the worm in tham n0phis’ brain

Grace flipping his shit, statement.

Bonus:

It has been one year since I randomly became obsessed with the character Bucky Barnes and read an absolutely massive amount of fanfiction about him, becoming introduced to fanfiction as an art medium in the process.

After reading so many great fanfictions I had to take a crack at it myself, and i am an exit is what resulted.

Summary

A broken, disillusioned Steve Rogers is afflicted by a delusion that the mysterious assassin who nearly killed him is actually his best friend, who died 70 years ago. SHIELD wants to lock him up and return him to being a perfect, sparkling nationalist symbol as quickly as possible. Sam Wilson, who has wrestled with his own disillusionment and his own ghosts, knows that Steve needs compassion and the support of a true friend, not a forced regime of recovery that takes away what is left of his shattered autonomy. Meanwhile, as Natasha tries to track down the Winter Soldier, her discoveries get more and more disturbing. She uncovers footage of the Soldier being subjected to, and forced to commit, horrific acts to maintain Hydra's cruel hierarchy. What's more, his resemblance to Steve's dead friend is too close to be coincidence. Sam and Natasha grow determined to stop the Soldier from being recaptured by his abusers, but how will Steve react when he learns the true extent of the Soldier's torture, and the true horror of what he was twisted into? Is the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes? Or is he a thing wearing Bucky Barnes's face? Which of those things is worse?

What it was like to write it

This fic is almost 200k words long. I wrote it in four months. Wow!

I'm convinced that writing this fic was what made all the difference for my final(ish) semester of college. To put it bluntly this was the first semester where I didn't feel like I was dying all the time. It put an end to the longest creative drought of my life and everyone's lovely comments gave me enough joy to carry me through.

I feel like I learned a ton about POV, plotting, and characterization while writing this fic. I'll probably talk about that more in the coming days.

My guiding questions/ideas

I don't really give a fuck about the MCU, but I do give a LOT of fucks about the fanfictional universe that has built around Bucky, and I had several ideas or questions that kept needling at me about this story and what people had done with it.

The whole story of Captain America, where a disabled kid in the 1930's is turned into a physically perfect superhuman, has "eugenics" written all over it. What if I explored that?

It doesn't really make sense that, in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it seems plausible to everyone that the Winter Soldier is Bucky. I mean, as far as anyone knows he died 70 years ago. What if the other characters assumed Steve was delusional out of grief?

I also really wanted to lean into Bucky/the Winter Soldier as an undead, uncanny-valley monster. A lot of Bucky fics deal with him being dehumanized and treated as a creature or a thing rather than a human, and I wanted to really dig into that, exploring the ways he is a machine and a reanimated corpse and a feral, terrified animal.

I had a craving for more medical horror. Bucky is the perfect character for it but not enough had been written about it thus far that really hit the spot for me.

I read a LOT of fanfictions that portrayed Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence and that compelled me a lot. I wanted to explore this as messily overlapping and entwined with all the other ways his body was invaded and taken away from him (as a lab experiment, living weapon, etc). I also wanted to explore what it would mean if Bucky was forced to commit sexual violence as the Winter Soldier.

What kind of story this is

The most common adjective I get on i am an exit is probably "visceral." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.

I do a lot of getting down and dirty with the Horrible Nasty. I went elbow deep digging in the back of my head for the things I don't want to think about.

BUT. I am also really intentional about satisfying softness and healing. The final 1/3 of the fic is the healing/comfort arc and I wrote a lot of self-indulgent fluff. Well, fluff doesn't seem right, because fluff implies something light, and every word is heavy with the horrors, but the healing is real. I was really, really serious about fully and sensitively acknowledging every part of the trauma the characters go through. Think hurt/comfort where both the hurt and the comfort are turned all the way up to the max.

I didn't feel confident writing about any of the canon locations in MCU so I basically sent all my characters to Kentucky.

Due to the person that I am, this fic is full of plants, and the plants are relevant to and intertwined with the plot and characterization. The Appalachian ecology is extremely detailed and realistic and thematically relevant.

Also, Bucky gets a horse.

The MCU doesn't have a lot of female characters, and I got mad about that, so Hawkeye, Thor, and Nick Fury are women in this fic.

I took heavy inspiration from a lot of the common themes and tropes of Bucky fanfiction. The way the narration reflects Bucky's dehumanization is indeed cool, but I can't fully take credit for it because it's a device a lot of fics use.

On content warnings

Each chapter has its own individual content warnings in the beginning notes. There is gore, there is fascism, ableism, and eugenics, there is a lot of medical horror, and there is sexual abuse and rape.

This fic does NOT use the Hydra Trash Party main tag, because the sexual violence is (mostly) "offscreen"/in flashbacks or memories instead of happening in the present in the characters' POV, but the sexual abuse themes are heavy and recurring. I think there are more individual chapters that have a warning for rape, than chapters that don't have that warning.

There is comfort and healing and ultimately a happy ending, but the warnings aren't fucking around.

Conclusion