#designations

Chapters: 9/9 Fandom: Captain America (Movies) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers Characters: Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes, Abraham Erskine, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Brock Rumlow, Alexander Pierce, there will be more as we go along Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, (kind of historical - cold war spies and iron curtain shenanigans), Identity Porn, a different take on the serum, lots of canon easter eggs, KGB spy!Bucky, Steve Rogers is just a guy (ish), neither shrinkyclinks nor shrunkyclunks and yet somehow both, (i'm so sorry the tags are confusing but really - HOW WOULD YOU TAG THIS - please help me), Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Friends to Strangers to Enemies to Lovers, hurt and comfort and action and softness and idiots in love, and a monster happy end, Don't copy to another site

Summary:

In East Berlin around the late 60s /early 70s, KGB Asset 3B-1 is tasked with surveilling a subject that has raised some low grade red flags.

Nothing too serious. The original order is to just eliminate the subject - kind of like you would swat a fly before it becomes a nuisance - but Asset 3B-1's personal equipment malfunctions and the whole thing gets switched to recon and this is how Asset 3B-1 finds himself watching a hapless artist sleep, mostly.

But this is the heyday of spies and corruption and nothing ever being what it seems, and so Things Happen. Plot and action and secrets and lies Happen. Until of course the truth comes out, the way it always does.

Because at the core of this are Bucky and Steve, as always---idiots who are being the most idiotic idiots about everything, especially each other.

Chapter 9

Snippet:

“It’s not important.”  Yes it is, Steve wants to scream.  He doesn’t even know why.  It really doesn’t matter at all.  “And anyway, my handlers called me Олень.”

“Olen,” Erskine says.  “The irony.”

“What irony?”  They both say it.  At the same time.  In perfect sync.  

Steve’s shoulders relax a fraction.  There was a name.  Not just a number.   Ridiculous as it may seem, it feels like a ray of true hope.

“Olen,” Erskine says.  “It’s Russian.  For stag.”

Steve looks at the doc.  So far the irony is not exactly revealing itself.

“What’s another word for stag?  In English.”

Bucky’s face slowly breaks into the patented Bucky Barnes smirk he perfected back in elementary school as he rolls his eyes and says, “Oh god,” but Steve doesn’t see it, can’t see it, until suddenly the word just drops into his brain without warning and he blurts out, “Buck.  A stag is a buck.”

And then they all laugh out loud.

Really I'm just hoping one fan will see this and help answer some questions that I have, or even better just want to chat about it. I’ve gone as far as writing my own works based off of its established universe/unique character portrayals, I even made a whole documentation folder filled with data so I can stay cannon. I have charts of timelines and a whole 

My main questions are:

- Is there any fanfiction based on this work specifically and where can I find it? I just need more and a03 doesn't have any designation tags or collections as far as I can tell.

- Why did the audiobook end with chapter 21? Elementals has Aftermath listed as coming soon on their website, is there any hope that it will come out? Was the site abandoned or is there hope that it may actually come out?

- Cleanwhiteroom’s blog shows chapters of Mathematique posted March of this year (I havent read any of their stargate work yet as I havent watched the show, but I plan to), are they only writing stargate now? Their output is quite amazing so I'm assuming that they write a few chapters over a month or more and then drop them all in the span of a few days so they can focus, at least this is what I hope as it explains the absence for the past few months.

- Does anyone know what Newt’s 6 PhDs are? I know two are honorary, one of which may be neuroscience but this is doubtful considering what Sam Gordon says, one is bioethics and chemistry but the others are just my guesses.

Easy! I could do either one, but I would probably lean toward a translation of the original name, rather than simply adjusting the name to Matoran phonology/spelling.

To illustrate the latter option: if you want to present the name "John" in Matoran phonology/spelling, it would likely just be Jan. "Mary" would be something like Meri. "Susan" would be Suzan. Etc. Pretty simple!

I haven’t seen TFA properly yet, though I really want to. So I don’t currently have any major headcanons for it.

I like the idea brought up though that all the Bots don’t have names until they’re given one. I think that works for them (especially with some of my headcanons on how they’re made). I feel like in Cybertronian society a name is a thing you earn rather than being given to you at birth. Which is also why their names can be a bit on-the-nose in terms of describing them.

[in response to this post]

I didn’t post in its tag to hurt anyone, but to inject a sense of reality and balance into the CWR frenzy that still sees people doing things like messaging specifically to challenge @irisbleufic on the fact that their fic rec list didn’t include DCWT (because it’s “a classic”!!!).

Side note: Anthology ( @irisbleufic )is a classic. Seeing in Color ( @what-alchemy ) is a classic. In the Hour After Zero ( @everybodyilovedies ) is a classic. Among many, many quintessential fics of early PacRim fandom. The good old days. But although all of these are better than Designations, none of them have attracted the hysteria and rabid stanning of Designations. No one goes around going, “Excuse me, I saw your fic rec list and WHY was Progressing to Flight ( @patster223 ) not on it???” No one is formulating conspiracy theories that the writer of Occam’s Razor ( @blairtrabbit ) must have been a writer of Uprising. No one goes around harassing BNFs to publicly promote Lights On (@berlynn-wohl). It doesn’t happen. Why, then, with Designations?

The point of this shaking-up is not to say, “You all are bad, you like a bad thing and you should feel bad.” If that were the point, we’d be in the tag frequently, over the last several years we’ve been discomfited by all this. The point is that people maybe need a little jolt to ask themselves some needed questions, like: Why did CWR ascend so rapidly to godlike status despite the fact we know basically nothing about them? Fam, say what you want about their fic, like it if you want; the writing itself isn’t that bad and CWR is clearly an intelligent author. But it isn’t so disproportionately above fics that it justifies all this baffling brouhaha that seems to accompany any discourse about it.

YES PLEASE READ IT IMMEDIATELY it is literally life-changing and then come talk to me like it genuinely is a modern masterpiece after reading like a lot of the most intelligent writers of the 19th-21st century i still can’t find anyone that creates something quite as intellectually impressive and emotionally devastating a work as this so please please please download spread and meSSAGE ME

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4vb85oyrxb9sdy/Designations%20Congruent%20with%20Things.pdf?dl=0