumed as he shoveled wet clothes into a basket and launched them into the dryer with one solid heave. That bastard, Tony. He made a washing machine that used some kind of super technology to sterilize clothes in minutes, but a high-tech dryer? Preposterous. Bucky could almost hear Tony telling Bruce to stop wasting my time and go to Best Buy!
Bucky waited until the next time he saw Natasha going to the exercise floor before he acted. He’d studied up; too much time living in Stark Tower had softened his Russian and his HYDRA handlers hadn’t been big on folk songs, but Steve had taken the time to show Bucky the power of the internet and he now knew every word to a handful of older Soviet songs.
Grabbing his wrist wrap and a towel, he made his way down the two flights of stairs and silently entered the sparring room. Natasha didn’t seem to notice him, invested as she was in wrapping her own hands for a round with the punching bag.
That, and she was singing again.
Bucky listened intently for several seconds until he could identify the melody. Tyomnaya Noch’. He knew that one better than the others, having heard it a time or two on Russian radios while on mission in the 60s.
Bucky waited until she neared the end of her verse and then stepped forward, joining in at precisely the same moment that his ass hit the bench a respectable distance away and she started the nxt verse. She didn’t seem to notice at first even though his rich baritone slotted right under her soft alto in a way that was impossible to ignore. Slowly, slowly her head crept up until her dark eyes latched onto his own and the strength of their voices together finally became apparent to her.
All the while, she kept singing, and he sand with her.
When they reached the end, Natasha stood from the bench, clenching and unclenching her fingers several times. Bucky finally picked up his own wrap and began to bind his fleshy hand with careful, practiced motions. Natasha was about to walk away when he spoke again.
“I heard you singing the other day,” he said. “Some real creepy shit. What was it, if you don’t mind?”
“Oh.” She met his gaze. “Pervert.”
Bucky shrugged. “I was walking past the bathroom and the acoustics were really good.”
She was silent for a moment. “Tili Tili Bom.”
“What?”
“The song. It’s called Tili Tili Bom.”
“Oh.”
She made to walk away, but didn’t take more than two steps before turning back. “All right, I can practically hear you thinking it. Let’s spar and then I will teach you Tili Tili Bom.” Natasha winked. “Unless you’re afraid of getting beat up by a little girl like me?”
Bucky grinned. “You’re on.”
Several rounds of sparring later, they both landed on the bench, drenched in sweat and reaching for their respective water bottles. Another piece of perplexing Tony Tech; Tony would make water bottles with built-in thermostats that looked no different from the average Hydroflask, but the mention of potentially upgrading the building’s water fountains from the same models used in airports and public schools across America brought about another very loud repetition of the words Best Buy. Bucky wasn’t quite sure what a Best Buy was, but he didn’t think Tony was, either.
“Ready?” Natasha asked, shaking Bucky from his thoughts.
“Yup.”
“All right. Repeat after me.”
She sang a line and Bucky recited it back until she was satisfied. They made their way through the entire song in that manner and were halfway through a duet rendition with Natasha on haunting harmony before a very loud crash disrupted their singing. Near-simultaneously, they whipped towards the door in combat-ready stances, staring down Clint as the poor archer grimaced apologetically, picked himself off of the floor, and righted the bag stand he had knocked over as quickly as possible so that he could dart out of the room. Bucky glanced over at Natasha once he was gone, drawing a bright peal of laughter from the Russian assassin. He grinned back at her as they sat back down.
They headed back upstairs a half-hour later, having run through everything Bucky knew how to sing just for the fun of it. Natasha showered first that time, leaving Bucky free to run into a visibly panicking Clint in the hallway.
“You alright?” Bucky asked him.
“Yeah,” Clint squeaked.
Bucky didn’t respond. He had to go back to his room so that he could let out his laughter without Clint hearing.
Once he and Natasha were both showered and dressed in their very fresh laundry, they made their way up to Tony’s office by unspoken agreement. Tony was just pouring himself a glass of something green that Bucky knew would taste like disappointment just from the color of it. Natasha slid into a seat across his desk with a sly grin slowly splitting her lips.
“Hey, Tony,” she said sweetly. “Can I ask a favor?”
Tony downed a mouthful of his green juice with a grimace. “What kind of favor are we talking about here?”
“Can we take a look at the security footage from the sparring room, say… 45 minutes ago?”
Tony gave her a weird look, but didn’t tell her no or mention the mystical Best Buy, which Bucky took as a good sign. “JARVIS, give me sparring room security footage from 45 minutes ago.”
A blue holographic screen flickered to life over Tony’s desk and Bucky scooted closer to see it better. Sure enough, there he was, sitting next to Natasha, and there was Clint, entering the room with a dry towel draped over his shoulders like he was going to take advantage of a punching bag when he froze mid-step at the sight of the two of them singing together. Clint put his foot back down and began to slowly back out of the room when his hip caught on the troublesome bag rack and sent both it and himself tumbling to the floor.
A small smile stretched Tony’s lips as he dismissed the window. “Is that what you were looking for?” he asked them.
Neither Natasha nor Bucky responded. Bucky had a metal hand over his mouth to keep from laughing, and Natasha’s shoulders were trembling, face turning as red as her hair, before she burst out with a bright peal of laughter that shattered Bucky’s composure as well.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tony grumbled, downing another mouthful of his green juice.
They never mentioned what happened that day again, but for several months afterwards, any time Natasha and Bucky were in a room and Clint walked in, they would catch each other’s eyes and stifle their chuckles as best they could. If Tony was there, he just shook his head and went back to whatever he was doing as Clint turned a lovely shade of tomato red, but if Bucky had a mind to look, he could still see the smile on Tony’s face.