my more targeted reclist, which, on this blog, will have an audience of approximately 1-2. but that is okay…! my thanks to @shinelikethunder for enabling me — i hope there is some untreaded ground on this list for you, but apologies if not.
everything on here is HTP or HTP-adjacent. all of these would count under the "what is the HTP" definition (darkfic related to the captain america movies), but some would've been considered off-topic on the trashmeme (dark characterizations of canon heroes).
notes:
entirely catered to my tastes, vastly steve-centric
generally tagged "character A/character B" if there's an explicit t/b order, tagged with popular ship name if there isn't. exceptions made if there's no popular portmanteau for the pairing.
mostly limited to AO3 because i haven't had the free time to browse for my kinkmeme or tumblr-only favorites, but there's an arbitrary sub-200 kudos cutoff for the majority of the AO3 recs. ideally fic that doesn't get recced quite as often, with some exceptions.
if your fic is on here and you'd like it removed, please let me know!
sometimes she says, “daddy?” out of a clear blue sky, and secretary alexander pierce will decide a mob boss in minnesota should die and order the asset to be taken off the ice.
alexander pierce’s daughter would like the keys to the car, please. (the winter soldier is the car.)
the masterclass in women abusing the asset via physically conventional M/F sex, exported from tumblr to AO3. brilliant work, 10/10, drive that vintage car. that one break in programming haunts me every time i think about it.
a plasticity to the soul by seinmit
pierce/steve, pierce/bucky, past pierce/winter soldier, background stucky; 3.7k
bucky awoke in a new place that he’d been in before.
noncon, retraumatization, filming, forced to watch. no current-pierce-body-parts going into current-bucky-body-parts, but the situation is similar & extensively-discussed enough — three cheers for gunplay. the lovely flavor of experienced-party-favor bucky seeing fresh-party-favor steve and remembering, intimately, what each detail of the experience is like.
walk into my parlour by eatingcroutons (WIP)
pierce/steve; 8.6k
written for the trashmeme prompt: steve/pierce - praise kink manipulation
pre-WS steve/pierce, where steve has no idea his sexual partner is HYDRA.
pierce is the older man, the guy who's seen everything steve missed, the guy who knows how the world works - plus he's charming and he's still not bad looking even for his age. so when he praises steve, steve laps it up, shrugging it off as depression/insecurity/inexperience even though he feels weird when it all gets darker, because all the experience he's got is jerking off and thinking of bucky when he was a kid.
dubcon, manipulation, power imbalance, emphasized age gap. indulgent thing about a pre-TWS steve just lonely & approval-starved enough to get wine-and-dined by an opportunistic pierce. unfinished, but ends at a fairly neat point.
tender thing, you'd be loved if only you'd heel by requiodile (WIP)
strike team alpha/steve; 4.9k
WIP of the third part of the you've paid your undue debts with the coin of your heart series (whose other installments slightly exceed my cutoff for this section). putting it here anyways because i truly consider this series the pinnacle of pre-TWS steve psychological abuse. by this installment, he spends half his time with strike in dissociative subspace and the other half of it dissociating normalstyle. incredible amounts of cruelty baked everywhere in the text.
the tapes of captain america being abused in HYDRA custody hit the internet. in the aftermath, steve has to make a choice.
publicized noncon, references events in blood from a stone. a steve-POV addition to the interests of national security, A.K.A. the best of the best in multi-layered steve Invasiveness & Exploitation. trash compounded with celebrity culture & the broader american security state. manages to gut with zero explicit flashbacks.
a little snippet of epilogue to ‘blood from a stone’ by shinelikethunder (WIP)
past HYDRA agents/steve; 0.8k
i could read a hundred ficlets of blood from a stone aftermaths and still come back for more. post-BFAS, post-helicarrier hospital stay where everything is in that just-starting-to-set-in stage; steve doesn’t want to think about it, would love to downplay it as much as possible, would love to make everything about the physical battle injuries. as usual, this hits me right in my stoic jaw-clenching steve needs.
salt by throttlegainwell
past OCs/steve, other pairings; 7.2k
memory is inconvenient – for so many reasons, in so many ways. bucky’d read the books and seen the movies and, frankly, lived the horror show. he knew the misconceptions that people so easily believed. memories weren’t like movies; they’re not so neat, not so cleanly edited, not so purposeful. they’re just bits of collected and confusingly collated data. attempting to get around that fact, as had so been the case for the treatment of his mind, was unnatural.
past noncon & WS-typical torture, current consequences. flashbacks, dreams, sense-memories, and other such experiences. unfortunately, i can't discuss this at length without ruining the slow reveal. falls within one of my favorite genres of trash, which i also cannot discuss without ruining the reveal. sorry... it's a good one...
playback by justanotherstonyfan
past rumlow/steve & steve/rumlow, stucky, brief implied past rumlow/winter soldier; 12.2k
the avengers simultaneously receive an anonymous email, with a video attachment. one of the guys in the video isn't steve.
rumlow-as-self-harm, publicized noncon edition. two of my favorite tropes together. as much as i like to indulge in steves who get naively in over their heads, some of the most gorgeously tasty narratives come from him, on some level, understanding the harm and coming back anyways.
prisoner #56898: prosthesis development by dragongirlg
gen; 0.8k
dr. helen cho summarizes HYDRA's records of extensive experimentation on the winter soldier in the development of his prosthesis. (AKA: what happens when you ask a PhD materials scientist to speculate on how bucky barnes' metal arm would work.)
medical record technobabble about various iterations of the metal arm. not conventional trash, but dehumanizing & torture-centric enough for me to feel like putting it here. i have a huge thing for unconventional formats and like this one a lot :)
the thing is, you don’t have to by shinelikethunder
past HYDRA agents/steve, brief implied stony; 1.3k
non-explicit rape aftermath, steve & nat hurt/comfort talk, a steve that seems terribly young in the face of it all. excellent voices — really nails that “the thing is, you don’t have to” between the two of them. also, i love aftermaths that focus on survivor-to-survivor discussion, and this hits on that genre perfectly.
we are not born for ourselves alone by teejcandraw
past rumlow/winter soldier, past rumlow/steve, background stucky; 1.5k
steve and bucky both have memories they’d rather leave behind.
rumlow made sure at least one would be permanently ingrained.
rumlow-facilitated scarification experiences: mostly flashbacks, some aftermath. a physical torture interlude between typical sexual abuse for the soldier, and a masochism-as-self-harm session for steve. trauma4trauma :)
trashy dirty talk fill by tenlittlebullets (WIP)
sam/steve, past rumlow/steve, past HYDRA agents/steve; 6.9k
shine, i’m sorry for linking to your fics on three separate sites. my thirst for unwholesome steve recovery fic is endless and is typically only satisfied by this fic and hallowed ground circling around me in a sort of revolving sushi conveyor belt situation. anyways: wonderful sam voice, double-dog dare steve sexual behavior, retelling rape experiences mid-sex in an unholy kink-catharsis-confession triangulation. what more could you want.
steve, natasha, the past. the smell in the room is indescribable; the way it looks is indescribable, too.
nauseating torture aftermaths, referenced past noncon, character death, extraordinarily bleak all around. this author has a lot of dark, generally pre-TWS release fic that's sparsely tagged, and i never really know how much i should reveal in my rec descriptions for them.
drinking in bars by quigonejinn
OMC/steve, stucky; 5.7k
bucky gets the first punch in, but the bouncer is in the business of getting the second, third, fourth, and all the way up to the twentieth consecutive punch.
pre-serum steve noncon & dubcon, horrible post-trauma decisions. this author also loves repetition and a rolling build-up. there's no Big Reveal here like in some of their other fics, but the buildup makes everything hit quite viciously. steve has a bad time but also does some less-than-nice things.
the best sport in the world (orphaned)
OMC/steve; 3k
steve is forced to attend a fundraiser party where he realizes that even if he's not fighting there's more he can do for the war effort.
extreme dubcon, coercion, chorus girl-era steve with a wealthy benefactor OMC who would love to tame an american icon. trashy fundraiser & rich-man's-car setting. extra self-indulgent, but i love to indulge.
getting warmer by linedragon
coulson/steve; 1.9k
steve will do anything to get away from the cold. all h no c.
noncon, coercion, obsession, dark!coulson. freshly-defrosted (well, not even all that defrosted when it starts) steve having a bad time. again: extra self-indulgent, but i love to indulge.
a better man by quigonejinn
coulson/steve, tony/steve; 10.2k
they send in a specialist. he is a small, unassuming man.
noncon, torture, mindfuckery, bad end, dark!SHIELD & dark!tony. systematic psychological-physical-sexual abuse fuckfest. a Whole lot going on in this fic, ideal if you like heroes-are-dark AUs and want 10k of steve brutalization & captivity with no hope in sight.
misc. fics, slightly above the sub-200 kudos cutoff, that i can't resist reccing
didn't feel like dancing by anonymous
stucky, past winter soldier/steve; 2.4k
"we were talking about dancing."
"didn't look like talking."
"didn't feel like dancing."
bucky doesn't always remember the things he did as the winter soldier. including the things he did to steve.
this is far beyond slightly above the cutoff, has been semi-widely recced, and is totally cheating. but it's such a prime example of my absolute favorite genre — "steve-centric trash × reverse HTP × the soldier gets wiped, eventually makes it in from the cold, and then remembers" — that i'm happy to cheat. i've been calling this the "he forgor... and then he remeber" genre in my head, but i suppose that's not very clear because he has, in fact, forgor and remeber many other things. anyways: so good, such a great bucky-recovery voice, and then things come crashing down and Get Complicated.
beast of burden. by quigonejinn
bucky/steve, steve/nat; 3.5k
there is a SHIELD response team all over the apartment. steve rubs his face with both hands, asks if he can go ahead and use the kitchen. they say that he can.
avengers, reframed.
dubcon, graphic character death, past torture & conditioning, general unpleasantness. another quigonejinn-typical dark!heroes AU, another fic i can't discuss at length without ruining the slow reveal. brilliant formatting & progression, horribly bleak as usual.
past midnight by storiesfortravellers
steve/bucky, past pierce/winter soldier; 1.2k
the winter soldier keeps dreaming about a man. he thinks this must be that man that rescued him from pierce.
a strangely non-cracky response to this prompt at comment-fic on LJ: avengers movieverse, steve rogers/bucky barnes, cinderella AU with bucky as cinderella, steve as the prince, and pierce as the evil stepfather, (though it's really only like cinderella in bucky's mind)
post-TWS, asset-typical memory & identity issues. uncertainty, flashbacks, referenced past noncon, and a happy-ish ending through a dream-like, fairytale elements lens. made me sigh deeply and think about all the dream-like cagefic i used to read for spn. it hurts similarly!! it really does!!
and bend your stubborn knee by mileshibernus
bucky/steve, past HYDRA agents/winter soldier; 4k
first it changed, and then it went somewhere steve never expected.
past noncon, increasingly D/s but mostly normal sex that morphs into mostly consensual but completely undiscussed rape roleplay. there's a lot of fic where bucky gets triggered & starts reenacting or oversharing his sex trauma with steve, but it always hits the best for me when 1. he does it as the perpetrator and 2. the two of them don't communicate properly about any of it :')
infernal memory by buckybleeds
strike team alpha/steve; 3.6k
another entry in the classic HTP genre of "yeah but what if steve *didn't* win the fight in the elevator."
a tried-and-true elevator gangbang. action sections juxtaposed against sections of steve losing it in his head. a party favor steve who's perfectly defiant inside and out is delicious, but i really like how horrible he's doing internally in this one. also, the emphasis on how much worse it all is because of his intimacy with strike — "last week he met vasquez's mother, this wasn't fucking real" — jesus christ.
a history of silence by glitteratiglue
rumlow/steve & steve/rumlow, past bucky/steve; 4.7k
it’s achingly familiar, being on his knees for rumlow.
classic rumlow-as-self-harm, bad BDSM etiquette shieldbones. direct, no-frills prose that helps hammer in how depressed this steve is — and consequently, how desperate he is to feel something. i love the flavor of steve engaging in both miserable masochism And sadism. it makes him feel worse, of course, but also makes the rumlow characterization more fascinating. not as bleak of an ending as one might expect!
This is actually a process that took place over months and years of me working through the different ways of keeping track of ideas I had while in bed at night. I’ve tried all of these ideas and more and all have met with these exact problems. Ultimately, what I’ve found is that there’s no decent way to record a good idea without committing myself to being awake again.
Making this a STRIP was inspired by a conversation in a Facebook thread with fellow cartoonist, David Reddick.
Did you hear something? An anonymous fear submitted to Deep Dark Fears - thanks!
My new book “The Creeps” is available now from your local bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, iBooks, IndieBound, and wherever books are sold. You can find more information here.
