hydratrashmeme | Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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.

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She was standing there in one of the old-fashioned dresses she favored—probably for his benefit, Bucky realized—and he caught the moment she recognized Steve, freezing.

Bucky looked at her with new eyes: she didn't really resemble Steve, no one would mistake her for his sister, but her coloring was perfect and her hands and feet were a little too big for the rest of her, and more than anything she held herself like it was impossible that anyone would ever deny her.

"Oh God," Steph said quietly.

Bucky’s thoughts slowed to the Winter Soldier’s deadly calm and he was on his feet before he realized what he meant to do. Steve tried to stop him but he evaded the grab without thought. If Steph was field-trained she’d been hiding it perfectly, and at this range she couldn't draw a gun in time. She didn't try to run, though he wasn't sure if she was trapped by fear or just aware he'd catch her anyway.

He pushed off the last step to hit her hard and bore her over backwards, not trying to cushion the landing except that he made sure she didn’t hit her head because he needed her to talk. “Hail Hydra,” Bucky said, the affectless growl all too easy.

“I’d rather not,” Steph said. She was breathless from the fall but the look on her face was resignation. “Jim—”

He slapped her with his flesh hand, not hard, just enough to startle. “Bucky!” Steve exclaimed. He ignored him. “Don’t talk to me like we’re friends,” Bucky ordered. Steph winced and nodded. “What’s your real name?”

“Katrina. Katrina Georges. If we stay here someone might see us,” she said, and Bucky thought it over.

“Is the office bugged?”

“Not while I’m here,” she said. “Your place is, though.”

Bucky stood and hauled her to her feet by her wrists. The metal arm didn’t move like it was supposed to; it was stiff, slow to respond. They must have put an inhibitor in it, because while it wasn’t quite as dextrous as his right, he could remember it being much better than this. He had a flash of memory, crouching behind a car and pulling one of his little sphere-grenades from its place, setting it by touch, intending to roll it into the Black Widow’s hiding place to drive her out...he shook his head. “Let’s go.”

He put her in the desk chair and sat on the edge of the desk himself leaning forward with his forearms resting on his knees. There was little enough room between the desk and the wall that she couldn’t make a move he couldn’t reach. Steve took unhappy sentry at the closed door, arms crossed over his chest.

Steph—Katrina drew a shaky breath. “There’s a STRIKE team on call but their response time is three minutes minimum. I’m supposed to keep you under control by...” She grimaced.

“By being me,” Steve said expressionlessly.

“Yes,” she said, and now she looked ashamed. Bucky didn’t buy it, but he had to admit she was damned convincing. Maybe she was a Widow; maybe she’d been faking her body language all along, even when she didn’t know she was being observed. “They picked me because of how I look.” She smiled, a flash that was there and gone. “I don’t have heart problems either.”

“You’re making this very easy,” Bucky said.

Katrina made a sour face. “I never wanted to be doing it in the first place. I signed up to work for SHIELD, not Hydra.” Steve made a small, surprised noise; Bucky carefully didn’t react at all. “A couple of months before Insight, my boss started acting weird. Personal. Taking an interest, you know? And then the data dump happened and she killed herself because she was Hydra. She’d been feeling me out, and I thought...I thought I was out of a job but I was lucky she didn’t get a chance to try recruiting me. I decided I didn’t want to be in the game anymore, moved here, and opened the store.” She paused and for the first time her eyes filled with tears. “Three months ago my folks were in a car accident. The morning after the funeral I went downstairs and there were two men in the living room who showed me live video of my brother Peter.” She swallowed. “He’s sixteen.”

“Hydra has him,” Steve said, disgusted.

“They let me talk to him once a week, but even he doesn’t know where he is. Nothing happens to him as long as I stay here and make sure the Winter Soldier stays under control and, well.” She wiped furiously at her eyes and her slumped shoulders straightened. “So you can kill me if you want. I might as well fuck them as hard as I can before I die because Peter was dead the second you remembered who you are.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Steve. Bucky...wasn’t sure what to think. The story was certainly plausible; Hydra didn’t scruple at using hostages to guarantee behavior.

“Why didn’t they just tank me again?” It would have been safer than relying on a memory wipe holding for an extended period, and his dreams were evidence enough that it hadn’t been solid even in the beginning.

“Tank you?” Katrina asked, looking baffled.

“Cryo,” he said impatiently. “Why didn’t they put me back in cryo?”

Her mouth hung open for a second. “Cryo-sleep works?” she asked, and for some reason Bucky found her astonishment convincing.

“Normal people, I think they just die, but it works on him,” Steve said, with grim humor. “It’d probably work on me.”

Bucky growled, “We’re not gonna find out.” It was irrelevant; maybe they just didn’t have a tank. Maybe they didn’t want the lead time of taking him out.

Maybe they just thought it was funny watching him try to live like a normal person.

"OK, here's what we're going to do," he said. "You and I are going to keep up the happy families act. Steve, what've you still got—the Black Widow have any contacts left? We need to figure out where her brother is."

Steve smiled, the smile Bucky remembered from watching Hydra bases burn, and said, "I'll see what I can do."

*

He couldn't take Steve to his bugged apartment, so they walked instead.

"Buck...you do remember me?" Steve asked.

Bucky smiled and said, "Like I could forget your ugly mug, Rogers."

Steve breathed a laugh. "Jerk."

"I just call 'em like I see 'em," Bucky said.

Steve punched him in the arm—fortunately for him he was on Bucky's right—and they went a few more paces in silence before he said, "If you need me to leave you alone, I can do that." It was pretty clear he'd rather gouge out his own eyes with a spoon, but Bucky knew he meant it. "I just. I just needed to see you were OK."

Bucky sighed. "I didn't...I didn't run because of you, Steve. I didn't even know for sure who you were for the first, must've been a month or more. Hell, I barely knew who I was. And once I figured that out, it just seemed safer to stay dark for a while. I was thinking about how to get in touch when they caught up with me."

"How'd that work, anyway?" Steve asked. "I noticed you're not exactly a pushover."

When Bucky was trying to kill him. He suppressed the wince and said, "There were a couple of deep-implant triggers. One-use, last resort stuff. Guy walked up to me in a bar in Singapore and said Sputnik and I fell over. By the time I could move again they had restraints on me." He looked up at the sky. "And then I woke up in an apartment with no memory and a cat."

Steve almost stumbled. "You have a cat?" he demanded, and Bucky started to laugh.

I absolutely loved this story from start to finish - it was great to see how Bucky was coping for himself, and the way they work it all out! Lovely writing. And glad that Steph isn't completely evil

Prompt!OP here. Thank you again for this absolutely lovely fill <3

I'm glad you liked.

I cleaned it up and posted to AO3, as well. http://archiveofourown.org/works/5833108

Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

FILL: Let the Water Hold Me Down 4/4

Re: FILL: Let the Water Hold Me Down 4/4

Re: FILL: Let the Water Hold Me Down 4/4

Re: FILL: Let the Water Hold Me Down 4/4