2/2) Fast forward to when Bucky is safe with Steve and they are trudging through. They make progress somedays and take two steps back on others. Sometimes, Bucky wakes to find this huge, warm, safe person in his bed, and the Winter Soldier breaks a little because he knows this isn’t real but if he doesn’t move maybe he can pretend for a little bit. If Steve ever found out, of course he’d want to burn Hydra to the ground, but convincing Bucky he’s real and that Bucky is free is his main concern.
He looks, he never touches.
He watches the rise and fall of Steve’s chest, the way his eyes flicker beneath closed lids while he’s dreaming, the minute twitches of his limbs as he starts to wake. He listens to the raspy ramble of Steve’s sleep-talking, the hitch in his breathing when he snores, and the only difference from memories of cold nights in their childhood is the missing wheeze in his chest. It should be grounding, it should be safe.
That’s why he only looks, never touches. Because if he reaches out to touch warm skin and his fingertips meet cold sheets then he’s sure he’ll lose it. He learned it early on, that he could watch the bright figure standing near him while he was injured, scared, sick, but if he reached out then it would melt away and take the comfort with it. That it was better to not know if Steve was real than confirm he wasn’t. That if the delusion was all he had, then like hell was he going to lose it.
So he looks, lets himself be comforted. And when Steve wakes he forces a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, because yesterday was bad and today is shaping up the same, and flinches when warm fingers wrap around his wrist.
Real fingers, solid and strong.
“I’m here.” Steve’s voice is rough, tired from the bad days and worse nights, but gentle as he guides Bucky’s hand to rest over his heart. His chest rises and falls, his heart beats, and he doesn’t disappear. “I’m real.”
“You’re here.” Bucky repeats, throat sore and eyes dry from being open all night, and finally curls into Steve’s arms.
Even if the hallucinations are just getting better, he’ll take it. He doesn’t care if Steve’s real anymore, as long as he’s here.
Tag: fic
Jellyfish, Alexander Pierce and Steve Rogers.
Jellyfish – A thousand little stings.
((i feel like kehinki wrote some tags that inspired this so here’s credit))
–
His mother had never liked the shortening Alex for Alexander. She would always tell him, after all, that he had been named after Alexander the Great, and when he’d been conquering half the world on behalf of Rome, no one had dared to call him by anything less than his full title.
Fortunately for her, Alex never stuck. More out of Alexander’s lack of grade-school popularity than any delusions of grandeur on his part, but so.
The power in a name and all that.
In 1928 Bucky Barnes sees his best friend choke down a glass of raw liver bigger than the size of his dad’s balled fist. It looks slimy. Bucky once saw a neighborhood cat maiming something unrecognizable and red, but cats are predators. He watches Steve’s small frame lurch through a suppressed heave. Something about it feels perverse. Steve’s no predator.
How often during Bucky’s Russian imprisonment do you suppose he passed through the hallways of that Siberian supersoldier training base, and glanced up at the silos that led to the top of the mountain.
How often did a glimmer of hope, the outline of an escape plan, flit through his broken mind.
How often did he imagine the impossible, acting of his own volition to activate the mechanism to open the blast door at the top of the silo, and climb out into the open air.
Maybe it wasn’t often – he wasn’t himself for long, his will to do anything except obey orders was a fleeting thing, fragile and soft and easily trod under jackboot. But surely it happened once, or twice, or half a dozen times over the course of so many decades. Who knows, maybe every waking minute, the smallest fragment of what was left of Bucky Barnes thought about climbing up, climbing out, into fresh air and freedom, into the light.
I don’t know that I’m worth all this to you.
And he’s been keeping a stranglehold on his panic since he and Steve climbed down together into this dark, dead Siberian base. He’s aggressively ignoring the familiar sound of his own footsteps echoing off frozen concrete and dusty, sterilized metal. He’s swallowing sour lumps of bile and frenzied nausea when they walk into the room with the conditioning chair, and his own empty cryogenic chamber.
(After he’d been conditioned, it was so much easier to focus on the mission. Everything in his head was tidier, less prone to fits of memory and conscience. To sit a spell in that chair, and have all of his human mess chipped and scraped away like so many barnacles from a bleeding warship.)
I know … but I did it.
Then the videocasette ends in static, and Bucky’s eyes burn with unshed tears, and Steve shouts “Get out of here!” How many times did Bucky hear that same voice in his broken dreams, in that cryogenic tube, in his waking nightmares; that voice coming to his rescue, helping him to rescue himself. That single phrase from Steve brings all those dormant whispers from his past roaring to life – those fruitless, unrealized urges to climb toward the light, to earn his freedom.
I don’t know that I’m –
Bucky doesn’t make for the front door of the Siberian base; instead, instinct drives him to the silo. Light pours through the opening blast door, cold air washing over him like water from the Potomac. Except this time he isn’t hauling Steve’s body. This time he’s hounded by the sound of battle at his heels, the sleek roar of Tony’s suit and the shrill clang of metal as Steve guards his escape.
Fettered with the weight of decades of imprisonment, buoyed by hope that never quite guttered to ashes, Bucky scrambles up the metal scaffolding toward the sky like a man saving himself from drowning. The harder he kicks, the further he jumps each time, maybe he can shake the shackles from his feet.
He grasps the lip of the silo just as Tony’s missile reaches the gate mechanism, and the blast door slams shut.
I remember all of them.
i want steve and bucky’s first kiss to be after bucky comes out of cryo. he comes stumbling out, and steve’s there, steve’s always there, catching him with arms around his waist and soft calming not-words. and bucky just sags, shivering a little as his body really starts to wake up and realise it’s been cold for so long. then the pain, bubbling under the surface, and he’s used to it, he can ignore it, but the heat of steve against him is making it worse, not that he’d ever give it up
then his fingers are digging into steve’s shirt, clutching tight to the skin and muscle underneath, probably hurting steve but steve doesn’t even flinch. just keeps murmuring wordlessly, rubbing a hand up bucky’s back, down his spine. over and over until bucky’s shivering turns to shaking. then steve realises his shirt’s wet where bucky’s got his face tucked in, and holds him tighter, both arms so tightly wrapped around him that his fingers are nearly white from the pressure.
then bucky. bucky doesn’t even hesitate, just surges up and mashes his mouth against steve’s, and steve’s shocked at first but quickly gets with the program as bucky clutches at his shoulders, fingers bruising against steve’s skin. steve hauls him in closer, kisses bucky for all he’s worth, gasping into his mouth, teeth clicking, and bucky’s making these hurt noises, but clings when steve starts to pull back in concern.
eventually they’re just breathing into each others’ mouths, and the room is empty, scientists having left when they realised bucky was crying, and eventually bucky pulls back just a little, eyes wary but lips curling slightly into a hesitant smile. hi he says quietly, unsure.
hi steve responds, smile spreading over his face, before his fingers dig into bucky’s hips slightly and he adds i missed you.
Imagine Bucky eyeing Steve’s paintings, the attention he lavishes on every detail, the way he loses himself in bringing a piece to life. One day, Bucky asks Steve to paint his body.
Appreciating Steve’s
art was weird because sometimes it felt like it was an exercise in appreciating
Steve himself. It was easy to love Steve despite his temper or righteousness
but sometimes it was harder to look at his paintings and say “Yeah, I get
it.”In fact, nine times out of ten, Steve’s paintings
didn’t make any sense to Bucky at all. Sometimes he’d paint people, faces of
loved ones from this life and the last, and for a while Bucky loved those best.
Most other times, though, he’d cover canvas after canvas in big explosions of nonsensical
color. Sure they were pretty, sometimes, but what kind of sense did a blur of
blue and ochre make.Once, Bucky asked him, “What is it s’pposed to be?”
Maybe the sky or the ocean? But why all the yellow?Steve just stared at the canvas, looked back at Bucky,
then back to the canvas. He shrugged.Maybe Bucky just wasn’t cultured enough? Sometimes
he’d flip through Steve’s glossy, expensive art books, but really Bucky was
just in it for the tragic backstories. Sure, Francis Bacon was kinda cool
carrying on with a boyfriend who was hands down bad news, but he didn’t really
see why that made his blobby, half-baked paintings art, let alone worth writing
a book about.Seemed that he and Francis Bacon’s boyfriend were on
the same page there.Hell, sometimes Steve made it just plain tough to take
it seriously. He had a box of latex gloves now and occasionally he’d prep the
canvas, set things up, pull on some gloves, squeeze out some paint and just
smear it all over the canvas with his hands. No pallet, no brushes, no finesse.“No clean up, neither,” Steve told him cheekily,
snapping off the soiled gloves and tossing them into the trash.Bucky’s feelings aside, he liked watching Steve work.
Especially now that he didn’t get all finicky and nervous like he did when he
was still learning. Sometimes he’d just forget Bucky was even there. Other
times, he’d drag Bucky to where the light was best, set him up sans shirt, and
paint some part of him. The slope of his back as he sat hunched over. The cut
of his jaw and the curve of his ear – the one with that bump on it that Bucky
hated. The uneven tilt of his shoulders. The blinding glint of his metal arm,
painted in thick cords of white as it caught the sun.Each time Steve paints him, he blows Bucky’s mind a
little more. And that’s a testament to Steve’s artistic prowess, not just
Bucky’s vanity, thanks very much. That’s what mirrors are for.One day, he’s lurking over Steve’s shoulder, watching
him contemplate making the purple blob on the yellow canvas bigger or more
purple or whatever when he blurts out “Can you paint me?”
Deep in December
So, this popped into my head this afternoon – first as Captain America: Civil War meta – but then it morphed into a ficlet. If anyone feels like expanding on it, be my guest… (Civil War Spoilers, natch)
Captain America: Civil War Fic: Peaceable Skills
I got to talking with @feanorinleatherpants about what Bucky was up to before the beginning of CA:CW, and I got so attached to my ideas that it turned into fic? 1600 words of CACW spoiler Bucky gen under the cut.
It’s not a happy ending.
It takes so much out of him, so much, but it’s not his choice to make and he thinks he can hear a sharp, British voice snap at him from the darkness, ‘Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice,’ and his throat closes up because she, too, has left him. Not like he’s ever had her, not really, but it was a glimmer, a glance, a – something.
This. This is different. This is real and red and blood hot and all consuming, like he’s 16 again and he feels his heart stuck in his throat when his palms run down two day’s worth of stubble. Bright blue eyes, so quick to smile.
They’re darker now. And heavy. And he can’t do anything – he’s tried and he can’t protect him, he can’t fix him, he can’t undo what’s been done to him.
It’s not a happy ending because even if Bucky is alive, even if he’s managed to snatch him away from the government and from Zemo and from Tony – he’s not safe. He won’t be. Not for awhile. And Steve can’t promise him that, and he would die rather than lie to him, not now, not ever again, and he just wants five more minutes, just a beat, just a moment where they can be –
He’s sure. He’s sure of it, and the days and nights he spends with Wakandan doctors and under Tchalla’s counsel only cement his resolve. They can’t take out what Hydra put in him. But they can –
He doesn’t want to say it. The words feel hard in his mouth, too big, too sharp. He doesn’t ask because he doesn’t know how. Bucky doesn’t look at him as he steps in the crystalline white chamber and the glass sizzles closed. He looks up and sighs and closes his eyes and he stares at Bucky, a desperation that’s alive in his belly, but their eyes never meet and in a matter of moments he’s asleep.
Asleep in the ice, and he shivers, his spine locking under Tchalla’s heavy gaze.
He moves on autopilot. He speaks and says the right things – he hopes. The forest is impenetrable, and Wakanda is an isolationist country. It all makes sense. He should be grateful.
Bucky’s alive. Bucky made a choice. Bucky is –
not there.
Alone, he watches the sun set behind the dark black panther statue rising above the royal palace. He doesn’t move, and nobody asks him to.
When the only light comes from the cryostasis chamber, he turns and steps closer. Lies his forehead against the glass, and lets the tears fall.
It’s not a happy ending.
Fic Snippet
So @samtalksfunny and I are thick in the weeds, writing our Stucky Big Bang, the Ghost Army AU that some of y’all have heard me talk about. I don’t wanna give away too much of the plot, but we’re too goddamn pleased with ourselves NOT to share a little preview.
In the course of researching our first big combat section, which is the battle for Monte Cassino, we discovered that there was an actual real life soldier bear present. Obviously we had to write about it.
–
The battle for Monte Cassino lasts nine days. Clark’s swift return from the road to Rome drives a wedge between the Germans’ line of resupply and the soldiers who had swarmed over the ruined abbey. Turns out they were out of shells.
They don’t see most of it – Phillips orders them swiftly out of combat and back to the job they’re supposed to be doing. They listen at a distance to the sound of guns and other men dying, heads bent over their own particular tasks. A whole world of soldiers had been ordered for when the Americans abandoned Monte Cassino to fill in the gaps left behind: Gurkha Rifles from Nepal, Maoris from New Zealand, engineers from South Africa, two whole divisions of Poles, and the road must be cleared for them to arrive safely.
Rogers and Dugan steal away each night to take down road signs and put up false ones, and spy on the Germans as they shuffle troops across the Gustav line. To keep their feathers from ruffling around Cassino, Jim and Gabe take to the radios, casting dummy signal traffic for the Nazis that a seaborne landing is being planned, north of Rome. From Carter’s double agent, they receive word that the 26th and 90th Panzer divisions have been quietly ordered to the coast.
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