Week 5 - A story set in London
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mcuflashmemePerhaps with a little more obvious relevance to our favorite characters, this week's challenge:
You have a week for this prompt, so get a move on!
A story set in London
You have a week for this prompt, so get a move on!
no subject
Date: 2016-02-03 01:36 am (UTC)Fandom: Agent Carter
Character: Peggy Carter
Summary: Peggy Carter, newly joined up with the SSR, in the London Blitz.
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Non-major character death, death of children.
Notes: Quickly written. Not betaed.
Peggy stepped out of the SSR offices and pulled her coat tight against the chill in the November air. Half of London, it seemed, was on fire, but the flames did little to ward off the coming winter; the ash floating through the air fell like blackened snow upon the ground and froze her bones just as effectively.
Despite the ache in her feet and her back from a day of, marching around the city, evacuating civilians to nearby shelters, Peggy found herself wishing she could have stayed at work, instead of being sent home to sleep. The typical nightly skeleton crew at the SSR offices had been bulked up to nearly a full daytime staff, but Peggy was still deemed to fragile for extra hours. She had been told, politely but firmly, every evening since the bombing started, to go to a shelter at night. It infuriated her; her mood, lately, had been as bleak as the city in which she lived.
Tonight was especially forbidding. Clouds had come in from the south during the day; now they hung grim and heavy in the evening sky, blacker even than the ash and smoke that filled the air constantly these days. Peggy found herself fighting to keep her spine straight beneath their weight as she walked. Few people were in the streets, which heightened her sense of wrongness. London was meant to be a busy and bustling city.
A block from the shelter, a young girl no older than thirteen ran up to her. There were tear-tracks running through the dust and dirt on the girl’s cheeks, and Peggy stopped instinctively. “Please, help me!” the girl cried as she drew near to Peggy. Her head twitched constantly in the direction she had come from, and her hands formed white-knuckled fists in her skirt. “My family,” she said, hiccupping out the words between swallowed back sobs. “A bomb landed on our home, and my mum and dad and Reggie were inside!”
Peggy’s exhaustion fled in a wave of adrenaline. “Show me where,” she commanded, as the girl finally burst into tears. The girl nodded frantically and darted off down a street perpendicular to Peggy’s own.
They reached the girl’s home a block and a half later. A flickering streetlamp shone on a scene that was becoming all too common in London. Most of the house was nothing but rubble; bits of what appeared to be the kitchen were still on fire. As she got closer, however, Peggy could hear low moans and other sounds from the middle of the wreckage. She forced her tired legs into a run.
“Stay back!” she said to the young girl as she stepped gingerly over the remains of the front door. Twisted metal, rough shards of stone, blown out glass, and other sharp odds and ends littered the entire scene. It was no place for a child. No place for a trapped family, either.
“Are my family going to be okay?” the girl asked, following Peggy into the debris anyways.
Peggy turned to her, and did her best to infuse her voice with confidence. “I’m going to get them out,” she said, “but I need you to do something for me. What’s your name?”
The little girl nodded as more tears streamed down her cheeks. “M’name’s Susan,” she said, wiping at her face with the back of one small hand.
“I need you to go get some colleagues of mine to help me dig your parents and brother out of here,” Peggy said. She gave the girl directions, and watched her run away out of sight. Then Peggy went to work. The noises came from the back of the ruin, where a staircase could be seen still partially intact behind a pile of heavy beams. The sounds of life slowly decreased in volume and frequency, and Peggy forced her body to work faster. When she could not lift pieces of rubble with her bare hands, she used bits of broken piping as a lever. Even with that, however, the heaviest beams remained lodged in place, trapping whoever of the family remained alive.
Halfway through the night, a few passersby joined her. With their help, she was finally able to lift the beams to reveal the door to a little closet under the stairs.
As the last beam was heaved away by a group of young nurses who’d been fetched from a nearby shelter, Peggy finally managed to get the small door open. Bits of it splintered off in her hands, but she ignored it. A middle-aged couple lay curled around a baby boy in the cramped closet, covered in dust and bits of wood and brick. The woman was still moaning, low broken sobs that Peggy finally realized were not moans of physical pain. The baby lay silent in her arms, a deep gash in his forehead that bled in the thin, sluggish trickle that said his heart had stopped beating. Her husband, too, lay still. The dark bruise on his forehead didn’t bleed, but it looked dangerous and painful nonetheless.
A nurse pushed past Peggy and knelt by the woman and her husband. She laid one hand on the husband’s throat, and then placed her other hand on the wife’s arm. “Your baby is with God, but your husband is still alive,” the nurse said, her matter of fact tone belying the sorrow in words. “Can you help me carry him? We’ve got a hospital set up nearby.” The woman stared at her baby, seeming not to hear the nurse.
“Where’s Susan?” someone asked in the crowd that had gathered, and Peggy finally realized: she had not seen the young girl since she had sent her off for backup from the SSR. That had been only just after nightfall, and now it was nearly dawn.
The nurse called out to Peggy as she left, but Peggy hardly heard. She rushed back along the streets, adrenaline once more carrying her tired body along. When she reached the street where the SSR building stood, she had to stop and hold herself up on the shop at the corner.
Half the SSR building and the entire home next door were utterly destroyed. The clouds of the previous night still filled the sky, but the encroaching dawn lit them up in red and orange to match the fires still burning in the wreckage. The whole place was an open, bloody wound at the end of the street. Peggy picked her way gingerly towards it, her horror growing with each step.
When she reached the building, a soft cry tore its way out of her throat. Susan’s body lay on the steps of the office, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Trails of blood ran from her nose into her hair, and one small hand was crushed beneath a pile of bricks that had blown out from the side of the building. Inside the building Peggy saw more bodies. Her coworkers (those she could see), never close or kind to her, now lay like broken ragdolls in bits and pieces among their scattered things and bits of desks and filing cabinets.
Peggy sat heavily on the curb. For several minutes, she allowed herself, for once, the luxury of not thinking, not feeling anything except the sidewalk beneath her and the raindrops that had finally begun to fall from the sky.
Eventually, she stood. She would go to a shelter and report the bodies. Then she would clean herself up, and head to the SSR offices in west London. Beyond that, she was too tired to think. The future would come, and she would face it.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-04 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-05 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-04 02:00 pm (UTC)Characters: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes,
Rating: T
Tags: Daemon AU, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Rescue, That bar scene in TFA
Warnings: Blood, Injury
"See? I told you: they're all a bunch of idiots," Bucky said from his seat at the bar, a drink in his hand and Evelina curled at his feet, her ears perking up when Steve slid into the seat beside Bucky, Niamh perched on his shoulder.
"How 'bout you, huh?" Steve asked, to Bucky and Lina both. "You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?"
Bucky grinned, his eyes strangely clear despite the thick smell of alcohol on him.
"Hell, no," he replied, sitting back in his seat. "That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight: I'm following him."
Lina gave a quiet bark of agreement. Bucky reached down to stroke at her ears with his uninjured hand. It was almost like Azzano had never happened; the bruising on Bucky's face and neck was nearly gone, and the fingers on his left hand were healing up nicely -- it was nearly impossible to tell that Lina had nearly bitten them off only a few days previous, after Steve had pulled Bucky off Zola's table only to realise that Lina was nowhere in sight.
He and Niamh had followed Bucky as he stumbled and staggered to the next room over, and there was Lina: trapped in a too-small cage, snarling – and God, the agony Bucky must have endured, being separated from her for that long – and then Bucky had taken the gun from Steve's belt and shot off the cage's lock and opened the door. Lina had lunged right at him and Steve and Niamh turned away, then, giving them a moment, and it was only when Bucky screamed that they had realised something was wrong.
Lina was thrashing in Bucky's arms, clawing at him, her ears flat against her head and her lips pulled back in a snarl and there was blood on her muzzle; Bucky's blood, his hand was covered in it -- and it took Niamh getting in between them and flapping her wings furiously for them to tear apart.
Lina had scrambled into the corner, tail lashing, and Bucky just sat there frozen, clutching his bleeding hand. There was a clear bite mark on his arm, and scratches on his chest and neck. He was very pale, in contrast to the dark blood.
"Let me see," Steve had said, jumping into action from his paralysed shock. From the other side of the room he could hear Niamh trying to calm Lina down.
Bucky hadn't made a sound as Steve gently uncurled his injured hand, trying not to wince when he saw how deep Lina's teeth had pierced.
"Steve, I--," Bucky had began, voice bleak, but what he was going to say Steve never found out, because a sudden explosion rocked the building.
"We've gotta get outta here," Steve had said, pulling Bucky to his feet, and he heard Niamh to say the same to Lina; and the four of them did, and by the time they got out Lina was running alongside Bucky in her usual spot, like this was just another back-alley brawl they were all running from, and when they made it to the others Bucky slowed down and scooped her up and buried his face in her fur.
They had found a medic to stitch his fingers, and by the time they made it back to base he was almost like the old Bucky again, and Lina too; they were fine, everything was fine. And Steve sat at the bar in a London pub and looked at Bucky stroking Lina's fur and thought: they were okay, they were fine; and he knew it to be true when Bucky turned to him with that familiar glint in his eye and said:
"But you're keeping the outfit, right?"
So: in keeping with my tradition of using the weekly prompt as a starting point to help get some ideas down for a potential fic, here’s a possible scene from a Daemon AU (trying to figure out what idea to pick for the Stucky Big Bang; currently deciding between a dark (but happy, eventually) Daemon AU or a happy, fluffy fic based on The Holiday -- although considering I’m not exactly great at writing fluff there’d probably be some extra angst in there somewhere.) Also, I feel like this snippet is the most emblematic of my writing process, which, essentially, involves coming up with a hurt!Bucky situation and then building a plot around it.
Tumblr url is the same as here!
(Edit: Forgot to add, while I haven't fully decided about the breeds of their daemons, I'm leaning towards Bucky's daemon Evelina as a Malinois (i.e a Belgian Shepherd) and Steve's daemon Niamh as some kind of owl, maybe an Eagle Owl or a Great Horned Owl.)
Ever I Saw Your Face (Steve/Bucky)
Date: 2016-02-06 01:00 am (UTC)Fandom: Captain America
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes
Additional Tags: Dick measuring contest, yeah literally, Docking, Mutual Masturbation, Angst, They don't talk about their feelings, Steve Rogers' serum enhanced dick, Frottage
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“S’too bad,” Steve says thoughtfully. He puts his hands back into the bucket, plucks Bucky’s underwear out of the sudsy wad of fabric down at the bottom. “If you’d gotten some of Erskine’s juice, maybe you’d still be taller than me.”
It does the trick: Bucky’s eyes flash. “I am still taller than you,” he says, threatening. Steve shrugs. “I am,” Bucky says, louder, and stands up, dripping water and soap.
Link on AO3.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-06 04:55 am (UTC)(With a few minor editing changes, now added link to AO3
'A Chilling Frost' by themirrordarkly )
Just an idea that came to me. It is part in Brooklyn, part in London. POV Steve. No warnings really except angst. And this being Steve pining over Bucky and not realizing it.
"A Chilling Frost"
A chilling frost hit just before Christmas. On another December day, Steve Rogers was camped out at the noisy radiator seeking out the warmth, buried in a thick, lumpy wool sweater his Ma knitted for him. The cold etched in his frail bones, skin blushed not with heat but cold. Not bone white with frostbite, but he imagined what the numbness would feel like. Better than the burning ache of the chill that was for sure.
His Ma was heating up some chicken soup that Bucky brought over. Bucky had stayed, flopped on the faded sofa, thumbing through a glossy magazine he spent too much for. Just to read about the lives of rich people going to concerts in London's Royal Albert Hall or ritzy parties with rose colored champagne and hors d'oeuvre of salty fish eggs.
Bucky's casual sprawl, loose limbed, was graceful not gangly with youth. The shadow of youth merging into a man while Steve stayed small and thin. And yet, he wasn't jealous in the true sense, more like he wanted to capture the changes in his friend. Cold fingers itched to sketch out the lines that blurred between boy and man. The artist in him called and it wasn't anything more or so he kept reminding himself. But his hands still were cramping from the lack of heat so he dug and twisted his fingers into his sweater's warmth as he watched Bucky mouth words silently as he read.
Steve slurped down the soup in careful gulps. He didn't want to over do it just getting over his cold. He observed Bucky, not with the same consideration, slurp with gusto the delicious soup.
"Ma, sure makes the best dumplings," Bucky said, between mouthfuls.
Steve just nodded as he ate. He had to agree, but he'd never let his own mother know.
A chilling frost hit just before Christmas. On this December day he found Bucky sitting alone on a low wall over looking Hyde Park. A trail of smoke floating up from his cigarette as he peered up in the dusky, grey sky. Searching, searching for what? Steve wasn't sure. He could be looking for a lone German plane that somehow gotten through the city's defenses. Or something more divine and less tangible.
Again that old ache shot through him. It wasn't from cold this time; his body lost the capacity to feel it as deep. It was the desire to capture this moment in time and freeze it in ink and paper. Steve thought he'd lost him last month. The capture of the 107th was more than a shock; it was a lose of youth, the etch of war becoming all too real.
Bucky's careful appearance he prided himself in was not to be found. Instead his rumbled uniform and mussed hair spoke more than the schooled neutral expression he wore on his face. A steady hand brought his cigarette to his lips, a deep drag, and a long exhale of air as if all his inner demons could be expelled in the sighing smoke.
Steve wished with all his heart he could have gotten to Bucky sooner. Before Zola took him away. Before... Something changed, but Bucky being Bucky waved it off with a smile and a wink, however Steve knew when Bucky was hiding something. Just like when he broke Mr. Gains' window with a baseball. He just knew.
Bucky swung his gaze toward Steve and stilled as if caught in a private moment, then smiled wide.
"Come on over, Stevie." Bucky waved him over with his hand holding the cigarette, patting the wall with his other.
Steve obliged, sitting on Bucky's left.
"Pretty, ain't it." Bucky pointed to the trees. "Like someone knew Christmas was comin'." He said, nodding.
Steve glanced around and was struck with the surrounding beauty. He didn't even notice so entranced by Bucky earlier. And that was something he couldn't find an explanation for or didn't want to understand the why.
All around him was a winter wonderland. The trees glazed in sparkling ice, cold and beautiful. The sleet from earlier must have froze, decorating all the trees in glittering frost and dripping icicles.
"The trees...the branches will break from all that weight." Was what Steve said, but what he felt instead was the raw, natural beauty of Mother Nature.
Bucky elbowed him in his chest, shaking his head. And for the first time since he rescued him, Bucky started to laugh. An eye crinkling, head thrown back laugh. And it warmed Steve better than any sweater, soup or radiator ever could.
"Oh Steve, you're such a Scrooge!"
And Steve had to chuckle too; it was infectious.
"Stevie, what do you want for Christmas?" Bucky wheezed out between bouts of laughter.
"The end to this war." Is what Steve said, but what he wanted to say was--you. I want you.
"Me too, pal. Me too." Bucky's laughter quieting, but his eyes still full of life and humor. He slung his left arm across Steve's shoulders as he did in Brooklyn so long ago. To the future, Bucky had said then. To the future.