Chapter Text
It’s a McDonalds.
Bucky pulls his car into a space and puts it in park, a bit disbelieving. A bit confused. Somewhere inside this McDonalds, apparently, Clint Barton - holder of the Worst Vampire Ever title - has tucked himself away to avoid the sunrise.
He calls Natalia. “A McDonalds?”
Her sigh has become familiar. This is, in fact, the fourth time Bucky has been called during daylight hours to go rescue Clint. “I just know where he is, James. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
Bucky shakes his head, climbing out of the car. “I’ve got the tarp. Guess I’ll go see where he’s tucked himself this time.”
“If it’s the oven,” says Natalia, fondly, “send a photograph.”
“You don’t photograph,” Bucky tells her, and hangs up.
Bucky enters the McDonalds. It’s early morning, probably around 8:00, and it smells like any other morning in a fast food restaurant: good, sweet, greasy, and a tiny bit nauseating. The employees and the customers all have a kind of blissed-out look to them, and Bucky can taste Clint’s magic in the air: it’s the bloodtang of vampire mixed with Clint’s own fresh scent, that’s something like fresh laundry and bread rising. That makes sense, Bucky has to admit; none of them want the customers to realize that there’s an actual vampire hiding somewhere in the restaurant.
“Hi,” Bucky says to the cashier, letting a little bit of his own werewolf force pour into his voice. “I’m looking for — a guest?”
The cashier gives him her loveliest, dreamiest smile, and gestures to the hallway with the restrooms.
Jesus, Clint.
Bucky stands in the hallway and glances between the doors. If Clint has locked himself in a bathroom stall, Bucky might just leave his dumb ass there.
He knows vampire hearing is as sensitive as his own - more or less - so he just says, “Clint?”
“Oh, thank god. Buck, I need an Egg McMuffin, stat.”
Bucky turns around. Yes, it appears that famous, long-lived, stupidly attractive Clint Barton, vampire, has locked himself into the handicapped stall.
“Clint.” Bucky wants to roll his eyes, even though it’ll do nothing. “Why are you trapped in a McDonalds?”
“Cause the sun came up, duh,” Clint says. “Here, I can even shove cash under the door. An Egg McMuffin and a coffee, man, be a bro and help me out.”
He’s so irritating. Clint just seems to have this absolute disregard for his own life. Which doesn’t make any sense, because Bucky knows he’s as old a vampire as Natalia - they don’t talk about Budapest - so he’s managed to survive this long, but… Bucky always wonders, how? Bucky’s come to be a bit fond of him, even as annoying as it is to have to deal with this all the time, and he doesn’t want to see Clint slip up and Burn.
“That isn’t the answer I was looking for,” Bucky says. “Why were you in a McDonalds and not, you know, heading home to your lair?”
“Cause I was hungry, Buck. Stop asking stupid questions.” Bucky hears the rustling and glances down to find a crumpled $5 bill shoved out between his boots.
“Natalia sent me with the tarp,” Bucky says instead. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Right,” Clint tells him. “Hang it up over the door, like — the corners should self-seal to the wall, alright, hang it in front of the door like a curtain, to cover the cracks. Then go get my McMuffin. Oh, here, look.” Another crumpled $5 emerges from beneath the door. “Get yourself one too.”
Bucky picks up both bills, looks at them, and sighs.
The tarp does in fact seal itself to the wall, over the door, and Bucky can feel the magic in it. It isn’t vampire or were: witch magic, probably. He knows Natalia has dealings with the Scarlet Witch; it’s probably her work. He hangs it carefully so that it covers the entire door to the handicapped bathroom, and then goes to buy some trashy breakfast food.
Because Bucky, despite all of his reservations and common sense, kind of has a thing for Clint. A small thing. A stupid thing, probably, because Clint’s going to mess up one day and that’ll be all there is to it.
As he returns to the hallway with a bag of sandwiches and two hot coffees, he hears the door open behind the tarp, and makes sure he’s standing there, glare in place, when Clint comes into view through the two-inch opening he’s created. He’s sitting crosslegged on the floor, grinning up at Bucky, completely not caring that he’s on the floor in a McDonalds bathroom behind a magic tarp.
“Hey, Bucky! Breakfast date?”
“I hate you,” Bucky tells him, but he sits down on the ground and passes a McMuffin and a coffee through the door opening. “Close that, will you? The whole point of this is to make sure you don’t burn up.”
“That’s what the tarp’s for,” Clint says cheerfully. “And I wanted to see your face.”
“I hope it’s telling you how stupid you are.”
“Nah.” Clint takes a giant bite. “God, their cheese is so good.” Bucky will never be over the shit Clint eats. Vampires don’t need food — well, this kind of food anyway. They feed off of the blood of humans and animals as well as intense emotions like lust. Probably no other vampire in the entire world has made these kinds of noises over a fuckin’ McMuffin.
“You know, you’re kind of an asshole for taking up the handicapped bathroom,” Bucky tells him. “What if someone needs it?”
“Hey, I’m handicapped at the moment,” Clint retorts. “Besides, I’ll take care of it. Just mojo them into being able to do what they need in the normal bathroom.”
And that’s the other part that always throws Bucky. Clint’s powerful. Here he is, sitting on a bathroom floor, eating a McMuffin with no cares in the world — but he’s also keeping all of the staff and customers in this place under enough of a thrall to not notice that anything’s wrong in here. And here he’s saying he’ll be able to get some poor disabled person to be able to walk or stand well enough to use a standard toilet. Clint is strong enough to do all of these things simultaneously, and yet he persistently forgets he’s weak to sunlight and buys Bucky terrible junk food.
It’s fascinating, and Bucky hates that.
“I’m not staying here all day,” he tells Clint, and Clint just smiles knowingly at him, as if to say, yeah, you are.