#sometimes it’s like muttering under your breath sometimes it’s like adding a note in the margin of your scrapbook#and sometimes it’s like whispering a joke to the person next to you to try to make them laugh
ao3! [podfic] These City Walls by TessaBennet
alternate: archive.org media player
time commitment: currently about 1hr
fic details:
These City Walls (88296 words) by TessaBennet. @tessabennet
Chapters: 30/30
Additional Tags: Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Mutual Pining, Brooklyn, Childhood Friends, Falling In Love, Slow Burn, in fact, “the literal slowest burn of stucky as they go through their entire lives as pining idiots in love”, or so I'm told, Idiots in Love, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, the barnes family, which I had a whole lot of fun with ngl, chapter specific warnings where necessary, the boys had a life and a family before the war, the sweetest part is the torture before they get together, and this fic is the literary embodiment of the grinning devil emoji
Summary: Before there was Captain America, before there was even a war, there were two idiots in Brooklyn, just getting by every day, living a life, trying very hard not to let it show that they had, as a matter of fact, fallen in love with each other.
here's me singing mrs mcgrath to practice!!! @tessabennet GET HYPE
podfic 2025-02-14 TCW 1 mrs mcgrath.mp3
this message is specifically for the social media admin on youtube’s OFFICIAL supernatural page, tumblr please help me get this to her:
dear admin,
the shriek of absolute joy that i let out upon seeing the latest 51 minute special of pure destiel on my screen captioned “Let’s Acknowledge the Destiel in the Room” cannot be understated. you complete madman, you made destiel fucking canon for a third time in three days and i don’t think i could ever express my goddamn gratitude and appreciation.
however. you bastard now i can’t think about anything else and my college assignments are never going to get done?? literally sitting here shaking at the november 5th of it all. @mishacollins you have to see this damn video and react to it PLEASE.
officially coming out as the lesbian commenter on yt who asked to be sapphic destiel all the way back in the friday night date video, all to say thank you and fuck you because god this is a rollercoaster i could never have expected.
on one hand. so glad the fanfics literally DO write themselves with that i love you buddy. good for the sambucky community<3.
on the other hand, bizarre how much of a stronghold stucky had on the suits and social media culture around 2015-2017 cause like. everyone was aware and were literally doing laps around already written scripts to no homo it. writing an "i love you buddy" in there would be cause enough to be put down like a rabid dog.
also, there's a lot of talk about how spn takes a lot of "inspiration" from buffy and x-files, but the amount of twin peaks drama and vibes it steals from is making me lol
So. It's been five years, give or take. There was a worldwide pandemic, I got two and a half-ish degrees, I got diagnosed with epilepsy, I lost my dad and my grandpa, I worked various jobs, international politics have been nothing short of awful for a long time now... Yeah. It's been stressful, the whole time I was writing What I'm Looking For.
And in all this time, in between all of that, working on this massive project has been a comfort that I can't even begin to describe. This was something I could dive into when I was at my worst, in all this time, even when it felt like this series was the only thing that I was doing well. It was something that kept me going and that I'm proud of having finished.
Having said this much, I don't want to make some stupid kind of speech about being done with posting now. For most people, this is probably not as big a deal as it is for me. But I totally will make this a speech, because I have some things to say that mean too much to me to leave them unsaid.
You may already know that I first started writing These City Walls as an excercise to practice writing dialogue. At the time, a lot of what I did came from a place of frustration, with myself and especially with the MCU. But the more I worked on it, the more I realised that this fanfic stuff wasn't going to be a one-time thing, and I'm glad I decided to make this a longer series. And it kept getting longer, the more I thought about, outlined, and finally wrote it.
And throughout this whole journey, there were people that I want to mention, now that we're at the end of it. Starting with girlbookwrm, whose Hundred Year Playlist was the initial inspiration for huge chunks of this series (please go read it, it'samazing). And then, I have to mention @jesuschristtakethewheel, who was my beta reader for the first two parts of the series, and who encouraged me to start publishing it in the first place. I also have to say a huge thank you to @the-littlefangirl, who I've only gotten to know because of this series, who occasionally served as my test audience, and who, I can honestly say, is one of my best friends today.
There's a lot more people I want to thank, and those are my amazing, incredible, wonderful, and lovely regular commenters. You guys have been a rock for me to hold on to for so long. There's @haluton with their excited (and at times incoherent) screaming at me, there's @numberonestuckyshipper with her never-ending kindness to me and my writing, there's @smlmsworld who never gets tired of recommending my work, there's @hipsterdiva who approaches my fanfic like it's an actual piece of literature that deserves analysing, there's @mythicalmxyhem who's been with my series from so early on, and there's @radicalpeachie who made amazing fanart for me. I only know a lot of people here because this fic made me part of the stucky community. And then on AO3, there's PanamaRed, Jo_Dee, kawherp, saturns_moons, SaphDragon494, helloilovefanfiction, TylOcephale, AlwaysAkin, shakleton2, dxzei, Shinigami24, thisisalright, theearthisntflatatall, kingandlionheart, crazyjane, machka, and many, many more that I'm really, really scared of forgetting here. If you guys are here on tumblr, please let me know so I can follow you. And to anyone else reading this: if somehow you aren't on this list but feel like you should be, I agree that you should and apologise. Believe me, I recognised your name in my emails every time and I love you very, very much!
I can never thank you guys enough for the praise and support I've gotten from you over the years. Every single comment still means the world to me, and I'll no doubt always go back to them when I'm feeling bad or need a boost in confidenc. My life will definitely change now that I probably won't wake up to all those lovely comments as often anymore.
This is exactly why I'll be selfish and ask anyone who might still read or reread the series to consider leaving more comments and kudos. Or if you want to, feel free to create fanart and link it to the fic. Consider this my blanket statement: you can translate it, podfic it (you'll be my hero if you do that actually), make playlists, write your own spin-off based on it - just please link it to the series and let me know so I can share it too. It would mean the world to me if you don't let this fic die just yet.
(Also, just as a shot in the dark: In case you know someone who works at Disney or Marvel or happens to be a talent scout for publishers, please recommend me and my writing to them. That would be the cooles possible thing to come out of all this.)
In the meantime, I'll keep writing. I've been working more on original stuff this whole year, and if I ever publish a "real" book, I'll be sure to let you know. And more recently I've also been toying with some ideas for possible spin-off stories in the What I'm Looking For universe, so who knows? Whatever they could be, those fics probably wouldn't me stucky-centric. But maybe I'll write and publish them at some point - you never know.
For now, this is it anyway. And I don't want to be didactic or patronizing about this in any way. It's just, if there's even one thing you can take away from my version of this story and these characters, I hope it's that there's nuance in the world. Perspective matters, empathy matters, and so does understanding. And with that in mind, I think there's hope. I have to believe that, no matter how dark and dire the world seems at times. Steve and Bucky managed to go back to Brooklyn. We'll be fine too.
So yes, for now this is it. And for a while now I've been thinking about how to say goodbye to this fic. I still don't know. I'm not sure I want to. And I definitely don't want to say goodbye to all the lovely people I got to know, all the amazing friends I made because of it. And if you want to, you can come talk to me whenever you like, I really mean that. My asks are open and you can dm me any time. You guys have been the greatest audience I could've asked for. I wasn't expecting anything when I started posting - never could I have imagined that one day my stupid writing exercise would mean so much to some people. I love you all, each and every one. I'll miss you.
And finally, now that I'm all emotional about this anyway, I'll say this last thing: next year's gonna be different, but that doesn't mean it can't be a good year. I hope it will be, for all of us. Please stick around. I love you so much, and you mean the world to me. So - goodbye, guys. And, from all my heart: Happy New Year 💜
vaporwave
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
2087
amandla
