The Ghost of Christmas Goat
@claraxbarton promised me, that if I wrote something to go with the burning Swedish goat - specifically the bit with the archer - that she would, in return, write me the rest of the WW3some panty fic from the Three Sentence Meme prompt. I believe she mentioned 3k words.
I told her it would be a ficlet at best, and she still agreed.
So this nonsense is all her fault.
If my Tumblr gets purged tomorrow, I want this to be my legacy.
Bucky had discovered Tumblr.
No one bothered to warn him about the giant time suck that was the internet, or how you could rabbit-hop down a wormhole of infinite leaps of thought that somehow ended with a Reddit thread detailing the psychotic demands of an over-the-top bride who wanted her wedding party to wear soda hats.
He’d had to google soda hats, and that had only increased his confusion.
Still, he was figuring out this modern social media shit, and he was chasing silliness on the internet, and occasionally he found good porn, so overall, Bucky felt solidly okay about his life choices.
Steve loved texting too - he mostly loved trolling Stark with telegram-like messages, as though Steve had ever sent a telegram in his goddamn life - and Bucky enjoyed sending memes. And weird links. And the ability to send said memes and links and, okay, the occasional necessary modern question, at all hours of the day or night with no one’s objections.
He and Clint had developed a weird habit of sending each other the most ridiculous-sounding real news stories they could find. Occasionally Natasha participated by sending tiny links with no context, often to Russian news stories, which she seemed to think was a particularly funny inside joke.
So when Bucky scrolled across ‘Swedish Christmas Goat Burned Down for 27th Time’ on his Tumblr dash, he was sure he’d struck gold. Holiday-appropriate, utterly ridiculous, complete chaos, and one thousand percent true.
He group texted it to Natasha and Clint before he even got through the first two paragraphs.
Then he screenshot the bit about the archer and sent that along too.
2005: Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December
Bucky added a few laughing emojis and an archer that Stark had created just for the latest line of Stark phones.
Friends of yours? He asked.
The ellipsis that meant someone was typing started and stopped several times, long enough for Bucky to wonder if he’d actually offended Clint, something he’d previously thought impossible. Before he could decide whether or not to apologize, Natasha sent a picture.
It was clearly a photo of a photo and it showed-
It showed her and Clint, dressed up as Santa Claus and the goddamn Gingerbread Man, arms thrown around each other and grinning like the cats that ate the canary.
Pretty sure we’re still on the most wanted list.
