I wrote this and I don’t know if I can use it in any of my WIPs. So here, have it here, for Bisexual Awareness Week.
2400 words of Steve Rogers on a talk show dealing with manufactured shock value and what in fact his superpower really is.
Steve shifted uncomfortably in his seat, eyeing the girl on the couch next to his with no small trepidation. She was a pop star of some kind, a wholesome child star turned “bad girl”, and she was wearing what amounted to pasties and glitter booty shorts, her short hair spiked and her face gaudily glittered.
He’d been given instructions, and had showed up dressed as they wanted– jeans, and a t-shirt, and a buttoned shirt open over the top of that, with no logos on anything, plain leather shoes, no hat. The shirt was white, the buttoned shirt a blue plaid, the jeans blue, no loud colors. He’d added a red belt, because he’d figured someone was going to make a crack about his monotone outfit at some point. Being prepared for a punchline made it easier.
He had known as soon as he’d walked in and seen her that this girl was meant to shock him. She had given him a limp handshake and a languid-to-poorly-conceal-nervousness once-over, and he’d not squeezed her hand too hard and watched her decide he was judging her, as he carefully kept his eyes squarely above her neck and tried not to show any expression at all.
He was already exhausted.
Tag: bomberqueen17
So. The missing extra novel I wrote last December, or ok ¾ novel. It was MCU fic, and featured Angie Martinelli as the main character, and Bucky Barnes as the secondary character. The plot was that she’d washed out of her acting career and come upstate to take care of her dying grandmother, and then gotten stuck with the now-dead grandmother’s hoarder house full of junk in this small town. And if she could get the house cleaned up and sold, she’d have enough money to get back down to New York, maybe survive long enough to get a job down there again. But in the meantime, she was stuck in this little town, which I lazily based off the town where I grew up. And so she’s working as a waitress in the 24-hour diner that I stole from a different but similar little town. And this weird guy shows up in town and it’s Bucky and they become friends; he’s brain-damaged and can’t really talk and Angie is enchanted by trying to get him to smile at her, he’s the most interesting thing to happen all year. But SHIELD is looking for Bucky, who escaped them and is just trying to live quietly on his own and not have to kill anymore. (Hey, I wrote this before Civil War even had trailers out, I feel kind of good about that characterization.) And they send Peggy, and it’s all Angie’s POV, but Peggy has twigged that Angie knows something, clearly.
Sort of coincidentally, I not only set the fic in my hometown, I also set it during the time I was growing up. So it’s the late 90s, in this fic; there are flip phones that can text, but if you want Internet you probably have to go to the library.
And everyone’s really homophobic. And Angie’s a lesbian.
So here’s an excerpt, because I’m remembering now how it came from a pretty vivid place for me, and maybe I’m in despair because I remember how fucking terrifying this shit was and we’re barely starting to come out of that and now everything is politically and culturally horrible and we’re sliding backward as a society etcetera.
(And oh yeah the novel switches tenses to present about halfway through, so.)
Angie’s so wound up in thinking what she’ll do that she isn’t paying any attention as she walks to her car. (It’s a small lot. To keep from crowding customers out the employees all park around the corner in a graveled-over little spot under some trees, it’s dark and it’s isolated and at night Jorge walks everybody out but it’s not quite full dark yet so she didn’t ask.) She puts her hand on the door handle, and someone very close says, “Angie,” and she jumps out of her skin oh God they’re not even going to come back to her house this time they’re just going to fucking jump her in the parking lot this time–
It’s Peggy. “Jesus Christ,” Angie says, stumbling against her car.
“Sorry!” Peggy says. “Oh, my god, sorry! I thought you’d see me!”
Angie flattens her hand against her chest as if she can stop her heart from beating so damn fast. Fuck fuck fuck fuck what is she going to do?
She bursts into tears. “Oh my God I thought you– sorry! Sorry–” She puts her face in her hands, Christ, she actually didn’t mean to do this, but it’s all coming back, they came to her house, they tried to break into her house, they weren’t going to kill her right away.
“Angie,” Peggy says, horrified, “Angie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Angie’s crying too hard to talk. It’s mortifying. And fuck, it’s suspicious, Peggy’s going to assume she’s got a guilty conscience. Angie shoves her face in her apron and pulls herself together, deep breath in, you’re gonna get James killed. “It’s not you,” she manages to say. “Christ, I’m sorry, it’s not you– I’m the only goddamn queer in this entire town and sometimes people take exception and I don’t– like it– when people– startle me, I take it bad, I’m sorry.”
“Oh my God,” Peggy says, soft and horrified.
“They came to my house,” Angie says, shaky, “they tried to break in, they weren’t gonna kill me they were just gonna teach me a lesson, I gotta get out of this fuckin’ town.” She wipes her face. Her hands are shaking. “I shouldn’t’a been cute with you before, I shouldn’t’a done that, I know people saw it, they’re okay with the rumors but– you gotta be careful, you can’t be obvious like that, and that was stupid, and I’m sorry I just unloaded all that on you but don’t sneak up on me, okay, don’t sneak up on me, I wasn’t built for this ninja shit.” She starts crying again. Fuck. Well, fuck, fine; she’s good at talking about herself, it’s a good distraction. Not hard to be honest about this.
“I am– so, so sorry,” Peggy says, “oh my God, Angie, I didn’t mean to put you in danger like that. You poor thing!”
“I ain’t here for your goddamn pity,” Angie sobs. She can’t stop shaking.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Peggy says.
“Nobody ever–” Angie shuts her mouth, tries again to pull herself together. “Christ on a fuckin’ crucifix, lady.” She breathes, in, hold, out, repeat. It’s hard to get the air out, her lungs want to hold onto it, like they might not get more. Out. In. Hold. Okay. “I called a friend,” she says. “Cops take a half-hour, and you know, they might not take your side, when they finally show up. I called a friend. He said, get a baseball bat or somethin’ and hide behind the dining room door. That way there’s two exits so they can’t corner you. He said, you just gotta live through it, and kill time, and stay alive as long as you can. That’s what I learned from that: what they leave you, in the end, you gotta try to make a life outta that.” She breathes in, holds, breathes out, makes herself push it out, breathes in again. “He got there before they got the door open. Scared ‘em off. That time. That’s all I got, lady. That’s the space where I live.”
Fuck, she should get a fucking Oscar, except that really wasn’t where she wanted this conversation to go. Too bad.
Peggy doesn’t say anything. Angie breathes a little more. “So that’s the shit you mess with,” she said, “when you come in people’s lives and push shit around, that’s the space you’re takin’ up. You scare people enough, they kill each other. You ask everybody in town about this kid yet? If you found him you wouldn’t be here still talkin’ to me. You wanna see if you can get me to give you somethin’ else, stir up some more shit, maybe next time they’ll just jump me in the fuckin’ parking lot, like I figured you were gonna just now.” Her hands are still shaking. “And then you drive away, back to somewhere you belong, and I gotta live with whatever they leave me.”
replied to your post
“So. The missing extra novel I wrote last December, or ok ¾ novel. It…”
wow i forgot how good this was!
aw thanks.
I had definitely built it up in my head into more / other than it was.
Looking at it again, though, if i scraped off the ending where I attempted to develop the plot, and filed off the serial numbers and changed a bunch of details, I could maybe make it into something interesting. (I dunno, maybe I’m just less despair-y tonight, or maybe it’s that I’ve despaired so long and hard I now no longer know what “good” even means anymore.)
Also– for what it’s worth, the thing wasn’t finished, but it also did not contain a romantic relationship; the main pairing was a platonic one. I don’t know if I can manage a whole novel like that, but it is interesting to note. If I redo the plot and change the Steve/Peggy characters… I don’t want Angie to be an eternally chaste lesbian though. Whatever her name winds up being. Hm….
She didn’t want to spook him. She knew how scared he was, of everything. But she had to talk to him.
She went to the gas station. She knew at least part of his schedule because his truck trundled by the diner on his way to and from. So she showed up just at the end of his Tuesday morning shift, just as he was coming out.
He was wearing the hoodie he always wore, but he had the hood down, and his hair was long but well-groomed, pulled neatly back. She’d parked next to his truck and was leaning against her car, so he saw her instantly, and he went on high alert like a wild animal.
“Hey,” she said. “I just wanted to say thanks. For— sticking up for me on Saturday.”
He looked alarmed, then made a wry face and shook his head. “I know,” she said. “But it helped me a lot.” She smiled at him. “I know you’re kind of a shy person but I just thought I should say I consider you a friend, and I don’t have a lot of friends in this town, and it means a lot, okay?”
He looked totally dumbfounded by that, and stared at her as if she’d said something truly astonishing. Angie had considered this beforehand, had thought he might be alarmed by it, so this didn’t take her totally by surprise.
“I don’t need anything else from you,” she said, “I’m not asking you to do more than you have. I just thought I’d tell you that. I wanted you to know. That’s all.”
He looked at her like he was investigating her. He was different, out here, she noticed; in neutral territory, or possibly his territory, he didn’t look like he was ready to flee. He looked bigger, more confident, less tense. She really, really hadn’t realized before how big he was; he was at least six feet tall, and had shoulders like a football player.
“I also figure I ought to tell you that,” she said, and it was hard to say the next bit. “That they were right. I am– a lesbian. A dyke. So uh. I’m not– trying to hit on you. You know?”
He tilted his head a little, like the dinosaur in Jurassic Park, like he was hunting, but he didn’t come closer. He looked like he was considering it.
“So uh,” she made herself go on, “it’s okay if you think that’s gross and don’t want to come around anymore. I’m— I’m used to that. Kind of thing. I just. I wanted to tell you because I’m sick of lying.”
Alarm crossed his features briefly, wide-eyed alarm, and then he made a face and stepped closer. His mouth moved, like he wanted to talk. She knew he could, now. “Angie,” he said, and it was a hoarse croak, no real voice. He leaned in and she stared at him in shock– he’d said her name. He pointed at his chest, put his right hand against it, tapped twice, and said, “Faggot,” and his face twisted up a little.
“Oh,” she said, and before she could think better of it she leaned forward and threw her arms around him and hugged him. “Oh James! Oh, James.” That would be why he was so upset. If people had treated him like that. She remembered his hands shaking.
He put his right arm around her; he was tense, stiff as a board, but didn’t push her away.
“Angie,” he croaked again. She leaned her head against his shoulder and hung on. He was thinner than he looked, her arms fit around his waist easily. After a moment he awkwardly petted her hair, and she wondered when the last time was that somebody had touched him.
Not like a lot of people touched her anymore.
She let go of him and stepped back to look up at him. “So,” she said, “you too, huh?”
His mouth pulled sideways and he shrugged, then nodded slightly.
“Us queers gotta stick together,” she said.
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.
But I’ll try.
It’s A Funny Story
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.
Like, thanks, Winter, for holding off until like two months late and then suddenly shitting all over me and my family. My baby sister left midday yesterday for a 2-day drive out Midwest to visit in-laws, and she and her husband and baby had to white-knuckle it through four inches of slush in Indiana; meanwhile my older sister and her husband and two dogs and three kids left first thing this morning and had to deal with the tail-end of the same huge storm system crapping freezing dribbles on them and slowing them enough that they got stuck in DC rush hour traffic enroute to their Georgia home. We hit bad snow about 3 hours into the 5-hour drive and it was real bad for a bit there. And it’s going to be 45 and raining tomorrow.
WTF anyway. I spent the drive first reading the gift fic I got in the first fic exchange I ever did, which was an adorable and elaborate bit of… I’d describe it as earnest sweetness. I’ll have to go back and reread it tomorrow and comment more intelligently– I just reblogged the post with the link, and it’s really delightful. The formatting was a bit messed up on my e-reader though, so I look forward to giving it another readthrough in a proper browser.
Then I read the literal actual novel I wrote while trying to come up with the fic I eventually wrote for my part of the exchange. I seriously wrote 50k of an AU that didn’t even have the correct pairings in it. I got off on the wrong footing, stumbled around, hit a tangent and started going, and couldn’t tear myself away even when I realized it was utterly unsuitable. And rereading it…
I could file the serial numbers off this one and do an original novel, like I’d been considering for literally years. Nothing else I’ve ever done would really work; all my epics are too based in canon of whatever thing I’m working off of to work. But this one was an AU enough that I could actually just shift everything about six inches to the left and be fine. It’s really tempting.
It’d probably be 100k long or more by the time I was done, but– I mean– why not?
Free sample:
Ficlet series: outtakes from before I fell down the rabbit hole and wrote an epic. (This is how I write epics, btw, I open a document and start writing things that amuse me until I suddenly get sucked into A PIT OF FEELS and that’s where the plot comes from.)
Bucky Barnes makes hilarious, sometimes-serious videos as part of his recovery.
Part Three:
The text appeared, bright yellow, on a blank black screen. Bucky Barnes’ Children’s Funtime Corner.
The Benny Hill theme started playing over a montage of images. Steve ran by, in workout gear, obviously just jogging for fitness, and suddenly Bucky dropped from above the frame, wrapped his thighs around his neck, and took him to the floor. “Ow,” Steve said, off-camera, weakly.
Sam came down a hallway in his underpants (exceedingly flattering boxer briefs), looking morning-sleepy and half-conscious (and fucking glorious), shuffling stiffly and yawning. Bucky jumped out at him and Sam screamed and reflexively punched Bucky so hard they both fell over.
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