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.

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FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (4/?)

[(Anonymous)]

“You can tell me anything, Buck. You don’t have to put up a front.” They’ve been sitting quietly together on the couch for a couple hours, occasionally moving into each other’s space—Bucky’s head on Steve’s thigh, Steve’s ankle resting on Bucky’s knee—but mostly coexisting peacefully, like two potted plants with the ability to scribble in notebooks.

Now Steve’s blurted that out, and Bucky’s snapped his notebook shut. Seemingly without thinking about it, he shoves it deep in the couch cushions. He rubs his right hand with his left wrist, and takes a loud breath. “Okay, fine, I think Money Management is really boring. I’m sorry I told you it wasn’t so bad.” He swallows and flicks his gaze around the room. “I didn’t want you to think I was doing the wrong thing. Unfit to be educated.”

“Bucky.” For a moment, he forgets what he really wanted to talk about. The uncalled for excess of shame in Bucky’s voice makes his throat feel blocked up. He wants to hold his hand, so he does, and Bucky squeezes hard. “Money Management sounds boring. You’re going anyway, and I see you doing the homework anyway. I can’t imagine the fortitude that takes.”

Bucky snorts. He shifts closer, switching from a hand hold to hooking their arms together. “Oh my god. Oh my goodness gracious. Sweetheart.” He smiles at Steve like Steve is the most adorable and pitiful animal he’s ever seen in his life, so Steve sticks his tongue out at him.

Bucky rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Sure. Okay. Going to a college class three times a week. That’s the most fortitudinous thing I’ve ever done in my whole long life.”

“It involves fortitude!” Bucky puts his face in Steve’s neck and inhales. On instinct, Steve leans in like he could be sucked up entirely by Bucky’s lungs, and not have to continue, “Oh, but um. That wasn’t what I meant.” A kiss to his jugular makes him shiver. And then makes him wince. The conversation he’s steering toward hasn’t exactly got him in the mood to get worked up.

“What wasn’t what you meant?” The words are hushed, said right up against the skin beneath his ear. “I’ve got the brain of a jellyfish. You need to give me clearer conversational cues.”

“No, I don’t. You’re just trying to shut me up with heavy petting.”

“'Heavy petting?' I’m barely touching you. Fine, fine.” He keeps their arms entwined, but backs up so he isn’t breathing all over Steve’s skin. “But actually: What wasn’t what you meant? I distracted myself.”

“About you putting up a front. I didn’t mean Money Management.”

“Oh. Okay, um.” He makes his mouth like he’s growling out one side of it, and closes his left eye. It’s the face he always has, these days, when he’s thinking hard about something. Or, more specifically, wants you to know that he is. “No, I’m sorry, Steve. I don’t think I’ve been lying about anything else. If I was, I didn’t mean to.”

“I don’t mean that you’ve been lying. Not exactly. I mean that you’ve been trying to spare me by acting cheerful about—You know.” He gestures at the whole room with his arm. That fails to make Bucky look less confused. “Things I don’t need you to act cheerful about.”

“I still honestly don’t know what you mean. But you look—” He puts the back of his metal hand to Steve’s forehead. It’s body temperature from how Bucky keeps it stuffed in his armpit so much of the time. “Oh, hang on. Can you get fevers now? You can’t, right?”

He shrugs. “I haven’t tried.”

“Brain of a jellyfish, told you.” The hand goes back under his armpit.

“Look, I’m not sick. I think, okay. Buck, because you don’t want to upset me, which is sweet, but. You’ve been acting like. Like you weren’t forced.”

“To kill people. We are not having—”

“No! No, not that.” Even though he does feel like Bucky should have that conversation again with someone. “I mean with Andrews. And the few other people over the years.”

“Excuse me?” He says it like he needs Steve to repeat a phone number. There’s the perfect crease between his brows that Steve always wants to touch in awe.

Steve’s face has been wrong; he’s been acting wrong; he needs to act like himself. Not tactful or subtle.
“Bucky, you were. I mean, it was rape, Buck. I know that. You don’t need to protect me from that.”

So maybe it was stupid to imagine that Bucky might break down now, or even weep softly while pretending to be stoic. Maybe it was repulsive of him to imagine those things. He isn’t sure. He certainly feels repulsive. But that doesn’t make it any less startling when Bucky laughs. It’s a laugh like falling down the stairs and breaking your arm at the bottom.

“Jesus, pal. That’s. Fuck. That’s taking the jealous thing a little far, don’t you think? I mean, fuck. That’s pretty callous toward people who have actually been raped, I think.”

His own voice stutters, laugh-like, when he says, “I’m not jealous. I’ve told you. I’m not jealous, and I don’t want to be callous toward you. I’m sorry.” He takes his arm out of Bucky’s. “I just don’t know how to talk to you about these things. And you obviously want to talk about them, because you were talking with your classmates.” Steve has tried to imagine wanting to share personal details with veritable strangers in public but not with Bucky in their own home. All of him recoiled at the thought.

“Not callous toward me, Steve. You’re not listening.”

Steve grits his teeth and purses his lips over them. Puts his hands on his knees and digs his nails in.

Bucky raises his hands like a crossing guard and looks at Steve sideways. “Hey, I’m not judging you!” He bobs his head to the side and sticks his tongue between his teeth. “Okay, I kind of am. You went too far. But I still love you and everything. Please don’t think I don’t.” His skin-and-bone placating palm wraps around Steve’s wrist. A loose grip. His thumb rubs at the underside. Bucky can get really weird and romantic about pulse points.

It always makes Steve want to keep him tight within his limbs and hold a glass of water to his lips and generally be careful and specific about him. About examining and protecting all his individual parts. His throat is blocking up again. He looks at Bucky’s hand and places his own hand over it. “Bucky.”

“Yeah, it’s me. I still love you. I’m sorry. Never mind.”

“Why would I think you don’t love me?”

“Hey, never mind. We don’t need to talk about this. It upsets you. It’s stupid.”

“Bucky. It’s not stupid. It’s not jealousy. You were raped, and that’s, well. Not ‘fine.’ But the fact that you apparently don’t think so is scaring me! Do you get that? I don’t want this to be about me. But you’re scaring me. You are.”

“I don’t get it. Even if you were right. You wouldn’t have to be scared. It’s over. Those guys are all dead.”

“I don’t know.” Unsure if it’s the right thing to do, Steve lifts his arm so he can kiss Bucky’s hand where it’s holding him. He looks into Bucky’s eyes. “But it’s true. I’m scared.” His brow wrinkles. “It’s not stupid.”

Bucky just looks at him. For too long. Big, worried eyes. Then he raises his metal hand and hovers it by Steve’s head, suggesting touch but not touching. “I’m sorry.” He licks his bottom lip. His eyes narrow more, lighting up. “Can I make you feel better?”

Steve knocks his head against the hovering hand and immediately regrets it when Bucky’s eyes get wide again. “I don’t know. No. Not right now.”



Now, when he looks at him, it’s impossible for Steve to see anything other than Bucky putting up a front. He’s all front, like a cardboard cut-out. He walks around delicately, but with a longer stride than he’s had in a while now. He tosses his hair a confusing amount, no longer keeping it in neat up-dos like a socialite. And he makes a lot of jokes. A lot more jokes than Steve thinks he made before, though he’s starting to not trust himself on the topic of remembering Bucky.

There’s the time before Steve said the word “raped” aloud, and there’s the time after. There was before he got zapped with vita rays and now there’s after he got zapped with vita rays, and the moment the chamber opened, before he could register his vertigo, or the clumsy, deadened feeling of his new body, he registered how bad his vision must have been before. And he’d never noticed. He’d been getting everything wrong and he’d had no idea.

At breakfast, Bucky wipes a milk mustache away with the sleeve of his flannel and says, “Hey, Steve, knock knock,” knocking on the table simultaneously, same as he did when they were kids.

Steve asks around his bacon, “Sure, who’s there?”

He says, “I’m Captain America.”

Steve says, “No. Nuh-uh. Not this”. But the truth is he’s waited so fucking long to hear Bucky make the most pointless joke in the world one more time.

“Come on! Say it.”

“Fine. Captain America who?”

“I’m Captain America!”

“This was never a good joke.”

“If it weren’t a good joke, it wouldn’t have gotten on your nerves so much.”

That doesn’t make any sense. A lot of things get on Steve’s nerves, and he doubts that they’re all good jokes.

When Bucky gets home from Money Management that afternoon, Steve is reorganizing the bookshelf. Previously, the books were alphabetized by author. A few hours ago, he alphabetized them by title. A little later, he walked by and decided that it looked awful and began sorting by color instead.

Bucky walks in on him sitting on the floor, surrounded by strewn volumes, staring at a stack of loose comic books, unsure how to place them on the color spectrum when they barely have spines.

“Hey,” Bucky says, and Steve looks up. At some point, Bucky took his flannel off and tied it around his waist, leaving him in an oversized white undershirt dotted with sweat. Humidity makes the hair by his ears curl. Steve wants to pull it straight to watch it spring back.

“Hey.”

“Hey, listen to this. I forgot it completely. So these hunters meet an old hunter in the forest. They know him, and he’s almost blind, so to be safe, they shout, ‘We are not deer! We are not deer!’ The old man notices them. He takes aim at them and he mutters, ‘Shut up, deer.’” He sets himself off on a hysterical peal of laughter, covering his face with his right hand.

He drags the hand to the side, hard, like he’s wiping off mud. There’s no smile under there. “Remember that one?”

“I never knew that one, Buck. Where’s that from?”

“You think I know? I’m not a search engine.”

Usually when Bucky throws memories at Steve to see what sticks—what’s from before the war and what’s from the war and what’s from some time a few months ago, all the rest sliding down and off Steve’s confused face—he’s nice about it. Extra nice. If he misjudges, and Steve shows no sign of recognition, Bucky says, “Oops, I’m really sorry about that,” like he’s put his dirty shoes up on the dining room table or sneezed in Steve’s face.

Now, he stands over Steve and glares at him. His right hand flexes in and out of a fist by his side, left hand toying with an edge of his flannel the same way he does with the end of his ponytail when he can’t decide whether he really wants to go for a run or just thinks he should.

Steve is at a loss. “Okay, well, either way, I don’t know that one.”

“Do you think it’s funny?”

“Not really. So it’s probably Russian, right?”

Bucky huffs and looks away. “Who knows? Your sense of humor’s a piece of shit.” He stalks out of the room.

Later, all apparently forgotten, he says, “Hiawatha nice girl until I met you.”

He says, “Little Audrey laughed and laughed.”

He says, “The internet says that the goat ‘craves that mineral.’ And now everyone craves that mineral. I don’t get it, but I do think it’s funny.”

Steve says, “I never understand who you’re talking about when you say ‘the internet,’” and Bucky rolls his eyes.

“Do you talk to anyone on the internet or just read articles?”

Steve shrugs his shoulders up high around his ears. They’re in bed, and Bucky has his custom night guard held loosely in his metal hand, thumb running over the ridges. As far as Steve knows, he hasn’t even looked at it since wearing it the first night after it was made.

He’d removed it in the middle of the night, thrown it across the room in a daze. When he woke up and found the little ring of plasticky teeth sitting in front of their closed bedroom door, he said, “Ah, well. Ground-down teeth are ground-down teeth! How much more ground-down could my teeth even get, really. How much wood could a woodchuck, right?”

Steve said, “They don’t grow back, you know,” and Bucky said, “I know. Jeeze Lou-fucking-eeze, you sound just like the dentist when you say that.”

Steve’s in pajamas, but Bucky’s still got all his clothes on. He throws the night guard in the air and catches it.

“Hey.” Steve knee-walks across the bed to where Bucky’s perched on the side. “You could give me a tutorial on how to talk to people on the internet. If you wanted. That could be fun.” Bucky stares at him. Little wrinkles in his forehead. His mouth drawn tight. Then he works his jaw like he has something to say, and looks down at the night guard.

He kisses his metal fingers and presses them to Steve’s mouth. Steve kisses them in turn. He sucks on the middle finger for only a moment. Bucky looks up. He moves his hand so that he can knock on Steve’s shoulder at the same time that he says, “Knock knock.”

Steve sighs. “No knock-knock jokes in bed.”

Dramatically, like it’s somehow payback for not getting to make his joke, Bucky fits the night guard over his top row of teeth and bites down. With his distorted voice, he says, "I'm Captain America."

"Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans," Steve says. He gets up to fetch Bucky pajamas from the closet. Just in case he changes his mind about wearing skinny jeans to bed.

Re: FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (4/?)

[(Anonymous)]

Can't wait to see when Bucky actually says what's on his mind! I absolutely love how you've portrayed Bucky-the-socialite and Steve-the-awkward-penguin. (Especially Steve's thought process whenever he has to socialize just strikes really close to home.)

Re: FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (4/?)

[(Anonymous)]

I really love this and I'm afraid I haven't written as good a comment as I should have yet. I LOVE the sex/roleplay scenes ("what would you do to me if I mugged someone?")--they are so great and also so realistically funny and awkward. You're a hilarious writer and I love the way you describe everything like Steve putting the liquids in the blender and thinking they look the same after he blended them. The characterizations are great, as the above commenter said--I think there's a lot of canon leeway for Steve to be really, really socially awkward and shy and not enough people take advantage of that. And I can't WAIT to see more about what's going on with Bucky.