hydratrashmeme | Dumpster #4: I Don't See How That's a Party

Dumpster #4: I Don't See How That's a Party

Okay, kids, you know the drill. Don't be a jerk except to fictional characters. Warn if you want, but read at your own risk, because

hydratrashmeme is about as far from a safe space as you can get. Garbage we like: noncon, whump, aftermath, violence, mind control, inappropriate uses of Bucky Barnes' metal arm, bad guys doing dirtybadwrong things to your faves. Garbage you should find a different trashcan for: a/b/o, D/s-verse, soulbonds, mundane AUs, OOC evil!good guys doing dirtybadwrong things to your faves, rotting leftovers dressed up as a romantic gourmet meal. Nothing wrong with 'em, but this isn't the crowd you should be pitching to if you're trying to sell Brock Rumlow as anything but a human dumpster fire.

Link your fills on the fill post, post unprompted fills as replies to a header comment so the wall o' text is collapsible, and let me know if you're interested in helping out with the Pinboard archive.

[Rules in full] [Round 1] [Round 2] [Round 3] [Fill post] [Chatter post] [hydratrashmeme Pinboard archive (maintained by

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All prompts or fills that contain Infinity War spoilers must go on the Infinity War spoiler post until May 26th. Spoilers in the main dumpsters will be deleted.

Round 4 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 5.

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Bucky reached over to grab Sam’s hand with his right one and as he did Sam suddenly flashed back a few hours to kneeling on the bedroom carpet, Bucky’s fingers twitching around his after he begged for a response.

The only noise in the room was Bucky’s loud, short breaths and Luiz’s quiet, steady voice asking him to move his legs apart, asking him to relax, telling him where she was going to touch next. Sam’s head was spinning again and he could feel the air of the room pressing in on him. It felt like the only stable things were his own hand clenched on his knee and Bucky’s hand around his, squeezing so tight it hurt. He wanted to leave. He wanted to look away. He wanted to tell Bucky to close his eyes instead of looking from the ceiling to his own spread knees, with the sheet over them and the crown of Luiz’ dark head visible above them, and back again and again.

He tried to focus on the way Bucky’s shoulders, the way they tensed and un-tensed, the way the pillowcase creased around his head, the lines at the corners of his eyes, anything but the lump in his own throat and the weight on his chest that weren’t going away, or the image in his mind’s eye of Bucky lying on the bedroom carpet, naked, bloody, looking like a doll or a dead thing.

Sam heard Luiz announce that it was all done as if from a long ways away. Bucky gave no indication of having heard except to finally relax and close his eyes. It took a moment for Sam to realize she was speaking to him, and another to understand that give us five minutes, please meant leave the room.

The hallway again. The MPs flanking the door. Sam stood there blinking, feeling like someone stumbling into the sunlight even though the big windows were dark now. And there was Steve, unfurling from where he had been sitting with his back to the window, taking Sam by the arm and saying words that were hard for Sam to string into sentences.

Steve, thank God, had been busy. He had a bag of clothes – sweatpants, t-shirt with the SHIELD seal on it, a sweatshirt, a pair of sneakers, as if he’d raided a gym locker and, Sam realized, since he and Bucky were almost the same size, maybe he had.

They would stay at the facility that night, which wasn’t a surprise for Sam. They’d done it before, when they were too tired to want to make the trip home or thought they might get called out again before the end of the night. There was a room ready for them.

“And everything’s going to be okay, right?” Steve was asking. “With Bucky?”

“Steve, I don’t think Bucky’s going to be okay for a damn long time.” Steve took a step back, which was when Sam realized he must have snapped harder than he’d meant to. But since Steve was actually listening to him, he pressed on. “No one knows how something like this will hit another person, but it usually hits them hard. And no, he still hasn’t changed his mind about seeing you tonight. So you might want to go before we leave.”

Steve ducked his head. When he spoke, it was quieter than usual. “It just doesn’t seem right to go without seeing him. Feels like leaving him behind. And we never left each other behind, except –” He cut off and oh, Sam should’ve seen this guilt pile coming.

“Hey. No one’s getting left behind here. Bucky’s trying to hang onto his pride.” His shame. “And he doesn’t want you to see him when he’s down.” Sam pulled a smile that he didn’t feel. “Remind you of anyone?”

“Remind you of anyone?” Steve’s smile was just as flimsy. “If you want me for anything, let me know. I’m going to be up the rest of the night anyway. We still need to find the guys that did this.”

Bucky made Sam turn away when he changed into the sweatpants, but he let him stay through Luiz giving him care instructions, which was good because Sam wasn’t sure Bucky was actually listening to anything she said. It was mostly a list of symptoms that should be reported to medical immediately. Headache, dizziness, numbness or tingling, vision problems, sudden weakness, shortness of breath, vomiting, sudden sweating, runny nose – “This kind of nerve agent probably would have killed a normal person, and we still don’t know how your body will react to it. So don’t wait for it to get ‘bad enough’ before you call us.” When to come to medical for what kind of followup. “I want you to think about seeing a counselor, even if you feel like you don’t need to.” A single, pre-loaded syringe with a supersoldier-strength sedative in case Bucky had trouble sleeping. A warning that even Bucky might hurt for a few days. An instruction to call medical immediately if the pain was getting worse. An instruction to wait before having sex again, even if he felt fine.

Luis chased off the MPs, and the walk over to temporary quarters was quiet. Bucky moved slowly and kept his head down, but shook off Sam’s guiding hand on his elbow, so Sam was stuck carrying the plastic bag with Bucky’s effects. Really the syringe with the sedative, sheets of care instructions, and the sheet Sam had wrapped him in at home.

They were standing in front of the door to their quarters when Bucky broke the silence.

“You remember that week in Vietnam?”

Did Sam ever. It had been when Sam had that gash on his thigh, the one that wasn’t supposed to get infected but did. He had to lie low while it healed, and Bucky came with him. At the time Sam thought it was a particularly cruel joke by the universe but later he realized Bucky must have volunteered. And then because Sam’s allergic to half the antibiotics that actually work, first one made him vomit for a day and the second one only made him think he was going to vomit for the whole week. He slept when he could, watched Vietnamese TV when he couldn’t, and drank a lot of strained soup.

“You feel like you’re gonna throw up?”

“I’m not really going to.”

What Sam really remembered was that he had bitched and moaned at Bucky for doing everything wrong – Sam was a paramedic okay, he knew more about wound care than Bucky did about wound care, he was right – and Bucky had never told him to knock it off. Every time Sam woke up Bucky would be lounging somewhere in their shabby little room, usually in his undershirt and drinking some kind of layered sweet thing that made Sam nauseous just to look at, but always watching over him.

A/N :

Sorry for the long delay. Life picked up a bit and I wasn't able to write regularly for a while.

I absolutely love all of this gentleness plus the horror of lingering after effects. And yay sambucky!! Thank you for returning, this update is perfection .

Thank you very much! I'm really glad you enjoyed it and hope to have another installment soon.

This is gutting me, I especially like Sam and Steve's interaction, the trying to help and fumbling and "remind you of anyone" because they're all so stubborn... wow.

Poor Steve. I don't think the magnitude of this has even started to sink in for him yet. Sam has a higher level of emotional self-awareness but it's not really helping in this situation.

Sam set the bag on the table and looked around. The temporary accommodation rooms had been designed so that two people could live in them without feeling like they were trapped in a ping-pong ball. Couch, table and chairs, closet and drawers built into the wall, bathroom off to the side, single bed. It was bigger than a lot of places Sam had lived in and cleaner than most of the places they'd stayed in on the run, but Sam didn't relish living in it for the next foreseeable. It was a little too sterile for him to really feel comfortable. The small, high Windows didn't help. And no privacy without one of them leaving. And the single bed.

Bucky was standing just inside the door, looking at nothing again – not at Sam, not at the furniture or the gray carpet or the little windows, not at his own arms, crossed over his torso like he was protecting himself from something.

Sam was going to cry.

"Do you want a shower?" He said it because he had to say something, had to help do something, but Sam wanted to kick himself once the words were out of his mouth. Bucky would never use the word "trauma" or "torture" about himself, but when they were looking at apartments he didn't want to live somewhere with only a shower cubicle. "Sometimes," he'd said "When I'm rattled I get funny about having water on my face." Sam had put two and two together.

Bucky just gave a minute shake of his head, and again when Sam said, "It doesn't have to be a shower, you can just sponge off."

But Bucky did the little head shake to that, too, and if he let this go on Sam was going to end up bossing him into taking the shower, into doing whatever he thinks Bucky should be doing just because it’s going to make him, Sam, feel better.

“You have... stuff in your hair.”

The bathroom was small enough that they were right next to each other in front of the sink. This close, Sam could see that the stuff was on Bucky’s forehead, too. All he could tell was that it had dried clear. Sam spit on the cuff of his shirt and started to wipe it away as gently as he could. He thought about the corpse on their bathroom floor, and how Bucky had looked just as dead when he saw him, and the bloody thing lying next to him on the bedroom carpet, and the last time they had been in one of these rooms, standing by the sink. They had both been stripped to the waist, Bucky laughing, eager, still running high from the mission and taking any excuse to insinuate his crotch against Sam, who was this close to snapping that unlike some people he was just a regular human and it had been more than 24 hours since last time he woke up and the only thing his body could get excited about right now was hitting the mattress.

Sam had to run his hand through Bucky’s hair to flake the last of the stuff out of it. Bucky smelled like sweat and hospital linens and horrifyingly like sex. His eyes were fixed on the middle distance somewhere over Sam’s shoulder.

Sam reached in the clear plastic bag and held up the street of sedative in its wrapper. "If you want to take this, I want you to wake me up, okay? Any time. You can do it yourself if you want to. I’ll just talk you through it.”

Bucky jerked his head once. Yes.

“C’mon, Bucky, talk to me.”

Sam didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t Bucky saying, “I’m sorry about the pictures.”

“What?”

“Our service pictures.” Bucky mimed pulling something apart with his fingers. “Two tore them up before he – did me.”

Did me, fuck. “Bucky,” Sam said, trying hard to keep his voice calm and steady. “I don’t give a fuck about the pictures. I give a fuck about you. I love you.”

Sam had once gone along with a “plan” that consisted of him flying at the target holding Bucky by the straps on the back of his jacket, while Bucky fired some kind of laser gun that none of them really knew how to use or had seen before that afternoon. He had watched that awful Flash Gordon movie with Bucky without rolling his eyes once. He woke up next to Bucky every morning in their shabby one-bedroom. They shared a bank account and a bathroom sink. Of course Sam loved him.

"Can I hold you?"

One jerky nod.

Bucky felt like he always had. Same warmth, same span of shoulders in Sam’s arms. Sam gave himself one long moment, one wet, shaky exhalation into Bucky’s shoulder, before he made himself step back.

"You should... Do what you want." It sounded as stupid as I love you.

I just read this all the way through. Damn.

You are such a gifted writer, the perfect blend of external and internal details. The way you write Sam is just all-around exquisite, as well as Bucky's reactions, and Steve's stubborness.

Thank you for this beautiful, painful story.

Oh my gosh, thank you very much. This means a lot to me.

At first I decided this was going to be Sam/Bucky for variety's sake (and because once I thought of a dynamic for them I really wanted to write it), but once I started to think about the structure of the story it was clear that there was going to be Sam POV later on, and I was looking forward to it the whole time. I wanted to try and write Sam as someone who had a pretty high level of self-awareness but isn't infallible or anodyne, and also as someone who has obviously gone through mental health treatment and training without sounding like a walking, talking Psychology Today article. And I was also looking forward to putting him in a trash context because ~~I love to make my faves suffer~~ Sam is all of the above and he's still unprepared for this, because really, who the fuck could be?

Anyway, I am very glad you've enjoyed it and hope to have another update ready... sometime before the next geological epoch.

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Dumpster #4: I Don't See How That's a Party

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