#steve g rogers

[thisuseristheirl]

Ignore that last one! [I'm requesting for someone else and they changed it]

"This user is a fictive of Theodore" (persona 3)

"This user is CORPSEHUSBAND IRL"

"This user is Captain Steven G. Rogers" (mcu)

"This user is a fictive of Captain Steven G. Rogers" (mcu)

"This user is Captain Steven G. Rogers IRL" (mcu)

It’s okay!! Here you go :)

I hope your friend enjoys, and as always if they’d like any adjustments, please let me know ^^

[aimmyarrowshigh]

MLMay 2024: 100 Slash Drabbles 2400 Words

029. Mirror - James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers (MCU)

[callalillywrites]

Steve's Choice

I've been listening to a bunch of music (old and new) while working on various projects. A few songs have struck inspirational chords and are bringing about a few different upcoming stories.

Find Version 2 of this song here.

Here is the first story based on this song:

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader (can be read as gender neutral)

Word Count: 695

Summary: The time heist had been successful. Thanos was destroyed. It was time to put the Stones back where they belonged. Steve volunteered, and you knew it would be the last time you saw him.

Warnings: Bittersweet ending, angst, amicable breakup

A/N: It’s proofread but all mistakes are my own.

I do not give permission for my work to be copied or posted on other sites or fed into an AI machine.

*****

Steve was leaving.

You could feel it in your bones.

He stood near the platform Bruce had quickly assembled after Tony’s funeral. The Stones packed neatly and carefully in the briefcase Steve held. He’d just hugged Bucky. An inner joke shared between them.

Then, Steve stepped back, swiveling on his heels.

The distance between you had never felt longer though he covered it in a few steps.

A watery smile graced your features as you looked upon the man you loved for the last time.

“Hey, I’ll be back soon,” Steve said, the promise falling flat. His gaze never quite reached yours as he said the words. It confirmed the truth you’d known was a long time in coming.

You shook your head. “No, you won’t, and it’s okay, Steve.”

“But –”

“Steve, I love you. I think I’ve loved you since we met in New York eleven years ago,” you paused to gather yourself and retain what composure you had left, “but I’m not where you belong. I never was.”

“Angel, I…” Steve let the words die.

You could tell he wanted to lie to you. To tell you everything you wanted to hear.

A week ago, you would’ve wanted to hear the lies. You would’ve wanted to cling to him and believe them. But it wasn’t meant to be. It never was. His heart has and will always belong to Peggy Carter.

Before he could try and regroup, you pressed a hand to his mouth. “Please, I don’t want or need you to lie to me, Steve. This isn’t your fault, and I don’t need you to make this better. You didn’t do anything wrong. I won’t have you thinking you have.”

This time, you paused to swallow the emotion clogging your throat. It took you another minute to collect yourself and give him a genuine smile.

“Go and get your girl, Cap. She’s waiting for you. I just know it.”

You rose on your tiptoes one last time. With a soft kiss to his cheek, you whispered, “Be happy, Steve. You deserve everything this world has ever offered and taken from you. You’ve settled and compromised since you came out of the ice. It’s time for you to be a little bit selfish, even if that means you’re not mine.”

Steve stared at you for several moments, his eyes growing misty at your words.

Before you could step back, he’d set the briefcase down and grabbed you. His arms wrapped tightly around you while his cheek nuzzled against yours.

He didn’t say anything at first, but he finally whispered, “I really hope you find your one, Angel. You are not someone’s compromise or someone who should be settled for. I do love you, and I always will.”

A single tear streaked down your cheek. “I know. Maybe saying goodbye won’t be a bad thing. At least that’s what I’m hoping.”

His arms tightened around you, impossibly tight, then he slowly released you.

When he picked up the briefcase again, he tapped your chin like he was prone to do all the years you’ve known him. In the same soft voice, he said, “Don’t hate me too much, please.”

“I could never hate you, Steve. No matter how hard I might try to.”

With that, he gave a final smile, then turned toward the platform and suited. It was time to return the stones to their rightful places along the timeline. He had some branches to nip before they took hold and created issues within the universe.

In a blink, he was gone.

Five seconds, Bruce had said.

Those seconds came and went without Steve’s return.

Then again, you knew they would.

He’d gone back to Peggy. Just like you knew he would.

Bruce and Sam argued on how to get him back and what to do with whatever had gone wrong.

Turning to Bucky, you nodded towards your car and asked, “Want a lift? I think there’s a bar in town, and I know I could use a drink.”

Bucky, forever a friend, fell into step beside you. After a moment, he asked, “You okay?”

You spared a glance at the platform, then met his gaze. “I will be.”

*****

Main Masterlist / Song Fic Masterlist

[captain-america-girls]

Captain Carter and bearded Steve

What if? Season 2

I can't tell if he's pre or post serum

[renif]

please don't cry i am not your brother i am not your lover and there is nothing wrong what if bucky never recovered the memories from the past but managed to escape hydra all the same and when steve finds him, well, for bucky it's almost like meeting a stranger. one that expects you to be someone you're not.

[fandom-gt]

COMMISSION TYPE: Full Page +1 addon

PRICE: 65

FANDOM:  MCU

CHARACTERS:  Steve Rogers

REQUESTED SUMMARY: ”I'd love a continuation of the growing Steve Rogers quick fill! He's a few kilometers tall and is just getting off on his new power and size, Avengers try to stop him but are absolutely powerless. And when he's done he ends up tripling in size again. Please keep me anonymous when you post this!”

WARNINGS: Violence and implied tiny death, mass destruction, nsfw

——

Steve Rogers has been a large man for a number of years now. Ever since they slipped his small, skinny body into that machine and let him come out the other side feet taller, a hundred pounds heavier, muscular and strong, he’s known that he was always supposed to be big. It felt good at first, but after a while, a secret part of him had kind of wished for just a little bit more. 

Finally, here smack-dab in the center of New York City, Steve’s finally got his wish. He stares down at the roaming little dots that make up people, the slightly larger little squares that must be cars, and a thrill of absolute satisfaction runs through him. 

Everything below him, every building, every structure, every person, is tiny. The ruined tatters of his uniform are all but invisible to his naked eye now, and it’s only because of the serum enhancing his eyesight that he can even make out vague details of those ant-sized people.

He kneels, naked, knees crushing pavement and concrete and roads and sidewalks and anything that happened to be in their way as he grew, massive craters beneath his muscular thighs and calves, with barely even the hint of resistance despite being made of reinforced steel beams and the finest construction the human species is capable of. It all crumples like paper under him.

What really gets him going, once he notices it, though… is the tiny cracked crater underneath the place his cock gently dipped and smacked onto the road. Even it, even just the engorged head of his member, is enough to devastate what must be most of a city block. It brings a surge of heat through him, has his balls tightening, and he can’t keep himself from reaching down to wrap a hand around it.

Down below him, the world is in chaos. He cannot hear the screams, he doesn’t know the sight that he makes to the regular-sized humans trapped underneath his crotch. Tony stares up from his place on the cracked and broken sidewalk, mouth agape in utter disbelief even as he engages the nanite of his Iron Man suit. 

Steve’s too large for him to take in all at once. All he can see at first is the shadow of his cock filling Tony’s skyline bigger than any skyscraper, the size of an entire mountain, with every vein and every ridge and every wrinkle of it in hyper-vivid super-high definition detail. 

Before him, he watches in horror as a new monumental event enters the chaotic landscape — Steve’s massive hand descending from the heavens to wrap around his titanic dick. The rush of wind blows back signs and people’s hair as his hand moves forward in one stroke so big it almost seems slow-motion thanks to the scale. The sound of it, skin on skin, is deafening. People too close to him feel their eardrums splitting under the immense pressure of Steve’s low grumble.

That’s not what scares Tony. What scares him is the glistening pearl of precum that buds at the volcanic crater of Steve’s slit. It builds in size, in volume, an avalanche of sticky fluid, and he knows with a great, mounting horror that the second it drops, it’s going to wipe out an entire apartment building. 

One single drop of precum will devastate dozens of people, will wipe out entire households, and Steve doesn’t even seem to notice — let alone care.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. He has to do something -— and so he kicks off, the rockets at his feet carrying him up, up, up a full kilometer in the air. Even with all that upward thrust, he still barely manages to make it to Steve’s waist. 

One sharp jerk of Steve’s wrist sends a gust of air that throws him out of balance, sending him careening head over foot and slamming into a wall of flesh.

With his back against something sticky, he realizes in horror what he’s stuck to right as he sees the barreling momentum of Steve’s hand in his next jerk. He’s swallowed in an avalanche of skin, and lost on Steve’s body.

Steve did not even see him. Steve didn’t even notice the little speck lost in his lazy masturbation. He’s too busy staring down at the ground beneath him as another growth spurt ripples through him, carrying him outward, carrying him upward. He must be miles tall now, he can’t even imagine the math, he can’t even compare it.

What he does know is, all those little grid lines beneath him are city blocks, and his dick spans a dozen of them. He also knows, with a rippling jolt of pure arousal, that if he were to come… if he were to just jack off and finish, it would flood an entire city.

And god, that thought gets him harder than anything ever has in his entire life. His hand works harder, works faster, jacking his cock with a renewed frenzy that sends the population between his thighs into despair. They know what’s going to happen, and it’s all they can do to run — knowing that even if they move as fast as they physically can, even if they hop into cars and somehow escape the gridlock of traffic, even if they manage to put literal miles between themselves and the place Steve’s testicles crush their city, they won’t make it far enough in time.

And they’re right.

Another groan rumbles, and this time every single person in the state of New York can hear it. Windows shatter under the sound of it. Earthquakes shake tremors in the ground through voice alone, to say nothing of the untold devastation as Steve shifts on his haunches to dip forward and press the head of his dick into the ground, rutting through entire counties and leveling them in one aimless, heated hump.

As he rolls his hips, as his enormous glutes tighten in fervor, as he drags himself along irreverent to the thousands of crushed people beneath him, Steve Rogers wipes Queens off the map entirely with one earnest rut. 

It’s too much. He shifts again, one elbow planting on the ground, his knees and thighs comfortably stretched out beneath him, and he works himself hard, mounting, building, wide blue eyes forced open so he can watch it when it finally hits, when it finally happens.

His orgasm tears through him in a torrent of semen bigger than any tidal wave. His release washes through city streets, drowning everything, sticky and unstoppable. A flood, a thousand rivers, the best god damn thing he’s ever felt. Every person in its wake is consumed by it. And all he did was just let himself come.

[burberrycanary]

Hi there! I am about midway through reading your story Lost Vocabularies and it is amazing!! The whole series has been so lovely, I’m obsessed with the way you write! The way that you convey the boys complicated emotions and capture all the little nuances of their dynamic has me feral!! Beyond even them the way you inject so much personality into the locations is so good, I feel like I am there!! So thank you for writing this lovely story 💕 I was wondering if you happen to have a list of all the books that Bucky and Steve read? I have been looking up a lot of them and adding them to my to read list bc they sound so interesting lol! On that same note, how did you decide what books to mention? Are they all ones that you have read or did you do research to find ones you thought they would like?

I’ve been coming back and rereading this kind and wonderful comment in my inbox over the last few weeks when way too many massive, stressful, time-sensitive things were all happening at once. 💕 But since I have a little breather between crazy periods, I get to dive in here as a treat.

Lost Vocabularies involved a lot of research, which I hope isn’t apparent because I didn’t want there to be any noticeable difference between the parts of the story that are based on places I’d been, foods I’d tried and books I’d read personally—and what was created purely based on research. Fingers crossed that the seams don't show!

In this series, we see both Steve and Bucky use art to process—helping them understand themselves and connect to the world again. Bucky is drawn to stories while Steve as an artist is much more visual, but the underlying impulse is similar. In the same way that you learn a lot by glancing through someone’s bookshelves, what characters read is interesting to me, and revealing. This version of Bucky is a very private person so these books offer a glimpse into his inner life. And as the POV character we get to experience all these things alongside Steve.

I’m not much of a sci-fi or fantasy reader so some of Bucky’s picks were a real challenge for me. But I wanted these to be grounded in the characters and the storytelling functions, not based on my own taste and opinions, though of course those always bleed through. 

Steve’s Reading List

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Bucky’s Reading List

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve included some notes and commentary on why I picked each of these works under the cut.

The Same River, Twice (The Man Is Still Left with His Hands)

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Classic post-WWII dystopian sci-fi that focuses on society collapsing after a series of catastrophes that were unintentional but very much caused by people, which leads to a lot of the population becoming blind. Thematically this work engages with the loss of identity that people, both abled and disabled, face in the process of survival and a dark look at what happens after societies break down. How this applies to Bucky is obvious, but part of the argument of this post-Endgame series is that it applies to Steve, too. 

Also, there are huge mobile carnivorous plants. 

Fun fact: the opening of this novel is said to have been the inspiration for 28 Days Later!

Still Left with the River (The Paradox of Motion)

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

Alice Neel’s portraits are extraordinary, almost unnervingly vivid. In this story, Steve is familiar with her work as a fellow New York-based artist active in communist circles in the 1930s. She also worked for the WPA, producing wonderful street scenes that documented New York neighborhoods of the era. 

To be honest, I have so many questions about what Steve was up to in the late 1930s before his war mania of the 40s hits.

One of the core themes of this series is Steve struggling with what his body is for if it’s no longer for violence. Who is he if he’s not a soldier? What is his radically changed body if it’s not a weapon? How do you come home from the war?

In this regard, Steve and Bucky have all kinds of shared life experience.

So thematically I include Neel because of her startling gift for capturing personalities and bodies through a process of frank, earnest, truthful observation of the integrated completeness of body and self: this space that’s you. 

But a book of Alice Neel’s work with her sensitive portraits and fleshy frank nudes pulls him into flipping through page after page of these personalities and bodies, not idealized: seen.

Steve isn’t ready for that when he bumps into this big “impractical” art book in a holdover Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn, not when he’s still so shook up and adrift. But he will be.

There’s such empathy and radical humanism to her pieces. “People,” as she famously said, “come first.” I stand by the conclusion that Steve would love her work.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was relatively unknown in his lifetime—he died in 1937—but his stories were published in popular fantasy pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, which is where Bucky would have come across his work. The fact that Steve recognizes Lovecraft by name means that teenage Bucky must have talked about what he was reading and the pulp stories he liked with teenage Steve, which is adorable—“this Lovecraft fellow, Steve, you wouldn’t believe the stuff he comes up with.” And Steve was paying attention enough to remember two decades and change later without the benefit of his serum-enhanced memory, which hurts my heart a little in the best possible way. 

That’s how Steve all these years and decades later is able to wordlessly toss this collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories at Bucky on a hot hazy stumbled-upon beach in northern Florida and watch Bucky’s whole face light up. 

And of course Bucky would view Lovecraft as a great beach read 😂

But this is the basis for something I’ve written into this series: Bucky excitedly sharing things he finds interesting with Steve—wanting to tell Steve first, Steve most. And although Steve is quiet, stoical and very self-contained, he’s paying a whole hell of a lot of attention.

Given that Bucky is canonically a Tolkien fan, I think the imaginativeness and ranging scope of Lovecraft’s complex, often interconnected stories would appeal to him. And, thematically, Lovecraft is distinctive for the era for having characters psychologically fragment when confronting these vast inhuman others. 

“The Call of Cthulhu” opens with:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Steve and Bucky have each voyaged out a long way.

Trauma, in a way, is a form of terrible knowledge. You can heal but you can’t unknow things. 

Not Language but a Map (The Grammar of Sensation)

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

This is the first book in the series that we see Bucky pick for himself. And, wow, he picks a doozy with themes of multiple and unstable identities, invasive surveillance, manipulation, psychosis, and how individuals can get chewed up by larger systems, falling through the cracks of society. Dick was writing based on his own troubled experiences with southern California drug culture of the early 70s, but this work gets at much more fundamental darknesses that I think would speak to some of the horrors Bucky has gone through and won’t talk about, not even with Steve. 

Within the first few pages, we get this:

It was midday, in June of 1994. In California, in a tract area of cheap but durable plastic houses, long ago vacated by the straights. Jerry had at an earlier date sprayed metal paint over all the windows, though, to keep out the light; the illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends. He liked that; he liked to get rid of time. By doing that he could concentrate on important things without interruption.

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

Eggleston was an early pioneer in color photography and that fascination with color is very apparent in his work. I think this focus would grab Steve as an artist who doesn’t take seeing the full spectrum of color for granted. Even in the MCU’s thin action-film scripts, Steve comments on things that offend his aesthetic sensibilities even when that has absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand, from Stark Tower to Lang’s van.

Not even a world-ending crisis can keep Steve from going, wow, no, that’s ugly. I enjoyed running with that 😂

Steve’s view of Eggleston’s photographs shifts over the course of the series, reflecting what he’s feeling, from the fragmented and disconnected detachment—“isolated and off-kilter”— that he sees in them at the beginning that shifts to the passionate engagement in the world he finds in them later. 

Steve looks through the whole book of William Eggleston’s photographs again and at first the colors still roll over him like the shockwave of a distant explosion, all he can focus on. But gradually the subjects and compositions pull forward, too: monumentalized images of the everyday that at first seem neutral, the work of a detached observer. But the off-center framing of ordinary life is so deliberate as though everything might be important and where every detail deserves attention—that’s nothing like neutral. That’s not detached at all. You have to care a whole hell of a lot.

This mirrors the journey this post-Endgame Steve goes on. Because Steve Rogers should be a character who cares a whole hell of a lot, not what the MCU writers eventually reduced him to. And that’s what this fix-it is trying to fix. 

Lost Vocabularies that Might Express (The Memory of These Broken Impressions)

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

I love writing Bucky as a big fucking science nerd. His last night in New York and how does he want to spend the time? At a science fair with his best friend and a couple of pretty girls. So Bucky reading about quantum electrodynamics is delightful to me. The thing is, though, Bucky is a bright enough guy with a high school education. He’s not a genius—and the MCU is lousy with geniuses. But if Bucky wanted to learn a little more about all this quantum stuff he heard about in passing during some vague and very improbable sounding explanations, which by the way also allowed one of the few people still living who truly matters to him and the closest thing Bucky had left to family to fuck off to the past, well, Feynman’s QED isn’t a bad place to start in understanding some of this quantum stuff, at least. 

Feynman here is very much writing for a popular audience. His writing is conversational—the book is adapted from a set of lectures he gave—and his voice is witty, casual and surprisingly light, but at the same time Feynman is deeply invested in helping lay people understand quantum mechanics. The book opens with:

Alix Mautner was very curious about physics and often asked me to explain things to her. I would do all right, just as I do with a group of students at Caltech that come to me for an hour on Thursdays, but eventually I’d fail at what is to me the most interesting part: We would always get hung up on the crazy ideas of quantum mechanics. I told her I couldn’t explain these ideas in an hour or an evening—it would take a long time—but I promised her that someday I’d prepare a set of lectures on the subject.

I prepared some lectures, and I went to New Zealand to try them out—because New Zealand is far enough away that if they weren’t successful, it would be all right! Well, the people in New Zealand thought they were okay, so I guess they’re okay—at least for New Zealand! So here are the lectures I really prepared for Alix, but unfortunately I can’t tell them to her directly, now.

C’mon! Tell me Bucky Barnes would not be hooked by this opening. 

Thematically, and more seriously, the question of how could Steve do this? has two very different meanings. So far in this series Bucky isn’t ready to confront the harder version of that question which comes potentially with some very painful answers: how could Steve make that choice? Nope, he’s not ready for that. Instead, his brain unconsciously takes the easier way out: trying to understand quantum electrodynamics. 😂😭

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Bucky must have liked A Scanner Darkly, because he went for another Philip K. Dick novel. Today remembered mostly as the source material for Blade Runner, this bleak dystopian novel is set in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war that destroys most life on Earth. The work has themes around empathy—who feels empathy and for what?—materialism and what really makes us human. 

I find it interesting how Sebastian Stan talks about The Winter Soldier in terms of someone who has undergone a process of total desensitization, which to varying degrees is deliberately part of the training of all soldiers. But rebuilding his core sense of empathy was one of the things Bucky chose to do as soon as he had any agency in that two-year period where he was on the run, which is remarkable. As a person who has been treated as though he wasn’t human and had his empathy forcibly stripped from him, I think Bucky would have a lot of complicated feelings about the enslaved androids who escape but are ruthlessly tracked down and killed. Some of these escaped androids are dangerous and do lack basic empathy—shown in the book by torturing and mutilating an animal—while other androids seem like ordinary people just trying to live their lives. 

I like that Bucky talks about the book with Steve later in the story, returning in my view to a very old habit of bookworm Bucky wanting to share what he’d been reading with Steve <333

“I need to find something to read next,” Bucky says after wrapping up his description of an imagined religion that involved plugging into a box to virtually suffer the existence of a man forever walking up a steep hill while struck by crashing stones. 

“Well, did the androids dream of electric sheep?” Steve asks.

“Who knows?” Bucky knocks into him gently as he takes the bowl Steve passes over. “They just wanted to be free. Though the free people just wanted to own stuff or plug into a box and suffer. So, you know, sort of a grim outlook. ”

“A little light, cheerful reading.”

“Hey, we live in a world where people write ‘Take back what’s yours’ in the streets and then smash up the windows. Dystopias don’t seem so far off the mark.”

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Another case of Bucky sticking with an author he likes! To me, this implies that Bucky has already read Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces, which explains some of the foundational basics of physics for a very broad and non-technical audience. Six Not-So-Easy Pieces is also drawn from Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics, focusing here on relativity and space-time, but this work assumes a greater knowledge of math, hence the name. But as a legendary sniper Bucky must have a strong aptitude for math and anyway I just leaned into making Bucky an all-around nerd, because Bucky Barnes, nerd who grew up hot, is delightful to me. 

Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time are all on point for a post-Endgame fix-it, which I think should count as a not-so-easy piece in its own right. 

Throughout the series, we see Bucky using physical copies when he reads fiction, more or less from unconscious nostalgia: connecting back to memories of his younger self who was an avid reader of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks. Once Steve gets him going with that first quietly tossed-over gift, Bucky always carries around a sci-fi or fantasy book in this series despite the limited space in his backpack. And this familiarity wouldn’t just be from his pre-war life since I figure Bucky would have gone for the Armed Services Editions that were distributed for free to soldiers. Bucky likely traded with other soldiers once he finished a book if he couldn’t get a new ASE distribution: trading in his finished novel for a new one is Bucky unconsciously falling back into another old habit.

But for non-fiction, Bucky is absolutely here for the Modern Marvel of being able to carry around as many books as he likes on his phone. I figure Bucky would have used public libraries during certain stages of his recovery when he was homeless and migratory since they are a place to get information that is consistently available in cities; and a warm, quiet place you can go with a minimal number of security cameras. I headcanon a middle-aged librarian who has a few streaks of gray in her dark hair—and who reminds Bucky of someone but he has no idea who—explaining what e-books are to this tall, gaunt, soft-spoken homeless guy with an eye contact problem. And this person who isn’t the Asset anymore and isn’t Bucky Barnes yet has the out-of-nowhere thought: huh, whaddaya know. That’s pretty neat.

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering by Steven H. Strogatz

Isolated systems tend to evolve towards a single equilibrium and these equilibrium points have been the focus of many-body research for centuries. But life is generally not that simple because most systems aren’t isolated. Often the dynamics of a system result from the product of multiple different interacting forces and objects in these systems can change between multiple different attractor wells over time. Or as Strogatz puts it:

As we’ve mentioned earlier, most nonlinear systems are impossible to solve analytically. Why are nonlinear systems so much harder to analyze than linear ones? The essential difference is that linear systems can be broken down into parts. Then each part can be solved separately and finally recombined to get the answer. This idea allows a fantastic simplification of complex problems, and underlies such methods as normal modes, Laplace transforms, superposition arguments, and Fourier analysis. In this sense, a linear system is precisely equal to the sum of its parts.

But many things in nature don’t act this way. Whenever parts of a system interfere, or cooperate, or compete, there are nonlinear interactions going on. Most of everyday life is nonlinear, and the principle of superposition fails spectacularly. 

You can think of nonlinear dynamics as situations in which the sum of the parts is insufficient to understand the whole. This connects to multiple themes in this story as Bucky and Steve try to understand themselves, their lives and each other. But here Bucky is also just continuing to live his best life as a nerd with a strong intuitive knack for math, a high school education, an internet connection and a growing collection of science e-books. Or as Bucky puts it:

“It’s nice, though, like this smart guy is just talking to you but doesn’t assume you’re dumb because of what you don’t know.”

It’s touched on only very lightly in the series so far, but Bucky has a lot of complex feelings about higher education that relate to class, indirectly to sexuality, and go back to the experience of being the son of upwardly mobile working-class immigrants who were very bought-in on a traditional take on the American Dream.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I picked this partly because I thought the title would grab Bucky, who has been a stranger in a strange land several times over. Thematically this midcentury sci-fi novel focuses on challenging social norms through having the main character, a human who’d been raised by Martians on Mars, come back to Earth as an adult. A best-seller in its day that was controversial for its rejection of Christianity, monogamy and the nuclear family, the work is very tied to the looming cultural changes of the 60s and 70s. 

The novel’s critical reputation has been steadily in decline for decades, but I think Bucky would find it interesting since he grew up within the traditional early 20th-century culture this novel satirizes and challenges—mores that this story’s version of Bucky didn’t unquestioningly accept but didn’t openly challenge, either.

Having Bucky pick this novel reflects the themes for the last act of this story that focus more on Steve and Bucky's different experiences as closeted queer men growing up in a deeply homophobic society. These experiences continue to shape and impact them and yet are also a past these two are coming to terms with and growing beyond. 

Fun fact: this novel coined the word “grok.”

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Of all the books featured in this series, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is my top recommendation. This is an accessible, well-written history of a topic that haunts American history: immigration. The specific focus is the waves of legislation passed in the first half of the 20th century that tried—and often succeeded—in limiting who could legally immigrate based on the racial and ethnic hierarchies that equally haunt American history, right down to the foundation. 

In this series, I wanted to pick up the themes of social justice and immigration that were so vaguely and incoherently included in TFATWS. These themes are inherent in the Snap and Return plotline except that Disney does not want to touch any of these politics with a ten-foot pole. But I remain fascinated by trying to wrap my mind around what it would mean for half the population to vanish and then return five years later, catastrophically in both cases. It’s a huge, intricate, sticky, difficult world-building problem that’s inescapably political. 

Steve isn’t quite ready to dive into facing or helping to fix the problems of the post-Return world that his actions helped to create. But here we get to see Steve’s burned-out passion and conviction slowly rekindle as he reads about the complicated and often ugly history of American immigration—and he gets mad about it. Of course, he gets mad about it! This is my answer to the ludicrous idea that Steve Rogers could quietly sit out the second half of the twentieth century. 

At the same time, I can have compassion for Steve knowing he can’t keep going but not knowing how to help himself, only to be given the cursed monkey’s paw of time travel. And he fucks up. His actions have real and lasting consequences. But that doesn’t make the situation hopeless or mean Steve can’t try to repair the relationships he damaged or work to regain the trust he lost, assuming he’s lucky enough to be given another chance by people who love him but have been hurt by his choices.

One of the greatest challenges in writing this Endgame fix-it was accepting Endgame as the starting point of the story and trying to reconcile a character I love with the choices canon has him make. Over the course of these stories, the central point isn’t Steve coming back to Bucky. It’s Steve coming back to himself. Through a slow and painful struggle, Steve finds himself again—rediscovering his stubborn endurance, his compassion for others and his drive to set wrongs right. Steve stumbled, badly, but he gets back up. Because that’s who Steve Rogers is. 

And because of who Bucky Barnes is—his innate kindness, his warm-hearted generosity and his stubborn loyalty that isn’t blind but runs deep—that’s how these two characters come back to each other, after everything.

Deliberately, this series is the first hard-fought and hopeful glimmer in a long trudging process that can get so heavy to carry forward, day after day, but is shot through with moments of beauty and joy all the same. 

I can't go on; I'll go on.

In other words, to quote one of my favorite poets: what the living do.

[stucky-headcanon-bot]

😠

[plznomonkeys]

Why does everybody write Steve Rogers as a gutless simp?

I mean seriously. Steve is my favourite Avenger by FAR and yet the man with all this fanfiction is always some kinda wimp in them. Blushing, stuttering, an absolute idiot most of the time.

This is not Steven G. Rogers. This is a rose coloured glasses depiction of a war veteran if I ever saw one.

Steve is a man who gave up his life and a chance with the love of his life for his country. He's the man who donated his body to science because he had something to prove to himself and to the world. He's the man who, after waking up in the future, talks about moving on and letting things go. Steve Rogers is a man who went in tights to save his best friend and went into active duty when he didn't need to. The man is a hero through and through.

Steven Rogers is not shy, he's got low self esteem which is a completely different outlook. And what makes him amazing is that even if he doesn't think he's enough, he doesn't run away, he doesn't hide. He knows what he wants and he's not shy about wanting it.

Stop writing Steve Rogers as a man who is bumbling around and embarrassed. He's not embarrassed, he's just not confident that he's enough. But you know what? A guy who's been on his own for a long time has an idea on how to be alone and is probably more comfortable by himself than with a group of people.

Steven Rogers isn't shy, Steve is still just a little guy in that big body. He's an artist who went to war and became harder/tougher from it.

[reebmiester]

Zombie Apocalypse Steve Rogers for @whotheheckitheheck’s au <333

[burningfudge]

Fallen Friend: The Death of Ms Marvel (2023)

[aimmyarrowshigh]

MLMay 2024: 100 Slash Drabbles

042. Life Sentence - Steve Rogers/Tae-Won | Taegukgi (MCU + Marvel 616)

[gay-jewish-bucky]

G-J-B Fic Rec

A sweet and soft Hanukkah sickfic to warm you up on these cold winter nights.

Rating: Not Rated

Relationship: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

Tags: Jewish Bucky Barnes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Sick Fic, Becca Barnes is the best sister, Hanukkah, Christmas, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Domestic Fluff

Words: 4.9k | Complete

“I’m pretty sure he has the flu,” he said. “Normally, I’d make my ma’s chicken noodle, but I know how much he looks forward to Hanukkah and the food, and no matter how hard I try, he always kicks me out of the kitchen—” “Just say you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to Jewish cuisine,” Becca said. “I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to Jewish cuisine.” Becca laughed. “Do you have a sheet of paper around?”

[ntshastark]

pathetic amounts of usa nationalism in today's ultimates issue. putting this line on the (cartoonishly evil) villain's mouth was particularly ridiculous

because apparently acknowledging the rest of the american continent and how fucking imperialistic it is for a single country to "claim" that name (especially while actively acting as if they're the boss of everywhere else) is on the same level as all the other bullshit he said

anyway, here's hoping this part comes true

[abuckygirlarchive]

Captain America Sentinel of Liberty #8

[fandom-gt]

COMMISSION TYPE: Quick Fill

PRICE: $7 + Tip (thank you!)

FANDOM: MCU

CHARACTERS: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Peter Parker

REQUESTED SUMMARY: ”A college-aged Peter Parker is far down Tony's shaft after being inserted there by Steve, who didnt tell Tony the toy he wanted to try out is his shrunken mentee. He looks up to see a glimpse of Steve as he asks Tony how it feels.”

WARNINGS: insertion, noncon, unaware

——

The world around him is a tightly constricting, constantly moving place. The walls are slick, and undulating, and so thick they barely let in a dim red light through what is, to him, several feet of flesh. Far above his head, real light streams in at an unsteady blink as the opening opens and closes, opens and closes, opens again slowly, sticking together and messily peeling apart again.

No amount of writhing, or pleading, or struggling desperately can help him. Tony doesn’t know he’s in here, and the more Peter tries to alert him, the louder the reverberating moans coming from deep underneath him get. It’s with a sinking dread that he realizes his efforts must feel good to the hard and rippling cock he’s trapped inside. Or- wait, no, that sinking isn’t just a feeling. He’s actually sinking. Oh shit-

Far above him, through the circular hole that leads to the sky, and air, and freedom, he can just make out Steve’s face, as high up as the moon, staring down at him with a cold, detached sort of mirth in his eyes. Through the sound of flesh on flesh, wet and sloppy, he can just barely hear that familiar voice rumbling, “HOW’S IT FEEL, SWEETHEART? YOU LIKE IT? I GOT IT JUST FOR YOU…”