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

FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (1/?)

[(Anonymous)]

Bucky's laughing. It's his mostly silent laugh, located all in his loose, open grin, the jerk of his shoulders, and jump of his abdominal muscles. Steve says, "What? What did I do? What, am I not intimidating anymore?" He pulls Bucky's head to one side by his hair, hard, and twists his nipple, less hard.

Bucky closes his mouth, but the laughter is still there, his tight-lipped smile squirming.

"Stop laughing at me." Steve tries to put a suitable amount of gravitas into his voice, but really, seeing Bucky laugh makes a bright warmth sing through his body. Even as he's kind of embarrassed, feeling like a kid again, like he’s touching Bucky, really touching, for the first time, pinning him to the floor and glowering at him for the first time at Bucky's request, a young and nervous Bucky whispering between kisses, “Hey, Steve, what would you do if I tried to mug someone on the street? What would you do to me?”
It is all new again. Steve is out of practice.

He lets go of Bucky's hair and shoves him back onto the mattress. Bucky's body flops, no tension in him, and he smiles up at Steve. "No," he says. "You're very intimidating. You have a very commanding presence."

"That's right. Don't you forget it."

"Been there. Done that," and Steve laughs, one loud, avian sound surprised out of him.

"So what's so funny?" he asks.

"Nothing. You just reminded me of something." There's a lot of precedent for Bucky’s memories causing complications, but right now he seems relaxed, which typically means he's been reminded of something he can share with Steve without getting guilty and ferrety for days, like he maybe ruined Steve's entire life by telling him about being operated on without anesthetic.

Often, when it's a nice memory, it's something Steve was there for. Something they can enjoy together.

He says, "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Just, your hand on my face." Steve touches his hand to Bucky's cheek and slaps him softly, a pantomimed version of the more stinging slap he gave him right before the laughter started. Bucky says, "Yeah, that. It's nothing. It's not important right now."

Steve isn't sure what that could have reminded Bucky of--fucking him ages ago or fucking someone else or a scrap they got into, bleeding bony teenage messes. No moment distinct enough to be interesting, just good. A shot of light in the gloomy jumbled mess of Bucky’s brain. Still, to be a dick, he starts yanking on Bucky's hair again—pulling his pigtails--and says, "What? Come on, share the joke. I love jokes."

"No!" Bucky's still smiling even as he winces at the pain in his scalp. "We were in the middle of something. And besides--" he makes his face somber--"you're much too intimidating for me to be making jokes around you."

"You’re damn right I am." He kisses the hollow at the base of Bucky's throat, then slaps his face to set him off on a new wave of pleased silent laughter. It's okay that Steve can't make Bucky tell him what the hell memory he's laughing about, when there are so many more interesting things he can make him do. He forgets about it. They were in the middle of something.



Over breakfast one morning, tapping his spoon against the side of his bowl, Bucky says, “I want to learn HVAC maintenance. Can you believe these advancements in weather-controlled environments? It’s like, uh. The One Sane Man. Do you remember that book?”

“No.” Steve definitely didn’t read that book.

“Oh, well.” He shoves a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth and makes Steve wait for more information. He swallows, and says, “It’s about a man who tries to control the whole world by controlling the weather. Have you expanded your literary horizons at all?”

“You know I hate expanding my horizons.” Bucky bobs his head from side to side in exasperated agreement as he eats more oatmeal. Steve says, “Wouldn’t the moral of that book have been not to control the weather? He sounds like the villain.”

“Nah.” Bucky’s mouth is full, and a bit of saliva-laden oatmeal lands on the tablecloth. “I think it was ambiguous. Not everything has a moral.”

So he looks through the HVAC courses on a nearby community college’s website, and writes down the information for all of them on a slip of paper and carries it around in his wallet for a week before deciding that he should take some other classes first. Training wheels before tackling his real interest.

“I haven’t exactly been in a classroom in the better part of a century,” he explains to Steve. “Unless you count—Nah. And I could still wait for hours to get a good kill shot if I had to, but god knows my attention span for constant flows of information ain’t so hot these days.”

He registers for Creative Nonfiction and Money Management. When he announces this, launching himself one-handed over the back of the sofa to land next to Steve, who’s watching the local news, Steve says, “Money Management? Since when can’t you manage money? You always helped me manage my money.” Steve complained about it relentlessly at the time, but it wasn’t like Bucky was ever wrong that he shouldn’t be blowing money on a new typewriter if he was barely gonna scrape together his next rent payment.

You can write your letters to the editor on my Dad’s, Steve. Come on. You can write them by hand. You have nice handwriting.

“'Since when?' Really?” Bucky nudges him with his metal shoulder. “Three guesses since when I can’t manage money, Steve. It starts with one…nine…four…”

Steve elbows him in the side. Bucky gets a feral grin and elbows him back, which hurts more than Steve probably hurt him on account of—“The fucking metal, Buck, Jesus.” He cuffs Bucky on the back of the head and Bucky grabs his hand and bites his thumb. Steve captures Bucky’s chin and smiles at him. Bucky leers like Bugs Bunny.

“Can I help you with something?” Steve asks.

They fuck on the floor, face-to-face, Steve’s hand around Bucky’s throat, barely pressing, but very present, threatening to pin him in place. It’s something Bucky only started wanting recently, but it makes sense that it takes more for him to let go now than it used to when he was smaller and had no concept of himself as a real threat. Steve can imagine what significantly more intense shit he’d want done to him if he were inclined that way.

Bucky’s asked recently for Steve to use a knife, but he’s waiting for the right time.

“It’s good. It’s good. It’s good,” Bucky’s chants, voice gone breathy.

“It—It is,” Steve says. He moves his hand up higher to force Bucky to show his throat more, and the chanting grows more insistent like Steve’s arguing with him about it instead of agreeing. “It’s good that you registered for those classes, Buck,” Steve says, close to finishing. “My smart fucking slut. Even the money management. You’re gonna do great.” Shuddering, he groans, “Especially with the writing.”

Bucky used to make fun of him for coming faster from talking about ordinary things during sex. He doesn’t this time. He takes Steve’s hand and holds it.



They both have beards now. Steve hates his. Bucky doesn’t. But between the beards and the change in location, they’ve been sliding by unnoticed. Sam flew to their house in the middle of the night once and got called a possible UFO on Twitter. Then the tweets showed up on the news. He drives when he wants to see them now. It’s only half an hour.

Still, Steve gets twitchy any time they meet people together. Even bearded, their faces side-by-side could spark recognition.

He goes to pick Bucky up after his nonfiction writing class. Bucky wants to take him to an art gallery; he said, “We should go on a date, you know. Everyone here thinks we’re a normal couple but we haven’t gone on a date, have we?”

“We are a normal couple,” was what came out of Steve’s mouth, only one of the many confused objections he had to this line of thinking. E.g. Do couples who live together still have to go on dates? Do they have to call it a date? Who are all these people who are maybe studying them and wondering why, if they’re a normal couple, do they not ever go on dates?

Bucky said, “We will be, after I take you on a date.”

Steve shows up in front of the college in sunglasses, jeans, and an ironed button-up. It wasn’t clear how ritzy an occasion Bucky thought a date to an art gallery was, but he sees that they’re dressed about the same, though Bucky’s shoes and braided hair both gleam in the afternoon sun.

Bucky’s lounging on the steps, faux-louche, leaned back on his elbows, smiling at the two women lounging similarly to his right. One looks really young to Steve, but Natasha often looks really young to him, so he’s learned to stop trusting himself on this. The other, with close-cropped hair and mauve lipstick, must be older than he and Bucky are. In one sense.

She’s saying someone as Steve approaches, and Bucky lets loose an enormous, bellowing laugh. He’s definitely been aware of Steve’s nearing presence for at least the past half block, but he looks absorbed. He widens his eyes like the woman is saying something unbelievably crazy that in reality is probably mundane, like maybe she lost her car keys or saw a stray cat.

At some point, Steve forgot that Bucky actually likes being around other people. It’s not that he used to have a lot of close friends, but he was likeable, and he liked being liked, and seemed to find the details of everyone’s lives fascinating, and would recount them to Steve as though Steve might also be invested in Brenda Who I Met on the G Train.

Those instincts must be compounded for him now by the sheer novelty of being told mundane stories about people’s lives. Stories with nothing utilitarian about them.

There’s a pause in the flow of conversation, and Bucky looks up, catching Steve’s eye as Steve jaywalks over. Steve smiles a little and raises his eyebrows. Bucky raises his eyebrows back. He makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, and says to the women, “Here’s my ride.”

“We’re walking,” Steve says, squeezing himself between two closely parked cars.

“Oh, I just assumed you were planning to carry me on your back.”

Steve snorts, but once he’s in front of the group, he isn’t sure how to proceed. Bucky is still sitting, smiling like maybe Steve’s invited to join them. Steve puts his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

The younger woman asks, “You’re Stewart?” and looks him up and down in the unabashed way that’s less common among people who have no reason to think of him as public property, but still not uncommon among people who know him as Stewart Roberts, who telecommutes and has an ugly beard.

“Yep,” he says. “That’s me.”

“Jake’s told us about you.”

“Oh, well. Jake’s a real talker.” She smiles and nods, looking over at Bucky with obvious fondness. He’s known this girl for a maximum of two weeks.

“Jake?” Steve says; a note of hysteria has crept into his voice. The thought of this interaction having no imminent endpoint makes him feel like his bones are all grinding together.

Bucky says, “Yeah, keep your shirt on,” and stands up, stretching, popping his joints, faking a yawn. He saunters the couple of feet to Steve. He throws an arm around Steve’s shoulders and kisses him on the cheek.

This is the most publicly affectionate Bucky’s been with him since before the war. Maybe these are the people who have been watching and wondering why they don’t go on real dates. That’s the main thing Steve hates about their relocation to somewhere smaller: the constant prickle of potential surveillance. Even if he isn’t being monitored nearly as closely as he was when SHIELD owned him. Owned them both.

Steve puts his hand to the small of Bucky’s back and says, “Yep. Well. We’re going now. It was very nice to meet you.” Bucky’s face is still close to Steve’s, but he submits to being steered around, cajoled into walking away. The women call out goodbyes.

When they’re out of earshot, Bucky slides his hand into Steve’s hair and ruffles away its styling. He says, “They’re classmates.”

“I figured.”

“They asked if I wanted to go for coffee. When I said I was waiting here for you, they said they’d wait too. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It is. I don’t know if I’d choose you over coffee.”

“Oh, shaddup.” He leans his head on Steve’s shoulder. They technically could walk that way; they could both walk a lot of more complex ways, but Steve takes it as a hint, and stops walking to put his arms around him, so that Bucky’s head burrows against the side of his neck. It’s a mostly empty street, parked cars and little houses and a bookshop. A woman sitting on her stoop smiles at them, then goes back to her tablet.

“All right there?” Steve asks, and Bucky sighs and pulls away, grinning.

“Yep. Just smelling your cologne.” He starts walking again, and Steve follows, more space between them now.

“I don’t wear cologne.”

“Exactly. You couldn’t wear cologne for our date? Steve.” He says the name in a lower voice, even if no one’s listening.

“I ironed a shirt!”

“I iron my shirts every day. Step your game up.”

Steve takes Bucky’s hand. “You looked happy, you know. You talk about anything fun?

“Ex-boyfriends.”

“What, you consoling? Starting an advice column?”

Bucky laughs, and knocks their shoulders together, squeezes Steve’s hand tighter. “No, no one was consoling anyone. Why do you always gotta assume everything’s a tragedy?”

“Well, I have a melancholic temperament.”

“You’re mostly choleric. We were just sharing stories.”

“About their ex-boyfriends.” Bucky smiles and squints at him like Steve’s missing something obvious. “And. Your. You. Someone, uh. In Brooklyn. Who I didn’t.” He knew at the time that Bucky was sleeping with other people, but it never occurred to him that Bucky would still be able to remember their names. Let alone anything worthy of a story.

“God, no. I would never call any of those guys my boyfriend, Steve. This guy Andrews.”

“In the Army?”

“I was a little busy in the Army, you know. All that shooting and whatnot. He was a SHIELD agent.”

His first thought is that Bucky secretly met and shacked up with someone from SHIELD after the helecarriers fell. They nursed each other back to health. It was torrid, yet domestic. Bucky insisted they get joint custody of a hamster: something that would die quickly, but be adorable and beloved in the meantime.

He returns to reality. He stops walking. It’s sudden. Their hands break apart.

Bucky turns. He raises his eyebrows and his hands, palms-out. “Okay, fine, so I wouldn’t have called him my boyfriend either. He also wouldn’t have called me Jake. You have to meet your audience where they’re at.”

“Fuck, Bucky.”

“What? Wait.” A smile blooms on his face. “You jealous, honey?”

“What?” He thinks, for a moment, that Bucky is asking if Steve is jealous that no one in Hydra ever did that to him. Then his brain catches up. Bucky thinks he’s jealous because he's never raped Bucky. “Jesus Christ, Bucky, I don’t want to—No. Never. I would never be jealous of that, okay?”

“Really? Come on. I’m not judging you.” He shrugs. “I was jealous of Peggy. It’s all right to feel human emotions, Steve.”

“Peggy didn’t. That’s a completely different situation! How the hell can you compare them?”

Bucky sighs and knocks his shoulder into Steve’s again. He tries to take Steve’s hand, but it’s dead weight, so Bucky gives up and places a warm hand on his bicep. “Hey, it’s fine. We don’t have to talk about this right now. Let’s enjoy our date.”

“Buck, if you want to talk about this, we can.”

“What I want to talk about is this artist lady’s ‘use of scavenged decaying materials to create life-size embodiments of the many faces of pathos.’” He studied the program for the gallery closely last night. “What do you think that means? Do you think we’re gonna be allowed to touch them?”

They’re not allowed to touch them. Steve catches Bucky brushing his metal fingertips along a twisting scrap metal arm for a couple stolen seconds anyway.

Re: FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (1/?)

[(Anonymous)]

So um I haven't even finished this yet but I'm SCREAMING at the title. You are best

Re: FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (1/?)

[(Anonymous)]

lol thank you. naming it this brought me a tremendous sense of peace and fulfillment.

Re: FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (1/?)

[(Anonymous)]

I just read the first part now, and I have to say, I love your characterization (and I'll have to wait for part 2 until I get back, damn real life responsibilities!)