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

Breaking with tradition here (no new content to offer yet) to say thank you for this comment. <3 I've known the general outline of what Sam was going to say to Bucky (i.e., that he was going to deliver the killing blow) ever since the scene at the end of part 3 where he kisses Bucky's scars, and I still very nearly backed down because (a) I love Sam so much and I just wanted to make it easier for him, and (b) I wasn't sure how people would respond to seeing a beloved character pushed and pushed and pushed until he says something genuinely cruel. Sam is trying so hard to protect Bucky, because he recognizes that he feels hurt and angry and violated and devastated and the last thing he wants to do is take that out on Bucky - and as desperately as he'd like to help, he has the maturity to understand that right now he's likely to do more harm than good. And Bucky just blows right past his boundaries, because he knows what it's like now to be abandoned and he can't let that happen to Steve. The instinct to protect Steve is so much stronger than the instinct to protect himself. And Sam explains what he's feeling, his grief at what Bucky has suffered and his horror at being cast in the role of rapist/torturer, and Bucky just can't comprehend that guilt. So Sam . . . frames it in a way Bucky can understand. (He tries to pull the punch at the last moment, because comparing the way Sam and Steve feel now to the way Bucky would have felt after being forced to rape a target is horrendously, unforgivably unfair, but it's too late. And Bucky is just destroyed.)

Bucky's mindset during his encounter with David worries me extremely. He's so incapable of taking action to defend himself even when he asks himself if he could. For me, the antepenultimate paragraph here is the heart of the catastrophe. Like, sometimes you come up against problems your particular brain just isn't equipped to handle, and no matter how smart and thoughtful you are, no matter how excellent the advice you receive, no matter how faithfully and honestly and bravely you look for a solution, you can't reason your way out. Bucky has all the intellectual tools he needs, finally, to get up out of that bed, and he can't do it. And it's not a failure of intelligence or of genuine courageous effort - it's not self-sabotage - it's just that the conditioning runs too deep to be susceptible to rational attack.

You pulled it off really well! And it was painful to read, but that's because it was done well; both of their actions were understandable, and that's part of what made it so difficult and raw. I do have a question for you, though. Obviously Sam is aware he crossed a line and hurt Bucky, but is he aware of just how deep the blow went? Probably not, right, or he wouldn't have let Bucky leave his apartment, but what are your thoughts on his perspective? Actually, I have another question. What's Bucky's understanding of what went down? The question hurt him terribly, but does he think Sam did it on purpose to punish him, or is he that devastated to think he made Sam and Steve feel as he felt after raping a target, or? The emotional fallout was incredibly powerful but at the same time I'm not sure I'm clear on why this was the killing blow.

it's just that the conditioning runs too deep to be susceptible to rational attack.

This leaves me so </3! I can't imagine what a happy ending would look like for this Bucky; will he slowly be able to come to understand himself as a person, or is the best he can hope for to be accepted as someone's property, and be safe and protected that way? I mean, don't actually spoil me, just know that I fret. I should also let you know that a happy or unhappy ending is equally cool with me.

Obviously Sam is aware he crossed a line and hurt Bucky, but is he aware of just how deep the blow went? So I'd say yes, in the immediate sense: after all, he literally knocks Bucky off his feet. When Bucky starts begging Sam to punish him instead of Steve, his distress is apparent, and it's severe enough that Sam ignores his instinct not to touch Bucky (neither Sam nor Steve want to inflict themselves on him any further) and hugs him. But in the broader sense, no. He doesn't know how demolished Bucky already is: that he's not eating and barely sleeping, that he's afraid to leave his apartment, that it's only stubbornness and the need to protect Steve sustaining him through this conversation. More fundamentally, as the commenter below put it, he doesn't know that Bucky has lost his best friends and his main source of security and love. From Sam's perspective, he and Steve were abusers who frightened Bucky and subjected him to sex he hated. (Steve asked Bucky whether any part of their relationship was real, and Bucky begged not to be made to answer before arriving at, "People use me, or they don't." This was a terrible response, because it completely elided the very real comfort and affection. Similarly, when Sam asks what Bucky felt when they touched him, Bucky gives an incredibly damaging answer. It's understandable, I hope, because Bucky construes both questions as being specifically about sex. But he'd have done better to mention THE CUDDLES.) As Sam understands it, he thought he was in love with someone who, in turn, thought Sam occasionally hit him and tortured him sexually as punishment. Now that he thinks he knows the truth, Sam doesn't imagine for a moment that there was anything genuinely good for Bucky in that abusive relationship. When Bucky asks to go home, Sam has no trouble believing that Bucky just wants to escape.

Does he think Sam did it on purpose to punish him, or is he that devastated to think he made Sam and Steve feel as he felt after raping a target? Both. And Sam did lash out at him. Sometimes we say the wrong things because we don't fully understand the situation or where the other person is coming from, but sometimes (hopefully not often) we say the wrong things because we're upset and angry. Sam obviously didn't mean to hurt Bucky as badly as he did, but invoking Bucky's trauma like that was unkind and unfair. And yes, Bucky is appalled when he finally connects the things Sam and Steve have been saying to him (you made us into monsters, we never would have touched you, etc.) to the visceral horror and sense of violation he experienced when Hydra made him into that particular type of monster. He loves them and is devastated to think he's hurt them that badly (and he didn't, it is not the same, hence UNFAIR), and at the same time he has a sort of cognitive meltdown (triggering the worst and [spoilers] last of the headaches) because he is conditioned to be pleasing and yet somehow by following the dictates of that conditioning he has fucked up catastrophically.

More fundamentally, as the commenter below put it, he doesn't know that Bucky has lost his best friends and his main source of security and love. From Sam's perspective, he and Steve were abusers who frightened Bucky and subjected him to sex he hated.

This is wonderful, and it's also terrible, because coming from this frame of mind, everything Sam and Steve have done makes sense. Since we're following Bucky's perspective, we see the disastrous turbulence his life has been thrown into subsequent to the traumatic loss of his support structure. (And that also clarifies, retrospectively, just how crucial their love and companionship were in enabling him to survive the entire world of shit he had to muck through just to get along in daily life.) But from Sam and Steve's perspective, why would they see it as him losing his support structure? If they thought they had coerced him into a relationship that was 100% abuse and rape, then wholly excising that from his life could only help him and let him start to heal. They tried to make sure he did have support, Steve's offer to do or be whatever Bucky needed, his therapist, his other friends, etc. How could they know that he feels like his strength has been ripped away, his self-image has been destroyed, and he's been left alone and defenseless in a world that's terrifyingly unkind to him? And that's what makes this SO painful, because Sam and Steve have caused much WORSE pain trying to fix the problem than they ever did perpetuating it, and they have NO IDEA that it's like a botched surgery, they killed the patient trying to carve out the disease, and Bucky's in so much pain and I just need them to knoooow. Even if there's an absolutely miserable ending and Bucky DIES, my burning desire at this point is just for Sam and Steve to understand the depths of his agony and what caused it. I suffer :(

Everything you write about Bucky makes sense. My poor baby.

(a!a) OP, you are the soul of patience. I hope you've been well and that your trash fire is still burning.

Next up: the living and the dead.

Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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