"Okay, so, from practically-legendary merciless superhuman assassin with a metal arm to sad hobo with a metal arm in, what, two months? I mean, sure, living in DC takes its toll on people, but sheesh." Tony leans back in his chair. "Make that sad psychotic hobo." The marks of metal fingers on his throat are blooming black-purple, and he's not going to get his voice all the way back to normal for some days yet. The Avengers help Steve help Bucky. I enjoyed this.
I really enjoyed this look at Bucky making an effort to show Steve he's ready to be on the Avengers, though it has some formatting and punctuation issues. (Also, it's in 2nd person, and I know that bothers a lot of people.)
You're eating pizza -- plain cheese, because your stomach twisted at the sight of the pepperoni and sausage -- with the girl when it occurs to you: "Did we ever tell Steve we were going to marry him?" The girl tilts down her sunglasses and looks at you with raised eyebrows. "If you want to marry Captain America, that's your own business. Leave me out of it." She takes a dainty bite of her pizza. "Unless I'm your sister again, in which case, what the fuck, Barnes. What the actual fuck." "Sorry," you say, looking down. You got confused again, but you remember that the girl isn't Becca now. Her name is Kate Bishop. She and Clint Barton are both codenamed Hawkeye, which they appear to think is perfectly normal, and everybody else finds a little strange. The girl stares at you for a long moment. She says, "Captain America acts like it was HYDRA that screwed you up, but you were kind of fucked up to begin with, weren't you?" You look up, twist your mouth into something like an expression. You hold your left hand up, pinch your forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart. Maybe a little. Oh Bucky. He and Kate team up to save their respective partners.
The Winter Soldier does not work for SHIELD, because SHIELD no longer exists. Neither does he freelance. The original Black Widow is his employer. She assisted Captain America and the Falcon in tracking him for six months and captured him outside Prague, pinning him to the interior wall of a metal shipping container with magnets. "From what I understand, you're recently defrosted and have been comprehensively brainwashed," she said in clipped Russian. "Do you want me to return you to base?" "No," the Winter Soldier said. The Black Widow nodded. "How about years of therapy?" The Winter Soldier shook his head. Unexpectedly, the Black Widow smiled at him. "Yeah, me neither. Want a job?" Hee! Kate and Bucky team up reluctantly at the local J. Crew.
"I begged my mom to make this so many times when I was little, she finally taught me how to do it myself. First thing I ever learned to cook." Bucky looked at Steve as he chewed. Finally he swallowed and murmured, "Date squares." Steve grinned. "That's right! Yeah, you got your Ma to teach you those because I liked 'em so much." Bucky nodded. "Lots of butter," he said approvingly. Sam squinted at him. With his wild-man hair and crazy-man arsenal, Bucky bore almost no resemblance to the clean-cut soldier from the history books, let alone a small boy trying to feed up his even smaller friend. Sam cooks for Steve and Bucky on their roadtrip of revenge. I really enjoyed this.
I really enjoyed this Olicity fake dating story (though I don't believe either of them would have sex without a condom, so that threw me a little *hands*).
Three weeks in Bucky sits on a bench surrounded by tulips just opening, vibrant petals tentatively unconcealing their dark centers, and writes in his notebook: I like to be a nice thing in other people's lives. He forces himself not to add a question mark, telling himself that maybe it doesn't have to be the only truth in order to be true. Slow, meditative, thoughtful and moving story about Bucky learning to live again. I cried a lot, so maybe have tissues handy.
CATWS AU where Steve starts dreamsharing with Bucky while Bucky is in cryo. Really lovely take on dreamsharing as a trope, and reworking the plot of CATWS to account for Steve knowing about Bucky beforehand. I enjoyed this a lot.
The story of the Winter Soldier's trial, told mostly via court transcripts and news reports. It worked for me, except for the interspersed texts/tweets. Overall, I enjoyed it a lot.
Long, excellent, heartwrenching story of how Steve getting de-aged finally gets Bucky out of his own head. Oh my heart. *sobs* I especially like Pepper here, and her friendship with Bucky around the edges.
"When I found this place, I thought Steve would like this. And, well. Now I can show you." Steve couldn't speak, mostly because when he'd first come out of the ice, it had happened to him all the time. Bucky would love this. I can't wait to show it to him. And then there would come the awful knowledge that he couldn't. In time the raw grief, so powerful he thought he'd die of it, had scabbed over to a dry and painful ache, so much a part of him that he no longer knew what it would feel like not to carry it around with him. Until that day on a DC freeway overpass. And then he'd been in a strange kind of limbo, grief and loss and anger all wrapped up into a snarled ball where his heart used to be. Because he hadn't known, couldn't know until he found Bucky how much was left of his friend and how much was still to be mourned, and he'd been living with that phantom-pain missing-limb grief for so long at that point anyway that he wasn't sure how to not feel it anymore. All this tied together in his throat until he managed to swallow it enough to say, "I love it. Thank you for showing it to me." Bucky reluctantly teams up with Steve and Natasha on a mission, and everybody has a lot of emotions.
