i got guns in my head and they won't go。

[foes]

(THIS IS A TRAIN WRECK RN I'LL FIX IT LATER) PERMISSIONS: backtagging: yes pls thank you, i'm slowwwww af myself because Life threadhopping: if it's contextually appropes, otherwise it's just awk fourthwalling: there are certain understandable punctures, like the comics-within-comics about captain america, and social media shenanigans PREFERENCES: ships: m/f preference (with a rare dash of m/m re: the occasional steve). cross-canon and OCs are also super cool, e.g. what up diana/bucky aka ducky (OCs with the caveat that it may be more on a case by case basis). unless it's on a shipping-centric meme, it's usually gotta evolve after some delicious CR. my fave ship is, believe it or not, bucky/wanda but i'm weirdly picky about my wandas so if you're not sure, just ask! kinks: no: brainwashing; weird bodily fluids (blood does not count as weird for bucky). yes: hairplay; bondage (with the right, trusted partner — would not be random); dom/sub play (also with someone he trusts); sensory deprivation; body worship; orgasm denial; somnophilia; dubcon (with regard to aphro/sex pollen context, usually with partners who are already into each other); unhooking motherfucking brassieres. anything else? i'm open. teach me ur kinks. WARNINGS: content from this character: involves severe PTSD, mind control, dissociative identity symptoms, violence, gore, fallout from non-consensual living weaponization. cybernetic (possibly vibranium alloy) left arm - which has been re-gifted post-ca:cw as a full-on upgrade from new ally t'challa (black panther). if any of these traits/items make you uncomf, lmk.

OPEN POST:
TFLN overflow (or brand new texts - crack/reg)
CONTINUATIONS (meme threads, any threads)
PROMPTS (pics, quotes, music)
START SMTH (fight me)
you don't have to ask, post it and i will love it B)

Comments

tfln ( zwilling )

[foes]

( from here )

it's quiet there

[ quiet in that way -- not too quiet, the stone hi-tech silence of the compound, but the quiet of public murmurings. people thinking, learning, hiding out. he is, at the heart of things, a people-watcher. his research wasn't book-related, this time, although that has a certain nostalgia to it.

he reads her next text, and the line of his neck goes taught, a vein throbbing. ]

sorry i missed that

[zwilling]

i do not have a library card.
i think i have to be an american citizen for that.

[ Not that she'd mind it, she only wants to show him she understands where he is coming from. ]

i am too.
are they ruined now?

tfln ( assembles )

[foes]

( from here )

[ his mouth quirks up in a half-aborted way at that first text. he pushes himself back against his headboard and rubs his knuckles over his stubble as he reads the second, then finally responds, ]

got coffee and peanut butter, i think i'll live

but i can pencil you in for a movie binge later too
you know, for the sake of full recuperation

i'm so sorry for the delay on this, finals week has eaten me

[assembles]

[ If Bucky finds movie watching sessions to be recuperating, Steve isn't going to argue. He realizes that it's escapism more than anything else, but they all need distractions from time to time. They can't always exist with the heaviness of the world bearing down on them. Every conversation can't be a painful one. ]

Sounds good to me.

Want to keep up with the Disney flicks, or were you feeling something else?

tfln ( fatalem )

[foes]

( from here )

[ there are so many different ways he could respond to that. he zeroes in on the most intriguing part of the confession. ]

exactly how much time have you spent wondering?

[fatalem]

more than what could be considered professional curiosity.
how much wondering have you done?

[foes]

apparently more than i realized
if i started whispering nursery rhymes at you

[fatalem]

so what do we do about this?

[foes]

it's my understanding that when you've constructed an hypothesis, the next logical step is to conduct an experiment

i learned this in school

[ danger ]

i even remember learning it

[ danger danger ]

[fatalem]

[ kenny loggins playing in the distance ( it actually is over the locker room speakers ) ]

i didn't know you were so scientifically minded.
when and where would you like to conduct?

[catastrophics]

He called me kiddo. We can't have sex

yessssss hi but noooo wanda kiddo

[foes]

his loss
wait-- who

hello <3 and ikr steve pls

[catastrophics]

i'm not sure i should tell you
but thank you. i think

he dumb (so much dumb)

[foes]

you can't start a conversation the way you did

[ mid-wildly-left-field intimate confession-- ]

and then retreat mysteriously. [ YES SHE CAN it's wanda. ] so you are not welcome.

[ he is teasing. rustily. (where is that arm lubricant...) ]

so dumb much idiocy

[catastrophics]

pretty sure i just did actually
and who said anything about retreating? i'm not going anywhere

[ she'd help look if she knew. at the moment she's doing some post-training stretches in her bedroom. ]

idk i'm selfish

[fatalem]

I just got called the stable friend. This makes me super uncomfortable.

feeds your greed happily

[foes]

your level of discomfort should correspond to who used the label
who was it

apparently i gossip now

mmmm, delicious

[fatalem]

your acclimation to the 21st century is going swimmingly.

scott. sam nearly spit out his coffee. i hit him with a bagel.

[foes]

mostly your fault, remember this

[ he squints at the second text, the wrinkle of his brow amused. ]

to be fair, a lot of people look stable standing next to him

[ scott lang is a weird ADHD roller coaster golden retriever insect hybrid. he is not a human being. ]

[fatalem]

you're welcome

[ that's an apt description if she's ever heard one. ( which she hasn't, because he didn't say it to her. ]

i told him thank you and left the room.

[ as uneasy as the declaration made her, she's not about to shatter lang's illusions. ]

[compromised]

( ooc | this is completely unprompted and i am just a rando off the street, feel free to ignore if you're not into it. )

[foes]

( ooc: um no i was so happy to find this in my inbox you have no idea? rando love all day come to my arms. )


[ It’s past 3 a.m. – all good girls and boys have gone to bed – but they’ve hit the sparring mats again.

This is their routine: they dance around each other in broad daylight, toying with band-aids where stitches should go; they keep a distance measured in waltz steps, and the music is always played in a slumbering G minor. They exchange few words. They pretend efficiently. They are professionals.

Then night falls – the key shifts and the chords rear themselves awake and vengeful, lusting after decades lost, years spent staring down the barrel – and they convene without fail to wage war. It’s no waltz, when they cross blows. This is leaving fresh bruises in an effort to claw back under flesh for their many former selves. Hold them up to the moonlight, if not accountable.

Which are you? (a right hook to a stubbled jaw)
Which am I not? (a metallic grip around a pale throat)
Which can we be? (a slam of two human-shaped weapons up against concrete)

He’s got his left arm around her, pinned by the neck to his chest, but he’s suddenly not there. The next moment puts him in 1944, shells blasting all around him, he’s trying to keep the rifle mount steady, Brody next to him just fell to the snow—

Then a voice speaks to him, like a nursery rhyme he’ll never forget, and he’s nameless, he’s more fist than man—

He’s sliding deftly over a hilltop, more snow, there’s a car overturned and two survivors. He really only needs to eliminate the male. The redheaded woman seems determined, though, to make the body count two. Efficiency override, always. He fires just one round, through her gut, and the man behind her slumps, glasses sliding halfway off his face. He doesn’t stay to see if the woman survives. He doesn’t—

He doesn’t know when his grip around her became so relentless, unforgiving, desperate. She’s clawing at him now, her heel sharp over his knee, and his skin goes cold. He’s ten paces away before either of them can blink, breathing as if bricks are weighing him down. ]

“…Natasha?”

[ Which one am I now? ]

wonderful! i'm glad! and this is amazing, ty for indulging me

[compromised]

[ in a life before this one dance became second nature. on pointed toes she can convince anyone she's something else—a swan, a princess, an ally. holding a posture with the beat and playing out a scene is just as important as how to hold a gun, how to break bone, how to survive. the roles change, she’s found, but the moves remain the same. he was there, one version of him, when she mastered the form.

she swings blunt, unyielding hits at him with little of her usual grace. between his arm and the chemicals pumping in his veins she should’t be a match, but the pretense of a spar doesn’t dissuade her. it’s a dialogue after all; metal and bone collide in place of the words they’re careful not to say. which are you? which will you be tomorrow?

nostalgia is a dangerous thing. it became rooted in this life somewhere between a best friend and auntie nat. the problem with wanting is the shot that goes through isn’t quite so clean, even if no on else can see the scar. she should learned her lesson a long time ago when she was natalia and he was james. before a bullet ripped through her in odessa. before the bridge in dc. before metal fingers bruised her throat.

history doomed to repeat. ]

Bu—cky! [ the name feels wrong in her mouth, his arm laid over her neck and pressing firmer with each passing moment.

he’s off of her almost as quickly as it started. her trained composure wanes, body hunched over as her lungs struggle for air. natasha can hear the tone in his voice, remembers that fear of the disconnection between your mind and body all too well. what do any of them have, if not themselves? ]

James—[ she shakes her head and stops herself. that’s not who he is anymore. ] Bucky. You're alright.

[trance]

[ x ]

[ even if the other avengers -- the only avengers -- are no longer pursuing them, it's important they stay sharp and prepare for anyone who might. the next inhuman assassin to creep out of the woodwork may not resolve their assignment as amicably as bucky has, himself a scale-breaking event that continues to splinter the world in distant, unseen ripples. training with him is most like training with natasha. equally ruthless but he manages to hit harder. she hasn't won against him once in hand-to-hand. it gives her a goal within reach from wakanda, something to propel her forward.

or put a stopper in her thoughts entirely. after the meeting, her foot taps incessantly and she wears the edge of her thumbnail thin with her teeth. she abhors being so easy to read. scott asks her if she's feeling antsy, cringes at himself, and intuits, albeit aloud and stumblingly, that he should just leave the room. throughout the day they disperse from the embassy as their individual business is concluded. wanda remains close, intermittently devouring a dish of dried stew and porridge from a sudanese food stand while she relieves some of her empty energy watching the local wakandans in the market.

it reappears undeterred when her eyes pass over the large photo printed under bold lettering she can't translate: black and white, with the resolution and angle of a security camera. it shows them collected on the berlin tarmac from afar, moments before the battle broke out in earnest. they are distinguishable entirely by their costumes, which they've all agreed to shelve along with any of their more distinct advantages as the "dust settles." (wanda thought, when was the last time it touched the ground?)

by 20:00 she's changed into her training clothes and is throwing telekinetic bolts at punching bag to slake her impatience and keep her forms fresh in muscle memory. as the minutes go by, she tells herself it's not worth wondering whether bucky will announce his arrival or not. the challenge will be the same. ]

surpriiiise

[ex_serum683]

( when bucky's put back under in wakanda, steve makes it a whole twenty minutes before he has to lock himself in a bathroom to have a panic attack. he'd accepted that this was bucky's choice — allow barnes the dignity of his choice echoes over and over in his head, and if he didn't love her so much he might just hate peggy, right now — but that doesn't make it any easier to bear, doesn't make it feel any less like he's just letting his best friend die. bucky's not dying, he knows that, he knows, but it still feels like he is, it feels like steve is losing him all over again, and he only barely survived it the first time. he managed days before he put the plane down and then two years in the future — two years because he had to, because there was nothing else he could do, because apparently he wasn't done yet and he had to find a way to live with that. and then bucky came back, and he couldn't quite breathe again but he was closer, and they were still apart for two more years but bucky was out there, he was alive, steve just had to look harder.

and now he's letting bucky go back under, bucky's made a choice and steve is respecting it, even if makes him feel like his lungs are collapsing and he'll never take a proper breath again.

he carries on, though. he comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later, he starts setting up to bust sam and the others out of the raft, he sets his eye on his next mission and he puts one foot in front of the other. and it's not like it's completely devoid of any kind of joy — getting his team out of the raft, wanda's grin when she sees the sun for the first time in days, sam's small proud smile when steve tells him he dropped the shield... all of that registers. he feels it, even if it feels like it's only skin-deep.

when steve first came out of the ice, it took months for anything to actually sink in for him. it was like his body itself had thawed, but his insides hadn't, and there was still a wall around all of him that prevented him from really feeling anything. this is just like that, like when the cryo chamber iced bucky it also iced steve's heart, and now he's trying to engage with the world through a wall. he can see through it, barely, the shapes of his friends indistinct but there, and he knows when to be happy, when things happen. but nothing really reaches him. nothing can penetrate the ice.

he manages a few months that way, and he'd promised himself he wouldn't wake bucky unless they had something actionable, something real. he can keep managing.

only...

only it's bucky's birthday, and steve's spent the past four years observing it quietly alone. he wants to share a slice of cake with his best friend, and yeah, that's selfish as hell, but sam's been saying he could stand to be a little more selfish, and everyone else agrees.

so on march tenth, steve stands off to the side, watching the doctors and scientists around him poke at their devices and computers as they bring bucky slowly back to consciousness.

it's more humane than anything hydra had, they assure him, but he's still watching bucky carefully, ready to step in the second it seems like his friend might need him. )

[sutures]

[ new york's increasing criminal, vigilante, and enhanced individuals related problems become the least of the world's problems after a city literally nearly collapses halfway around the world. as a lifelong resident, claire is fairly sure they dropped off the world's radar after the 2012 alien attacks, so regardless of whether or not she thinks them involving more people in whatever they're fighting for is a good idea, she's also pretty sure they're not going to. she doubts that the ones she knows would accept the offer or join up voluntarily, anyway. these are things she'll think about lately while in transit, usually to her favorite coffee place or to work ( or, lately, to job interviews ). they aren't things that used to cross her mind. the avengers and how they assemble never used to be something she wondered about, but since encountering people like matt, luke, and jessica, it's been on her mind more often than she's comfortable with.

she's about to unlock the door to her place one night when she spots movement out of the corner of her eye, too far in the distance for her to get a good look but close enough for her spot a flash of silver. it's unusual enough for her to step away from her door and over to the ledge, where she sees a man struggling to get to his feet, using the corner where the brick wall and side of the dumpster meet for support. she keeps up with the news, especially lately. she knows what happened in vienna, but she'd also heard he'd been captured. there'd also been some reports of a fight in a deserted airport in germany involving more of the avengers, but details had been so sparse on that that she's suspicious of something bigger going on. and even if she weren't, someone being in pain has never been something she's been able to ignore.

so in a few moments she's in front of him, about ten feet back in case this is a ruse to trick someone into helping him. this isn't like matt, it isn't like jessica. this isn't someone ordinary who decided they were going to help people one day, it's someone who'd been a trained sniper well before hydra had gotten their hands on him. ]

Are you injured?

[ her tone is bold, confident. much calmer than she feels. ]

[fatalem]

[ his idea to stay frozen isn't a bad one, but much like any solution, it isn't permanent. it's a few months before they get a call from t'challa informing them of an attack from hydra, resulting in a lot of casualties, a few deaths, and barnes's chamber being stolen. t'challa and the rest of the team start a search for those responsible. steve takes off looking for him with the thought that she's joined them. she sets out to find him before he does, instead.

something goes wrong, even before hydra can wake him up and reprogram him. the freezer malfunctions and he wakes up and takes off, but not before taking out the hydra agents in charge of observation. natasha arrives to find an empty capsule surrounded by broken bodies, and it doesn't point to anything good. this situation is unprecedented; as far as she knows, he's never woken up with a clear mind and memories in tact before. from this, she can't tell if he was defending himself or if something's gone very, very wrong.

it's another few weeks before she gets a lead, and she tracks him to an old safehouse in moscow, one that had been shared by the red room and hydra. memories flood through her mind as she walks through the door, she can recall them being formed in these rooms, short missions before her full training was completed, sparring sessions in the basement, biding time while they waited for debriefing. the basement is where she heads, and it's where he turns out to be. his back is to the stairs, but he turns immediately when he hears her coming, and she stops at the foot of them, stance open but prepared to fight, hand at her holster. ]

You recognize me now?

[ now that they're in a place from both their broken memories. ]

dat meme;

[revlon]

[ Her mission in Los Angeles did and didn't go entirely as planned. The incident with Whitney Frost was resolved, the last of the Zero Matter gone, and holes ripped through time and space mended, and the city survived in one piece. If one measures success by the world being saved, then it was absolutely a job well done all around. But if one measures success by the world being saved with no lives lost, then that's another thing entirely — grievous bodily injury included. As always, there is a cost. Peggy Carter is painfully aware of that. And her acknowledgement of the fact doesn't make it any easier, nor does she expect it ever will be made easier as time wears on.

Ana Jarvis was shot and is recovering, but will never have children. Peggy herself was impaled on rebar and never allowed herself to recover and is feeling the effects of that nearly two weeks after the fact. And Chief Jack Thompson —

Jack is dead. Shot in his hotel room with the assassin and weapon (and the redacted SOE file stolen from Jack's briefcase) unaccounted for. It's a mess and the SSR is in an uproar. Peggy had no choice but to fly back to the East Coast and head up the SSR's New York office in Jack's stead, leaving Daniel Sousa behind in LA along with any possibility of them being together. It's the wrong time. It will always be the wrong bloody time for them and she can't keep wasting his or fooling herself into thinking they can make it work. LA had become a disaster.

And Bucky Barnes is returning to the smouldering aftermath of it. Peggy had to return to Howard Stark's penthouse before her shift ended and no one had questioned it; thank God for that, because her injury is throbbing too much for her to think straight and the entire rattling subway ride home had been agony. She's practically limping through the door and breathless when she gets home but squares her shoulders and puts on a light, nonchalant air in case her roommate is in. ]

Angie? [ She might still be in rehearsals. Good. ] Angie, it's just —

[ And she breaks off, shocked into silence. Because Bucky is standing in the middle of the grand sitting room, a rucksack on the parquet floors, and looking like a ghost from the war. He's been in Europe with the Howling Commandos. She didn't expect — ]

Bucky? What the hell are you doing here?