Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[trashmod]

Holy shitballs, look at us go. Welcome to Captain America fandom's resident wretched hive of scum and villainy: ROUND THREE. AKA Bad Guys Do Dirtybadwrong Things To Your Faves, AKA the Hydra Trash Party kinkmeme. As usual, BLANKET NON-CON AND NSFW WARNINGS apply: just assume going in that everything in this landfill is unfit for human consumption.

Rules in brief: don't be a jerk except to fictional characters, warnings for particularly fucked-up garbage are nice but not required, thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor's kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two, off-topic comments may be chucked out of the dumpster at management's discretion, management's discretion decrees that omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, and dark!good guys AUs are off-topic.

[Round 1] [Round 2] [Fill post] [Chatter post] [hydratrashmeme Pinboard archive (maintained by greenkirtle)] [Round 3 in flat view (comments in non-threaded chronological order, most recent last)]

Round 3 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 4.

Comments

a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

This is, like, half a prompt, but I have this one idea in my head: Bucky asking Steve to draw a portrait of him as the Winter Soldier, curled up in his cell, with blood on his hands, and blood and come slicking his thighs.

This is literally all I have and if anyone wants to flesh it out I'm open for anything. Why does Bucky want this? Why does he want Steve to be the one who does it? What does Steve think about while drawing it? What happens afterward?

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh, I like it! So much potential!

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

What if it's something he remembers--but all he remembers is that image? He can't remember even the physical sensations or emotions, not even what it is that's smeared all over him, and he's not good enough at articulating or verbalizing yet to really describe it to a therapist or anything. Finally he tells Steve that there's this thing he remembers and it seems important but it's just an image and could Steve try to draw it, and maybe Bucky can guide him to the way it looks in his head, so Steve can help him figure out what it means.

Cue Bucky working with Steve like a sketch artist, correcting Steve's drawing, and Steve gradually watching this scene take shape under his hands, Bucky saying "no, face more like this--" and Steve being the one who realizes that Bucky is describing an expression of pain, or fear, or total desolation, Bucky saying "something wet, right there--not water, but kinda clear--" and Steve realizing it's come, realizing that he's drawing Bucky in the aftermath of a brutal rape and Bucky doesn't know. Maybe he still doesn't understand after he's seen the finished image, and Steve has to decide whether to explain it to him or just let him shrug and walk away, having gotten the image out of his head.

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

I like the way your mind works.

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

(OP) yessssssss? Yes yes yes, YES oh my god, this is glorious. This is so painful. Bucky starting out with the description of his cell, then where his body is, how it's positioned, and it gets worse and worse and Steve having not just to listen, but also to immerse himself in the story enough to draw it. Yes!! I mean, I tend to prefer a Bucky who's lucid and sharp, but a Bucky who doesn't remember things like what semen and rape are works well here -- or maybe lucid!Bucky but give him the same articulation issues (trouble speaking super does it for me) and maybe some self-protective mental blocks, like his brain refuses to identify certain things for him... Either way I love this idea.

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

And, God, what does Steve DO with that drawing afterward? He can't get rid of it, it's so important, but he can't just leave it out somewhere--and maybe he gets kind of obsessed with it, drawing it again and again, even painting it, doodling little details because he just can't get this image of Bucky out of his head. What if Bucky finds the other copies, does he think Steve likes looking at him in that state?

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

Or maybe Steve can't bring himself to copy the image over and over, but he's so disturbed that he ends up creating a series of paintings about that drawing, which are vague enough in their interpretation that you couldn't necessarily tell what they're about: paintings with thick red slashes smeared with white; paintings of hands clenched in agony; paintings of that expression on different faces. Or he sketches out fix-it drawings where he's holding Bucky in the cell.

Re: a portrait of the Winter Soldier

[(Anonymous)]

Awww, saddest fix it drawings.

WAIT. WHAT IF HE DRAWS HIMSELF IN BUCKY'S PLACE THO

Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

"I have a picture in my head." Bucky said that night, as he was washing the dishes after dinner. Steve was hardly surprised -- Bucky had been spacey since he woke up, and had barely spoken 10 words all day, and that's usually a sign that a specific mental image was haunting his brain.

So Steve got out his sketchpad and they sat down together on the couch. When Bucky got like this, the best method they've found was to get the image out of Bucky's brain as best as possible -- then Bucky could stop remembering it and start seeing it.

"It's a dark room, and there is a big pane of glass on one side. There is a man on the other side of the glass. He is lying on the floor." Steve hurried to outline the room and the figure as words tumbled out of Bucky. Once the drawing session started, Bucky'd enter a dissociated state where he'd describe his mental image in a flood of dispassionate details: shapes, colors, values. Often Bucky didn't know what he was describing until he'd fully excised the image from his mind.

And so they were always surprises, to both Steve and Bucky. One turned out to be a sniper's view of the Kennedy assassination. Another was of an airfield in the Philippines. Those, after some discussion with Bucky, were turned over to Pepper for analysis and safe keeping. Others, Bucky kept in his room -- the image of Becca in the Barnes' kitchen at age 5, with raspberry jam smeared on her face, for example. Steve didn't know what happened with the image that turned out to be Steve himself with his arm outstretched from the train in the Alps, but he didn't particularly want to know. Bucky had gone pale when he'd snapped out of his dispassionate description phase and saw the image on Steve's sketchbook. He'd ran his fingers along the tear smudge lines that Steve'd tried to cover up with his crosshatching, and that was when Steve left to go take a shower. By the time Steve got back, the sketch had disappeared and Bucky was there with a soft smile and a warm hug.

"There is light coming from the bottom of the door here. There is a slot. 3 inches by 10 inches." Bucky reached out and pointed to the spot on the dismal cell taking shape on the page -- a stark room with no opening to the exterior, except for the door. A florescent light on the ceiling that remained off. And Bucky was looking through some sort of window or glass into this room. Nothing on the floor except the man and an empty plate.

Steve couldn't help wondering, who was this man? Why is this image etched in Bucky's brain? That was when Bucky turned his attention to describing the man on the floor, and Steve's sense of unease grew as his hand obediently sketched out every description and correction. The man was naked, lying on his left side, with his rear end exposed toward Bucky. His body was curled in on himself and he was looking Bucky in the eye. The man's body was covered in various bruises, which Bucky pointed out in unfailing detail. Whip marks down his back, bloody bruise lines from cuffs about his ankles and wrists, rope burns around his neck, and blood dripping down his thigh.

"No, not just blood. Also something more translucent. Semen" Bucky's finger traced lines down the man's thigh that Steve dutifully followed with a pencil and eraser. In times like these Steve tried to focus on the artistic challenge of portraying translucency with graphite. It distracted Steve from the greater ramifications of the image taking shape on his sketchpad. The distraction unfortunately didn't last long, as Bucky pointed to the man's rear end and the center of the scene of violation. "And this was more swollen and open, with more sperm and blood spilling out. 3 oz or so."

Steve tried his best to keep calm. Certainly, he's seen and heard of worse. But there was something especially distressing about drawing the aftermath of what was clearly a brutal rape of a prisoner while listening to Bucky's calm descriptions. Had Bucky been complicit in what was done to this poor man? And was Steve also complicit in a way, through his drawing of this scene? What would Bucky think when he snapped out of his fugue state?

By now Bucky had moved onto describing the man's face, and Steve found himself sharpening lines and bringing his features into focus. Lips swollen and similarly smeared with semen and marked with the bloody imprints of some metal gag. A chin with a tiny cleft, sharp cheekbones marked by yet another bruise, a delicate but firm jawline, and blank, unseeing eyes, directed straight at the viewer.

Steve recoiled in horror when he leaned back from adding some additional shading to the deep-set eyes. It took all of his self control to not immediately smudge the drawing beyond recognition.

The man was Bucky. Bucky had been describing an image of himself all along, seen through some dim mirror on one side of the cell.

"And he had some stubble on his face, around here..." Bucky moved to point, completely unaware of anything else except the clarity of the image in his mind. Steve reached out and grabbed his hand. Bucky looked up at Steve, perplexed but unguarded, eyes distant. Steve had never tried to stop Bucky in this state before. Even when Steve found himself drawing the fall from the train from Bucky's perspective, he'd managed to keep his tears to himself and complete the task at hand. But this time...

"Bucky," Steve said softly, words failing to come as he struggled to breathe from the emotions flooding his chest. He shouldn't... he's probably already broken 15 different therapist recommendations and set Bucky back months of recovery, but he needed to... he wanted to know, right now, "What's...?"

And it was probably because of the state that Bucky was still caught in, but he merely quirked his head at Steve and studied the image briefly. "The man. He just gave up and decided to stop existing."

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man, that last line!

Not op, but so glad someone filled this!

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

Hee. Thanks! I saw it this morning and was like "um, yes please." And then I wrote it during breaks at work.

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

NNNNNGGGGGGHH You took an already horrifying idea and turned it into THE MOMENT BUCKY BROKE????!!!! Oh god. Oh god. Author anon, I love you so.

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

mwahahaha. It just happened. I was thinking about how the original prompt was asking Bucky to basically describe an image of himself, which basically required a mirror, but also a LOT of dissociation and ... this happened.

Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

Because I love sappy epilogues:
----

Finally, the picture was out of his head. Bucky closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of the couch. With the weight of the image gone, he can finally think again -- process the events of the day properly. Steve had made a particularly nice dinner that night that Bucky should really thank him for. And he was pretty sure he'd rejected Steve's overtures in bed this morning, so now that his head's clear again, he should really make it up to Steve tonight....

Bucky leaned over to nuzzle in Steve's shoulder, and found it stiff and unyielding.

Bucky sat up instantly. Steve sat stiffly beside him, fists clenched and resting on his thighs, right hand holding a pencil that he'd snapped. For Steve to be this stiff -- whatever was in his head was Very Bad. Another victim of assassination? Maybe the look on Howard's face when....

Then Bucky caught sight of the sketch that was laid carefully on the coffee table. It wasn't a victim, it was him. Bucky shivered. It was *that* moment. He'd forgotten until now, but...

"You said this was the moment when you decided to stop existing." Steve said quietly beside him. "When you gave up."

Bucky swallowed. That was true, but also much more complicated. And even though half of it was lost in the mess of his memory, this was something that Steve needed to understand. Something that he needed Steve to understand.

"This was... early. They'd amputated my arm but were still working on different prototypes. They told me that you were dead, and that everyone thought I was dead, so ... it was just me." Bucky gently touched all his bruises in the picture. Funny how he didn't remember any of that part. "This... this stuff wasn't particularly new. I'd long gotten used to the everyday torture stuff, and it always healed. They'd keep me in the dark for a couple of days, then pull me out and the torture happened again." He chuckled. "I was like Prometheus -- stuck on the rock -- couldn't do anything about the vulture, but it couldn't exactly kill me, either."

Bucky picked up the sketch and leaned in to Steve, pushing him and feeling him loosen a bit. "But this one time... they threw me in like usual but forgot to close the food latch, so light came in and reflected off the two-way mirror in the back." He didn't even know he was in a converted interrogation room until then, and that he was being watched the entire time. Not that that's hardly surprising. "It was the first time I really saw myself, my whole self since ... well, since London."

“And seeing myself like that... at first I didn't even recognize myself." What had gotten to him the most was the stubble, actually. Bucky had always stayed clean-shaven for as he could remember. "And seeing the actual physical evidence of what they'd been doing to me --- I realized that they weren't going to give up, that even if this current batch of HYDRA got bored or whatever, there'd always be another batch. They're right, you know ... it doesn't do much just to cut off the head of an..."

"...ideology" Steve said, grimly. Bucky shrugged. He was going to say "institution" but Steve always thought about these things differently. And at this this shows that Steve was thinking about what he was saying.

"So when I saw myself like that ... I knew that I couldn't win. That even if I kept fighting and refused their demands until I died, that's still not winning. No matter what, I wasn't going to see my family again, or really do anything else a normal person would. As far as anyone was concerned, Bucky Barnes was dead." Bucky could feel Steve trembling from emotion beside him, but he kept going.

"In fact, the only person who still cared that I was still Bucky was me, and at that moment, I didn't care very much." Bucky shrugged. "So I decided to stop. It was easier that way, to give up the stuff that was important to Bucky that wasn't doing me or anyone else a jot of good. For all this time, I'd been clinging to my name, my serial number, but the man in the mirror wasn't Bucky Barnes. I didn't even know it until I saw myself in that reflection, but I'd stopped being Bucky somewhere in the middle of all that had happened." Bucky remembered the clarity of that decision, the reassurance and calm that came from realizing that Bucky Barnes didn't matter anymore.

Steve caught him in a tight hug and Bucky almost laughed. Steve could be such a sap sometimes. He responded by pressing reassuringly into the embrace. "It's all right, Steve. *You* remembered Bucky Barnes. And when you did... suddenly it started mattering again." Bucky thought back to the helicarrier. "Sure, I gave up on Bucky, but you didn't."

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

(OP) :D : D this is so agonizing and hopeful at the same time! I agree with the other commenter that it was a stroke of genius to have Steve drawing the moment Bucky broke. And one of my favorite details about that is the difference in their interpretations of the picture. Steve, putting together 'victim in the immediate aftermath of rape' + 'that's BUCKY,' has an instinctive reaction is of visceral horror. That's where he drops everything and turns to Bucky. (I loved the line about having to stop himself from smudging out the details.) I feel like Steve's narration is leading the reader to place a huge emphasis on the rape itself, because that's what he's zooming in on. Bucky, though, then has this great and totally unexpected other take on it, where it turns out it really wasn't the rape itself. Nah, the rape was part of the everyday torture he'd normalized (which is a detail that says so much). It's the image of himself as this destroyed person Hydra made that really broke him. And that's great; I think it says a lot about their varying levels of experience with this, that Steve is thrown by one rape and Bucky was more impacted by himself as the product of countless rapes and other tortures. But we get to focus on the horrors of both through their dual perspectives.

You also did a wonderful job with the tricky shit I couldn't figure out for the prompt, like why and how is this even happening?, explaining it with Bucky's dissociation and preoccupation with his recovered images. I loved that this is a regular thing they do together, that it's something Steve does all the time to help Bucky out. Some of your other choices for things he's drawn for Bucky -- ouch!

Really nicely done! Great minifill!

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

I love the way Bucky deals with his memories in this by dissociating and describing images for Steve to draw. It's an interesting take on recovering!Bucky that I can imagine quite easily.

I also love, as the OP pointed out, that you give us two very different perspectives on the same scene.

It is interesting that Bucky wanted to stop existing when he realized that he was the only one who cared any more if Bucky Barnes was Bucky Barnes, and that he decided he wanted to be Bucky again when Steve remembered him. We're often told (in the US, at least; I can't speak to other cultures) that we are supposed to be entirely independent and not care what anyone else thinks. It's useful in some situations, but not entirely practical. Humans are very much a social species, and it is nice to know that other people care about you. So on the one hand, I want this Bucky to recognize that he has value independent of Steve believing in him, but on the other hand I can completely sympathize with him deciding not to exist as himself anymore until Steve came along and remembered him.

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

I love this

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

This was so good and touching!

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

Oh hey I ended up drawing the picture for my ficlet. It's here:

http://thefilthiestpiglet.tumblr.com/post/130856644943/haha-guess-who-accidentally-wrote-a-trashfill

artfill link above

[(Anonymous)]

... and I keep messing up anon posting. oTL. Guess who's new at the whole kinkmeme thing?

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

That is very nice art.

Very nice art indeed.

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

(OP) !!! Wow! Yo, my favorite detail has got to be the handprint on his ass!

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

Three ounces!!

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [1/1]

[(Anonymous)]

Actually I legit had a hard time deciding whether Bucky would describe things in Imperial or Metric. (Also known as "how Soviet is Bucky?")

I also really enjoyed drawing the blood and the come, so ... *rolls around in filth*

AO3 link bc why not

[(Anonymous)]

http://archiveofourown.org/works/4968268