Captain America Fic Recs, Part 2
Part 1
Steve/Bucky
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn series
"You keep asking me what I want," Bucky manages, eventually. "But on any given day, my number one priority is to get through the day alive and myself, and to do it without killing anyone. Everything else is extra." Each work is standalone.
Embers, Not Ashes
“You okay?” The outline of Steve’s hands, balled into fists inside his pockets, looks too sharp despite the wool barrier. His nice pants. Standing there in his fucking church clothes and all it makes Bucky want is to walk over there and rub him through them until he’s in just as much of a state as Bucky is. The laugh that catapults out of Bucky’s mouth tastes like bile. “Nope.”
The Dud series
When he was eight or nine, Bucky Barnes was the secret sworn enemy of the dud newsie.
Mortal
Steve is ten years old and he’s a mortal sin walking.
The Hundred Year Playlist series
Steve and Bucky, start to finish. "Come on, pal, it's me. Take another hundred years if you want, I'll still be here."
Sharp, Metallic
The day after leaving the hospital, still woozy on the massively high quantities of morphine they gave him, Steve dreams about a metal arm around his throat and warm, salty fingers in his mouth, just the way he likes. The next day, there are plate marks on his throat, fading by the minute, and his breathing skyrockets as he touches them with reverence. Steve gets fished out of the Potomac, and Bucky comes to him.
Accidentally on Purpose
Bucky turns toward him, sliding his hand onto Steve’s hip as he mutters a lazy “G’night” and presses a soft kiss to the corner of Steve’s mouth. It takes him by surprise, and he barely has time to register Bucky’s half-closed eyes and the warmth of whiskey-ripe breath on his lips, before it’s over. After Bucky drunkenly kisses Steve by accident, it just seems to keep on happening, until it's not so much by accident anymore.
Exactly Like We Were
“You can make a fight out of anything,” Bucky says, and affects a laugh, badly. “You can make a metaphor a fight. What the hell do anesthetics have to do with anything?” Steve almost blurts out, Art is an anesthetic! But at the last second, he gets a hold of himself.
despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained)
“They really didn’t want the mask to come off.” Hill thumbed through the scans, and pulled out a film that she then handed over to Sam, face mostly expressionless but for the flat line of her pursed lips. Sam accepted the film and held it up to the light, angling so both he and Steve could see it, squinting at the outline of the Winter Soldier’s skull, and the blips of unnatural white that showed up, God, in his brain, not to mention about half his teeth, plus the mask, with its thin protrusions— “Those are pins,” Steve realized. He looked over at Hill. “The mask—it’s nailed to his face.” Hill’s face was as unmoved as ever. “Like I said. They really didn’t want it coming off.”
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen
Bucky Barnes and the Great Sexuality Crisis of 1938.
Will There be Any Freight Trains in Heaven?
It's summer of 1934, a quarter of all Americans are unemployed, and record numbers of migrant workers are hopping freight trains to seek their fortune out west. What are two boys from Brooklyn to do? or, Steve and Bucky ride the rails, become socialists, and fall in love, in no particular order.
how cold steel is (and keen with hunger)
There is a man who lives inside the Soldier’s head. The Soldier does not know much about the man. The man is an American, and he fought in one of the few twentieth-century wars the Soldier had not—if only because he did not exist yet. At some point, a war pitted their home countries against each other, but that did not put much of a damper on things. They are good friends. Here is how the Winter Soldier dies: the resurrection of James Barnes. An account of Bucky's time in Bucharest.
A red fish that fits just right in the hand
Steve asked, "Is it James now?" and he said, "No, Bucky." But no one else calls him that.
Howling Commandos series
Jacques' grand-père had kept a lock of his wife's hair, after she had died. He had worn it around his bony, age-spotted wrist, the way he had worn her smile in the reflection of his eyes.
dead hearts and midnight cowards
"Do you want to get out of here?" he adds then, all in a rush; and Bucky's not sure he meant to say it but he knows what his pulse is doing and he knows what his dick is doing besides, and he knows that Steve is looking like that and that he's looking at him like that, too. Bucky swallows to think about pressing his mouth to him, any part of him, every part of him, if they can only find some space.
Everybody is Supposed to be Dead
“…there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.” In 1944, Bucky Barnes falls off a train into the Alps, missing and presumed dead. Months later, Steve Rogers nosedives a plane into the arctic. In 2010, the Winter Soldier project is uncovered by S.H.E.I.L.D., and Bucky Barnes is found alive. Three years later, Steve Rogers’ frozen body is found in the ocean.
Impossible Measurements
"Steve, I love you."
In the Sight of Green Carnations
"What happened between you and Jimmy?" He caught the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Bucky had jumped upright, was twisted round in the bed to look at him. He looked pale. "What?" In which Bucky has a terrible day, and Steve manages to accidentally say exactly the right thing. Despite not knowing what the fuck is going on.
All The Angels and The Saints
In which Steve Rogers loses God and finds God and loses God, and also: Bucky.
Not Easily Conquered series
In 1945, Steve Rogers jumps from a nosediving plane and swims through miles of Arctic Ocean to a frozen shore. In 1947, Steve Rogers marries Peggy Carter. In 1966, the New York Times finds the lost letters of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.
Practice Makes Perfect
And it’s just. It’s too much. Weeks of pain and months of missing Steve and his mouth and the stupid shit that comes out of it; years of molding himself to his back at night and pretending there’s nothing else to it apart from sharing warmth; a decade of his stomach twisting with the foolish desire to make Steve laugh. It's August and sweltering when Steve asks, out of nowhere, if Bucky wants to try kissing. Just to see what it's like. Bucky then spends far, far too many years pretending it didn't mean anything at all.
cascades.
“Holy shit,” Howard says, crackling through the speakers. “You alive in there?” Lying is a sin, of course, but Steve’s not sure what else he can do. He’s already lied to the government and Bucky and God Almighty; and himself, himself most of all. He ought to tell the truth. That he’s not quite what they hoped for. That perhaps they should put him back into the ocean. “Probably,” he says, instead, listening to Howard’s tinny laughter; and waits for the blast doors to unlock.
not just the carcass, but the spark
Time stopped mattering to him long ago, except in units of distance: how many days' walk they had to go, how many days until their next orders. The air smells nice; it's even warm enough that one of the windows has been propped open on the cabin. Bucky remembers cracking open the window to the fire escape in those early days of April and smelling the Brooklyn morning with something like hope.
Remscéla
“It’s going to rain,” says Steve. Bucky squints out the window. He sways slightly as the train jolts on its tracks, but doesn’t reach for the handhold. Through the trusses, the sky outside is gray, reflecting oily and leaden on the East River. The air feels heavy, warm for late October. “It’s not going to rain.” Steve snorts. He can’t help smiling. “It is. You know it is. Not everything in the world just arranges itself according to the will of Bucky Barnes.”
Ill With Want
Bucky pretends to be asleep when Steve crawls into bed, too tired to feel guilty over the quivery pleasure that settles in his belly when Steve’s arm brushes his. Steve falls asleep in about five minutes flat, unconsciously wedging his icy toes against Bucky’s leg. Bucky doesn’t move him. He drifts to sleep in a comfortable haze and tries not to wonder where this feeling was two hours ago when he had Marie in his lap.
tezeta (nostalgia)
Steve Rogers is a terrible tourist, and a lousy house guest. Bucky Barnes waters his plants and tries his best. Set in that sweet spot between Black Panther and Infinity War, in a little valley in Wakanda
Painted in Indigo
“You should be careful of that one,” Mr. Hendrickson says, with a nod to Bucky outside the window. “It ain’t right. Looking at you all the time as he does. The way he should be looking at girls.” Steve laughs, because damn, but what a ridiculous idea. Or, five times Steve caught Bucky looking at him, and the one time he looked first.
Shangri-La
Steve gets money, still won't move in with Bucky, and somehow totally misses that Queer Brooklyn is an option.
three white horses
Steve, it's not your fault, Sam had tried to say, before Steve cut him off, and Steve doesn't think that's untrue so much as it's irrelevant; fault's got nothing to do with it. It's just—wrong. It's wrong. Steve couldn't wrap his head around it the first time, how wrong it was. Steve should have gone first. Was supposed to. Bucky could have carried on without Steve, he knows, but Steve without Bucky is a zero sum. There should never be a world that Steve is in and Bucky isn't.
The Interrogation
There's a story and it goes like this.
Through Cities And Churches
A tale of many cities and churches and two boys. Happy 100th Birthday, Bucky Barnes: March 10, 2017.
the long slide from kingdom to kingdom
They want you to love the whole damn world but you won't, you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath, who knows what to do with his body, with his hands. -Richard Siken, Driving, Not Washing.
The Problem Solver
This wasn't what Steve wanted from him.
winter wheat, sunflower peat
In the dead of the night, a man pulls over for a hitchhiker.
Welcome Home, Son series
Her face is warm but neutral—she is a kind person, he thinks, but also a professional. She would not think twice about killing him if he tried to strike. “My name is Ayo,” she says. He hesitates when he realizes she is waiting for him to respond. He doesn’t deserve the name Bucky anymore. He still answers to Soldat—the way a beaten dog answers to a jerked chain, but it sure as hell can get his attention in a hurry. But that’s no name for a person, and he is determined to become one. (In Wakanda, two wounded soldiers begin to heal.)
