"I Know Chatgpt Is Bad But You Just Don't Really Have Any Choice" You Literally Do. Don't Use It. Have

"I know chatgpt is bad but you just don't really have any choice" you literally do. Don't use it. Have some moral backbone.

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feathersatwar

4 weeks ago

chapter 1/8 now available on AO3 <3

→ marvel (mcu/comic), captain america: the first avenger

→ bucky x steve, bucky x peggy

→ flawed super soldier serum, dark!steve rogers, mcu compliant with comic influences

→ gore, faked relationship, canon-typical violence

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Bucky thought he understood rage.

Steve was his primary example. He saw it all over Joseph Rogers before he had passed. He saw the marks and bruises on Sarah Rogers’s face, her wrists. Both of Steve's parents had been fierce in their own ways, two sides of the same coin.

Steve had always been an angry son of a bitch. Shake a bag of wet cats, that was what it was like to handle him. He lied when he didn’t have to. He gave one word answers to piss people off. He took every little thing as a challenge, as something personal, so convinced that he needed to prove something about himself.

But now? It was entirely different.

Bucky had known Steve all his life. He knew all his tells; when he lied, when he was about to go into an asthma attack, when he was simmering in rage and about to blow a fuse. He knew how to read his expressions like a book. He knew something was wrong with Steve, just as he knew there was something wrong with himself. His near-dead delirious ass was able to notice it in Azzano, as soon as Steve pulled him off that table. His eyes were - empty? Mostly? He looked like nothing phased him, like nothing made him feel anything - the only emotion he had seen on Steve’s face up until they returned to camp was rage as he faced Johann Schmidt on that catwalk.

It was in himself. He’d felt rage before, he knew it well, but - to his core - he wouldn’t consider himself an angry person. But watching Steve walk around like he was, with the little context Bucky had, god's gift? He just got out of experimentation. Pulled off that death bed by the man who walked like he was the baddest soldier on Earth, like he was chosen by Divine Right when all he did was sign up for a dangerous experiment - it was a slap in the face.

Steve towered over him, and that certainly wasn’t the issue. He acted like he had to be better than him. Bucky’s training didn’t matter, because Steve thought he was better than all the men he’d pulled from Azzano combined. The old Steve had never acted like that. But despite the belief, the narcissistic pride that stained the ground he walked on, he seemed to think he still had something to prove. To the world. To himself. To Bucky. He’d never needed to prove himself to Bucky - he had always been the one person who saw Steve more than anyone else, that knew him as well as he knew himself; from childish friendship to learning how to kiss to leaning on each other after both their families were gone, they had been through it nearly every step of the way. Three years they had been torn apart, longer than they had ever been separated before, and that whole time Bucky was hoping Steve had been blocked enough by the system that he’d keep getting deferred and - Bucky didn’t care how much it tore at Steve to see it - declared unfit. He’d stay safe at home, he’d keep going to art school, Bucky would get back to him and his world would go back to what it was -

But the fucker willingly let an an entity running on agendas pump chemicals in him, because he had something to prove, and now Bucky had to work with a man he couldn’t recognize.

Rely On Time

Wherein I'm a whore for Jewish Bucky Barnes and love writing things inspired by religions and myths.

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2023

Bucky had never truly felt alone in the world.

Of course, as the Winter Soldier, he hadn't had much of a consciousness to even consider that idea. Even when he was in Azzano, he had his men. Strapped to Zola's table in experimentation, the idea of being alone hadn't mattered so much, knowing he would be dead. Before the war, he had Steve.

Steve.

Fastened to his side, Steve had always been there. It had been a month, and he still couldn't believe it. That he would leave so easily, after all they had gone through. But that was just it, wasn't it? Steve had time taken away from him, had his freedom stripped under the stripes of that shield in an attempt to fight for the freedoms of others. Of course he would choose to go back for a second chance.

Bucky didn't have that option.

Eve was her own being, her own thoughts. Though fashioned from Adam's rib, she was not him. Her own desire lived within her and the snake knew it. But why is that a sin? The pursuit of Knowledge in the name of growth, even at the risk of disobeying God? Could it have been what He intended all along? He planted the Tree, he created the snake, he fashioned humanity knowing they would question it all - all for humankind to learn and grow, to plant their roots alongside the Tree.

He wondered, sometimes, what he was. Was he a collection of thoughts? Are people only the recollections of times past? He walked as living proof of not only a time that no longer was, but the strength of a people who lived despite all odds.

Despite all odds.

Was that all it was? Random chance? Did he ever fight anything? No choice but to accept the draft. Too sick to fight Zola back, barely lucid enough to keep himself from biting off his tongue. The chair, the abuse, was that all some twisted fate that he had to live through because it was meant to happen? Did all that happen so he could be where he was now, laying on cold hardwood floor because he was falling through his bed?

Could he rely on time, when it was ripped from him?

He sometimes thought about what his life could've ended up like, if he hadn't gone to war. He thought, at one point, that he would get married. As Adam and Eve wed under the Tree, he could stand under the chuppah in their image surrounded by love and life and foliage. Sometimes he thought about what it could be now, if things somehow got better. If he could sleep in his bed without drowning. If he could look a man in the eye and not see his ancestors instead.

Could he be a shadow?

Something that varies, melding and changing. If he was made of memories, what would happen if he forgot again? Hands of Esau but Voice of Jacob. Was he now building to the divine Israel? Making up for his wrongs, turning to virtue.

Was it worth it? Trying?

At this point, what could be good? What all could he love? Everything was a mess. He wandered.

Maybe he was meant to be lost. He could choose to believe he was worthless, aimless without his other half. Or he could make his own choices; eat the apple like Eve, take the virtue like Israel, and trust that someday, everything that happened to him would make sense.

And that one day, he could trust that he wouldn't ever be alone again.