fandomtownies | Fandom Post Office, June 25 (Tuesday)

Those has really been some two weeks to come back to the island for, huh? Bucky had kept mostly to himself, to the sidelines, to the shadows.

(Apparently Steve had a dog now? Good for him.)

This week looked to be calmer. Though of course it was still fucking with his head, the way everything looked like the movies, all colors just gone. But still, it was calmer and quieter and he was walking around town just to make sure it continued not to be just the calm before the storm.

Did he have whims these days? Maybe finding himself walking into the post office was one those.

"Well!" exclaimed Éponine, emerging from the back room with a tray of letters in her hands. "I was wondering whether some strange creature last week might have eaten you. I'm glad to see that's not the case. Good day, Monsieur."

To call Bucky's expression a smile would've been a stretch, but he did offer a nod in greeting. "Didn't get eaten," he confirmed. A lot of the things in the last couple of weeks hadn't been all the way human but then, he wasn't either.

He made a sound that was half a huff, half a sigh. "The hell were these last two weeks, Éponine?"

Yeah. He remembered.

Éponine laughed at that, but it was a little too fragile and manic.

"D'you think I'd still be working here, if I were clever enough to know the answer to that question?" she asked, setting the tray of mail down on the counter. "Good lord! Nothing good, I'll tell you that. Seems the island's up to more of its old tricks than usual this summer, and it's an awful inconvenience."

That was one hell of an understatement there, Éponine.

This time, Bucky almost smiled, although even the ghost of it was still considerably on the mirthless side. But he was acting a little more -- or better put, he was acting a little less like he was forcibly putting up a front.

And it wasn't just that he appeared to have dropped pretending he wasn't that guy from before.

"One way to put it," he said. "I think I woulda gone for some stronger words, myself."

"So would I, only I'm trying to be polite while I'm at work," Éponine said with a chuckle, but she leaned forward to watch him for a moment, humming to herself.

"You're feeling a little more yourself these days, it seems, Monsieur."

Now that got a vaguely laugh-like huff out of him, complete with the edges of his mouth tilting upward as he cast his gaze downwards for a second. He inhaled through his nose as he looked up again, then exhaled it as a quiet sigh.

"I don't know if I would go that far." But Steve knew he was here, so the need for a shoddy cover was over. He looked aside again, shook his head, then looked at her again. "Didn't fool you one bit, did I?"

The grin Éponine gave him was almost smug, because she was awfully pleased with herself for having guessed correctly.

"Oh, for a moment or two you might have," she said cheerfully, "but I suspected, so no. You didn't really fool me at all."

"Man shows up with the letters of someone who looks exactly like him but claims not to be him, it's not that hard to put together." That might've even counted as teasing, if Bucky had been a livelier sort these days.

There were ways in which he was his old self, and ways in which he wasn't.

"Though, on this island..." He trailed off for a second, then shrugged. "I used to manage the candy store. For a bit a kid worked there, looked just like me." Except much angrier. Sorry, Flick! "So, it's possible, I s'pose. Just not probable."

Well, Éponine knew a thing or two about what it was like to not be as much of a lively sort as one used to be. It was entirely unreasonable to expect him to just go back to the way he was once.

"I remember him, yes," she said. "'s the only reason I thought it might be possible that you were someone else, but you're the only one with that face, came 'round here often enough. There's lots of people here who might look like someone else, but they're usually different enough in every other way."

She burst out laughing, for a second. "But wouldn't that have been a funny coincidence!"

The laugh felt abrupt, almost jarring, and yet completely fitting.

He half-smiled. Then he was quiet for a moment, feeling like some previous incarnation would surely have come up with a quip but he just came up dry. So.

"Sorry about lying."

The laugh was less jarring these days than it used to be. Might be because it was so often more genuine, and not a slightly desperate attempt to pretend she was all right.

"Oh, you don't have to apologize to me for that," Éponine replied, her tone light but serious. "We do what we've got to, sometimes, to get by, and one never really knows who can be trusted with a secret, after all."

She pulled a stack of letters from the tray and undid the rubber band to start sorting them out. In a matter-of-fact tone, she added: "But it's good you don't think you've got to hide from whatever it is you were hiding from, any more."

There didn't seem to be any pressing curiosity to the statement. Sometimes you really did have to lay low for a while, with plenty of valid reason. She knew that.

"Could say that," Bucky replied, noncommittal in his tone but greatful she wasn't trying to angle for information he wasn't willing to give.

Bucky was grateful for a lot of small things, really.

He was still hiding enough, anyway: the long sleeves and the thin gloves continued to be pretty unseasonable in late June.

But he wasn't thinking about his hands. He was watching hers. "I mean, small places like this aren't that great for hiding, anyway. Everyone's all up in everyone else's business, almost without meaning to."

"That's true enough," Éponine allowed. Yes, she'd noticed the gloves and the sleeves, and yes, she was curious. But it didn't always do to go poking around for answers directly, now did it? "Hard enough in a big city, so long's there's folks around who know what to look and listen for, but here? Good lord, if someone oversleeps one day and isn't getting coffee at the same time as you, you can't help but notice."

Setting the sorted envelopes aside, she started in on the next stack.

"Suppose there's something to be said for people choosing not to notice things, though one can't really count on that."

A few chatty people on the mainland had asked him directly. He'd implied he'd disfigured his hands in a war. Served the double purpose of shutting them up and giving him some grim joy in how it was both a lie and the truth at the same time.

"No," he agreed. "And if people are ignoring things on purpose, that doesn't mean they don't have a motive for it and it's not gonna come bite you in the a--" Guess something of the semi-well-raised Brooklyn boy bubbled up inside him, since he suddenly decided to re-work his wording. Except it was less a decision and more a sudden reflex. "Uh, that it won't haunt you later."

The pause and the reversal didn't escape Éponine, and a flash of amusement crossed her face.

"Too many clever folks 'round here," she remarked after humming a few bars of some old drinking song, "to assume at least some of them don't have their reasons. But it's nice that you're not hiding any more, I think. It's tiring, it is, trying to keep one's story straight."

There it was again, that huff of a sound Bucky made that was probably a laugh, just one that had seen much, much better days. A long time ago.

"Yeah." He shook his head, glancing down, clearly weighing any further words he might say. One gloved hand - the right one, that wasn't metal under the thin layer of fabric - came up to push his hair away from his face.

He didn't owe her an explanation, and she hadn't asked for one. But he sort of felt like giving one, anyway, even if it was vague. "Kinda came back to this island to put the story together, anyway."

Éponine looked up at him and nodded, a simple acknowledgment and thanks for the explanation (such as it was) at once.

"And d'you think you succeeded?" she asked lightly. "Seems you have, at least a bit."

Bucky shrugged as he dropped his hand again. "Don't know if it's a story that wants to be put together." Or one that should - there were a lot of blanks he would be more than content to leave that way. (Even if that was leaving them to fester. He knew.) "But yeah. Figured a chunk of it out, I think."

He remembered her name. Remembered living here, remembered employing Flick (and his Amazon of a girlfriend), remembered Steve bringing him that godawful 'slow senior' badge for his birthday...

"Not every story is worth telling from beginning to end, 'f you ask me," replied Éponine with a small shrug of one shoulder. "There's parts can be skipped, if you need. I used to make up bits of my own to fill in the blanks, sometimes."

Was that healthy? Not necessarily, but she'd spent too long preoccupied with just trying to survive to care too much about such things even now.

"Is it useful parts you remember, at least?"

"Yeah."

It felt so simple when he said it like that, didn't it? Sounded it, anyway. Not at all as messy as it really was.

His lips twisted into something faint and wry. "It's complicated."

"Of course it is," Éponine said with a laugh that was equal parts amused and rueful. "Isn't it always? Well, I can help you put bits of it together, if you like, or the parts I remember anyway, or ask around for you. I'm quite good at it."

She'd done that a lot back in Paris; not so much now, but she thought she still had the knack of it.

"I'll keep that in mind," Bucky replied, with a flicker of a lopsided smile. It was very small and slight, and gone all too soon.

He looked a lot sadder and wearier this time, even if he was trying to push it back. Guess that was the price for having his head on a little straighter.

"Think you got work to do," he added, nodding at the... letter, and everything else. "I should get outta your hair."

"As if you're any trouble at all, monsieur," Éponine said with a little laugh -- slightly broken sounding, as all of hers were by default -- and an expression much like she was scolding him for being absurd. "Good lord, it isn't as if you come in here making all sorts of unreasonable demands and expect me to drop whatever I'm doing and take care of them right away! You can stay if you like, I don't mind."

Not that she seemed like she was insisting in any way at all, just trying in some odd way to cheer him up.

Bucky paused. He looked like he was about to say something almost immediately, but then stopped himself.

When he offered, "I could help?" it didn't sound like that was what he'd meant to say at first. Also, he hoped that wasn't a stupid offer. Being able to tell what was and what wasn't still felt like a work in progress, most of the time.

"Pretty sure I can figure out sorting letters."

"If you like," Éponine said, nodding, and this was probably not supposed to happen, per regulations, but see if she cared. "It's simple enough, you see --" and she went into a quick explanation of what to look for and how to sort the envelopes.

"D'you recall how you used to come in here all the time?" she asked as well, after a moment. "I imagine you've seen me do this before, only I don't remember if I ever told you how it was done."

Bucky shook his head. "Think I was more concerned with just getting my letters and stuff sent," he said. "I was... I sent money back to Brooklyn. So it was a priority."

And boy, was it really something else to think that from her perspective, he'd been standing at this counter just a couple of years ago, sending cash to his ma, sending letters to Becky and to Steve.

"So that's what you were doing!" she exclaimed with a small laugh. "I remember you were awfully -- what's the word? Diligent, that's it. You were awfully diligent about it, more so than most I've seen. Almost more reliable than a calendar, you were."

She might have been exaggerating a touch there, but all in the name of friendly teasing. (Though it did make her think, for a moment and with a flash of guilt, of Cosette's mother sending money diligently to Montfermeil all those years, and the pretty new clothes she and Azelma would have, and Cosette never getting the benefit of so much as a sou from it all.)

"So it was a bit of a surprise when you just stopped coming round," Éponine added after a moment to flip through a few more pieces of mail and shake off those thoughts. "People come and go here all the time, that's not unusual, of course, but there's some things you can't help but notice, d'you know what I mean?"

"Small town," Bucky said, sort of echoing the earlier point about how you couldn't hide things here. Couldn't even disappear. He shrugged. Then rubbed at the back of his neck again. "Sorta skipped all my goodbyes, actually."

Steve had been too difficult to even think of, so in the end he'd just... left.

"I suppose I've done that a bit myself, so I can hardly fault you for it," Éponine mused, though to be fair it was much easier to disappear unnoticed in Paris, especially for someone like her.

"Still," she went on, in that playfully chiding tone that she must have picked up from Cosette, "you went and deprived me of one of my best customers."

"Sorry," Bucky replied, trying to match even a sliver of her playfulness, but failing miserably and hitting rueful instead. "A war needed me."

Ha ha.

"That's always how it is with people I know, it seems," Éponine said with a sigh, though it was mostly an amused one. "Though I think you're the only one I do know who came back."

Her father didn't count, since she still didn't believe he'd been anything more than a corpse robber.

"Not all of me," Bucky said, before his brain had a chance to intervene and tell him that as far as jokes went, it wasn't a great one.

Also that it wasn't one. No matter the wobbly humorous tone.

He cleared his throat and looked like he regretted saying that. And wanted to just -- move the fuck on, as quickly as possibly. "I mean... Sorry about all the wars. Can't be easy."

Éponine chuckled anyway, because no matter how much better adjusted she might be these days her sense of humor was always going to be on the macabre side, but it was brief and mostly kept to herself.

"I grew up in Paris almost two hundred years ago," she said with a too-cavalier laugh and vivid sensory memories -- the acrid smell of gunpowder, the echo of cannons reverberating off the walls in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, a musket ball shattering her hand at point blank range -- surfacing for a brief moment. "One gets used to it after a bit."

Not really, so she was just as willing to move on from the subject as he was. She would remember what he'd said, though.

Yeah, he didn't think anyone got used to it. He'd had people brainswashing him into apathy about it for over half a century and once it'd worn off, here he was.

Remembering gunshots and the fall and the snow and blood.

He breathed in just a little too sharply, then tried to relax. What did normal people talk about? He almost asked her about Paris, then set that aside for some later time. If there was to be a later time. Who knew? "Anyway," he said. "Guess being from back then means you're not getting as much of a feeling of being inside a movie, from this black-and-white thing, as I am."

"Hardly," Éponine said with a laugh that came easier this time. "Though I expect I might find this all much more amusing if I did. I've seen quite a few since I arrived, of course, but they've all been in color, I think."

"Didn't used to be, in my day." Technically, some of 'his day' had been in the 2010s but anyway. "Sort of keep expecting to round a corner and find Claudette Colbert."

Sometimes the pre-war, pre-Fandom memories came the easiest. And the frivolous ones.

"It was only ever the theatre in my day," Éponine said with a light (but still fractured) laugh. "If my brother could sneak us in, or get tickets off his actor friends, anyhow. Only I didn't like it so much, it was a lot of rowdy people, and not very nice. I'd much rather a movie, I think."

She tilted her head. "That was an actress in your time, then?"

"Oh, was she," Bucky replied, trying for playful and wistful. It came out a little rueful instead, but still, decent effort under the circumstances. "Don't know what the da-- the actresses are like in movies in this time, but she was something else."

He knew he probably didn't have to censor himself, talking to her: something in the back of his mind kept telling him she would've fit in fine on the Brooklyn streets of his youth. But he liked going with the impulse, anyway.

It felt human.

It was more than many people Éponine had known, who were fully human in at least a biological sense, could be bothered to do.

Though Éponine herself seemed amused by the effort.

"I wouldn't know, really," she said. "So long's the movies are entertaining enough, I don't think too much about things like that. I suppose I don't really know what to look for, to know."

Bucky managed a small shrug. It almost looked natural. "Might've just been that I saw her in... immodest dress, at a formative age."

Now there was something he didn't think about much, these days. Or at all. he huffed out another one of his vague laugh-like sounds.

"I don't know, I was never a big arts guy." He didn't think he'd been, anyway.

"Why, Monsieur Barnes," Éponine exclaimed in mock horror, laughing the whole time. "I wouldn't be surprised at all if that had something to do with your opinion."

It didn't seem to bother her, though.

"And that's all right. about the arts. They're all well and good, but they seem to make people awfully stuffy and boring."

Or possibly she had just met the wrong people, but this was an opinion largely formed from people's reactions to things such as a street girl lurking around outside of the Louvre.

There came that pause again. The same hesitation that he'd gone through a few moments ago.

He thought he should've just gone ahead talked more about art, how he didn't really understand much beyond what Stee drew, but... This time, the urge won out.

He glanced down at the counter.

"My name's Bucky."

There was something sheepish, almost apologetic about the way he said it.

Not a great tone for something he hadn't said since the forties, but it was what it was.

"Bucky," echoed Éponine, then repeated it again with a thoughtful expression like she was evaluating the way it sounded.

Then she nodded as if satisfied.

"It's a nice name," she decided. "Not one I've heard before, I think. D'you prefer I call you that, then?"

"Yeah."

Truh was, he didn't actually know, because he kept having moments where he wasn't sure he deserved a name, especially one that he could remember hearing with so many shades of emotion attached to it.

But that was probably why he craved it, too.

He looked awkward about it. "I... think I'd prefer it, yeah."

"All right then, Monsieur Bucky, if that's how you'd like it, that I can do," Éponine said brightly, and the honorific was just going to stay for now because some habits didn't really seem like they needed to be broken.

She sketched an elaborate little curtsy (too elaborate, really) and added, "Éponine, as I can't recall if you recall. That's me, I mean."

Bucky nodded. "I remember." What a loaded thing to say, and maybe that was why it was so quiet even though he hand't meant it to be.

There was a grimace behind his smile, somehow. Or his attempt at a smile.

He exhaled. "Think I might take my leave now, Miss Éponine." Socializing was exhausting. "Thank you for... everything."

Socializing was exhausting, she'd certainly agree to that, though perhaps she found different reasons for that than he did.

"I'm happy to help," she assured him, even though she wasn't entirely sure what she'd done to warrant gratitude. "And you've helped me here today, too, so don't think I'm not grateful for that, d'you hear? You take care, Monsieur Bucky, and you're welcome to stop by any time, even if it's not to do business. I'm always glad of the company."

Fandom Post Office, June 25 (Tuesday)

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