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quigonejinnSome people have a thing for fic about sibcest or fucking against walls. SPN fandom has a thing for knotting (no, don't google that. Seriously, I'm not joking.)
I have a thing for fic about really, really, really awkward sex.
What does Bucky remember about the Hydra interrogation chamber? Everything and nothing, everything and nothing about this room, too. The light bulb is dim; the walls are stained, and Steve touches the bed gingerly, as if not quite sure it will bear his weight, not quite sure that he should sit down in it; the walls are thin, and outside, in the hallway, they hear a sailor and his girl pass by, both drunk, both giggling. They hear someone flush the toilet in the bathroom down at the end of the hall, and in his life, Bucky has gotten two blowjobs, the first from a professional on his first weekend of liberty after boot camp, and the second from a girl who could have been a professional, except it was on his last night of liberty in England before they went to Italy, and he can't remember the end of the night.
"Did you always feel this way?" Steve says and has his hat in his hands before he decides that it's OK to put it on the dresser. "I mean, back in Brooklyn."
"Maybe," Bucky says. His jacket is already off, and the tie follows; after the fourth button on his shirt, he pulls it off over his head and puts it on top of his jacket and tie.
"Do you want me to -- " Steve makes a gesture to suggest, sort of awkwardly, taking off some of his clothes.
"You can leave them on," Bucky says. He takes a step towards Steve, sort of reflexively, then immediately regrets it.
"Do you want to kiss?" Steve asks, so Bucky stands in place, not quite sure what to say, and Steve leans forward, tentatively, and puts his lips against Bucky's. Steve isn't sure where to put his hands when kissing someone; Bucky isn't sure where to put his hands when kissing a man, let alone his childhood friend who suddenly grew two feet in the shoulders alone, but when Steve opens his mouth, a few things happen. First, Bucky moans and gets hard inside his pants.
Second, in response, Steve jerks back, surprised in spite of himself.
Third, Bucky bends down and picks up the bottle of whiskey, takes a slug of it, and hands it back to Steve.
...
What does Bucky remember about the Hydra interrogation chamber? Fear and agony, pain and terror. Everything and nothing. When Steve pulled him onto his feet, Bucky felt his sides and abdomen, expecting them to be bloody, but found that his hands came away dry. What does Bucky remember about his emotional responses to things before the interrogation chamber? Both something more and something less, and he knows even less about his physical responses. At his debriefing on arrival back in camp, they became convinced that Hydra was less interested in interrogating him than in telling him things. Did he have conversations with the man in the photograph? What about this man? Did Hydra give him injections?
Steve sits down on the edge bed after having taken half an inch out of the bottle, and Bucky, awkwardly, gets down on his knees in front of Steve.
What does Bucky know about his place in Steve's life, now that Steve is the one doing the rescuing?
...
Steve sits down on the edge bed after having taken half an inch out of the bottle, and Bucky, awkwardly, gets down on his knees in front of Steve. He reaches up and undoes Steve's dress belt; the leather is stiff and new, and Bucky's hands fumble with undoing a belt from the front, pulling down the zipper.
"Lift your hips up," Bucky says. His throat feels raw and scratched, but Steve lifts his hips up, and Bucky hooks his fingers under the waistband and pulls Steve's trousers and underwear down together.
...
Bucky is very clearly aware that Steve rescued him twice. First, from Hydra. Second, from the intelligence advisors without names who did the debriefing.
Did he have conversations with the man in the photograph? What about this man? Did they give him injections? Did he know that from interviews with other survivors of the camp, they took over eighty men to the interrogation chamber, and none of them made it back? As far as they can figure, most of the men died inside the chamber; a few survived, but they were changed men. There were men from the 82nd Airborne somehow caught up at the camp; they saw their lieutenant who had been in the interrogation chamber being dragged along the corridor. He was put back in the cell next to them, and they tried to talk to him, give him some of their water and food because he had clearly been tortured, but he spent the whole time screaming and weeping, pissing himself, throwing himself against the bars and shouting unrepeatable things about what he was going to do to himself and to them. He never took a breath. He never stopped.
One of the men admitted, crying himself, that when Hydra took their old officer out into the courtyard and shot him, it was a relief. The man was decorated, a commissioned officer in an elite force.
But Bucky walked out of the camp.
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you find that you know things that you can't possibly know?
They had wanted to hold him for further observation, keep him indefinitely; Bucky remembers seeing Steve shove his way past the MP's at the door, shouting that with all due respect, colonel, his friend was a hero and he was going to take it up with the very highest levels if this injustice was not fixed.
...
In his life, Bucky has gotten two blowjobs. He fooled around with plenty of girls in Brooklyn, even made it all the way with two or three of them, but his experience of blowjobs is minimal. His experience of giving blowjobs is even less, so he works things out from first principles and half-remembered memories. He came embarrassingly quickly with the first blowjob, and he was too drunk to remember much of the second. It doesn't help that Steve stays mostly soft, but Bucky works out that teeth hurt, that he needs to wrap his lips over his teeth. He works out how to breathe, and when he touches his tongue to the underside of Steve's cock, Steve's hips jump.
In the corner of his eye, Bucky sees Steve's hand come up off the bed, so he reaches up and takes Steve's hand by the wrist, and he puts Steve's hand in his hair.
When he works out that Steve likes a tongue laid flat against the underside of his cock, the hand in Bucky's hair tightens to the point where it hurts.
...
"Did you always feel this way?" Steve says, quietly, when they're walking to the hotel. Steve is tall, takes big strides now, and with his legs still sore from the walk back from Hydra, Bucky has to take four steps to three of Steve's.
Bucky looks up ahead of them, then behind them. Since the street is empty, he says, "No."
"Not about me, specifically. I mean, of course not. Why would any -- but about guys. Generally. You had so many girlfri -- "
Steve is honestly trying to understand. Steve is honestly trying to help.
...
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you want to do things you can't explain?
...
Steve told Colonel Phillips that unless they released Bucky, let him join the Howling Commandos if he wanted, Steve was going to walk out into that camp and tell all of those men what was going on inside. It was a travesty. It was not the American way.
Bucky knows, Phillips knows, everyone knows: the happiness of Captain America is very important to the war effort.
...
In the end, it doesn't work: Bucky can get Steve to the point where Steve is basically hard, even to the point where Steve is rocking a little into his mouth and Bucky can taste salt, but they can't get past that. Steve gets soft again; they try once, twice, and Bucky is trying for the third time when Steve touches his hand to Bucky's cheek and pulls away.
"I don't think it's going to work," Steve says, letting his breath out. He stands. "I'm sorry, Bucky." A moment of silence.
Bucky is still on his knees by the bed, and he brings his right hand up to his jaw and rubs a little. Steve winces.
"Come on. We'll go back out. Maybe get something to eat. You think we've got enough time to catch a late movie?" Steve is trying to catch Bucky's eye, but Bucky doesn't want to look him in the face, so Steve pulls his pants up and re-does his belt. Creakily, Bucky gets up off his knees and sits down on the bed. He is still in his undershirt and dogtags and trousers and shoes; Steve only ever had his pants pulled down to his calves.
Outside, people are passing again. Another sailor, two sailors this time. Two girls.
"Go on ahead. I can get back myself," Bucky says. "I've been in London before, remember?"
"You've had a lot to drink."
"Remember when you were eleven, and you had that ear infection that gave you vertigo for two weeks and got lost on the way between your bedroom and the kitchen?" Bucky looks Steve in the face now and considers the angles on Steve's new face: the nose hasn't changed much, but the cheekbones are broader, the chin stronger, and the eyes look bluer. In the yellow light from the overhead bulb, Steve's hair looks especially blond.
"I do," Steve says, but doesn't move to pick up his hat and go, because they both remember Bucky finding him collapsed in the hallway, and Bucky having to help him back to bed until Steve's legs went out entirely, and Bucky pretty much carrying him the rest of the way. It had been late spring; the window was open. They listened to the Dodgers game from the wireless in the apartment underneath. Bucky sat with Steve until Steve's mother came back from her shift at the sanitarium, and she made dinner for all three of them and they ate in Steve's room. It isn't a happy memory, but it isn't a bad one.
"I'll be fine," Bucky says and smiles a little, on the left-hand side of the face. "I just need to be alone for a while."
After another moment of considering, Steve takes his hat and goes, and Bucky lies down on the bed. He can taste salt in his mouth; the sailors and the girls are still outside. Somebody left something somewhere, and Bucky hears Steve say a few words to them; Steve must lift his hat off to the girls or something, because there is fresh outbreak of giggles, and then he goes down the stairs.
Bucky leans over, takes a long drink from the whiskey, and then lays back down on the bed, stretching his arms over his head. The girls and the sailors are still out there, still talking. Bucky wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, feels the alcohol burn a little on his mouth and hand; ever since coming back, he hasn't been able to get drunk or stay drunk. It burns off faster than he can drink, and he is noticing other changes, too. His vision is better. His muscles are stronger. Would a normal man be able to walk thirty-five miles after two weeks of torture?
One of the girls calls one of the sailors darling. He does something that makes everyone laugh together; if Bucky closes his eyes, the picture of how all four of them must be arranged in the hallway springs into his mind, based on triangulating the various sounds, taking into account how the voices bounce and his memory of the hallway. Angles. Trajectories. Escape routes. Attack routes. It isn't exact, but it's close enough.
Would he have been able to do that before?
Finally, for the first time since walking out of the factory gates, Bucky lets himself cry.
...
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you want to do things you can't explain?
Sergeant Barnes, we know we have to let you go, but do you know that we've been speaking in German for the past half hour?
Any good parts in this are because ofdestronomics.
I have a thing for fic about really, really, really awkward sex.
What does Bucky remember about the Hydra interrogation chamber? Everything and nothing, everything and nothing about this room, too. The light bulb is dim; the walls are stained, and Steve touches the bed gingerly, as if not quite sure it will bear his weight, not quite sure that he should sit down in it; the walls are thin, and outside, in the hallway, they hear a sailor and his girl pass by, both drunk, both giggling. They hear someone flush the toilet in the bathroom down at the end of the hall, and in his life, Bucky has gotten two blowjobs, the first from a professional on his first weekend of liberty after boot camp, and the second from a girl who could have been a professional, except it was on his last night of liberty in England before they went to Italy, and he can't remember the end of the night.
"Did you always feel this way?" Steve says and has his hat in his hands before he decides that it's OK to put it on the dresser. "I mean, back in Brooklyn."
"Maybe," Bucky says. His jacket is already off, and the tie follows; after the fourth button on his shirt, he pulls it off over his head and puts it on top of his jacket and tie.
"Do you want me to -- " Steve makes a gesture to suggest, sort of awkwardly, taking off some of his clothes.
"You can leave them on," Bucky says. He takes a step towards Steve, sort of reflexively, then immediately regrets it.
"Do you want to kiss?" Steve asks, so Bucky stands in place, not quite sure what to say, and Steve leans forward, tentatively, and puts his lips against Bucky's. Steve isn't sure where to put his hands when kissing someone; Bucky isn't sure where to put his hands when kissing a man, let alone his childhood friend who suddenly grew two feet in the shoulders alone, but when Steve opens his mouth, a few things happen. First, Bucky moans and gets hard inside his pants.
Second, in response, Steve jerks back, surprised in spite of himself.
Third, Bucky bends down and picks up the bottle of whiskey, takes a slug of it, and hands it back to Steve.
...
What does Bucky remember about the Hydra interrogation chamber? Fear and agony, pain and terror. Everything and nothing. When Steve pulled him onto his feet, Bucky felt his sides and abdomen, expecting them to be bloody, but found that his hands came away dry. What does Bucky remember about his emotional responses to things before the interrogation chamber? Both something more and something less, and he knows even less about his physical responses. At his debriefing on arrival back in camp, they became convinced that Hydra was less interested in interrogating him than in telling him things. Did he have conversations with the man in the photograph? What about this man? Did Hydra give him injections?
Steve sits down on the edge bed after having taken half an inch out of the bottle, and Bucky, awkwardly, gets down on his knees in front of Steve.
What does Bucky know about his place in Steve's life, now that Steve is the one doing the rescuing?
...
Steve sits down on the edge bed after having taken half an inch out of the bottle, and Bucky, awkwardly, gets down on his knees in front of Steve. He reaches up and undoes Steve's dress belt; the leather is stiff and new, and Bucky's hands fumble with undoing a belt from the front, pulling down the zipper.
"Lift your hips up," Bucky says. His throat feels raw and scratched, but Steve lifts his hips up, and Bucky hooks his fingers under the waistband and pulls Steve's trousers and underwear down together.
...
Bucky is very clearly aware that Steve rescued him twice. First, from Hydra. Second, from the intelligence advisors without names who did the debriefing.
Did he have conversations with the man in the photograph? What about this man? Did they give him injections? Did he know that from interviews with other survivors of the camp, they took over eighty men to the interrogation chamber, and none of them made it back? As far as they can figure, most of the men died inside the chamber; a few survived, but they were changed men. There were men from the 82nd Airborne somehow caught up at the camp; they saw their lieutenant who had been in the interrogation chamber being dragged along the corridor. He was put back in the cell next to them, and they tried to talk to him, give him some of their water and food because he had clearly been tortured, but he spent the whole time screaming and weeping, pissing himself, throwing himself against the bars and shouting unrepeatable things about what he was going to do to himself and to them. He never took a breath. He never stopped.
One of the men admitted, crying himself, that when Hydra took their old officer out into the courtyard and shot him, it was a relief. The man was decorated, a commissioned officer in an elite force.
But Bucky walked out of the camp.
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you find that you know things that you can't possibly know?
They had wanted to hold him for further observation, keep him indefinitely; Bucky remembers seeing Steve shove his way past the MP's at the door, shouting that with all due respect, colonel, his friend was a hero and he was going to take it up with the very highest levels if this injustice was not fixed.
...
In his life, Bucky has gotten two blowjobs. He fooled around with plenty of girls in Brooklyn, even made it all the way with two or three of them, but his experience of blowjobs is minimal. His experience of giving blowjobs is even less, so he works things out from first principles and half-remembered memories. He came embarrassingly quickly with the first blowjob, and he was too drunk to remember much of the second. It doesn't help that Steve stays mostly soft, but Bucky works out that teeth hurt, that he needs to wrap his lips over his teeth. He works out how to breathe, and when he touches his tongue to the underside of Steve's cock, Steve's hips jump.
In the corner of his eye, Bucky sees Steve's hand come up off the bed, so he reaches up and takes Steve's hand by the wrist, and he puts Steve's hand in his hair.
When he works out that Steve likes a tongue laid flat against the underside of his cock, the hand in Bucky's hair tightens to the point where it hurts.
...
"Did you always feel this way?" Steve says, quietly, when they're walking to the hotel. Steve is tall, takes big strides now, and with his legs still sore from the walk back from Hydra, Bucky has to take four steps to three of Steve's.
Bucky looks up ahead of them, then behind them. Since the street is empty, he says, "No."
"Not about me, specifically. I mean, of course not. Why would any -- but about guys. Generally. You had so many girlfri -- "
Steve is honestly trying to understand. Steve is honestly trying to help.
...
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you want to do things you can't explain?
...
Steve told Colonel Phillips that unless they released Bucky, let him join the Howling Commandos if he wanted, Steve was going to walk out into that camp and tell all of those men what was going on inside. It was a travesty. It was not the American way.
Bucky knows, Phillips knows, everyone knows: the happiness of Captain America is very important to the war effort.
...
In the end, it doesn't work: Bucky can get Steve to the point where Steve is basically hard, even to the point where Steve is rocking a little into his mouth and Bucky can taste salt, but they can't get past that. Steve gets soft again; they try once, twice, and Bucky is trying for the third time when Steve touches his hand to Bucky's cheek and pulls away.
"I don't think it's going to work," Steve says, letting his breath out. He stands. "I'm sorry, Bucky." A moment of silence.
Bucky is still on his knees by the bed, and he brings his right hand up to his jaw and rubs a little. Steve winces.
"Come on. We'll go back out. Maybe get something to eat. You think we've got enough time to catch a late movie?" Steve is trying to catch Bucky's eye, but Bucky doesn't want to look him in the face, so Steve pulls his pants up and re-does his belt. Creakily, Bucky gets up off his knees and sits down on the bed. He is still in his undershirt and dogtags and trousers and shoes; Steve only ever had his pants pulled down to his calves.
Outside, people are passing again. Another sailor, two sailors this time. Two girls.
"Go on ahead. I can get back myself," Bucky says. "I've been in London before, remember?"
"You've had a lot to drink."
"Remember when you were eleven, and you had that ear infection that gave you vertigo for two weeks and got lost on the way between your bedroom and the kitchen?" Bucky looks Steve in the face now and considers the angles on Steve's new face: the nose hasn't changed much, but the cheekbones are broader, the chin stronger, and the eyes look bluer. In the yellow light from the overhead bulb, Steve's hair looks especially blond.
"I do," Steve says, but doesn't move to pick up his hat and go, because they both remember Bucky finding him collapsed in the hallway, and Bucky having to help him back to bed until Steve's legs went out entirely, and Bucky pretty much carrying him the rest of the way. It had been late spring; the window was open. They listened to the Dodgers game from the wireless in the apartment underneath. Bucky sat with Steve until Steve's mother came back from her shift at the sanitarium, and she made dinner for all three of them and they ate in Steve's room. It isn't a happy memory, but it isn't a bad one.
"I'll be fine," Bucky says and smiles a little, on the left-hand side of the face. "I just need to be alone for a while."
After another moment of considering, Steve takes his hat and goes, and Bucky lies down on the bed. He can taste salt in his mouth; the sailors and the girls are still outside. Somebody left something somewhere, and Bucky hears Steve say a few words to them; Steve must lift his hat off to the girls or something, because there is fresh outbreak of giggles, and then he goes down the stairs.
Bucky leans over, takes a long drink from the whiskey, and then lays back down on the bed, stretching his arms over his head. The girls and the sailors are still out there, still talking. Bucky wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, feels the alcohol burn a little on his mouth and hand; ever since coming back, he hasn't been able to get drunk or stay drunk. It burns off faster than he can drink, and he is noticing other changes, too. His vision is better. His muscles are stronger. Would a normal man be able to walk thirty-five miles after two weeks of torture?
One of the girls calls one of the sailors darling. He does something that makes everyone laugh together; if Bucky closes his eyes, the picture of how all four of them must be arranged in the hallway springs into his mind, based on triangulating the various sounds, taking into account how the voices bounce and his memory of the hallway. Angles. Trajectories. Escape routes. Attack routes. It isn't exact, but it's close enough.
Would he have been able to do that before?
Finally, for the first time since walking out of the factory gates, Bucky lets himself cry.
...
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you want to do things you can't explain?
Sergeant Barnes, we know we have to let you go, but do you know that we've been speaking in German for the past half hour?
Any good parts in this are because of
destronomics.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-08 05:13 am (UTC)I honestly don't know what line terrifies me more/is my most favorite:
Third, Bucky bends down and picks up the bottle of whiskey, takes a slug of it, and hands it back to Steve.
and
Do you have impulses that you can't explain? Do you find that you know things that you can't possibly know?
Just. The entire story feels packed into those two lines so neatly, so perfectly, that by the time I get to the end, I'm just nodding, of course, of course, how did I not see that coming?
Also Steve saying with all due respect and Steve is honestly trying to understand. Steve is honestly trying to help. and Bucky trying to put it in his head, get his head on straight, look at the world and order it, how he survived, and he's just lost. Every workable definition, I can't.
I have forgotten how to leave any coherent feedback beyond I love this. So much.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-08 02:32 pm (UTC)Steve is trying. He is so happy to have his friend back again, and it's OK with him if his friend is a little different. You'd be a little different if you went through what Bucky went through, and now, goddammit, I want the fic where they're part of the first Quarter Quell and Erskine is a refugee scientist who re-defected from District 13. Technically, he picks Bucky, not Steve, but it's still picking Steve in the end because --
"Vitamins," Bucky repeats, saying the word, a little skeptically, and he looks over when the kid just about his age comes up, dark hair, dark eyes, stupid mustache, comes up and starts strapping him down.
(There are ways to die in the Games, and there are ways to die. Erskine chooses to make Steve the control because he likes the kid, because he knows what this version does serum does to memory and higher neural function. He sells it to the government on the grounds that Bucky is closer to human standard, but when the serum doesn't result in the winner, when his experimental test subject kills himself on Steve's knife. Afterwards, it isn't a Red Skull agent who shoots Erskine down, but Panem. The other dose doesn't get destroyed; Erskine didn't leave notes, but the dark haired kid, the one with dark eyes and the terrible mustache, figures it out, and when Steve asks, he straps Steve down alone, administers it himself. It's his way of saying sorry.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-08 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-08 01:59 pm (UTC)But man, the creeping paranoia of knowing that something's been done to you, or that you've changed, but not quite knowing how or into what? The repeated refrain of "Did you always feel this way" and how it starts out innocent but by the end, auuugh.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-16 03:12 am (UTC)