what is the fucking point of flipping it you pulled it out of the sheath by the handle there’s no goddamn need for that
why even bother having a special spot easiy to reach in your black leather suit for knives if you’re just going to play with them when you take them out
but on the other hand
hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng
(He’s switching grips, largely because someone like Steve ain’t gonna give you an easy target for a straight thrust, especially if he’s got his shield, which makes for a lot of over and underhand stuff. But god yess hnnnnnnnnng.)
Also he LOOKS like he’s pulling it out normally, then flips it around—if you don’t have the advantage of a specific close-up you’d easily miss the little flip and think his blade was pointing toward his thumb. Then when he pulls his arm back across his body you think he’s pointing the knife over to his left, when in reality it is pointing straight at you and he’s about to slam it in your face. The arm movement to pull it out of the sheath that other way is super awkward and telegraphs the fact that your blade’s going to be reversed from the very beginning. But the Winter Soldier is a tricksy bastard. And IIRC, it works—Steve isn’t aware until his arm comes down to strike that he’s about to get hit. Otherwise he’d find a better way to block it.
</fencer>
Now with additional commentary from a fencer. My “hnnnnnnnng” is only exponentially increased.
Tl;dr knife flips are a useful, brutal, excellent tool. When the Winter Soldier is coming after you with a knife you’d better have superhuman reflexes, because he is going to attack you from every possible avenue. If I only hold my blade like a screwdriver, there are a limited number of physical movements I can make, and they are relatively predictable. If I hold it like an icepick, the repetoire changes but is likewise limited. If I can flip it around with absolutely no notice, I’ve effectively doubled how difficult I am to defend against.
Reblogging for commentary, and also because I could watch that gif all day.
All of this, and also, even if he WAS just playing with it, fucking around with a weapon is one of the ways that you get really good with it. With knives specifically, for a guy like Bucky — in both his lives — you’d pretty much have one on you at all times, and a lot of the military life (and probably the assassin life too) involves sitting around being bored as shit waiting for the death and terror to start. You end up playing with your weapons, because they’re there, and that’s one of the primary ways you really learn that weapon inside and out. You might play around, switching your grip, flipping it over and over, learning to catch it by the handle, by the point, learning to throw it, learning the exact weight and the center of its balance and all the other things that make handling it so effortless… it’s all just repetition and asking yourself “I wonder if I can….” and doing it until yes, indeed, you can stab some guy in the face before he can even see you coming.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
So, I have to say something.
This is my favorite post on this website.
I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.
Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.
I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.
This never went anywhere, but it was going to be in the Full of Grace series somewhere. Maybe I’ll use it?
In the meantime, here’s some outsider-perspective Bucky characterization. 1400 words, corny jokes.
“Oh, hey, you’re new,” Ben Greene said, glancing over at his co-pilot as the man swung into the seat and buckled himself in efficiently. He was a white man, dark-haired, strong-jawed, with longish hair, in the standard uniform. “I didn’t notice anybody new on the roster.”
“Last-minute availability swap,” the man said, and fished out— what? His official SHIELD badge, like Ben was gonna ask to see it or something. He glanced over. “You really ought to check that, you know.”
“You couldn’t’ve got in here if you weren’t authorized,” Ben said, laughing, but he obediently looked at it. “James Buck.” Recent enrollment date, but long enough ago to have been through relevant training. And from the look of the guy, he was nobody’s green rookie.
“And I know you’re Greene,” Buck said. “I had a chance to look over the roster and all.”
“Watch who you’re callin’ green, rookie,” Ben said.
Buck gave him an impressively-deadpan stare. “Great,” he said. “A wise guy. I’ll buckle in.”
“I’m not quite up to comin’ up with a pun on Buck and buckle yet,” Ben said, “but rest assured, I’m workin’ on it.”
“That’s fuckin’ great,” Buck said. “Puns. Well, it takes some of the suspense outta wondering what’s gonna go wrong on this mission.”
“You sound pretty experienced,” Greene said.
“I was in the Army for like eighty years,” Buck said, “this ain’t my first rodeo.”
I was wrong, I can’t update Full of Grace right now. Here’s a bit I was going to use, but I had forgotten where exactly I left off.
This is not where I left off. So here it is, instead, for now; its eventual destination is probably in FoG’s sequel.
Not Civil War-compliant, precisely.
The Soldier’s face filled the screen, a little blurry. He had sunglasses on, even though it looked dark in the room. “I don’t got anywhere safe to sleep,” he said, hoarse. “Not for a few days now. I got a public service announcement about that: if you don’t sleep for a couple days you start gettin’ delusions. So I got delusions at the moment, somethin’ fierce.”
He sat back a little, and the camera focused a little better. He was wearing about eight layers of clothes, collars all mismatched and protruding, and he hadn’t shaved in like a week, and his hair was loose and stringy and his sunglasses were visibly badly scratched. “So I’m gonna start off by sayin’– like, I don’t sleep at homeless shelters because that would be really dangerous for the other people at the homeless shelters, but sometimes I wind up hanging out with homeless people so I know what’s up, right, and I got a point here. Like, this is a platform a lot of people watch. And I know you’re all in it for the train wreck. I know I’m being hunted. I know somebody’s gonna catch up to me one of these days, and whether it’s Tony Stark or not doesn’t really matter. Whatever.” He waved his hand across the screen, and it glinted metallic.
“My point is. I got this real public platform, and some insider knowledge, so I’m gonna start off by sayin’ like, I keep seein’ people sayin’ we shouldn’t help refugees if we can’t even house our own homeless veterans, and here’s the thing– so fuckin’ do it, okay? Like, I meet a lotta guys out here and fuck if they don’t need help. If you’re gonna toss that shit rhetoric around like, fuckin, do something. Otherwise fuck you, we’re people, not a punchline. We certainly could help homeless veterans a lot more than we do, and we don’t, so that’s not a good excuse to just not help anyone. Unless that was your whole point?”
He sat back a little further, put his hand to his chest, and made as if declaiming to an audience. “America! We’re pieces of shit, why would you expect better from us? Fuck you!”
He sat forward again. “Fuck you, pal. I fuckin’ died for this country and I’m telling you. Fuckin’ do better than that.” He pointed with one finger toward the lens, jabbing viciously. “Do better.” It was the metal hand. He had no gloves no it, just the visible cuffs of three or four shirts coming down over the heel of it.
He pushed the sunglasses back up on his nose and hunched his shoulders in. “So that was my, like, ad. All y’all vultures watching this for the inevitable meltdown, that was the price of admission. So here comes the meltdown: I told you, right, I ain’t slept more than a couple minutes in four, five days, maybe more now. I actually don’t know.” He pushed his hair back with the skin-covered hand, looking down and away a little.
“So I got these delusions now and it’s making me wonder like, maybe.” He broke off and looked at nothing, folding his arms across his chest. “Maybe I’m– not really the Winter Soldier. Maybe those were delusions.”
Going through the extant raw materials of the rest of the Full of Grace-verse is a wild ride, let me tell you. I wrote this in such a flood of disorganized free-association. It’s a testament to how Not To Do Things.
I’m up to about 25k of mostly-contiguous stuff, but it doesn’t have lakeisha’s subplot and I know I didn’t write the Solving of the Mystery of Natasha’s Mysterious Mysteries. Because that’s the over-ambitious sequel.
Anyway, here’s a chunk I just found that made me laugh: James giving Lakeisha tips on How To Badass.
“In my case, I choose an angle of approach where they can’t see me coming. Which is tactically good, if they can’t see you they won’t shoot you– but also, if you just sort of turn up in the doorway like you’ve been standing there glowering for half an hour before they noticed you, it’s way more intimidating than if they saw you coming like a mile and a half away and have been watching you for five or six minutes commenting on how funny you actually look when you walk.”
“Nice,” Lakeisha said. “You should make a video about this.”
“I have some notes for one,” he admitted. “It adds a lot to your total commute time though, because you have to scout, like I’m doing now. And sometimes it involves scaling a wall so you can approach the door without coming through, like, a courtyard or whatever, where they’d see you from the time you came through the outer gate– the way to avoid that is to just scale the wall, and drop down next to the door so you can just step into the doorway and scare the piss out of everyone.”
“And you do this for effect,” Lakeisha said.
“There’s sound tactical reasons, but yes, effect is the main one,” James said. He paused and glanced over at her. “You don’t think pure drama is like half of my skillset? It is, though.”
“I know you’re not even kidding,” she said, amused.
“Especially if you’re working intimidation,” he said. “Between seventy and a hundred percent of that paycheck is going to be earned by looking and moving and just being as terrifying as fuck. And you can’t ever look like you’re trying too hard. You have to be super method. You are the night. You are death embodied. You are come from hell to take the undeserving. All of that.” He waved a hand. “Okay I’m not going to make you climb any walls. We’re just going to walk around the block to come at them from that side.”
“What if you have to run?” Lakeisha asked. “In my experience it’s impossible to look scary when running.”
He laughed. “I promise you I’m fucking terrifying at a run,” he said. “If for no other reason than I’m almost twice as dense as a human ought to be so I weigh 300 pounds and move like I weigh 180, and I’ll go fucking through you. Tends to intimidate people.”
from the archives of outtakes for Full of Grace, I was just digging through and found these. So Bucky has a blog and gets Qs, and A’s them, in the story universe. (It’s carefully not quite any actual website, for various reasons, partly laziness.) And in-story, so far, they’ve all been pretty plot-driven Q’s.
But I got bored at some point while stuck on a plot point, and I just found where I gave him a sideline as a relationship advice blogger. So, in honor of the holiday, here’s some excerpts. (The story is on a brief hiatus at the moment but that doesn’t mean I don’t have more to post soonish, it’s just not on the schedule at the moment.) (Remember when I wrote MCU fic? So do I, pretty much all the time. I’ll get back to it. Don’t worry.)
q: Dear Winter Soldier: If you had a nice time on a date and you text her to say you hope you can see her again, and she doesn’t text back right away, how long should you wait to try again or should you never speak of/to her again and try to forget about it?
a: I laughed, out loud, for like, ten minutes when I got this. Thank you, this made my day. I’m a relationship advice blog now. I’m going for this. This is great. I could not be less qualified for this and I’m ecstatic. Let’s do this.
If you’re asking the Winter Soldier for real, all the advice I’m gonna have for you is to make your choice now. Either you return to the last known coordinates your handlers left for you and wait for further instruction, or you make your own mission now.
The Winter Soldier isn’t very good at girls, though. Or dating. Or humans. Not living ones, anyway. Making them dead, sure. Texting them back, no. He understands how texting works but not on, like, an interpersonal level. And he is completely baffled by the whole concept of dating.
If you’re asking who I am now, I’m not gonna have a whole lot more advice. If you’re asking who I was before I was the soldier, well, he’s gonna want a pretty detailed explanation of just what this “texting” is after all.
This is going to be in the Hour of Our Death series at some point, or is in that continuity, anyway, but I just can’t figure out where or when. It came to me kind of entire a little while ago, and I wrote it, and I’ve been sitting on it, and I just– it wants out, so I’m posting it here, at least temporarily. (For anyone not reading that series, Full of Grace has as one of its major plot points that Bucky’s trying to avoid disappearing into a basement after his inevitable recapture by making a series of videos that go viral on the Internet, so– there’s none of his POV in the story, except the videos, which he mostly narrates.)
It’s A Funny Story, 2400ish words, tw for descriptions of gore and depersonalization: The Winter Soldier tells the viewer all about cryostasis.
“I got a story,” the Soldier said without preamble, sitting back from the camera. He was shirtless, illuminated by silvery natural light from an offscreen window to his left. “I got a story I gotta tell. I don’t got names or dates or nothin’, I just, I gotta tell it. I was thinkin’ about this and I just– I don’t know if there’s a point, lemme tell it and I’ll figure it out.”
He sat back in the rickety wooden chair he was in, which creaked in protest at his weight, and crossed his arms across his chest, metal over flesh. “So here’s the thing with– I was readin’ documentation on this, I know now I’m the only one ever to survive cryo, and I know people been, like, debating it. Like, it could help real people or something, and I gotta tell you, no. Just– no. It’s– no.” He sat forward. “In the docs it talks about some stuff that sounds all medical and sterile and boring and whatever.” He gestured with the metal hand, a flyaway gesture. His hair was loose and fell in his face, and he shook it back absently, a practiced gesture. “Subject experienced tissue damage, organ function compromised, acclimatization period blah blah. Skin sensitivity, I remember that phrase. So like– the only reason I survived thawing was that I got amped tissue regeneration. I got a healing factor. And it’s like– it’s a doozy. Okay? I know they tried to duplicate it, it gave all the subjects like–” He closed his eyes, shook his head quickly, “fast-acting face cancer or some shit. Don’t fuck with it.” He grimaced. “It’s not– actually a picnic. Is the thing. Anyway.”
He sat back a little, shoving his hair back more with his skin hand. “I could try to tell you how fuckin’ nasty it was, but I’m gonna tell you a story instead. So imagine– I don’t know what year it was. I don’t know how long I’d been in cryo. I know it was some kind of party. Whoever had me in his department, he was having some kind of shindig, showing off for other people, right? So you know how sometimes nowadays– well, everybody’s got a freezer. And you see it on sitcoms and memes and things.” He glanced up. “You see like, Mom asks the kids to take the chicken out of the freezer to defrost it so she can make dinner when she gets home, right?” His eyes were very blue in the indirect light, a cloudy hazeled blue, and he cocked an eyebrow. “And the punchline is, the kid forgets to take the chicken out and then the mom is super mad.”
He gestured. “Whoever was in charge of getting me out of cryo didn’t leave enough time.
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