Sometimes it’s the most difficult thing, coming home. They both learn that, in their own ways. (In the end, Bucky comes back to Steve. In the end, it is all that matters.)
Steve’s unending faith in his best friend was beginning to look less like hope and more like fantasy. When they’d caught the Soldier – in a firefight that still gave Sam nightmares – the only thing the man seemed to recall was how to hit exactly where it hurt.
Four months later, Barnes still refused to speak English. Refused to heed anything but Steve’s voice.
So, all in all, it was not a great time for Hydra to attack New York. All in all, Sam really wished they’d just killed him, instead of turning Captain America into a baby.
Bucky feels fairly confident when he decides not only is this the Worst Day Ever, but there is no way he can feel worse than right now. You would think that by now, he’d know things can always get worse.
As if getting falsely accused of bombing the UN, having his reunion with Steve go a million times worse than anticipated, and becoming the Winter Soldier again for a brief spell wasn’t enough, Bucky gets to relive it all… over and over again.
“And this is the thing, Steve. I would rather relive this day for eternity than watch them win and you die, or see you be enslaved to them the way I was.”
Sooooo recently I decided to clean up my subscriptions on AO3 to get rid of fics that were finished, fics that I’ve read and forgot to unsubscribe from, fics that hadn’t updated since 2014… During that spring cleaning, I also found WIPs that I absolutely love, but that either update unregularly, take a long time to update, haven’t updated in a while… you know the drill 😛 These are all amazing fics and I wanted to give them some love!
If you have read them and enjoyed them, or if you happen to read them for the first time after seeing this post, I encourage you to leave comments on them! Please be nice and respectful; do not demand updates, but don’t hesitate to tell the author that you enjoyed their fic and that you would be happy if it updated 🙂
So here it is! Tell me what you think about this type of post and if you would like me to talk more about WIPs 🙂
Steve gets out of the hospital in two days, but just barely. “I’m fine,” he tells Sam, Nurse Eunjung and the phalanx of doctors assigned to make sure Captain America didn’t bleed out and die and get bad PR all over their nice clean hospital. “I have an advanced healing factor. It’s fine. See? I’m standing.”
“That is not standing,” Sam tells him.
“You’re bending the IV stand,” Nurse Eunjung adds pointedly. “Let go and sit down, they don’t grow on trees.”
aka Steve and Bucky’s Global Honeymoon Revenge World Tour.
Hydra has risen from the abyss, bent on conquering the world’s oceans and all who dwell within. A small faction of seafolk reached out to mankind for help, but were never heard from again. Captain Steve Rogers and the crew of the Americus have set sail on a mission to find out why, and to free their new allies from Hydra’s merciless tyranny. Everything changes when the crew captures one of Hydra’s soldiers, a young Delfin with no name, who ends up stealing the Captain’s heart.
He’s shorter than Steve by a long shot, standing alone on the side of the road. His eyes cut through the darkness, staring directly up at Steve. He can’t be older than twenty.
And he’s holding a thumb out.
Steve makes a split-second decision and slams his foot on the brake.
(Or: the dirty trucker AU that approximately two people asked for.)
Written for the capkink meme; “To the Winter Soldier, there are basically three kinds of people in the world: superiors, mission support, and targets. He doesn’t have the context to understand things like friendship. So what he sees in the Smithsonian exhibit and what little he remembers or feels about his past, he interprets in that light. He thinks that Steve must have been his handler during World War II. That the reason he couldn’t kill Steve and the reason he was smiling in the museum photos was because Steve was a good superior who treated him well (or at least didn’t hurt him like Pierce and Rumlow, which to him might be the best he can imagine).
Thinking he understands the situation, he decides to report to Steve. Cue misunderstandings, confusion, and heartache for both of them.”
Steve crouched down again, slowly, so he was on the same level as Bucky. “You remember me?” he asked desperately.
Bucky looked down at the portal remote Steve still held, then narrowed his eyes when he met Steve’s. “You let some yahoo experiment on you again, didn’t you? Some mad scientist said, ‘hold my beer,’ and you pushed the button, right?”
Do not read this without reading the first story, you will be so lost holy shit. (Part 2 of Dishonor)
There is a crossover fic with characters from the Dishonor On Your Cow verse and it is this one below!
Tentacle Monster Steve is captured by Hydra. They send in the Winter Soldier with a bull whip to break him, but as far as Steve’s concerned the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen walked in to his cell and started waving a sexy black tentacle at him. It’s love at first sight.
When Steve’s dad is diagnosed with cancer, Steve returns to his childhood home to support his mom – a small town called Gold Cliff, Colorado. Ten years before, he left Gold Cliff behind him, left his no-longer-best-friend Bucky Barnes behind him, with the intention of never seeing him ever again. But Bucky Barnes crash-lands back into his life nonetheless, long-haired and one-armed and haunted, keeping secrets from day one.
Filled with self-loathing and millennial angst, they agree to a mutually beneficial sexual relationship to blow off steam.
Steve should have known better than to think he could ever put Bucky Barnes behind him.
“You can’t be my date,” Steve shook his head, concerned at the fact he’d almost let himself consider it for a half second, “you don’t even know me.”
Bucky wiggled his eyebrows and his voice did that purring thing that turned Steve’s insides into jelly. “I could get to know you.” ________
After finding himself suddenly single, Steve can’t bring himself to face his school reunion alone; especially knowing his school nemesis will be there.
When a handsome flight attendant offers to be his fake boyfriend for the weekend, it’s almost too good to be true.
Steve can’t turn down an offer like that, right?
AKA The Fake Fake Relationship AU that no one asked for.
I was lucky enough to partner with the lovely Buckities for her amazing SBB story. I ended up in the hospital last week so I hadn’t been able to post for the BB itself, but I wanted to share with you this beautiful tale of growth and healing in ways we least expect it. If you are a fan of fake realities and domesticity (until it’s not), I suggest reading this amazing story. I hope you love it as much as I did! I’m still inching my way along all the amazing monsters all these amazing authors and artists have created, and this one was the first I read. I’m beyond grateful to have been a part of it, though it’s more like fanart now than a collaboration haha. Anyway, please give it a read! It’s definitely worth it 🙂
Bucky lives in a sleepy town, shares a house with his should-be-boyfriend Steve, and helps Wanda with her crafts. He likes hanging out with Clint the owner of the animal shelter, and drinking Natasha’s delicious coffee at the bakery. But there is something off about this life that Bucky can’t quite place; Tony Stark dislikes him for no apparent reason, his dreams are too strange to understand, and his left arm occasionally glints under the light. A series of strange events clue Bucky in on the fact that maybe their lives aren’t what they seem…
Depictions of violence/implied torture, hallucinations, extreme emotional/mental distress
James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers
James “Bucky” Barnes, Steve Rogers, mentions of Hydra characters
6,044
In the dark of the night Bucky longs for closeness and a hand to hold in his own, someone to touch him gently or even to hit him, playfully, in that rough and caring way that belonged just to the two of them. Silent tears soak into the fabric of his cot. It’s something he has learned to do here, something he didn’t know could be done: crying, without movement or sound, without a change in breathing. He can’t even say that he is sad.
Because he certainly doesn’t wish for Steve to be here. God—when he thinks of it, in the moments when he can think, Bucky shudders with horror at the thought. Steve, in a place like this. No matter what the scientists told him, no matter how much of a hero Steve thinks he is, Bucky doesn’t want him here. Doesn’t want him to know this.
But when he feels the empty space beside him, inside him, he’ll be damned if there’s anything he wouldn’t give for just a heartbeat’s warmth.
This actually happened in some of the cartoons! I gasped out loud when I saw it for the first time. (Go to about 10 minutes in for the full scene.) I thought I’d do something a little different, because while I love Erik in the First Class movies, I always wanted a happier ending for him…
The Howling Commandos, as a forward team focused on Hydra, hadn’t liberated many camps; the ones they had were Hydra slave labor camps, where the men were, if not well-fed, then at least not the gaunt, barely-alive prisoners they’d heard about from Red Army soldiers and Allied units.
This camp was different; at the heart of it was some kind of lab. When Steve battered down the last reinforced door, he found a man holding a gun to the head of a young boy.
“I’ll kill him,” the man said. Steve didn’t bother with an answer; the shield took the man’s head off before he could threaten the kid again.
Still, in that second before death, Steve had seen the man’s finger spasm on the trigger, and felt the thickness in the air when the trigger wouldn’t move. He looked at the boy, looked at the body, and had a sense of destiny resettling itself in the world.
“Was he the camp commander?” he asked the boy, who nodded, huge-eyed. “Commander…Shaw?”
The boy nodded again. He turned and pulled Steve’s now bloody shield out of the concrete wall like it was nothing. Then, with narrowed eyes, he floated it across to him, through the air, without touching it.
Steve took the shield out of the air, shook off what he could, put it on his back, and said, “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” the boy said, in trembling English.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Erik Lensherr.”
Steve had seen a lot of things in the war; nothing like this, but there had been signs of strange experiments in Hydra labs. This was comparatively harmless.
“Well, I’ll make you a deal, Erik,” he said. “I won’t tell what I saw here just now, and you help me close this place down. Then we’ll take you to HQ and get you a hot meal. Sound good?”
Erik nodded, then offered, “They knew you were coming. They destroyed all the records.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “Come on.”
In the convoy, bringing the prisoners out of the camp, Steve brought Erik up to the cab of the lead truck, and put him in next to Bucky at the wheel.
“Who’s this?” Bucky asked.
“Erik,” Steve said. “He’s riding with us.”
“Sprichts du English?” Bucky asked.
“Yes,” Erik replied. “I can speak. English, German, Yiddish, some Russian. Good interpreter. I can work for Allies?”
“How old are ya?” Bucky asked.
“Sixteen,” Erik said.
“You are twelve,” Bucky told him.
“I’m just small,” Erik replied.
“Yeah, because you’re twelve,” Bucky insisted. “Well, we’ll make sure the folks handling the refugees take good care of y – “
“No, he’s coming with us,” Steve said.
“What?”
“Erik’s coming with us to HQ. We could use an interpreter. And he’s small enough to make a good spy. He’s had enough of camps, ain’t ya, kid?” he asked, and Erik nodded.
“You wanna join the allies, huh?” Bucky asked.
“I go with Captain America,” Erik announced.
“Yeah, that’s what I said, and now I know better,” Bucky replied, but he was grinning. “Fine, on your own head be it. Sixteen my ass,” he said to Steve.
Steve took off his helmet and plopped it onto Erik’s head. “Sorry, got a new sidekick now,” he told Bucky, who laughed.
Years later, when a magazine asked Erik Lensherr why he agreed to become Captain America after the disappearance of Steve Rogers, he said, “Steve took a terrified twelve-year-old Jewish kid out of a slave labor camp, gave him a helmet, and told him he had power. I believed him. Turns out he was right.”
ALSO IMAGINE MAGNETO AS CAPTAIN AMERICA WITH THE SHIELD. HOLY CRAP. 😀
I had a dream last night that I was writing a sequel to this in which Erik is on the train when they’re going after Zola, and manages to yank Bucky back up into the train by the metal snaps and buckles on his uniform. So Bucky is part of the assault on Schmidt’s fortress, and he and Steve go down in the ice together, and are thus brought out of the ice together in the sixties.
And they’re in a SHIELD conference room waiting to have what the HELL HAPPENED explained to them when they see through the glass wall Captain America and a guy in a blue jacket with a sniper rifle walking through SHIELD, and Steve is like “….TINY ERIK LENSHERR?” and Bucky meanwhile is like “And who the fuck are you?” to the young guy in the blue jacket and Erik’s like “Uhhhh this is my sidekick I’m training, his name is Tony, you may remember his dad…”
Also there was a bit where they went to Westchester and Charles was like “You really should pick a mutant name, all the kids have them and it sets a good example” and Erik’s like
Erik: I’m already Captain America, can’t that be my mutant name? Charles: It’s your name, Erik, you get to pick it. Please don’t pick Captain America. But I don’t approve mutant names for other people. Erik: That’s a terrible policy. You let that one kid name himself Asskicker. Charles: We’re working on it, Bobby has a troubling sense of humor. Erik: Uh okay lol my name is….MAGNEEEEETOOOOO” *wiggles his fingers menacingly* Charles: *rubs forehead*
DAMMIT
Also I changed Shaw to Schmidt because apparently that was his alias in First Class, and I may wander off into an AU where Johann Schmidt and Karl Schmidt were brothers.
I rewatched bits of First Class for this and I am once more reminded how I would watch an entire movie that was nothing but Erik Lensherr running around the world in a sharp suit fucking up Nazis.
Anyway here’s Wonderwall.
***
Erik had been reasonably well-fed and looked after in Schmidt’s lab, but he hadn’t let his guard down once; the entire time he was there he’d eaten only what he was giving and usually not all of that, never wanting to have indigestion or a full stomach when he didn’t know what would happen from one minute to the next. Schmidt had been…volatile.
But Steve, giant, smiling Steve with his white star and his shield, had killed Schmidt in front of him, unkillable Schmidt. The shield had a strange feel to it; for some reason Schmidt hadn’t been able to absorb its energy the way he had other attacks.
Schmidt was dead and Erik was free, and just from listening to the soldiers Erik could tell the tide of the war was turning.
When they reached HQ, it turned out to be a collection of sturdy tents, and Steve sent Bucky (Erik hadn’t decided whether to trust Bucky yet) off to report to someone. Then he led Erik straight to the mess tent and started piling food on a tray for them both.
“No – that’s got pork,” he said, when Erik reached for the beans. Erik widened his eyes.
“Are you – ?” he asked.
Steve shook his head. “I had friends in the Jewish neighborhoods growing up,” he said. “And the Jewish fellas in the unit talk. You can’t get real Kosher in the army, but don’t eat the beans, they got salt pork in ‘em.”
Erik nodded soberly. He probably would have taken a bullet for Steve Rogers just then.
Okay but honestly do you guys know how often I think about those little gray hairs in Bucky’s beard in Civil War? DO YOU??
Do you know how often I think about him going to look in a mirror, maybe during their stay in Wakanda before he goes back on ice, and maybe he’s thinking about shaving it off, maybe he wants to stop looking like, uh, how did that one post put it, “the shiftiest sad hobo in all of Romania”? And like, he’s about to get his face all lathered up when all of a sudden he leans in a takes a closer look, and is absolutely floored by the fact that some of the hairs are gray. Because sometimes he feels ancient, like he’s lived a thousand more lifetimes than any human being should, but more often than not he feels like he hasn’t lived any sort of life at all, that he’s been cheated out of the life he should’ve had, cheated by the war, cheated by HYDRA, and now cheated by his own traitorous mind. The last time he was really Bucky, he was round-faced, clean-shaven, well-groomed and pressed and immaculate. And now here he is, aging, of all things, like a person—
So he grits his teeth and lathers up his face and puts the blade to his jaw, but he just…can’t do it. Steve finds him liked that, face covered with soap, head bowed over the sink, the razor hanging limply in his hand.
“Buck?” Steve asks. “You need some help?”
Bucky shakes his head, meeting Steve’s eyes in the reflection of the mirror. “We’re really old, Steve,” he says.
Steve shrugs. “I’m just a spring chicken compared to you, grandpa.” He frowns when Bucky doesn’t smile, puts a hand on his back. “Hey.”
“I look old.” Bucky shakes his head at his reflection, as if doing so might erase it and leave a fresh one in its wake. “I look tired.”
“Vain as ever, huh?” Steve gets a little twitch of the lips at that, knocks his hip into Bucky’s for encouragement. “What’s this all about?”
Bucky blinks at his reflection. “Do you have any gray hair?”
Steve laughs. “Buck, I got my first gray hair at thirteen.”
“What?”
“Well, to be fair, they weren’t an easy thirteen years.”
Bucky runs a hand through his hair. “I was afraid maybe we…couldn’t. Maybe we…didn’t…we weren’t going to—”
“Me too. But I think we can. We just do it a little slower than everyone else.”
“Well what the hell is that serum good for, if we ain’t gonna live forever?”
Steve laughs, a quick, surprised sound, and pats Bucky’s shoulder. “You wanna live forever?”
“Fuck no,” Bucky breathes. “But I wanna live…some.” He touches his face gingerly. “Enough to have earned these.”
Steve looks at Bucky for a moment. “Ma used to say a little gray hair just meant you’d put some miles on your soul. That you’d seen and done some things, and were ready to face it all, armed with the strength of your experiences.”
Bucky huffs a bitter laugh. “Hell, I must be indestructible then.”
“Must be,” Steve says with an earnest smile, and Bucky has to look away, bow his head, to keep Steve from seeing the tears that spring to his eyes.
“You think I still got a soul?” he asks quietly.
Steve grabs a washcloth and starts wiping the soap from Bucky’s face. “Miles and miles.” He takes his thumb, brushes gently at the corner of Bucky’s eye. “You’d look good with some laughter lines, too, old man.” He dabs a little bit of shaving cream on Bucky’s nose. “We’ll see what we can do about that.”
He
itches. Under his skin, he feels strange–not in the constant, aching way that
indicates that everything is functioning normally—so strange, as if his
colorless skin has turned thick and brittle; as if with every labored movement
he makes, it grows closer to splitting down his spine like a seam and spilling
out the restless growth that he feels crawling out of his bones, coiling in his
muscle and scratching raw at the parts of his interior that are neither flesh
nor bone.
In a divergence from the canon storyline, Hydra experiments with occult legends of a more demonic bent. When Bucky is captured in Azzano, something more insidious than a knock-off super soldier serum is done to him, but the full effects take some time to completely set in. Bucky struggles with building impulses and an increased libido while trying to keep his interest in Steve from boiling over and ruining Steve’s chance at the life he deserves.
*_____* Oh my goodness! Thank you soooo much, @vvinterdumpling for the rec to @thestuckylibrary ! That means SO much to me!
I’m thrilled you’ve been enjoying Dragging you Down so much! I’ve been having Soooo much fun writing it and have a lot planned >3
Ahhh that makes me so happy to know that you enjoy writing it almost as much as I enjoy reading it! Because that amount quantified is unparalleled… I’m sorry but my love for your work cannot be tamed.
Dragging you Down is beautifully written and the characters are so fleshed out and I just love it so much- it makes me just squeal a little every time I see an update. It’s gonna hurt soon, I can tell, but I can only hope there’s gonna be some good things, too… I hope Steve and Bucky can figure some things out before the inevitable happens >__< Those poor boys.
I just love the spin you put on Hydra’s research, and I love how it connects back to the Nazi party’s historical infatuation with the supernatural. Given your plot in a supposedly non-magical world, you are handling your subject in a careful and believable way. I do wonder if Bucky was attracted to men before his experiments (with his healthy dose of internalized homophobia) and Zola just made his body need it in order to survive (with a lack of a better way of describing a succubus/incubus), or if the experiments are creating new thoughts and feelings from the supernatural nature of the demon inside of him.
Every chapter opens up so many new doors, I can’t consume this story fast enough. Thank you so much for sharing it with us!! This kind of turned into a gushing ramble about your story but I’ve been bottling this up for a while!
An Excerpt: Bucky stretched, toes hooking over the end of his bed and arms out to his sides to avoid the headboard. He relaxed, popped his jaw, stared up at the ceiling for a long moment as he woke up fully. Then he was pushing upright, grabbing the pile of mostly clean clothes off his desk chair, and pulling them on. A swipe of deodorant, then he was grabbing his bathroom gear.
Within five minutes he was out the door, closing it behind him carefully as to not wake his teammates. He readjusted the bag over his shoulder, fingers stroking the strap lightly as he walked across the campus. His boots crunched on the thin layer of frost, and there was no one else around. Not even the crazy jocks on the football team were out for their run yet.
Bucky checked his watch as he reached the rink, a big, hulking building that had been more than a little intimidating when he’d first stood in its shadow. He pushed open the doors at exactly four thirty am, after fumbling with his access card for a few precious seconds.
He didn’t bother going to the locker room. He didn’t need anything from there, not this time. He just kept walking, past the rooms, through the tunnel, fingers brushing along the stick rack as he passed. Then he was out on the boards, and he could almost feel the tension leaving him. It’d been a long. Fucking. Week.
He had his lace-tying down to thirty seconds, and barely felt the tight cut of the nylon against his fingers as he checked, then checked again. Guards off. Final lace check, and he was out.
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