I started writing my next fanfic before I finished posting Entanglement. I’m about 50,000 words and 9 chapters into an untitled piece. I don’t have it all plotted out yet, so there are still many unknowns. I don’t know exactly how long it will be, but it will likely be over 120,000 words and 20+ chapters. I don’t know when I’ll be finished writing it, but it will likely be sometime in August. I don’t know when it will be ready to share with all of you on AO3, but it will likely be sometime in late-August or early-September.
I can, however, share the general premise with you. Read on for that...
A couple years after the events of The Winter Soldier, Steve tracks Bucky down and brings him in. With the support of the Avengers, he is able to get Bucky exonerated of the actions he was forced to carry out as the Winter Soldier. Bucky is still a risk because the trigger word programming HYDRA put in place is still there. Tony Stark reworks some technology he was developing for Alzheimer’s research to find the connections to the trigger words woven through Bucky’s memories during his decades with HYDRA. He just needs a helper to do the grunt work: watch the memories with Bucky and zap the connections out of his head.
So, when Jane Foster shows up with her former intern and new astrophysics grad student in tow, Tony offers to pay Darcy a modest salary, give her room and board, and cover her grad school tuition if she spends a few hours a week working with Bucky. Bucky and Steve aren’t so agreeable to this plan at first, but they come around.
The fic starts a month into the project. Tony and Darcy have successfully cut the links with two trigger words and are working on the third when Steve Rogers corners Darcy in the lunch room of Avengers Tower. Once he gets her alone, he doesn’t ask her for an update on his friend, though. Instead, Steve asks her something she couldn’t have expected. He wants to know if she’d be interested in having sex with him while Bucky watches. He says it would help Bucky get comfortable with intimacy after the abuse he suffered at HYDRA’s hands. He also admits that he and Bucky have thought about her in that way, and they were hopeful she might be willing to help them scratch that itch.
Darcy isn’t dumb, so she says yes. What ensues is a mess of sex and feelings with some hit and miss communication as the three of them figure out what they want and how to navigate a sexual (and romantic) relationship between more than two people. With the exception of a short first chapter from Steve’s viewpoint, all of this is told from Darcy’s perspective.
If you’re looking forward to this, I should give you some warnings to be fair. One—the fic is sexually explicit throughout. Some of the sex involves light kink. If you’ve read my other work, you probably won’t blink an eye, though. Two—there are a couple flashbacks/memories of Bucky’s that involve sexual abuse/rape. Darcy witnesses these through the machine Tony has built. Three—there is a sexual component to Steve’s and Bucky’s relationship even without Darcy in the middle. She enhances that, but Steve and Bucky will be touching each other and kissing in this fic with and without Darcy in the room.
I’ll provide progress updates, inspo, and excerpts here as I write. I’m excited to share this with the WinterShieldShock fans in a few weeks.
