AO3 | BuckyMel Community Ted Lasso, BuckyMel, Shrinking… and occasionally, existential crisis. Any ads you see on the blog are not supported and/or promoted by me :)
Summary: Mel’s just trying to survive another "New Avengers" meeting. Bucky’s just trying to get under her skin. They argue, they bicker, they definitely don’t care.
Except she still has his business card.
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Mel Gold (Thunderbolts, 2025)
Word Count: 730 words
Warnings: None
GIF by: @calisverse (Thank you!)
“Okay. Any questions?”
“Yes. Why does he get a new suit—" Walker jabbed a finger toward Bucky. “—and I still have to wear this, Mel?”
“Questions related to the press conference.”
Walker opened his mouth. Then quickly shut it.
“I have one.”
“Yes, Yelena.”
“How do you and Bucky know each other?”
Mel inhaled and stole a quick glance at Bucky. “Ask him.”
“Bucky, why—"
“Not right now,” Mel interrupted Yelena, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Again, any questions about the press conference.”
Mel scanned the room as everyone shook their heads.
“Yes.” Except Bucky. Of course.
“What do I tell them when they ask me how I went from trying to impeach Valentina to working for her?”
“Tell them you changed your mind,” Mel offered.
“I didn’t.”
Mel rolled her eyes. “You were bored of being a congressman?”
“Yes. But I’m not saying that.”
She resisted the urge to groan. Even as she heard chairs scraping and footsteps leaving.
“How about you ‘found a better way to help people’?”
“No.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Is there any chance you’ll say yes?”
“If you ask me if I can skip this conference.”
She sighed. “That’s not happening.” Then got up, accidentally kicking her bag in the process. “Shit.”
She kneeled over, trying to grab onto the rolling lipstick when she saw his metal hand snag a piece of paper that had fallen from her bag. “Hey, that’s mine!”
“No. It’s actually mine.” He flipped the paper in his hand. “My business card. You kept it.”
“Well, you gave it to me.” She got up, flinging her bag onto the table with a thud, as she threw her lipstick in it.
“That was two months ago.”
“What, it’s got an expiration date on it?”
He pulled the card away as she tried to reach it. “No. But I’m sure you got a phone to save the number in.”
“What do you want?” She tried to reach for the card again. “Give me that!”
“Skip the conference.”
She huffed. “No. And just trash that card. I don’t need it.”
“You did call it trash. Hurt my feeling. But you still kept it. So it seems you do need it.”
“Feeling? Singular?” She tightly shut her eyes. “Why are you doing this?”
“To annoy you.” He smirked.
“Okay. I get it. You hate me.” She exhaled slowly. “But let me do my job!”
“I don’t hate you.” He shook his head, settling further into the chair. “And you are doing your job. Convincing me proves you’re competent. I’m very stubborn.”
“I really hate my life.”
“Yeah, so do all of us on this team.”
She pursed her lips and sat back down. “Okay. What do you want, Bucky?”
“For you to realize you’re working for the wrong person.”
“You think I’m an idiot? You do, don’t you?” Her elbows came to rest on the table. “Set your nobility aside for one second and you’ll see that maybe this is exactly what I wanted.”
“To work for the bad guy?”
“We’re all bad guys. The entire team is made up of bad guys.” She glared at him. “But you’re still doing good. While, wait for it… working for the bad guy!”
“Oh. Right.”
“Yeah. Oh. Bucky, I know you don’t trust Val. Or me. But, I know, as well as you, that you now get to do good, much quicker, because you’re working for Val.”
“But we don’t—”
“I know. I know you don’t listen to her. Or do what she says. But you have the monetary backing, the connections now. Maybe that’s why I’m still here. Working for her. Why is it so hard for you to believe?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Yeah.” Mel let out a long breath. “As for why I still have your card. It was nice to have someone show up when I needed them. Guess I just wanted to remember that.”
Bucky stilled at that. “Huh.”
He slid the card back toward her.
She took the card back. Didn’t look at him when she slipped it into her bag. “Surely you understand what that feels like.”
He didn’t look away from her, but his eyes did widen a fraction. “You know you can still call me. Anytime.”
need y'all to know that most academics have publicly searchable email addresses and this not only makes their day but they can put nice emails in their giant packets for applying for jobs or tenure. "hi i read your paper for a class and it was very helpful, im at xyz college and the class is blah with professor blah" is sufficient and ENORMOUSLY helpful
quick tip from someone who has been in fan spaces for 20 years: being enthusiastic about your rarepair and making your own stuff/engaging your fellow rarepair shippers will ALWAYS work better than yelling at people who enjoy a more popular ship about how bland their ship is
i know most things in the pitt are very intentional, but naming the chill, unflappable, and musculoskeletal-ultrasound-proficient resident crus henderson is so clever!!
crus is the literal medical term for leg or pillar-like anatomical structures
and then having this man use ultrasound to identify limb injuries just makes it so much better
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
So basically what this is going to mean is that somebody can spend hours and hours putting together a post, and when someone reblogs it and adds anything at all to it - even if it's just an applause gif or a single emoji or word like "gorgeous!" on an exceptionally stunning piece of art - each of those reblogs becomes its own post, and none of the likes or reblogs that come after will trickle up to the original creator.
It will also mean that if someone has something hateful to say, it will not get back to the original author and they will not be able to respond or clarify or set the record straight. It will make it so that someone can reblog a post and turn it into a vehicle of hate against that original creator, without any recourse for that original creator. It will lead to more toxicity and ridicule and hate on the site.
It will mean that if somebody downstream reblogs a post of mine with a question about some aspect of what I said, I will not be the one answering that question because I will have no idea that it was added.
It will also mean that if someone reblogs a work of art and adds a meme of someone weeping for joy at how beautiful it is, and then that gets reblogged and liked a million times, the original creator will not get any of those notes, and the original post on their blog will still only have 20 notes even if it becomes the most popular piece of art on the entire site.
This is going to utterly obliterate any sense of community that came from engagement with a post. Every reblog that adds anything is going to become an amputation of that post, and a creator will have to actively crawl down every separate reblog chain of every post if they want to try to find out what's happening with their content.
Just FYI everyone, because of this change I will be disabling reblogs on posts where I am sharing my own thoughts and ideas. If it's just a photo set or something I will not disable them, but anything else is going to get disabled because I do not want to feel like I'm putting my work out into the wilderness and have no meaningful way of tracking what's happening to it, and have a reblog suddenly turn it into somebody else's post, and any further engagement go to them.
Because let's be realistic, no one's going to go back through a reblog chain to interact with previous iterations. All of the engagement is going to stick with the current version that is in front of someone, which is cut off and separated from the original creator. If for no other reason than that no one will understand how this new system works, and they're going to (understandably) use the site the same way they always have and expect the same results.
I can think of so many ways that this could be weaponized and used for harmful purposes, and that is the very last thing we need in a world where there is already too much hostility.
Even if things are handled in a well-meaning way by people, it would still make it difficult, if not impossible, for creators to have any ongoing involvement in what happens to their own content once it is out in the wild, and will potentially cut them completely out of the conversation.
If you are as horrified by this change as I am, please do not stay silent. Please give some strong feedback through the feedback form so that the staff can realize how hated this change is.
This is one situation where leaving a comment or re-blogging with complaints is not going to be enough. Please send direct feedback about this to the team through the feedback form. They have said many times that they do not read the comments of their posts. If you do not give actual feedback in the feedback form they will not see it.
