…made it over here OK… English beer worse than piss but… good atmosphere and the boys are… all sending SWALK to their sweethearts and you’re the best I got so…
…shipping out, can’t tell you where but the big cheese says… [redacted] looks just like St Catherine’s but with more bullet holes… miss you… SWALK
…don’t know if the mail is getting thru, if you wrote back it hasn’t arrived… SWALK you little bastard…
…shot him in the… there was nothing left, Moloney looked thru his pockets and the kid has a picture of his mother… don’t know if I can… let me know you’re OK…
…please let me know… really scared, Stevie… was right next to me and went down like a ton of bricks shot right thru the… blood on my… so scared please God let me hear from you before I… Thank Christ you’re not here…
…don’t think I’ll make it thru the next… I love you, I’ve always loved you… wasn’t joking when I said
SWALK
“Jesus, Buck.” Steve drops the last letter as his face crumples, the paper dated days before Azzano landing innocently on the floor beside the bed.
No wonder he’d been so uneasy those first reunited days, like he wasn’t sure of himself around Steve anymore. He hadn’t known Steve never got the letters, that his confessions of love and fear hadn’t been read, that his best friend had no idea he’d admitted to being in love with him for years and wasn’t rejecting him when he didn’t…
“Jesus.” Steve lets his head fall into his hands and squeezes his eyes shut until his head aches. He feels like he might just about lose his mind, dead voices ringing through his ears, and if there were ever a time to do it this would be it.
Bucky never knew he loved him back.
Or alternatively how about I don’t imagine that because why are you doing this to me what makes you think i deserve this pain
Imagine Sam taking him to the beach at his parent’s place
And Steve looks completely awkward and adorable with dorky board shorts and a big floppy hat
(He hasn’t been to the beach in the modern era; shaddup he’s busy)
(He also has zero idea how not to walk on sea oats jfc Rogers)
He is pale as a vampire with an instant Irish flush
And Sam isn’t a creeper, you know, he’s respectful
Not gonna lie though, he was looking forward to helping Steve with the sunscreen
Then Steve has to be an asshole and ruin it by saying he can’t burn anymore
Sam says he ought to protect himself anyway, but of course Steve ignores it
So all day Sam has to shake his head and watch as Steve flip-flops between lily white and flaking and blistered boiled lobster
(Next time, shut up and lemme be sweet to you, Cap)
The next time, they take Bucky and Nat too
And it’s kind of a beautiful disaster
The day gets off to a bumpy start because Bucky’s left arm isn’t exactly ideal for the beach – he walks down the beach stairs and damn near blinds everyone
But he also hates wearing long sleeves in the sun; he and the arm both overheat
Sam solves the problem by plastering on every last cooling towel his family owns over Bucky’s shoulders and neck
But then Bucky starts complaining he’s going to get sand in the plates anyway
And does anyone know how annoying brushing out grit is
(Answer is yes, literally everyone)
Then Steve tells him to suck it up and literally chucks him into the surf
And Sam has nine heart attacks because the dude sinks like a stone and holy shit, doesn’t come back up
Can he even float with that arm, seriously Cap, what the fuck
And then Bucky explodes up out of the water and does his level best to throw Steve farther
And now the two of them are actively attempting to depants each other in the surf and shove sand in each other’s trunks and Natasha cannot stop laughing
Eventually they wear themselves out and flop under the umbrella where Nat was trying to read
So she goes out in the surf with Sam and holds onto his elbow and he picks up a couple skates to let her touch
Because she’s never been to the gulf before, and she’s fascinated by absolutely everything
A little too much though
He turns around at one point and she’s picked up a shark
after cryo no matter what steve is doing bucky just drapes himself over steve, gets as much contact as possible, tucks his face against the side of steve’s neck, and hums happily. his arms end up around steve’s waist, sliding under the hem of steve’s shirt, and steve can’t contain the little smile that breaks out over his face as he ducks his head a little, then keeps doing whatever he’s doing as bucky mumbles “you’re warm” sleepily
But… imagine the backpack, something Bucky’s clung on to and never even let Steve see inside, snagging on something and tearing open. And some of the loose pieces of paper scatter all over the place like mice running across the floor and all Bucky can do is stare, frozen in abject horror, as Steve reaches down to pick up some pages that aren’t so pretty…
go write the thing
Okay…
~~
It started off with just a crumpled up piece paper with one thing written on it. Who the hell is Bucky? Then came the Smithsonian and with it more flashes of faces and scraps of memories that might or might not be real. People and names and places. Things that may have happened or he may have wished happened or may have just happened in a dream. When he could dream.
Every time something flashes in his mind, Bucky quickly scribbles it down. Quickly. Very quickly because sometimes they fade back into the darkness they emerged from. Disappearing into a mask of thick smoke.
The more time passes, the clearer things become. Memories, as scattered as they are, become clearer. Stick with him, and pretty soon his backpack is full of mismatched and jumbled up memories. Jotted down words and messy sketches. Anything. His life, what he remembers of it, now bleeds all over once crisp, clean pages.
Steve is there. Steve is there a lot, but sometimes smaller than he is now. Images of a caring woman called Sarah who took care of him. Newspapers stuffed in shoes. Fear as his gaze spans across a field and rain of bullets. Pain. Red, white and blue. There’s a group of men. A pretty woman named Peggy. A fall. More pain. Lots of pain. Blood. Lots of blood. A whole lot of blood.
Not everything written on those pages are pretty. There so much ugly. So much darkness. Violence and fear and loss.
Sometimes pages fall out. Sometimes Bucky rips them out because he doesn’t want that memory, but it’s his so he stuffs it back into the bag. Sometimes he rips them out because he doesn’t think he deserves to have that memory, but it’s still his so he stuffs it back into the bag.
So when Bucky first feels the tug at his side, he’s readies himself for a fight. It’s second nature. Easy as blinking. What he can’t ready himself for is the ripping sound that echoes through his ears as jagged piece of wood in the wall tears through his bag. Through the body that’s been housing his life and memories all these months. He feels it like a knife cutting through his side. Pouring his insides out.
Notebooks fall out and land with quiet thuds. Pages fall with them. Scatter across the floor like living creatures trying to get away from him. His memories running away.
“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve says softly. “We’ll get them.”
Bucky wants to yell at him. Wants to scream for Steve not to touch any of those pages, it’ll burn him. Bucky knows it. But all he can do is stand, frozen in horror as Steve bends down to start picking them up.
As Steve starts to gather them up, Bucky quickly regains himself and hurries to catch up. Scrambles to get his notebooks and loose memories. Steve is kind enough not to look at anything. Not until the very last scrap of paper – wrinkled and torn, one of the oldest ones. Something on it catches his attention as his eyes scan it once. Twice. Then he sucks in a deep breath and tries to smile for Bucky while he hands it over.
Steve swallows hard before assuring Bucky they’ll get him another bag, but right now they have to keep moving. So they do. But not before Bucky takes a look at the memory that’s burned his greatest ally. Maybe friend. Brother. More?
one night, the commandos see something, a flicker of something none of them dare name, between their captain and their sniper.
‘i think we should just ignore it, dugan. it doesn’t really make a difference. we’re still a team, right?’ gabe asks, eyes flickering over to where cap and barnes are sitting at the bar as he does. there’s so much there; it’s in the way they move around each other, the look in their eyes as they stare at one another.
‘i mean… does anyone here have a problem with it?’ falsworth comments. gabe quickly translates, and dernier waves him off in a way that tells gabe that he’s got no quarrel with it.
‘speak now or forever hold your peace, gentlemen,’ morita says. they stay silent, and falsworth raises a glass. the rest of them follow suit.
‘swear yourselves to silence, gentlemen. cap and barnes deserve this. we owe ‘em that much.”
they drink, and the moment passes. none of them mention it again. they don’t mention it when barnes and cap go missing for hours, only to sneak back into camp in the middle of the night. they don’t talk about the way the two of them slide their sleeping mats ever so closer together when they’re out in the field. they don’t talk about it, until the day after they receive the news that cap’s plane went down, with him on it.
“to the captain, and to barnes. may they find each other again, in every eternity.”
This drawing was found between the things Steve Rogers left behind the day Dr. Erskine chose him for Project Rebirth. After years in the possession of a private collector it was willed into the hands of the Smithsonian, where it vanished inside some nondescript box for even more years. Until the day Captain America returned. Dismissed for the great exhibition it became part of a gesture of goodwill as the museum returned some of the more personal things to the man out of time.
The first time he laid eyes on that picture again, Steve Rogers broke down sobbing. He’d never even known that Bucky wrote him this note. Reading those words now only served as a stark reminder of all the things he’d lost.
The first time Bucky saw the drawing after more than seventy years he had to fight the urge to deny that he’d ever been this young (and innocent). Instead he asked Steve why he’d never finished it. Steve answered with a smile, “because all the important parts had always been done.”
The couch in the corner has a blanket and pillow tossed on it. Bucky hesitates; that’s new.
“Am I…?” He’s raw with exhaustion and not sure how to finish that. Tony glances up, screwdriver clenched between his teeth, eyebrows raised. Bucky gestures to the balled up blanket and the pillow. Tony releases the screwdriver just long enough to shrug. “All yours.”
The couch is nowhere near comfortable – it’s lumpy, and the blanket smells of something like engine grease, but it’s deeply familiar by now, and Bucky’s eyes drift closed anyway. He can hear Tony murmuring to himself about capacitor flows, and Dum-E whirring around in the background, and he floats on it.
Sometime later, Tony glances over. Barnes looks like he’s out cold: face slack, mouth slightly open. “He out?” Tony asks around the screwdriver.
“His respiration and pulse have been lowered for about twenty minutes, sir,” JARVIS reports softly.
Tony nods. “Let’s give him another ten.” He finds something for Dum-E to do, and starts cleaning and reorganizing the nearest toolkit.
Fifteen after that, Barnes starts softly to snore.
Tony eases the toolbox closed, quiets Dum-E for the night with a soft word. He resets the coffee pot to kick on in about six hours – optimistically long, given Barnes’s erratic sleep, but he’s been gradually improving. He gestures to JARVIS to dim the lights, and quietly retreats out of the lab. Barnes sleeps on in the dim, soft glow.
Bucky knows how little money this delicate wanna be painter from his neighbourhood has, so he always gives him special prices. He likes chatting with him. People always claim that he has a bad temper and starts fights all the time but with Bucky it all is but fun and interesting conversations. Just rumors then, right? The little guy does some fantastic paintings. The bunch are just telling lies about him because they are jealous. Bucky is cool with him… Until that day that Steve storms into his garage and demands to pay him the full amount of all the repairs that Bucky did for him because what does Bucky even think he is? A sick puppy he feels sorry for? And while Bucky tries to defend himself, he is suddenly confronted with the answer to why he really made exceptions for Steve all the while…
Imagine a universe where, if you are alive at the same time as your soulmate, you will receive some sort of indentifying mark on your skin that represents them. It can be an image, a word, anything: marks vary greatly in size, placement, color, texture, etc. It represents the totality of the other individual’s being and touching it gives you a general sense of the person that they are. It’s like literally carrying a tiny piece of their soul around and it means that even if you never meet, you still know they’re out there and – in a sense – you know them.
In the (MCU) universe there exists a wide variety of species with varying lifespans. Everything from short-lived Midgardians to practically immortal personifications of abstract concepts and the wide spectrum in between. Some souls/ abstract collections of specific energy/ people are born, die, and then live again, though not all species are aware of this (especially those with a much shorter comparative lifespan).
There are a lot of ways this could play out. Lets look at two of them!
Option 1, in which one soul is born a mutant.
When the Wolverine is found by Xavier’s people, they discover that he is littered with soulmarks. At first glance they look like tattoos, but they are all too sharp, too finely detailed, to be anything but the marks of matched souls.
When he wakes, he tells them that he doesn’t know a damn thing about most of them. The majority came from Before, and he cannot recall if he ever met them. Three are more recent and he knows at least some of the story behind them: the first is a faded dragon that, he assures them with a bitter smile, once sparkled with all the colors of flame; the second is a wolverine wrapped around his wrist, with face tilted up towards the sky – it faded even as he watched the very first time he remembers waking up.
There’s a third mark, one in vivid detail, but he guards it jealously and refuses to tell them when it appeared. It’s enough that he remembers when it appeared, that he knows that she’s out there. He’s not sure how many of the old marks are hers, but it doesn’t matter in the end because he knows that she’s alive, and somewhere, and he will find her.
Option 2, in which one soul is born of Asgard.
Thor was barely a hundred when his soulmark appeared. His mother was pleased, as was his father – until Odin touched his son’s mark and was able to divine that Thor’s ‘mate had been born of Midgard. He refused to let Frigga take Thor to Midgard to look for his match and felt thoroughly vindicated when the mark faded a scant three days later.
Thor was utterly heartbroken and convinced that if he’d but been there, he would have found a way to save his mate.
Fifty-odd years later, Odin again felt justified when Thor burst into the council chamber, full of joy that his ‘mate had reincarnated. He had been blessed with a second mark, different in small ways from the first, but he remembered how it had felt and he knew that it was the same soul – changed, as all are changed by life – but substantially the same and still his perfect ‘mate. Again, Odin was dismayed to find that Thor’s mate had been born of Midgard, and again he refused to allow Thor to go to the other realm. This time Thor’s mate lasted nearly thirty years before dying.
Thor was inconsolable for a full decade. Yes, his ‘mate had come back, but they had changed. What if, even if they did return, they were so changed that they were no longer his ‘mate? What if he had lost his chance?
The third time Thor’s ‘mate was born, Thor solemnly presented his case before his father: he was of age, a full 450 years old, a warrior in his own right. He could take care of himself, he would be safe venturing to Midgard, he would find his ‘mate and return with them.
Odin refused, citing unrest in the realms, and essentially gave Thor a series of labors: do this, and you can go to Midgard. Fix this problem, and you can go to Midgard. Halt this civil war and you can go to Midgard. By the time Thor had completed all the assigned tasks, his ‘mate had grown old and died.
Thor didn’t tell anyone the fourth time his ‘mate returned, but his behavior grew more reckless. For twenty years he nursed his grudge and cherished the small mark that unequivocally proved he was not alone. He chafed at the All-Father’s restrictions, and when the opportunity presented itself, he leapt at the chance to thwart him.
…and was banished to Midgard for his disobedience.
Okay, so, disclaimer: I arrived a bit late to the fandom, so I have no idea if I’m rehashing old territory or not. If I am, just let me ramble quietly to myself in a corner. No harm done.
Anyway, lately I’ve been working on my own Bucky Barnes Howling Commando cosplay (because, yes, I’m a huge dork and I’ll totally wear it to conventions). So, I was scrutinizing screen captures of Bucky’s outfit like it’s nobody’s business when it dawned on me–all of the Howling Commando uniforms are on display at the Smithsonian.
No, no. Think about it.
All of them are there.
ALL of them.
Including Bucky’s.
Even though Bucky most definitely fell from the train wearing his.
Practically speaking, this could simply be writer/set design oversight. And within the confines of the narrative, it’s entirely possible that the museum commissioned a replacement to finish out the display; but considering Steve goes out of his way to steal the Captain America outfit later on in the movie, we might reasonably assume that all of the uniforms are as authentic/original as possible. If we also consider the fact that the Smithsonian likely got most of its exhibit material from SHIELD–and Hydra is hiding within SHIELD, and Hydra has Bucky–the story actually does allow for the possibility that Bucky’s Howling Commando outfit on display isthe genuine article.
(I just wish they had thought to do something with the left jacket sleeve–have it a bit torn up or something. To be fair, it’s partially in shadow so there might be some blood stains there we can’t see…)
But the thought that’s been really driving me crazy? What if the uniform is genuine and what if Steve noticed?
Because I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, I wrote a bit of a fanfic teaser:
It couldn’t be the same uniform.
Bucky’s fall from the train was burned into Steve’s memory, every detail. The biting wind, the lurching bulk of the train, the winter-chapped hand reaching for him as the blasted metal wall shuddered. Bucky’s collar—usually folded in perfect, crisp lines—smashed haphazardly against his cheek as he struggled to bridge the gap. The strangled scream as his form shrank into the distance below.
Steve still hadn’t to come to terms with the memory. It was hard to find his place in the future without Bucky’s steadfast presence. Even the idea of a going on a date without his friend there to bolster his confidence didn’t feel right. He couldn’t explain it, but he wasn’t entirely himself anymore.
They had never found Bucky’s body. Steve had checked the files. The museum would have had to make a reproduction to complete the collection of Howling Commando uniforms, or cobble together vintage pieces to match.
The funny thing about war, though, was that it sharpened every connection Steve had with his comrades. All of the uniforms had been cleaned and fixed for display, but he still recognized the worn-in folds and scuffs like they were old friends. He knew each outfit almost as well as he knew the man who wore it.
Bucky’s was no different. He had always been fussy about his appearance, the definition of clean-cut—at least as much as it was possible to be clean-cut in the middle of a war zone. Bucky had given brooding attention to mending his jacket after every mission, like a ritual. Maybe because it was one of the only things he could control. It was too bad his skill with a needle wasn’t equal to his skill as a sharpshooter. Try as he might, there were inevitably a few places where the fabric puckered or a stitch showed.
Steve heckled him about it once, when Bucky had fallen into one of those haunted silences that came frequently after his rescue from the Hydra base.
“That jacket’s starting to look almost as rough as the one I wore as a kid.” It was a lie, but it got his friend to smile.
“God help me if I’ve fallen that low,” Bucky said wryly.
“You should have one of the gals fix it up when we get back home.”
“If I follow Captain America on many more missions, there won’t be anything left to fix.”
As it turned out, Bucky had been right.
When he fell from the train, the uniform fell with him.
Except that Steve was sure it was his friend’s slipshod stitching he saw the mannequin wearing now. The faint, well-scrubbed bloodstain on the left sleeve was new, but every other crease, every painstaking stitch was exactly where it should be. It couldn’t be the same uniform… but it was.
explodingcrenelation 