fics on fics on fics

sometimes i read stevebucky fic, and then sometimes i post it here.

[wintergaydar]

Welcome to the first of my very late @fandomtrumpshate stories! It’s a werewolf AU that is mostly about feelings. It’s got family (blood and otherwise), action, angst, and tons of hurt/comfort. Thank you to @starmaki for being the most patient and supportive high bidder a gal could ever ask for. Shout outs to @winterofthedarkestlight, @fasach, and @floggingink for the help with editing.

Title from “Furr” by Blitzen Trapper. 


And fill our bodies up like water till we know (Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes)
 22,705 words


Wolves mate for life. It’s both the best thing about Bucky’s life, and the most inconvenient.


After six days in Steve’s arms, Bucky dreams again, for the first time since the ice — wolf dreams, four feet on the ground, the smell of the earth, and his eyes in the sky.


The moon is coming, and this reprieve — like all reprieves — is temporary.

[toli-a]

Please: Bucky stealing food from Steve, putting his cold toes under Steve's thigh, basically anything where he's a little shit and laughs a lot

Well, technically this is neither of those things, but Bucky is a little shit, and there is cold involved. Prewar 1930s, because that just seemed a lot easier. (And dear lord, I don’t think there’s any angst in this. Quick, I’ve been replaced by a pod person!)

Steve normally wakes up slow, murmuring replies to hismother’s calls while still lingering over the dregs of his dream, face buriedin the pillow to block out the morning light. Even after he rolls out of bed hestays hazy with sleep, shuffling over to the chair, rubbing his eyes and justas likely to try to shave with his spoon as he is to scoop up his breakfast.

It’s only about an hour after he tumbles into his desk thatSteve’s mind catches up to the rest of the world, staring at the board andsuddenly realizing what the pencil in his hand is for. The first class of theday is religion; Father Johnson thinks Steve is one of God’s creatures, but notone among the brighter of the bunch.

By seventeen, Steve’s accustomed to the thick fog ofmornings, the dappled light shifting too quick to follow, the warm tones of hismother’s voice and the shrieked squabbling of Lizzie and Alice when the Barnesclan waits at his door on their walk to school.

Sometimes, though, Steve wakes up quick, jerked toconsciousness with a jarring ring and a sharp pinch—sometimes Bucky stays thenight.

Everyone thinks that Bucky is the next St. Francis of Assisi,and that Steve is a wild flock of birds. “You’re such a good lad,” Mrs.Mulroney says, when she sees Bucky carrying Steve’s bag. “It’s so nice of youto let him play,” Mr. Koenig declares, clapping Bucky’s shoulder when comes outto shout at the boys playing ball near his windows and sees Bucky next toSteve. “Look at how gentle that boy is,” the Mrs. Smiths—three in one building—coo,sitting on their stoop and fawning over Bucky offering Steve the last square ona chocolate bar.

Steve wakes up quick, gasping for air and already pushingoff the bed to tackle Bucky onto the floor, icy water still dripping from hishair.

(Bucky liked to steal Steve’s bag and take off running afterschool, only slowing down when Steve started cursing, smiling winsomely at theold ladies who grimaced at Steven Rogers’s ungrateful language toward hishelpful friend. Steve played centerfield because Bucky played second, and whena window broke he showed up at the door looking contrite, dragging Steve by theshoulder and saying how hard it was to catch right, for a boy with as many contraryaches and pains as Steve. Bucky—who had three sisters and faster reflexes thanany boy who wasn’t raised fighting for the biggest slice of pie—would snatchSteve’s chocolate bar out of his hands and jam the whole thing between hislips, chewing with his mouth wide open and his teeth coated brown, holding backthe last square and handing it magnanimously over to Steve once they’d caughtsome gullible grown up’s eye.)

Steve clouts Bucky in the head with the bucket—everyonewho thinks that Bucky is gentle believes that Steve must be frail, because no one looks past Bucky’s guile, and no one but Bucky looks at Steve—and they tumble onto the floor, Bucky still laughing like someonefrom the looney bin, high-pitched and grating and far too loud.

When they go to school tomorrow, Bucky will have a black eyeand a busted lip—he’ll tell Father Johnson that it’s all part of helping Steve,and the priest won’t see Steve’s scowl or Bucky’s smirking wink as he turnsaway—and Steve will be moving slow, the first drips of a cold tickling histhroat, shuffling lazily through the syrupy morning, his handkerchief in hisbreakfast and his spoon folded into his knapsack, the bag slung over Bucky’sshoulder and Steve slung under his arm.

[stevebuckyfic]

“S’too bad,” Steve says thoughtfully.  He puts his hands back into the bucket, plucks Bucky’s underwear out of the sudsy wad of fabric down at the bottom.  “If you’d gotten some of Erskine’s juice, maybe you’d still be taller than me.”

It does the trick: Bucky’s eyes flash.  “I am still taller than you,” he says, threatening.  Steve shrugs.  “I am,” Bucky says, louder, and stands up, dripping water and soap.

[camwolfe]

Have you ever seen supernatural? How about a stucky mystery spot fic? (If you haven't it's Groundhog Day and after each day X dies somehow until Y can find a way to stop it)

He feels the needle prick his skin, but he doesn’t stop. He clocks the guy in the side of the head and keeps moving. He has to, he doesn’t has a choice. This place is going to be in ruins in approximately 25 seconds. 

He heads for the stairs and vaults up them, taking the steps four at a time. He doesn’t have time to stop and think about the burning sensation now starting in his arm, where the guy had pricked him. It’s fine, the serum in his blood will take care of it if it’s poison. 

Steve doesn’t bother to stop and try and get the door open. He puts his head down and throws his shoulder into it. It buckles and swings open, and Steve stumbles out into the bright morning sunlight. 

“Steve!” he hears Sam shout. He blinks in the light and keeps running, angling slightly to where Sam’s waiting with the truck. He can see Bucky out of the corner of his eyes, skidding around the side of the building. Good. They’re all clear. 

Steve hits the ground just as the building blows behind him. It’s loud, and it’s hot and there’s dirt and rubble flying everywhere, but he keeps his face down and his eyes closed. 

(warning for violence and suicidal thoughts/attempts)

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[cesperanza]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter: 1/17 Chapter: 2/17 Chapter: 3/17 Chapter 4/17 Chapter 5/17 Chapter 6/17 Chapter 7/17 Chapter 8/17 Chapter 9/17 Chapter 10/17 Chapter 11/17 Chapter 12/17 Chapter 13/17 Chapter 14/17 Chapter 15/17 Chapter 16/17 THE END: Chapter 17/17

Series: Part 7 of 4 Minute Window MASTERPOST

This is an Advent Calendar for the 4 minute window verse, one to be posted daily between Dec 8 (The Immaculate Conception) and Christmas. These are unconnected scenes in the universe, little mini-stories and moments that I am writing to bring myself joy in between reading a lot of terrible prose and dealing with stress this holiday season. I have a lot of it drafted, but I’ll take requests too if there’s things you’ve always wanted to see.  Hope you enjoy!

[stevebuckyfic]

Bucky says some explicit things to his dentist while under the influence of heavy anesthesia following a wisdom tooth removal. The rest is (embarrassing) history.

[toli-a]

Are you still taking prompts tho? I was thinking about oblivious Steve and observant Bucky. Steve who looked at one side of the beach and saw great waves and a nice day and Bucky who looked at the other side and saw a kid drowning. And how post Bucky dying Steve probably couldn't be so oblivious, see the bright side of things anymore. Especially after WS. Just wondering how Bucky would respond to that. How they would fit together differently. Could be more your thoughts than prompt.

Aww, you referenced the stone’s in the midst of it all! Also, see this post for some of my thoughts on Steve’s … blinders, maybe, to certain things.  (As in The Light Fantastic, where Steve can tell you that killing someone is wrong and homophobia is wrong, and Bucky knows that it is possible to be both a murderer and a man.)

****

Steve didn’t want to kill anyone, before the war.  He wanted to fix things, Sarah used to say, rolling her eyes, and Bucky would mutter that he wanted to break his damn nose, and then Mrs. Rogers would paddle Steve for fighting and Jamie for language.

It wasn’t that no one died, in Brooklyn.  Mike Lonciani fell in with a bad crowd, Mrs. Rogers said, and got gunned down working late in his Pop’s garage.  Kids died every spring, the yellow quarantine mark painted on the door, the apartment empty for a few months because no one wanted to move where the fever had been.

Steve lit candles in church, for the dead.  Prayed to St. Stephen for their souls, and kept his commandments.

Then he listened to Col. Phillips’s gravelly voice declaring Barnes, James Buchanan among the lost, and wanted to wrap his hands around the man’s throat just to make it stop.  For an hour—for a plane ride and a reckless fall, for the moments after he opened the prison cells and the captives swore Barnes was dead—Steve wanted to set the world on fire, just to feel it burn.

But Bucky couldn’t be dead.  Wasn’t dead.  Bucky was alive, and whole, and everything was fine, better than fine.  Everything was just like it should have been all along, Bucky at his side and permission to save the world.  (This time, Steve wouldn’t break his nose.)

You can’t fool fate, Sarah Rogers would say, brushing her thin fingers through Steve’s sweat-damp hair.  You can’t bargain with God.  (Steve had lit candles for the dead, as a child, for his father and all the fathers before.  After Bucky fell, Steve lit sticks of dynamite, and watched the train burn.)

Peggy tried to tell him that it was honorable, to die for one’s country.  (That it was honorable, to die for someone you loved.)  Steven Grant Rogers had believed this, sitting in an examination room in an enlistment office years before.

There are men laying down their lives, Buck.

It wasn’t true.  There was no honor in killing the best man Steve had ever known.  (There would be no mercy, for any of them.)  There was no glory, in the folded flag and the gold star that Phillips gave him, in the medals for Sgt. Barnes that bit into Capt. Rogers’s palm.

***

Steve did not bother to choose his battles, in the twenty-first century.  He would not recruit, like Fury thought that he should, though he would fight.  He would not trick any more boys into believing that they could save the world.  He watched Fury try to explain the missiles, Stark try to explain who had a right to power no one should wield, and thought of Mary Agnes wrinkling her nose and asking who had made Steve the pope.

Then there were helicarriers, and Zola, and it turned out that Steve’s frozen vengeance was still fresh and bleeding.  That he had lost, in 1945, but he wouldn’t lose again.

He wouldn’t lose Bucky again.

***

“Stark wants to fix the world,” Bucky says, settling onto one side of a couch in a summer home not built for the two feet of snow outside.  “Thought that was everything you ever wanted?”  He raises an eyebrow at Steve, and manages not to flip over the sofa when Sam drops a stack of frying pans and curses loudly two rooms away.

It is not as though Steve is the only one who’s changed.  Steve wakes up some mornings wanting the world to burn, woke up before dawn this morning with his face pressed into Bucky’s neck, the tips of his ears cold but the rest of him wondrously warm, and wanted to stay in bed for the next seventy years.  Bucky wakes up and catalogues his memories, lays quietly and labels every sensation he has, every place Steve’s skin touches his.  When they go outside the world is sorted into threats, escape routes, and safe places.

Bucky sees danger.  Steve isn’t certain what he sees, anymore, besides the gap between Sam’s teeth when he smiles—open despite the Air Force and Riley’s fall and the fact that they are all now wanted men—and the way the tension eases in Bucky’s jaw when Steve leans across the sofa and pulls him in.

“Maybe the best way to fix the world,” Steve mumbles, pressing his face into Bucky’s neck until he can’t breathe, “is just to let it be.”

Bucky hums, sounding unconvinced, and Sam rolls his eyes as he walks in balancing three plates of food on one arm, his other hand curled around the necks of a few beers.  “You want to stop saving people?” he asks, looking skeptical when Steve picks up his head to glare.  “Captain America wants to stop saving the world?”

“I want to stop stopping people,” Steve corrects, reaching for a beer.  “And start saving them, instead.”

Sam smiles, gap-toothed and grinning at Bucky, who huffs and steals Steve’s beer.  “Going to be a hell of a lot harder,” Sam says, “since there’s a couple billion people to one world.”

“Gotta start small,” Steve answers, burrowed into Bucky’s shoulder, completely unprepared for the metal fingers digging into his ribs, declaring that Steve better think twice about who he’s calling small.

[toli-a]

Yuna- Lullabies Lyrics

Hi! I love this song so much, it's super relaxing and the lyrics are really deep. Enjoy!! The video clips belong to: terrastro --- http://www.youtube.com/use...

Before the war, Steve jokes that he shares his past, since he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have a single memory that Bucky isn’t in.  (It’s not true, of course, but it feels true, the way Bucky elbows him in his brittle ribs and says, “Hey, Stevie, you remember that time …”  It is those memories, told with laughter and the voice of a happy young man he will never hear again, that survive the ice.)

It’s not true after the war starts, though Steve thinks more than once that he would sell his first hazy memories–the curve of his mother’s smile in crimson red and the lilt of the first song he knew–if he could have Bucky’s memories of the 107th, instead.  (This is war, yes, and war is hell, but Steve can see the memories haunting Bucky’s eyes, at night, and knows that suffering is better shared.  Bucky won’t share anything about the factory, though, and Steve had been failing to save him for months before the fall.)

Steve is angry, when they pull him out of the ice and back into the fight.  Angry at Stark, for looking, angry at the US government for “saving” him, angry at the serum for keeping him alive.  Angry at God, for dropping him into a world where everyone he loves is dead or dying.  It gets better, slowly, as he talks to Dugan’s children, works with Jones’s grandson, reads Peggy’s SSR records and the newspaper clipping on Monty’s home for lost boys, goes to Dernier’s vineyard and stands in front of the law practice that Morita built from the ground, without a college degree but determined to help the dispossessed regain what was theirs.

His friends had lived their lives–lived full, wonderful lives, and Steve wasn’t so small that he would dwell on the resentment in his gut that he hadn’t joined them.  (He’d never intended to, after all.  It had been his choice, to save the world and not himself.  It had been his choice, to love a boy and learn that the boy had belonged to the war, after all.)

He makes new memories, fresh and neon bright and lonely, doesn’t bother to write them down or speak them aloud, doesn’t carry them close like the memories that begin with an arm too heavy around his shoulders, a grin and the Brooklyn patter of a boy’s voice.  He reaches out for Bucky every night, turns to him in the grocer’s to complain about the price of eggs, pushes through the DC crowd to catch up to a dark haired man that he doesn’t know, thinking like a boy in Brooklyn and not the thawed shell of the person Steve Rogers had been.

Of course, the Winter Soldier isn’t Bucky, no matter that he remembers Sarah Rogers’s soft smile or the clear soprano of her voice when she sang them to sleep.  That’s okay, though.  Steve Rogers isn’t Stevie, either, but that makes no difference at all to how fiercely he loves.  (It makes no difference at all, since Steve is determined that they will share a future, with Bucky’s voice in his ear over the comm during a fight, muttering, “One day, Steve, I swear to god we’re going to …”  It is those plans, after all, that make it worth the fight.)

[toli-a]

HI I was wondering if you were still doing prompts? If so, would you ever write about Steve never going to war/never getting the serum and Bucky coming back from the war to him and just how their lives would be afterwards?? I would hope happy and great lol but I really love your writing, I've been having such a difficult time with family that some of your stories just make my day so much better. Anyway thank you and sorry to bother!

What a lovely compliment, thank you! *blushes* And family can be distressing in many different ways.  If you haven’t read it, A Gentle Thaw is a good, slow story about Bucky home from the war, and Steve, and Howard—and long enough for some serious escapism.

I’ll admit, this prompt deserves a whole story, but I don’t think it’s the kind I could write without serious research into the 1940s (in the miraculous Never-Never Land where I have free time), and part of me thinks that well, Steve isn’t the sort of man who would ever stop pushing, so …

* * *“Jesus H. Christ,” Bucky swore, hands shaking and thin as a subway rail.  “Only you would organize a goddamn prison to help support the war, Rogers.”

Steve sneezed, then rubbed his dripping nose with the oversized prison-issued shirt, both of them waiting for the superintendent at Riker’s to sign his release.  “You said you needed socks,” he shrugged, then waved at a burly man with a crochet hook.  “We all got to do something.”

“One day someone is going to take a knitting needle to your fool head, Steve, and I’m gonna –”  Bucky stopped in the middle of the sentence, mouth flattening out to a thin line, hands curling around the corners of the nearest table.  He looked like he was having an asthma attack.

Steve fidgeted for a moment, then darted away from the prison guard and toward the friend he hadn’t seen in two years—before the Allies liberated Italy and found the 107th and more regiments besides—wrapping his arms around Bucky and squeezing too hard.  “Breathe, you jerk,” he whispered, because Bucky sounded like Geraldine Marie the first time she ever stood in an elevator, panicked about the walls.

“I knew you’d wind up in prison,” Bucky wheezed, prying his fingers loose from the table and clutching at Steve.  “Punk.”

Someone to their right coughed politely.  “You’re free to go now, Rogers.  Your friend here took care of the fine.”  The prison guard frowned at them, then brightened a little.  “And thanks for the socks.  Winter is hell, working here.”

“Jiminy cricket,” Bucky muttered, but shook hands with the guard and practically dragged Steve away.

“They say the war’s ending,” Steve said, looking out of place on the train home, watching the flowers bloom in people’s windows, watching Bucky out of the corner of his eye.

Bucky flinched.  “Guess so.”  He fidgeted with a fold in the loose fabric of his dress slacks, rubbed his fingers against the weave.  “We still got a home, punk, or did you turn that into an ammunition factory?”

“Dorothea kept it up,” Steve told him, rolling his eyes.  “Dusted, and everything.  If she heard you were coming home, there might even be lasagna.”

“Straight from the troop ship to the prison yard,” Bucky grumbled, but he’d perked up at the thought of Thea’s lasagna.  “Did they arrest you for being an idiot, or for wanting to be from Jersey?”

“Shut up.”  Steve elbowed Bucky gently in the ribs, then laced his fingers together so that he couldn’t fold them over Bucky’s shaking hands.  “You want to stop for a soda, before we get home?”

Bucky shook his head.  “Nah.”  Pushed his hair out of his eyes, tilted his head down and peered up at Steve.  “I just wanna get home.”

Steve captured Bucky’s hands as soon as they made it through their door, the apartment smelling like lasagna and musty air.  “You’re okay,” he whispered, thinking of the moment years before, dirt from his Ma’s grave in the creases of his palms, Bucky’s hand steady on his shoulder.  “You’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed, hunching forward until he could smash his face into Steve’s prison cut, greasy hair.  “I’m okay.”  His voice cracked on the last word, and Steve could feel the tears damp in Bucky’s exhale.

But that was all right.  They would both be all right, now that Bucky was home.

[toli-a]

Umm prompts? How about Steve and Bucky walking on the beach? I'd like to read that ❤️ thank you!!

Er, might I refer you to pull apart the dark, specifically the flashback scenes? :) Or, here, what I think of anytime anyone says “beach scene.”

Briefly, this is what came to mind …***“Did you know they discover over a thousand new animals in the ocean every year?” Bucky asks, reading from the kindle Sam is fairly certain he’s never going to get back.  “According to marine scientists, there may still be whales out there that no one has seen.”

Sam isn’t sure what he regrets more: taking his great-uncle up on the offer of a cabin on the northwest coast, or spending the misty and cold vacation surrounded by men who never stop reading.

“People are still whaling,” Steve interjects, one ear bud still in his ear, the other hanging around his neck.  Bucky prefers books—has always preferred books, apparently, though Steve says it used to be Martians and alien spaceships whereas now it’s all facts, truths that can connect James Barnes to the world.  Steve prefers podcasts, though he still refers to them as ‘broadcasts’ and smirks when Sam can’t help but correct him.  “Do you know how many ecosystems will be destroyed, if we keep plundering the oceans?”

Sam would have thought that Steve would be the reader, giving that he was always home sick, and deaf in one ear, but when he’d asked Barnes about it, the other man had rolled his metal shoulder and shrugged.  Frowned off into the distance, trying to pull back a memory, and then nodded sharply.  “Stevie’d get headaches,” he informed Sam.  “Can’t read with a headache.”

“Migraines,” Steve had agreed, coming into the kitchen and resting a hand on Barnes’s metal shoulder, leaning over his friend to grab a muffin from the platter on the table.  “Bucky used to bring books home from the library, read to me until his voice gave out.  Won’t do it anymore though,” he griped, smiling at Barnes’s exasperated face.

“They’ve got people for that now,” Barnes retorted, leaning his head back against Steve’s ribs.  “And you haven’t had a migraine since 1942.”

They’ve been at the cabin for a week, now, and Sam has learned more than he ever wanted to about marine life and maritime injustice in the world.  He also briefly met Namor—who had heard about the Winter Soldier and surfaced to check in on his old friends—which was incredible and very, very frightening all at once.  At least Namor didn’t want to teach Sam about different kinds of gulls, and increasing problems caused by plastic in the ocean.

Still, Steve and Barnes go out sometimes without the books (on Sam’s kindle) or the headphones (also Sam’s), just before dawn when the coast and sea blend into a single, formless grey.  Sam doesn’t follow them, then; he sits on the porch with his coffee, because he has his own demons, and burying Reilly may have kept Sam sane but it wouldn’t help him heal.

So he sits, and he watches the waves roll past the dark rocks and into the sand, watches the sun struggle to burn through the mist pouring in from the sea.  And he watches Steve with Bucky, sometimes, when they settle on one of the boulders like ungainly seabirds (great black-backed gulls), and Steve pulls a battered paperback—one of the terrible romances that Sam’s uncle apparently read, because Steve knows Bucky can’t handle suspense or androids or spies—out of his jacket and hands it over to Bucky, a hopeful grin curling at the corner of his mouth.

And Sam can’t hear them, over the crash of the ocean and the muffling fog (over the ache in his chest, because Reilly might be buried deep in Sam’s mind but he’s also gone, a hollow pain under Sam’s ribs), but he knows Barnes always mutters, “Punk,” right before giving in, and he can see well enough when Steve wraps his arms around Bucky, settling his head on Bucky’s shoulder as the other man begins to read.

[brendaonao3]

Prompt: Steve and Bucky meet on a plane.

It’s a little long for a proper ficlet, but I figured you wouldn’t mind. :)  Consider this the first of MANY MANY thank yous I owe you for all of the comments and encouragement you’ve given me on my fics.

One modern AU Stucky fic, just for you:

“You mind if I sit here?”

“Uh, no.”  Steve moved his knapsack off the chair next to him and glanced up into a pair of warm, brilliantly blue eyes. The face surrounding them was movie-star handsome, with sharp cheekbones, a square jaw, nice full lips, and long, dark hair pulled back into a stubbed ponytail.  But the eyes were what held Steve’s attention.

They reminded him so much of his mother’s eyes.  Of comfort and family and home…everything he’d lost.  Steve glanced away, forced the stabbing pain down deep into his gut, and willed himself not to bolt.

“Sorry,” the guy was saying as he tried in vain to get comfortable, trying to cram an obviously muscular body into the smallish seat.  (Steve had the same problem when he’d first sat down.  But, most chairs weren’t designed for someone built like him.)  "Normally I’d pull up some carpet, but it’s a little crowded tonight.  Lots of people headed back to New York, I guess.“

“Looks like,” Steve replied, on polite autopilot.  The guy had a nice, deep voice, too.  The kind of voice that invited conversation and the exchanging of confidences.  Normally, Steve would have reacted in kind, fill the silence with his own words, engage this kind-looking, chatty stranger in a bit of small talk to pass the time.  Maybe even try his hand at flirtation, if the signals were right.  But nothing about today was normal.

Keep reading

[toli-a]

Bucky or Steve stumbling upon a pair of lesbians

Hi, my name is togina, and I have a problem with prompt subversion.

Thus, a brief autobiographical note: I am more or less Steve in this.  So if he seems incredibly obtuse—well, children don’t often bother to question things like “these are my great-uncles, and their house,” or, “these are my downstairs neighbors, who don’t share an apartment but share a dog.”  (Both of those are actual introductions from my childhood.  Shut up, I’m not terribly aware.)  Second note, academically: Gay New York is a book that talks about the 1920s and 30s in NYC, and there are lots of posts looking at the likelihood that Steve grew up in a fairly queer part of Brooklyn.

***Steve spent a whole month with Lucille and Cora once, when he was five and his Ma was sick with pneumonia in their rooms.  She’d carted him off, down the stairs and across the hall to the fourth-floor apartment that faced the clotheslines in the alley, only a few feet away from the tenement next door.  Cora worked with Sarah Rogers in the ward, and knew how to deal with Steve’s asthma and his brittle bones, his sudden fevers and equally startling chills.

Lucille may not have known anything about the common cold or the common Irish-American child, but she had sure studied up on how to spoil rotten one tiny, American boy.  She insisted that Steve call her Aunt Lucy, and took off work at the library to bring him to the fair, held a finger to her crimson lips and smiled wide when Steve asked what Cora had said about taking the train all the way into Manhattan to see the new lion at the zoo.

Aunt Lucy always had something baking, once she learned that even sickly little boys loved chocolate cookies and apple pie, and even after Sarah Rogers recovered (though she never quite kicked the cough) and Steven Grant started school, he would scramble up the stairs to the fourth floor after classes for Lucille’s cookies and the thick lipstick of her smile.

“They’re cousins,” he explained to Bucky through a mouth full of chocolate bar and a glass of Ovaltine, shrugging when Bucky frowned.  Aunt Lucy was round as a sticky bun and colored, and Cora looked like a sour string bean with lank blond hair paler than even Steve’s.  But Bucky’s family lived with his cousins, and Beatrice Barnes was uglier than a dump truck and cross-eyed to boot.  Steve figured there was no telling, with cousins.

He’d only brought Bucky around because Aunt Lucy had insisted, lifting him onto her wide lap and asking him all about his day while Sarah Rogers worked the late shift at the ward.  So he’d told her, about how he’d met Bucky defending Becky Barnes from mean Gertie Thomas, and how Bucky had taken a slingshot to the O’Boyle cousins when they’d threatened to break Steve’s knees.

“I’d like to meet your young man,” Aunt Lucy had decided, and Steve had flushed to the roots of his hair.

“But they’re old,” Bucky replied, kicking Steve’s shins under the table, fidgeting in the too-large chairs.

They were old—older than Steve’s Ma, and maybe older than stern Sister Joan, who Becky swore was past thirty.  Steve thought about this, chewing on a withered apple slice.  “Maybe they’re poor,” he decided, because that’s what Ma said had happened to the O’Brien family downstairs when they couldn’t pay the bills.  “I guess you’d live with Beatrice –” Both boys grimaced, wrinkling their noses and pinching them shut. “- if you were old and poor.”

“Pffft,” Bucky spat, pretending to be sick.  “Not a chance.  I’d just live with you.”

“Of course you would,” Aunt Lucy declared, swooping in with a fresh plate of oatmeal cookies and ruffling Steve’s hair, her smile wide and red lipstick smeared across one tooth.  “That’s what cousins do.”

“We’re not cousins,” Steve told her, swiveling in the chair to stare up at her cheerful face.

Aunt Lucy’s whole body shook when she laughed.  “Oh, child, I’ve been Cora’s cousin since I saw her in knee-high stocking and flapper curls these ten years past.”  She pinched Steve’s cheek, and chuckled when he rubbed at it and scowled.  “You just wait long enough, and being cousins will come in its own time.”

Steve looked at Bucky, who shrugged, just as confused by Lucy’s proclamation as Steve had been.  Who wanted to be Cora’s cousin anyway?  She didn’t paint her face, like Aunt Lucy, and she only ever smiled when Lucy turned on the phonograph and started to dance.

“Guess you’d be a better cousin than Beatrice,” Bucky announced, and that was the end of that.

* * *

“Why, you’re Steven Grant Rogers!” Dum Dum said, reaching out and shaking Steve’s hand as though they weren’t in the middle of a thirty-mile march back to safety, and Steve hadn’t just saved them all from a slow death without time to introduce himself.

“Uh,” Steve managed, trying to extract his hand from Dugan’s.  “Yes?”

“You’re with Sarge!” Dugan added, winking like he still had factory ash in one eye.  “He’s been talking about his cousin since he joined up.”

“Beatrice?” Steve asked, even more confused than he had been five seconds before.  Beatrice had grown up as mean as ever, and had married a lawyer, moved to Manhattan, and refused to come to Brooklyn ever again.  Why would Bucky talk about Beatrice to anyone?

“Don’t worry about it,” Bucky interrupted, slinging one arm over Steve’s shoulders and then pulling it away when it didn’t sit right, Steve taller now and four times as broad.  “We call him Dum Dum for a reason, you know.”

But that night, camping in enemy territory, everyone seemed to sleep on the other side of the trees, leaving Steve and Bucky on their own just over the next small hill.

Steve stared at Bucky in the last of the Italian light, tracing the fresh hollows of his cheeks, the streak of ash down his temple that mirrored the shadows under his pale eyes.  His confusion must have shown in his face—along with the fear he couldn’t kick, that he would blink and Bucky would be gone, that if Steve slept he’d wake up to ash and factory bone and have lost the only person who—because Bucky smiled, tired and small, and said, “You still haven’t figured it out, huh?”

“Figured what out?” Steve wondered, forcing himself to look away from Bucky and at the suspiciously empty space around them.  “Why no one wants to sleep near me?”

Bucky snorted, and ducked his head the way he always had when he was lying to the Sisters at their school.  “Not no one,” he told his boots, but Steve’s new ears meant that he heard every word, even if they didn’t make any sense.

It took Steve till England, a whole week after they made it back to camp and back over the ocean and into training with a handpicked band of idiots.  It took a week of Dugan’s winking and the men’s insistence on changing bunks until Steve and Bucky were left alone in a room meant for six, a week of Bucky ducking his head without telling a single lie, and a letter from Aunt Lucy that had been sent to four different USO sites before making it to Steve.

“I hope you find your young man, Stevie, since you’re headed out to the war.  Dear Cora –” Who was as dear as a grizzly bear, and watched Steve like he might keel over dead even after he weighed two hundred pounds. “- says to tell your cousin hello, and that she’s terribly sorry he had the misfortune to choose you.  She’s kidding of course, dear boy, and Mr. Smith down the block is starting a victory garden …”

Steve sat up so fast he hit his head on the bunk above him, and Bucky leaned over and peered at him, upside down.  “Whatsa matter?” he grumbled, face puffy with sleep, the shadows in his eyes instead of underneath.

“I’m your cousin,” Steve said, fumbling with the letter and the words and the ache in his head from hitting the bunk slat.  “I’m your cousin.”

Bucky snorted and shook his head, exasperated and grumpy and smiling just a little despite that, the way Cora always had when Lucy dragged her into a dance.  “Figured it out, then?” he asked, head still hanging upside down and yawning at Steve’s shocked face.

“Bucky,” Steve remonstrated, because they were cousins and Bucky didn’t seem to think this was an important enough conversation to have right side up or out of bed.  “You—you told the men.  You chose me.”

Grumbling under his breath, Bucky hooked his fingers under his mattress, rolling out of his bunk into a neat, cross-legged position sitting next to Steve’s shins.  “I chose you back in 1933, you punk.  Three years after I figured out what Aunt Lucy meant.”

Steve’s eyes went wider.  “Lucy and Cora—oh.  Oh.  Bucky, they’re not really—Bucky, stop laughing.  Bucky!  Bucky, damnit, this isn’t that funny.  Bucky, if you piss yourself on my mattress –”

“We could always use mine,” Bucky interrupted, huffing with laughter, a different spark entirely in his blue eyes.

“Guess we could,” Steve allowed, breathless with something that wasn’t the echoes of Bucky’s laughter, or the asthma that had rattled through his lungs.  “Cousin.”  There were six mattresses, after all, and plenty of time.

[toli-a]

Tis the Season... :) How about Sarah taking little Steve and Bucky to see the first Rockefeller tree in 1931? Steve has to get all bundled up, and when they get back, they celebrate a quiet family Christmas. Maybe Bucky and Steve (~13 yo at the time) are just starting to realize they like each other in a non brotherly way? And Sarah nudges that along a bit, or at least condones it because no matter what she loves her boys. <3

I love this prompt!  It’s so seasonal, and perfect since the tree lighting is tomorrow!  I’m a giant history dork, so: the first Rockefeller tree is in 1931, here, but it’s put up and decorated by the workers while they’re still building Rockefeller Center (see the photo), so it seems sort of unlikely that this would be a family holiday (though completely likely that—since it’s also the year the Empire State Building is finished—Steve and Bucky would sneak off to Manhattan to see all the fuss and bother, and, don’t you know, Ernie’s uncle is on the Empire crew, says it’s a hundred feet off the ground, only the guys with Cherokee blood ain’t pissing themselves they’re so scared?).  Officially, according to the ever-reliable internet, the Rockefeller tree begins in 1933 …  And because fifteen is one of Those Ages, this becomes a bit more of a family tumble.

* * *“Jaysus, Lizzie!” Bucky’s voice echoed down the street, through the frost on the windowpanes where Steve had rubbed a hole to peer through, though when Sarah caught him trying to catch a glimpse of Bucky he grumbled that it was just because the Barneses were always late.  “You couldn’t lose the button at home?  How are we supposed to find it now, when the whole dam-darn city’s under four inches of slush?”

“I checked my buttons before we left,” Nonie declared, prim under her knit cap and a coat that had barely survived Liza Barnes.  “And put on extra socks.”

“And put on extra socks,” Lizzie copied in a singsong voice, sticking her tongue out at Nonie when Bucky was scouring the ground for a button that no one could see.

“Lizzie’s being mean!” Nonie shrieked, and Becky glanced up from her newspaper long enough to swat Lizzie in the back of the head.  Bucky, crouched in the corner of Steve’s clear bit of window, looked ready to spit nails at all three of his sisters.

“I swear to God,” he muttered, teeth grinding when Nonie looked up and replied, “Father O’Malley says you shouldn’t swear.”

“Father O’Malley says you shouldn’t swear,” Lizzie mimicked, and Becky hit her with the newspaper.

“You can all stay in Brooklyn!” Bucky announced, stomping through the slush in his father’s oversized shoes, throwing his hands up in the air.  “Mrs. Rogers can take some other brats to see the tree, little girls that don’t lose their buttons and who mind their manners and don’t preach mass on a Tuesday!”

“It’s Monday,” Nonie corrected, and Steve was still laughing when Bucky threw open the door and barreled inside.

“C’mere,” he said, grabbing onto one of Bucky’s gloveless hands and tugging him toward the stove.  “Your hands look awful.”  Her son caught Sarah watching and ducked his head, but didn’t stop chafing Bucky’s reddened hands between his own thin palms.

“Aw, they’re fine,” Bucky shrugged, face too pink from the cold for Sarah to tell if he was blushing.  “Lizzie just stole my last pair of gloves, is all.”  Lizzie must have stolen them weeks ago, when the temperatures first plummeted well below normal levels for November, because Bucky’s knuckles were red and cracked, the skin on the backs of his hands chafed raw by the freezing wind.  “They’re not that bad.”

“They look worse than your ugly mug,” Steve shot back, blowing on them and holding them over the stove, “And I didn’t think there was anything worse than that.”

Bucky had just gotten Steve into a headlock—fifteen and growing like a weed, a mass of ungainly limbs where a year ago he’d been smaller than Steve—when the girls tumbled through the door, Lizzie and Nonie still arguing, Becky buried back in the fashion section of the old newspaper.

“All right,” Sarah declared, clapping her hands to distract the girls from where their brother had nudged his nose into Steve’s straw-blonde hair, an unconscious gesture that Steve hadn’t pushed away.  “Who wants peppermint sticks to eat on the train?”

“Sister Frances says only bums eat on the train,” Nonie announced, and Steve’s hair muffled Bucky’s low scream.

* * *The tree was beautiful—as tall as a fifth-floor walkup, sparkling with lights and ornaments like the rich people’s trees in Becky’s fashion magazines.  Rebecca immediately faced the other direction, watching the women in their fur-trimmed coats and silk stockings, the men in their suits and brushed hats.  Nonie obediently held her oldest sister’s hand, chin tilted up and eyes wide at the way the light glittered through the branches of the giant pine.  Lizzie thought she saw a kitten and took off through the crowd; Bucky, well versed in all his sisters, sighed and grabbed her by the collar, lifting her right off her feet.

“Stay with Mrs. Rogers,” he ordered, and Lizzie glared at him from a mouth sticky with peppermints.  He scowled right back, though he spun around as soon as Steve said his name.  Sarah pressed her lips together before Steve could see her grin, and abandon Bucky just to be contrary.

“Bucky and I are gonna go find chestnuts,” Steve said, already tugging Bucky away, bumping into his friend despite having space in the courtyard to back away.

“Only bums eat chestnuts,” Bucky shouted, laughing when Steve elbowed him in the ribs, sliding his arm over Steve’s shoulders and checking that the scarf was pulled high enough to help stave off the asthma Steve got when the air was too cold.

“Jaysus,” Steve retorted, mimicking Bucky’s favorite word for anything his sisters did.  “Guess what that makes you, ya’ jerk?”  They leaned into each other as they walked away, kicking through the slush and the used paper wrappers and chestnut shells.

Nonie was still staring at the tree, the electric lights reflected in her pale blue eyes.  Becky was planning for next season’s runway, for her debut on a Paris floor.  Lizzie tugged on Sarah’s hand, and raised both dark eyebrows at Bucky and Steve as they disappeared around the corner of the tree.

“Boys are dumb,” she informed Mrs. Rogers, pulling her mouth up and to the left the way her older brother did when he was making a point.

Sarah laughed, and pulled an extra peppermint stick from her pocket, handing it over to the eager little girl.  She looked up to the top of the tree, watched the snow start to fall, flakes catching the light like another ornament on the giant pine.  These were things she never could have imagined, during a war in Ireland, so many years ago.  There were two boys she never could have dreamed of loving, sparking and sparkling, tumbling into men.  “They’re not dumb,” she disagreed, smiling down at an unconvinced Lizzie Barnes.  “They’re just a little slow, Eliza-girl.  Sometimes boys just need a little more time.”

[stevebuckyfic]

Bucky Barnes loses a bet to his sister and ends up on 'First Dates', a reality show where people are set up on blind dates   with people who have 'supposedly' similar interests. He's less than impressed.

But then he meets Steve Rogers.

[stevebuckyfic]

The down side of the whole Captain America deal is that it’s very difficult to get any kind of privacy, to escape the watching eyes for five minutes, let alone long enough for a decent fuck.

Bucky was mostly joking about Steve keeping his Captain America stage outfit. So was Steve. And yet...

[stevebuckyfic]

Sarah Rogers smiled, and ran her thin fingers through Bucky’s perfect hair. Bucky stilled, and Steve had the feeling that no one tended to touch the Barnes children besides each other. “The sea is never fair, lad,” she said, sad but certain, and Bucky swallowed hard and looked away. “But she takes what’s hers, in the end.”

[stevebuckyfic]

 "This was your idea," Steve reminds him.  "I need to be able to keep up in the field, you said, just in case –"

 Sam levels his second best glare Steve's way. (He doesn't have the energy for his best glare – that one tends to work better if he's standing.)  "Next time you throw yourself out of a building and expect me to catch your ass, I'm gonna let you drop."

 "I'm sensing a bit of sarcasm in your tone."

 Sam holds out his hand, the glower deepening.  "Shut up and help me stand so I can kick your tiny ass."