brooklyn 1918 to brooklyn 2015: in which steve questions his humanity, has a mid-twenties crisis (though he doesn’t call it that), makes friends, falls in love again, and slowly learns that he doesn’t need to live in the past to honour his memories.
teen+ / 54k / soulmate au
the associated press @ap
winter soldier set to stand trial for washington d.c. massacre and treason apne.ws/1og6swe
teen+ / 20k / court drama
steve, it's not your fault, sam had tried to say, before steve cut him off, and steve doesn't think that's untrue so much as it's irrelevant; fault's got nothing to do with it. it's just—wrong. it's wrong. steve couldn't wrap his head around it the first time, how wrong it was. steve should have gone first. was supposed to. bucky could have carried on without steve, he knows, but steve without bucky is a zero sum. there should never be a world that steve is in and bucky isn't.
mature / 16k / mourning
“man, are you ever planning on clueing stark into the fact that you know exactly what’s up with this century?”
a smirk curled around steve’s lips as he glanced at sam. he laughed when his friend groaned.
“not a chance in hell.”
teen+ / 16k / shrunkyclunks
the mission resets abruptly, from objective: kill to objective: protect.
teen+ / 257k / old people!
"you keep asking me what i want," bucky manages, eventually. "but on any given day, my number one priority is to get through the day alive and myself, and to do it without killing anyone. everything else is extra."
explicit / 164k / post-cw
bucky gets on a manhattan bound train around 2:30, heading to 8th st. he watches the lady far off on liberty island as they roll over the east river. the train is crowded and people smile at him, pleased to see a handsome young man in uniform. he smiles back, pleased with the world and everything in it. he wonders where steve might want to go for lunch. what he'd say if bucky asked him if he’d ever thought about treating this thing between them as real.
he comes out of the subway a little before 3 o'clock, and the world has changed.
mature / 14k / pearl harbor
“jarvis,” tony called thoughtfully.
“yes, sir?”
“those young people are in love,” he said.
teen+ / 10k / tony is nosy
bucky lowers himself against steve's body, boneless and yet still agile as he speaks against steve’s lips:
“and how he kissed me.”
and steve doesn’t need a damned engraved invitation. steve doesn’t need to be told twice.
mature / 2k / proposal
"look, if they catch me," bucky muttered, "they're either going to kill me or they're going to put me in a box with a little window and — steve, i can't."
explicit / 105k / new lives
when stark tears through his arm like it’s tissue paper, it feels like dying all over again.
no. that’s not right.
it feels like the shards of memory rattling around his brain – the ones that crawl frost across his body, the phantom pains of an arm trapped under a rock, of cutting through his tendons with a pen knife, of the coppery stench of blood and rotten flesh and pain that is raw and electric.
teen+ / 3k / post-cw
as we come forth, so we shall return. ecclesiastes 5:14
teen+ / 21k / jewish bucky
the complete story of steve rogers and bucky barnes--not quite cradle to grave; more like brooklyn cradle to icy grave to russia and dc to eastern europe and south korea, and back to new york again.
explicit / 139k / life stories
in the dead of the night, a man pulls over for a hitchhiker.
mature / 25k / steve isn't shield
it is like steel, the determination inside of you that tells you you will achieve this, that you will find him. nothing will stop you. you are two sides of the same coin, you and he: he cannot escape you forever.
bucky runs. steve follows.
general / 25k / it's MISERABLE!
you'll be on my mind, my destiny.
teen+ / 77k / post-cw
when barnes stumbles into a small town in maine at summer's end, he's been running a long time and doesn't expect to stay. but as weeks pass, he starts wondering whether all this time he hasn't been running away from, but towards something - the kindness of strangers, quiet fields, and a curious, yellow-eyed goshawk.
teen+ / 25k / goshawks
"did he leave a forwarding address, the emigrating bastard? steve rogers, 50 main street, valhalla?"
teen+ / 9k / fólkvangr
“they really didn’t want the mask to come off.” hill thumbed through the scans, and pulled out a film that she then handed over to sam, face mostly expressionless but for the flat line of her pursed lips.
sam accepted the film and held it up to the light, angling so both he and steve could see it, squinting at the outline of the winter soldier’s skull, and the blips of unnatural white that showed up, god, in his brain, not to mention about half his teeth, plus the mask, with its thin protrusions—
“those are pins,” Steve realized. He looked over at Hill. “the mask—it’s nailed to his face.”
hill’s face was as unmoved as ever. “like i said. they really didn’t want it coming off.”
explicit / 71k / mask au
when the soldier is sent to investigate a decades-old crash site in the canadian high arctic, he finds far more than he expected — instead of retrieving salvage, he pulls the plane’s pilot, injured and amnesiac but still breathing, from the wreck. curious about the pilot’s fragmented story and strangely hesitant to turn him over to his handler, the soldier pretends to be an officer assigned to the dew line and delays his check-in. but the longer he waits, the more he questions the pilot’s identity and his absent handler’s intentions both for the mission and for the american family the man already holds captive, not to mention his own piecemeal memories. he doesn’t know if it’s a test, a set-up, or a disaster, but he knows he can’t let the pilot go.
teen+ / 25k / cold war
steve hasn’t been back to his family’s cottage for years, ever since the car accident took both his parents and his childhood memories. his therapist seems to think it’s a good idea for him to get out of the city for a while, so steve decides it's time to fix it up. he remembers a lot of things when he’s finally arrives, smells the fresh grass, hears the whisper of the trees, and the familiar warmth of a home away from home. the river outside is familiar too, only steve can’t quite remember the imaginary friend he invented from it, when he needed one the most.
the river remembers him though, and will be damned if it watches his old friend sulk in loneliness instead of play with him, like he used to.
explicit / 50k / river spirit
it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in want of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. yet for steven rogers, painter of miniatures, it is not the company of ladies, but the acquaintance of captain james buchanan barnes, royal navy, that captivates his imagination.
teen+ / 16k / napoleonic wars
bucky's therapist recommends that he try hiking, so he gives it a shot. he runs into steve on his very first hike, during an unfortunate encounter with a bird.
it goes from there.
mature / 50k / lumberjack steve
“holy shit,” howard says, crackling through the speakers. “you alive in there?” lying is a sin, of course, but steve’s not sure what else he can do. he’s already lied to the government and bucky and god almighty; and himself, himself most of all. he ought to tell the truth. that he’s not quite what they hoped for. that perhaps they should put him back into the ocean.
“probably,” he says, instead, listening to howard’s tinny laughter; and waits for the blast doors to unlock.
mature / 152k / woke up early
“you go to a lot of games?” barnes asks.
"whenever i’m in town.”
“how often is that?”
steve looks at him. it moves him, somehow. just looking.
teen+ / 6k / the dodgers
they keep surviving, time after time.
(the commandos get deployed to the pacific.)
mature / 11k / bucky doesn't fall
steve gets out of the hospital in two days, but just barely. “i’m fine,” he tells sam, nurse eunjung and the phalanx of doctors assigned to make sure captain america didn’t bleed out and die and get bad pr all over their nice clean hospital. “i have an advanced healing factor. it’s fine. see? i’m standing.”
“that is not standing,” sam tells him.
“you’re bending the iv stand,” nurse eunjung adds pointedly. “let go and sit down, they don’t grow on trees.”
mature / 237k / revenge!
they've been steveandbucky since they were kids, but that ignores the parts of their lives that don't wrap around each other, that never did. (bucky needs to figure out who he is, just him, with or without steve.)
teen+ / 6k / sniper bucky
in 1945, steve rogers jumps from a nosediving plane and swims through miles of arctic ocean to a frozen shore.
in 1947, steve rogers marries peggy carter.
in 1966, the new york times finds the lost letters of sergeant james buchanan barnes.
mature / 117k / steve lives