#time fic

in the next

a Bucky/Buck time slip romance by phlegmatic

ii. Bed rest and a stiff drink

“Fuck, man. You alright?”

The question’s maybe halfway sincere, because there is a story to be pieced together from the gun and the blood and the dirt and the wild, animal edginess in this guy’s movements, and though there’s nothing but flitting panic in Bucky’s mind, he knows it can’t be a happy one. This guy, he’s American too—hard to miss the twang and drawl even in so few words—and maybe a bit younger than Bucky, and despite waving a gun around is noticeably damn pretty, and rangy and hard but with a stink of fear about him, and it’s getting into Bucky’s head and making him afraid as well—afraid of whatever has this guy so shaken; afraid for him too, in truth.

“Hey, you alright?” Bucky asks a second time, getting his legs moving, shuffling and stumbling a bit as he’s forcibly tugged along. “Who’s chasing you?”

“Who d’you think?” is barked back gruff, before a deliberate jerk on the chain as he turns from Bucky and nearly stumbles himself, trying to drag them both down the road. “You gotta move,” he insists, but the tail-end is smothered by a gunshot from the woods.

Heyyy!!! I love getting messages like these because they make me feel all mushy 🥺 thank you so so much for the support! As per the release of time/silence part 2, I was hoping on finishing it this week so it could be released next week, but I have three exams next week so I don’t know if I’ll finish it on time 🥲

Summary:  Time; the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

Rating: 18/Mature

(Harald/OC, Halfdan/OC)

This is slow going at first, bear with me!

@naaladareia

Chapter One - The Camel

“Are you excited to see your Uncle, my son?” Harald lifted Erick high above his head and the boy laughed in delight.

Time ficccccc xxxxx thank u bestie

In which Bucky is self-medicating with alcohol, waiting for the inevitability of his brain snapping, and leaning in to being the family fuck up because it’s what he thinks he deserves, anyway. I wonder what happens when you take an unmedicated bipolar guy, block access to his crutch/coping method, and chuck him into a scenario that pushes the bounds of sanity.

Kind of a spoiler, but also a moment of Bucky trying to rationalise himself to calm after he and his new tag-along are accosted by Germans:

The beating had been real (Bucky has the smarting aches to prove it) and so had the bullets (blood all over the other American’s fingers), and Bucky has heard of historical war re-enactors but he doesn’t think the middle-aged guys running around Gettysburg actually try to kill each other.

He can’t stop his stare from drifting, from finding the other American’s profile and picking all over him. There’s iron-clad determination in his expression, in the way he’s marching on while injured, and he isn’t sparing Bucky a single glance, which makes deciding whether or not he’s a part of this a whole lot more difficult.

If he’s consensually role-playing a Nazi capture with actual bullets, then maybe for once Bucky isn’t the biggest fuckup in the proverbial room.

If the entire thing is an act and he’s just going along so the freaks behind them don’t do worse than they’ve already done, well. There are two of them now. Two against three, the odds aren’t so bad. Wouldn’t be so bad, if they weren’t both injured.

The only color left in the guy’s face which isn’t a shade of grey is, fascinatingly, the flush of his lips. It isn’t the sort of thing that Bucky should be noticing, but there they are: berry red and delicious, pouting with the way he’s panting his breaths a little, something wholly out of place with the clusterfuck of everything on this day. Staring at him, those pretty lips are weirdly grounding—burst of color in a blizzard of a different kind, drawing Bucky’s focus and giving him a thin shard of clarity.

I also have my long overdue Christmas AU in which Bucky is also hurled into a Situation™ and has to unpack a lot of his feelings about being bipolar and how it connects to his relationships:

Two months into living in London, Bucky had rejected a call from Gale. It had been late, and Bucky had been unable to sleep because this should’ve been the opportunity of a lifetime but nothing he did was good enough, and every mistake was just another reason why he didn’t deserve this, and he didn’t have it in him to pretend to be the guy who Gale was waiting for. A week later, Bucky had his stomach pumped in A&E; his flatmate had been the one to call the paramedics. He never told Gale, but it didn’t matter so much anyway, because only a few days after that, he got kicked out of a pub for trying to start a jousting tournament with the pool cues, called Gale from the adjoining laneway to break up with him, and then did a rail off a freckled redhead’s dick in a club bathroom stall. The lithium prescription had been his birthday gift to himself that year.

Bucky wonders if this version of Gale had been spared any of it. Gale presses the heels of his palms into his eyesockets, inhales through a wet shudder, and the most unselfish decision that Bucky has ever made had been while he was manic.

All my Buckies are bipolar but some are more bipolar than others lmao

Thank you, anon! Wow dealer's choice okay.

I'm going to say some things about the blizzard scene in in the next chapter 1, if that's okay!

One of the big factors in Bucky's character arc and personal journey in in the next will be bipolar disorder. I think I've said before that all my Buckys are bipolar, but some are more bipolar than others, by which I just mean sometimes it's prominent in the story and sometimes it isn't. It's very prominent in this story. At the point Bucky begins the story in, he's self-medicating with alcohol, which is a depressant anyway, but he's also not regulated and he knows he's not regulated. By the point of the "snowstorm" hitting, he's experiencing withdrawal and also high levels of stress from everything going on, so when something inexplicable happens, he tries to rationalise by blaming it on himself.

What I wanted to start digging in to here is how a bipolar diagnosis is kind of a double-edged sword, because on the one hand you know what's wrong with you, while on the other you know what can go wrong with you. It's so easy to sit in a space of anticipating your brain snapping, and it's also easy to dismiss everything you think and feel as being irrational or crazy because of your disorder. It feels like you're constantly on a precipice, especially if you do a lot of work around recognising early signs of an episode so you can then put preventative/mitigating strategies in place; it's easy to start thinking that everything could be a sign that you're about to snap, too. So for Bucky in this moment, losing time and seeing something that then quickly disappears, he's thinking he did this to himself (by drinking, by not drinking, by letting himself get bad again), and it was only a matter of time. Also nothing is real because maybe he's just that crazy and it's finally happened, he's lost total touch with reality. To me, this is really in line with Bucky as a character because of the way he shoulders responsibility when things go wrong, and sits in guilt to the point of numbness even when he has no material control over something (one of the behaviours which initially made me go 🫵🫵🫵bipolar🫵🫵🫵).

So that's the snowstorm! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to run my mouth lmfao

thank you thank you thank you hello!!

water comes from my cannibal romance aka meatfic

Under a silvery dusk, Bucky watches Gale undress and tread with no hesitation into the glacial waters. He submerges with a sudden plunge, and the ripples of him are dissipated by the time he breaks the surface again, the silence clutching icier around Bucky’s lungs with every passing second. Flicking soaked hair out of his eyes, Gale turns back to the bank; the cold has already made him red, nose and pretty cheeks and the corrugated center of his chest. “You comin’?” he asks, and impossibly, he’s smiling.

raw comes from chapter 3 of my timeslip AU, which i'm a bit stagnated on but hopefully the mood will strike soon! it's dual whump lmao both of them are having a shit time

They’ve been running for hours, a lope that’s only slightly more than walking, and with each lurch forwards Bucky feels the German boots in his gut; the ants of no food and no liquor under his skin; the festering rawness of his feet, his shin, his brain. Gale is swaggering just as widely as he is, though he isn’t clutching at his shoulder any more. Even with the moon, it’s too dim to see whether there’s more blood soaking and darkening Gale’s sheepskin, though it seems unlikely: has hasn’t keeled over yet.

skin comes from my cyberpunk AU in which some bad things are happening to Gale

The view is locked on what those fingers are doing, and Bucky knows they’re not his own—is usually good at blocking out how they’re not his own—but the nerves of his touch are sparking as those fingers get rougher. There’s no sound from Gale, no flinch, as the pinching becomes tweaking, becomes grinding and pulling, turns sensitive skin from dusky pink to something inflamed to a lurid promise of a bruise.

thank you so much for the words and interest <3 i appreciate youuuu