Dumpster #5: We didn't start the trashfire

[trashmod]

Welcome to the latest, greatest, scummiest iteration of hydratrashmeme. Come on in and please check your sense of shame at the door.

Rules in brief: Don't be a jerk except to fictional characters. Warn if you want, but read at your own risk, because this is emphatically not a safe space. Link your fills on the fill post. Unprompted fills: make a prompt or a header comment and reply to it with the full text. Continuations of fills from earlier rounds: just make sure you link in both places.

What's on-topic: Filthy and perverted twists on all the quality whump served up by Cap: Winter Soldier. Noncon, aftermath, uncomfortably sexualized violence, mind control, inappropriate uses of Bucky Barnes' metal arm, bad guys doing dirtybadwrong things to your faves.
What's off-topic: a/b/o, D/s-verse, soulbonds, mundane AUs, shippy/romanticized noncon, MCU heroes repurposed into OOC or edgydark delivery vehicles for your fave's suffering. If you've got a prompt for one of those burning a hole in your brain, head on over to mcu_trash.

[Rules in full] [Round 1] [Round 2] [Round 3] [Round 4] [Fill post] [Chatter post] [hydratrashmeme Pinboard archive] [Round 5 in flat view (comments in non-threaded chronological order, most recent last)]

Comments

FILL: "not that bad" gaslighting (5/6)

[(Anonymous)]

Next to him, close to the doorway to the bedroom, the other two men are arguing: they’ve been arguing for a while now, and the soldier lets the words flow past him.

He doesn’t remember this bedroom so much, not anything from before tonight, anyway. Theres’s a bed with a dark bedspread, a nightstand next to it with a lamp and a single drawer. A chest of drawers, the door to the bathroom, a window with curtains over it. The window would be close to the ground outside, and there probably aren’t even bars over it to slow him down if he had to get out, but he is safe here now and there is no reason for him to try that, no reason for him to even think about it.

“It’s just as weird if you’re looming over us,” Rumlow is saying to the larger man. “Besides, he freaks out when he’s lying flat on his back. Especially if there's bright lights on him. The Soviets used to do surgery on him without—”

“I don’t need to know that shit, Jesus Christ.” The other man is speaking very loudly.

The soldier tunes out the words again, looks back at the bed. Water from his still-wet hair is dripping onto his bare shoulder. He doesn’t have his clothes, and they’d taken all his weapons from him right after the mission, but weapons were never necessary for him to—

—but he has no reason to try to get out of this room. He is safe.

He focuses on the dark bedspread: the room is bright enough for him to see even from half a room away that the fabric actually has tiny paler lines on it. He doesn't remember those, either.

Rumlow says something else, and the other man says: “Okay. Fucking whatever. I’ll do it. But I gotta piss first.”

“You know where the bathroom is down the ha—”

But the man is already heading into the other bathroom, the one connected to the bedroom. Rumlow does not seem angry about this, though. He looks back at the soldier, face open and happy and relaxed. The soldier is still warm from the shower, so it’s fine when Rumlow takes the damp towel from the soldier’s waist and hangs it up on a hook on the back of the bedroom door. He gives the soldier a look for a moment after that, and says: “You still doing good?”

The soldier nods, and Rumlow seems satisfied, even though it hadn't been true, even though the soldier is now unable to keep his eyes from straying toward the bathroom door. The man had gone in there. He will see the sink, and he will realize what the soldier had done. The man is already angry, and now he might be very angry at the soldier for it.

Behind him, Rumlow switches off the bedroom's overhead light. The soldier forces his gaze away from the door: he watches instead, in the light still spilling in from the hallway, as Rumlow turns on the small lamp on the nightstand beside the bed. Rumlow had forgiven the soldier for losing focus and breaking the sink, and so he will probably not let the other man hurt the soldier too much if the man is angry about it. But Rumlow also obviously trusts this man—he has clearly let him into his house multiple times—so maybe it wouldn’t be hard for the man to trick Rumlow into leaving him and the soldier alone together. The soldier knows that he ends up alone together like that with people who aren’t Rumlow quite a lot, even if he can’t remember it happening with this particular man.

The soldier feels his fists clench at his sides. If that happens, the soldier will have to let the man punish him. The other man works for HYDRA too, after all, and the soldier had behaved terribly. The soldier will be angry, but he will have to take it. Still, Rumlow had said it was okay; it wouldn’t be fair—

The door opens again. The man looks angry, but the soldier can’t tell if he looks angrier than before. The man sighs, looks over at the bed and then back at the soldier, and opens his mouth like he’s going to speak.

“I broke the sink,” the soldier cuts him off.

“Huh?”

“In the bathroom. I broke it with my hand. The commander said it was okay.”

He waits. If the man is going to get angry at the soldier, he might as well do it now, and not after he has gotten them alone.

The man doesn’t get angry. He doesn't say anything at all for a few seconds, just looking between him and Rumlow, who's still standing near the nightstand, and then he lifts his hands palms outward in front of him, the way people often do when they are trying to calm down the soldier before the soldier kills them. “Okay then, soldier,” he says. “Whatever you say. It’s good.”

The soldier scowls at him. The light is worse in here now and he can’t read the man’s expression. Is the man saying he doesn’t believe him? He had said it's good, but his tone was so exaggerated he probably didn't actually mean it. A lot of the people in HYDRA who are not the soldier's friends like to talk to him like that, saying good things about the soldier that they don't mean and then laughing a lot. He doesn't like those people. He—he doesn’t like this man. He might be close to Rumlow, and work for HYDRA, but he has been nothing but rude since they got to this house.

What he does next doesn’t help, either.

The man turns to Rumlow again, and gives him a weird look. He sighs, and then he's climbing onto the bed, turning and moving himself up so his back is against the headboard. He accidentally shoves aside one of the pillows as he's getting there, and he pushes it away, then kicks it onto the floor like he’s annoyed. He settles himself in like that, knees up, soles of his boots flat against the bedspread.

The soldier frowns even more, and clenches his fists tighter. This man had not touched him earlier in the evening, has in fact never touched him before, the soldier is sure of that now, but clearly he intends to now, and maybe that is why he had been making fun of him. Rumlow is here, but an angry man of that size can do a lot of damage even while abiding by Rumlow’s rules.

The soldier glances at Rumlow, who doesn’t smile, just tilts his head in a come here gesture.

The soldier goes.

He stops at the side of the bed next to Rumlow, not knowing what to do next. The other men are both clothed, and he—

—he is safe. He is safe.

The large man gives another loud sigh, and leans forward from where he’s sitting and takes the soldier’s human arm. He makes no pretense at gentle guiding like Rumlow does, just yanks the soldier up and towards him. Rumlow is right there, and it’s safe, so the soldier allows himself to be manhandled onto the bed, pulled so he is sitting between the other man’s legs with his back against the man’s chest and the man’s knees on either side of him, cutting him off on three sides.

He exhales. The man is warm through his clothing where it touches the soldier’s bare skin. The soldier smells smoke and blood and sweat on the man's clothing, his skin. The buckle of his belt digs sharp into the skin of the soldier's lower back.

But it is okay. He is safe. The soldier exhales again, forces his way through another breath, and does not look at the window or the door. He looks ahead, and then there's new movement next to the bed out of the corner of his eye: Rumlow is retrieving an object from the drawer in the nightstand. He turns to look.

It’s a knife, about seven inches long including its handle, its blade still hidden inside a leather sheath. Rumlow looks down at it, smiling a little, like he’s found something that belongs to an old friend. He rests it against both his hands, like he is weighing it, and then draws the blade out of the sheath.

The soldier follows the motion of the blade with his eyes. It’s a dagger, he can see now; black titanium nitride coating on its blade, the type of smaller backup knife he might keep strapped to the inside of his leg on a mission. The soldier has never been issued this particular model of knife by HYDRA, and he does not know its strengths and advantages, but his friend looks down at it very fondly now. He sets down the empty sheath on the nightstand. Then he looks up at the soldier.

The soldier is okay. He breathes in and out again, and a bit more water drips off his hair. The man sitting behind him shifts, clothing catching on the soldier’s skin as he moves, and then his hands are closing around both of the soldier’s wrists.

The mattress dips as Rumlow climbs onto the bed as well.

He sits near the soldier’s feet, and then moves the soldier’s legs so he can sit between them and get closer. The black coating on the blade means the metal doesn’t catch the light as he moves, but it is still very visible even in the softer glow from the lamp. The soldier keeps his eyes on it, but for a moment after that Rumlow doesn't move, just looks at him. He is smiling.

The soldier breathes. The skin of the other man’s palm feels rough where it grips the soldier's human wrist, and two of the fingers of the man's other hand are tracing now along the wrist of the soldier's metal arm, seemingly unconsciously, as if the man is curious about what it feels like. It is quiet in the room. The soldier can feel the man behind him breathing, in and out.

Then the man's fingers stop moving, and he speaks. “I’m going to die right here,” he says. The soldier can feel the vibrations in his chest, the breath against his neck and the back of his ear. “He’s going to snap a chunk of my arm off like that fucking sink, all so that you can—”

“He won’t,” Rumlow says, taking his eyes off the soldier. “He’ll be fine. He's always good.” He looks back at the soldier. “Soldier, you’re going to stay here with me, yeah? You’re going to be good.”

The soldier is almost grateful to be spoken to so directly, because it allows him to focus properly again on the man in front of him. And—he is. He is going to be good. He has not been concentrating well at all since the end of his mission—he’d assumed he hadn’t needed to, since the mission was over, and since his friend was around. But then he’d slipped, back there in the bathroom: he had gotten angry, had acted stupidly and dangerously. He has kept on slipping, even up until now.

He swallows. He needs to do better now and concentrate again, needs to stay with him, and he is good at doing that. His friend Pierce has praised him for this before, for how well the soldier can concentrate for a long time while he is hunting someone. He has told the soldier that the Russian scientists made him very very good at that. Pierce is not always happy with the Russians about everything, but he is always happy about that.

The soldier can make up for before. He can concentrate and be good.

Even so, it takes him a moment to move. He nods at Rumlow, and Rumlow smiles even more, showing teeth. Then he looks down.

The soldier is naked, and for the first time now he feels naked, his skin bare and pale against the dark bedspread underneath, bracketed by the man’s legs clothed in black fabric. He is safe, he will stay here, and Rumlow has already been so nice to him, but he feels—

Rumlow touches him, with the hand that isn't holding the knife, gripping one side of the soldier’s hip, thumb moving across the crest of his hipbone. The soldier’s skin is still faintly pinker than usual from the shower, and even in this light he can see the little paler spots Rumlow’s thumb leaves behind after he’s pressed it into the skin, after his hand shifts and moves over the soldier's bare abdomen, down his other hip.

The other man’s heartbeat is strong against his naked back. He must have turned his head, because his breath is on the soldier's cheek now. It smells sharp, like the alcohol they’d been drinking.

Rumlow lets go of his hip, looks up at him again. Then he leans closer and brings his other hand up, the hand with the knife, and lays the hand against the side of the soldier's face, the heel of his palm pressing into his cheek, the flat of the blade brushing against the soldier's hair. Rumlow's hand is rough and warm and the blade is cool where it touches his ear. Despite his breathing getting more difficult again, despite all the noise his own heart is making, the soldier can’t help but tilt his head toward his friend's hand.

He is safe.

“You can make all the noise you want,” Rumlow says to him, and he is looking into the soldier's eyes. His eyes look very dark, as dark as the surface of the knife so close to his face. “I won’t punish you for screaming. But you gotta hold still. You gonna do that for me?”

The soldier breathes. He gives a tiny nod.

Rumlow smiles. He looks proud, and something inside of the soldier glows warm, as warm as he had been in the shower. The soldier does something daring, something that he doesn't think he's done before, something that HYDRA has never required him to do, something that he does because he wants to: he lifts his head up a little from the other man's chest, and kisses the delicate skin on the inside of Rumlow's wrist.

Rumlow closes his eyes for a second, but not in anger. His face is flushed, and when he opens his eyes he smiles, shows his teeth again. Then he takes his hand away, moves it down, and re-angles the knife.

Re: FILL: "not that bad" gaslighting (5/6)

[(Anonymous)]

OMG THE SUSPENSE!
This continues to be magnificently horrible. Bucky's sheer self-control! This is like a whole new dimension of mind-fuck, it's not the animal parts of his brain that HYDRA has hijacked, it's the human parts. The trust, the generosity, the integrity, the courage.

Re: FILL: "not that bad" gaslighting (5/6)

[(Anonymous)]

Wow I am really enjoying this, it's so intense and heartbreaking!

Re: FILL: "not that bad" gaslighting (5/6)

[(Anonymous)]

(OP) A!A, I seriously love you for this, it's already everything I could have asked for and more, and I cannot wait for the last part <3

Re: FILL: "not that bad" gaslighting (5/6)

[(Anonymous)]

I’m so glad you’re still enjoying it OP! Last part coming very soon I promise <3