#pre-catws

[funsized-loser]

For the @samsseptember Samtember 2024

Day 5: Canon Divergence and Day 10: I Never Said Pilot

Rated T | 2.2K words

Sam learns to fly while deployed in Afghanistan.

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

This didn't turn out the way I'd hoped, but I still posted. Late and everything.

[glittercake]

MASTERPOST FOR OUR @starspangledbigbang​ ENTRY.

Title: Ain't No Grave

Artist: @yavannie

Author: @glittercake

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Sam Wilson/James “Bucky’ Barnes

Wordcount: 19k

Main Tags:  Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence; Falcon!Bucky Barnes; Secret Identity; Falcon!Sam Wilson; Falling In Love; Brainwashing; Torture; Grief/Mourning; Presumed Dead; Reunions; Angst with a Happy Ending.

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Summary: In 2010, Sam loses the love of his life in Bakhmala and retires from the Air Force. Late 2014, with the fall of Hydra, the love of his life comes back from the dead to assassinate him. In which the Winter Soldier is Sam's EXO-7 partner. In which he is shot down and believed to be dead. In which Sam carries that loss around for years before a violent twist of fate reunites them.

LINK TO COMPLETED WORK

CHAPTER ART: ch1; ch2; ch3; ch4

[glittercake]

Have a 2nd snip of my and @yavannie​‘s star-spangled mini bang entry this year. Posting begins in November! Can’t wait for y’all to see the art for this fic!

"I got you!" Sam says and rummages his duffle for an extra t-shirt, just a plain white one with a red Coke label over the chest. "Put this on." 

Winters takes the shirt and scrutinizes it, pulling a face. "Negative."

"You can't wear your fuckin' uniform, man. Just put it on." 

And now Winters looks physically pained and panicked. "There are— I don't—I'm not permitted to reveal—"

"What?" Sam says, watching him. "Reveal what?" 

With that, Winters sighs. He unbuttons his uniform and shrugs the jacket off his shoulders. Sam doesn't see it at first, but when Winters turns in the low lamplight, his left arm gleams silver. The whole thing is pure metal with a bright red star painted on his bicep. 

"Woah, man, that's—" He comes closer to inspect it, every little metal plate that makes up his arm, the mechanical whir beneath the surface. "This isn’t just a prosthetic. Does it come off?" 

Winters shakes his head. His chest rises and falls with rapid but controlled heaves. Sam's fingers hover but don't touch.

"Where'd you get it?" 

"You can…I wouldn't mind if you—"

"Touched it?"

This time he nods almost too quickly. Almost as if he's eager to feel it. And Sam gets that. Human contact is scarce out here. It ain't the type of place you go around hugging or cuddling each other to sleep. And Winters never talks about his family, so Sam wonders how long it's been since he'd been touched at all. 

[glittercake]

But this is the Winter Soldier, and Sam's still kind of miffed about his car and nearly being murdered. He shuts up about it, though, thinks Steve knows what he's doing, and Sam's right behind him all the way, so when Captain America robs the goddamn Smithsonian and steals his own uniform, Sam doesn't bat an eye. Instead, he drives the getaway car.

And when Sam puts on his old EXO-7 suit, he doesn't bat an eye either, even though, for a swift second, he expects to smell JJ on the collar, on the sleeves, but there's only an old smokey leather smell. He refuses to think it's from that night, from the RPGs. It can't be. God, it can't be.

READ FINAL CHAPTER HERE

LINK TO CHAPTER 4 ART

[glittercake]

In the mornings, after coffee, he goes for a run all around the lake and back. He cooks dinner most nights and later watches the news with Sarah and Cassius on the porch while sipping on ice-cold beers.

One such night, early 2011, news breaks that Captain America has been found alive under the ice in the Arctic.

"Huh," Sarah says. "Ain't that a thing."

And Sam thinks, what a goddamn miracle for someone to come back from the dead like that, what a tragedy that all Steve Rogers had once known is now long gone.

READ CHAPTER 3 HERE

LINK TO CHAPTER 3 ART

[skullsandsteel-a]

Why does Steve call you babygirl?

“Sweet-talked to him too hard on a mission, my mistake. I think he thinks it’s some kind’a nickname over a pet name, but I’m not gonna talk to him.”

[saferforeveryone]

What if Bucky keep trying to push Steve to ask Peggy out because despite being in love with Steve he knows they can't make it work, people wouldn't understand. Not to mention everyone else pays attention to Steve now that he's big and healthy so why would he stand a chance? He pesters Steve endlessly and one day Steve stops dead in his tracks causing Bucky to almost walk into his back, he puts his hands on his hips, huffs in frustration and says, "because I love you ..."

“...what’s wrong with Carter?” 

Bucky’s been on this for an hour. Again. Steve is getting really sick of the martyr act, and the fact that Bucky thinks he’s been subtle about his all-consuming crush on him is the most insulting thing of all. As if Steve doesn’t know he’s trying to put his heart in the line of fire under some misguided sense of sacrifice right now. 

It’s getting really old. 

“Or any of them, y’know? You’ve got dames falling over themselves to get a piece of Captain America.” Bucky really thinks Steve can’t see the tension around his eyes, everything he’s trying to hide with his casual drawl and easy smile. As if he doesn’t know when Bucky’s hurting. “I mean c’mon Steve, you’re sitting up in your ivory tower like some kinda monk. What’s wrong with-”

Steve suddenly stops walking, just far enough ahead of Bucky that he collides with his massive shoulder. Bucky lets out an oof of surprise and frowns at him, rubbing his chest unnecessarily. 

“You’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

“Why?!” Bucky scowls, jaw clenching defensively. He’s probably thinking about how he’s just trying to do right by Steve and getting it thrown back in his face, and Steve rolls his eyes and grabs him by the hips. The shock is very satisfying. 

“Y’know what’s wrong with Agent Carter and all the others?” He asks slowly, like he’s saying something very obvious. Bucky shakes his head, equally slowly and struck dumb. Steve has to lean down and kiss him, dry and firm and weirdly authoritative for an expression of love. “They’re not you, you moron.”

“Oh.” Bucky croaks, eyes wide. Steve lets him go and starts walking again, grinning to himself where Bucky can’t see. “Huh.”

[marlovingian]

Steve/Bucky ficlet: La Vie en rose

(The date on this is slightly inaccurate: La Vie en rose was released in 1947, but the ficlet popped into my head with that song and couldn’t be done with any other. Song. Full Lyrics and Translation. ) They’re in a bar on the French border the first time Bucky hears La Vie en rose. He’s already drunk, they all are, and the radio’s crackling out this weak, staticy rendition of it, but Bucky just sits up a little straighter and focuses all of his slightly wobbly attention on the radio.

Steve notices, because he always notices these things, but he doesn’t think anything of it, even when Bucky asks the bartender what was that? and the man tells him. He doesn’t even think anything of it when Bucky starts asking people if they know the song, until he can get someone who knows all the lyrics and they go down on a little scrap of paper that he keeps tucked inside his breast pocket. Frenchie knows the tune, but not all the lyrics, but he’s game to hum it a few times while Bucky’s still learning.

“Again,” he says, when she’s finished, and Steve glances over and smiles to see Bucky flirting with someone and so passionate about something, just like the old days.

But when she whispers in his ear and glances toward the cramped supply closet, Bucky shakes his head and comes back to sit by Cap’s side instead. Not like the old Bucky, who would have kissed his way across France.

It seems like anytime the war has paused for a moment, and they’re licking their wounds and recovering in some foxhole or some war-torn bar, Bucky starts humming. Steve still doesn’t think anything of it—it’s a lovely, catchy little tune, and Bucky’s been getting songs stuck in his head since they were kids together, driving Steve nuts by repeated renditions of whatever struck his fancy that week.

But what finally gets him wondering is how sad Bucky looks when hums it. Sometimes he even sings a few bars, in that soft, husky, shy voice of his. Bucky says he’s got no musical talent, but really it’s just that he’s got no formal training. Steve could listen to that voice for hours, even though Bucky’s too self-conscious to sing more than a few stray lyrics at a time unless he’s roaring drunk.

“Why that song?” Steve asks at last.

Bucky just gives him a lopsided smile in return and drunkenly sings “c’est lui pour moi, moi pour lui dans la vie.”

“Who?” Steve elbows him, unable to help smiling at Bucky’s drunken antics.

Bucky just shakes his head and stretches out his glass across the bar, tapping the base of the glass against the wooden surface until the bartender comes over to refill it.

Steve shakes his head also, unconsciously mimicking Bucky as he dismisses it as nothing, just like he has the past three dozen times Bucky’s started humming that damn song.

Even when it’s gotten around four or five dozen hummed renditions of La Vie en rose, Steve can’t bring himself to mind. It’s pretty. Although sometimes he wonders why none of the other Commandos tease Bucky about it. They always did in the past, joking about how Bucky was their little wireless radio and trying to get him to actually sing.

“Connie?” Steve asks, when Bucky’s drunk enough to sing again, and it’s the 47th rendition of La Vie en rose since Steve started counting.

Bucky breaks off mid-verse. “Qui?”

“The girl you were going with before the war. We went to the Stark expo together. Connie. Is that who you’re singing about?”

Bucky laughs, this harsh, broken-hearted laugh without humor, and doesn’t answer. He just picks up the song again. The last verse, which Bucky always sings so soft and quiet. “Et, des que je l’aperçois, alors je sens en moi, mon coeur qui bat…” When Steve wakes up in the 21st Century, the song is stuck in his head. He hums it to himself every time he’s alone for a week straight, thinking that it’s just a symptom of his dysphoria and his nostalgia for his friends and the world that he understood.

He drops a glass the first time it occurs to him to wonder why Bucky never changed the pronouns. It would have been so easy. Elle instead of il doesn’t change the cadence of the song.

And he realizes now the way that whenever Bucky started humming that song, late at night and usually drunk, the bar cleared out. The other Commandos always suddenly found places to be, leaving Steve and Bucky alone for the kind of late-night drunken conversations that happened in bombed-out bars in wartime. They knew. Everyone knew, except Steve.

It’s him for me, me for him throughout life.

He’d been so blind, so stupid, even when Bucky looked him in the eyes, wobbly with alcohol, and sang the version in the second verse that used the pronoun you instead of him.

Steve buys a copy of an old Edith Piaf record and plays it over and over again, trying fruitlessly to get drunk and hearing Bucky’s drunken, wavering voice in his head, singing La Vie en rose.

(Happy ending, by request.)