Omg can we see some of your morgue files???! I literally love anything you write
oh man the thing is they’re all SUPER fragmented, and i really mean SUPER DUPER. A lot of them are 5-10 sentences long and completely unconnected to anything else, it’s literally just my brain generating one-liners.
that said, here’s a few below the cut:
“I need somebody who speaks French, looks good in a tux and can punch through a cement wall,” Natasha announces, entering the Rogers-Barnes apartment via the fire escape window.
The Rogers-Barnes contingent, currently in some kind of… hug situation… on the couch, both look at her expectantly. “Fluent French,” she adds.
They keep looking at her.
“What, both of you?”
“Take your pick,” Barnes says. “I’m fluent in eight dialects, but you have to kickstart it and sometimes my brain damage likes to play language roulette. This one - “ he jerks a thumb at Steve “ - can speak on command, but only Parisian French from the forties.”
“Both of us can do the wall-punching,” Steve says.
“And it’s lady’s choice as to who looks better in a tux.”
Bucky buys the rope, because Steve has some kind of condition that prevents him from accessing common sense whenever he has to buy something. The shop is in Park Slope, and the tattooed salesgirl assures him it’s 100% vegan and organic and paraben gluten carcinogen free, which, okay, but Bucky would’ve been happy with “won’t give you a rash, probably”. It’s also dyed a soft petal pink. The salesgirl offered him black and red, too, which was probably a reasonable enough guess given his boots and motorcycle jacket, but there’s something about the pink that makes him go a kind of warm inside, just looking at it.
He takes it home and throws it in the washing machine with the rest of the colors, and that’s enough to make him forget about it until Steve pulls it out from their pile of clean underpants.
The now-iconic footage of Iron Man firing his repulsors at Captain America’s shield and using it as a redirect to take out six Chitauri in a moment of perfect teamwork and flawless cohesion is playing again. It looks great on TV and the clip has over nine million hits on YouTube, but what actually happened is that Tony swung around, turned his fire on Steve, Steve raised his shield to cover himself - the cameras entirely failed to capture him bellowing “STARK WHAT THE FUCK” as he tilted the shield to turn the reflected beam away from Iron Man - and it just happened to knock over as many aliens as it did without cooking one or both of them in their suits.
After Bucky watched all the available Battle of Manhattan footage, he’d rested his forehead on the kitchen table for a long five minutes. “It honestly wasn’t that bad,” Steve tried to tell him.
“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” Bucky said.
“No, honestly, after Tony flew the nuke through the wormhole - ”
“Do you even hear what’s coming out of your mouth?” Bucky demanded, sitting up, eyes wild. “How the fuck are you doing it? Where do you keep finding people crazier than you?”
“Are you including yourself in this category?”
“The world may be ready for a queer Captain America,” Bucky says wearily, “but it is not ready for Captain America’s extremely fucked-up homicidal ‘boyfriend’. And the boyfriend,” Bucky continues threateningly when Steve opens his mouth, “Is not fucking ready for the fucking security nightmare that is stepping out to the closet or whatever they call it in the twenty-first fucking century.”
Steve shuts his mouth, looks incredibly mulish for a second, then deflates all at once, curling his arm around his knees. He thunks his forehead against the side of the tub. “Sorry.”
Bucky lifts his pruny flesh hand out of the water and puts it in Steve’s hair, watching the suds drip down his collar as he takes another drag on the cigarette. “What’s that they say,” Bucky says, blowing the smoke out the window. “You gotta do you. Something like that. And I gotta do me.”
”Thought that was my job,” Steve halfheartedly tells his own knees, and Bucky rubs absently at Steve’s nape but neither of them bother to move.
“You really are sorry,” Bucky muses a few minutes later. “You’d have suggested we fuck in the tub by now with your butter-wouldn’t-melt face on otherwise.”
Steve doesn’t lift his head but Bucky can hear his grin. “Why, you wanna?”
“You feel like flooding the downstairs neighbors, Rogers?”
“They’ll survive.”
Bucky squeezes Steve’s nape and shakes him a little. “What day is it, Rogers?”
Steve groans. “Thursday.”
“That’s right. That means my week of nice boring vanilla sex isn’t over yet, and that means until midnight on Sunday you’re going to keep your trap shut about whatever the fuck the internet’s told you to try with your dick next–”
“Fuck you, you loved the thing with the belt - ”
“I’m going to desecrate his grave,” Barnes said calmly. “Ideally I would have liked to piss on his corpse, but not even that is worth digging up the carcass. Also, does anybody know where Arnim Zola is buried?”
“Under forty yards of munitions bunker rubble,” Steve said.
Barnes thought about it. “Acceptable. Pierce?”
Natasha grimaced. “They wanted to put him in Arlington–”
“–but given the fact that he’s the biggest fucking traitor to his country since Benedict fucking Arnold–” Steve interjected.
“– they buried him in his family plot instead. Glenwood Cemetery.”
Sam turned his phone to them. “About an hour from here, if google’s right about traffic.”
It took more like ninety minutes, but that was because, as flying Sam most eloquently described it, DC traffic was its own super special individual circle of hell.
Pierce’s grave was large and tastefully elaborate, the final resting place of a successful politician. The headstone was grey marble slab, Alexander Michael Pierce written across it in engraved gold script. 1948-2014. There were no flowers.
“Want me to draw a dick on it?” Steve offered.
Barnes looked at the Sharpie in his hand, then at the gravestone, then at his metal arm, then back at the gravestone. He threw the Sharpie over his shoulder and crouched down, bracing his flesh hand on the head of the tombstone.
“What are you– wow,” Steve said, as the shriek of Barnes’ metal finger carving into the marble split the air. “That’s… wow.”
“Marker washes off,” Barnes grunted, carving in another letter. “Adamantium is forever.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or… no, I’m definitely impressed,” Sam said. “A little scared, not gonna lie, but definitely impressed.”
Barnes sat back. “There,” he said, wiping rock dust off his finger. “Now it’s accurate.”
Alexander Michael Pierce, the gravestone now read, with NAZI TRAITOR ASSHOLE spelled out below in huge, mathematically perfect capitals right below. Barnes blew some more rock dust out of the letters and nodded in satisfaction.
“That’s about right,” Steve said critically, regarding it with hands on his hips. “You sure you don’t want me to add a dick on there? Because I could absolutely–”
“Steve,” Bucky said, standing up, “shut up for a second,” and then he grabbed Steve by the neck, kissed him on the mouth and dipped him backwards like that one picture of the sailor he’d seen from VE day.
“Bucky!” Steve exclaimed, wrenching his mouth away. “Not in a cemetery, oh my gmmmphhh–”
“Really?” Sam said behind them. “Are you for god damn serious right now?”
“Bucky,” Steve gasped, when Bucky came up for air. “Bucky, we are literally over Pierce’s dead rotting body.”
