Drinking in Bars.
I wrote a fic a couple weeks ago where Steve got the girl, the apartment, and all of the cool friends. He made out OK! Nothing was awful! Nobody got smacked around! Nobody was raped! And this is my soul's opposite reaction. Though nobody dies in this one either.
One night, you go alone to that bar.
...
One night, two weeks later, Bucky gets into fight with a bouncer at that bar. Not one of the big places, not a fancy place, just a neighborhood spot a subway stop or two away. They've been there plenty of times before, and the guy says the place is full. You suggest that the two of you should leave, but Bucky decides to be an asshole and snakes his head around and sees plenty of empty seats, plenty of empty floor space, so he pushes the issue. He wants a drink. This is a place that sells drinks. Have they gone out of the business of selling drinks?"
The bouncer looks from Bucky's face, then to yours. Back to you.
"I'm not sure he's eighteen."
"I'm not sure your vision doesn't need checking. He's twenty-two. We've been here before. Steve is the asshole who always orders a ginger ale."
There is a period of silence; inside the bar, some people are laughing, and a car passes behind them. It rained in the afternoon, and the sidewalk and asphalt all smell wet. Neon signs line the street. You puts your hand on Bucky's arm. "Come on. There're -- "
The bouncer looks at your hand on Bu --
...
One night, you go alone. Maybe Bucky was working the night shift. Maybe Bucky had a date. Maybe you just wanted some time alone, so you bring your sketchbook, the small one that fits in your coat pocket, but when you get there, you don't feel like drawing any. You lay it out in front of you, closed, with the pencil stuck in the spine. You nurse a beer; you eat some peanuts; you listen to people talk around you, and after thirty-five minutes, a man comes and sits down on the stool next to you.
"I know you," he says. He has a beer in his hand. Possibly not his first of the night.
"Do you?" you say and take a pretzel from the bowl.
"You come here sometimes."
"I do," you say, letting yourself be a little bit of a punk. "I'm here now."
He looks at you for another second. "You were here -- a week and a half ago with a guy."
You look back at him, take a bite of your pretzel
Eventually, it comes out that Bucky --
...
There is a period of silence; inside the bar, some people are laughing, and outside the bar, a car passes. It rained in the afternoon, and the sidewalk and asphalt all smell wet. Neon signs line the street. You puts your hand on Bucky's arm. "Come on. There're -- "
The bouncer looks at your hand on Bucky's shoulder, then up at your face.
"Take your business elsewhere," he says.
"You don't want our business?" Bucky says, in his most asshole voice. "You don't want our money?"
Eventually, Bucky takes the first swing.
...
Eventually, it comes out that the girl Bucky ditched you for that night was this guy's girlfriend.
Eventually, he pushes the yelling too far, and you tell him that he should stop asking you where your best friend lives or works, and maybe he should take it up with his girlfriend if she keeps going off with men, and then he says that oh, he has. He yells that last part, and the bar is still just about empty, but the two men down at the end, talking and smoking quietly, stop talking and smoking. They look down: you look over at this hands, at the red flush on his face, which is visible even in the half-lighting of the bar. The way he is leaning forward at you, eyes narrowed.
"Is that what you did?" you say. He has what, you estimate, eight inches in height on you. Probably at least sixty pounds in weight. Do you remember anything about the girl from that night? Small. Dark hair, dark eyes, bright lipstick. Once she and Bucky started talking to each other and tuning you out, there wasn't anything for you to do, so you have a sketch in your notebook. Two figures, an exercise in thinking about negative space; you'd been thinking about filling in the background with soft black pencil afterwards to capture the lighting, and when you were doing the line work in the bar, you remember frowning at the paper, trying to capture the girl's quick, nervous way of holding herself and her quick, nervous way of looking to the side by only moving her eyes.
The memory of that nervousness -- it makes you say something that you shouldn't.
"Big man," you say, beer in your hand. "Maybe if you didn't hit your woman, she wouldn't go out looking."
The man looks at you, asks if you're willing to say that to him outside. Are you? You look down at your beer, your notebook. You curse yourself briefly, then take a deep breath. What can you do at this point? Even after all these times, your heart is beating a little fast. You'll admit to being a little bit scared.
"I'll say it anywhere you want," you say and finish your beer down and slide off your stool. You come up to just about his shoulder, maybe his jaw, but you say the words very clearly, very slowly, and you tilt your head back so you can look him in the eye.
"You're a bully who hits women," you say. "And now, if you want, we'll go outside."
...
What can you do? Bucky gets the first punch in, but the bouncer is in the business of getting the second, third, fourth, and all the way up to the twentieth consecutive punch. Bucky goes down like a sack of bricks, and the bouncer gets a kick in, for good measure; Bucky insists that he can still go out, that he's fine, and you're arguing with him because you can actually see his face and what he looks like. Thankfully, half a block down, he goes legless, and you can't quite catch him, and you reach into his pocket and take out his pay for the week and dip into it to get a cab back for both of you. You tip handsomely because Bucky is in -- in a bad way.
Thankfully, him being in a bad way also means he doesn't notice how quiet you are on the ride home.
"What the fuck was his problem?" Bucky says as you half-walk, half-drag him up the stairs to your place. "I mean, what was his deal?"
You prop him against the wall while you get the door; he sort of leans his head back and pinches his nose, though you're pretty sure that all the blood in his head is already all over his shirt.
"How much did you have before we went out?" you ask, and he flops his arm back over you again for the final stretch to your couch. You have a small apartment, thankfully. Being an artist, even one gainfully employed at an ad agency, does not exactly pay, as Bucky has pointed out. He makes better money than you do.
So: your apartment is small. You drop Bucky onto your couch and then straighten up, rubbing your shoulder, because Bucky is heavy and roughly, you estimate, forty percent legless.
You turn on the small lamp on the side table and whistle. "He did a number on you, Bucky."
Bucky tries to laugh, but he has a split lip, a black eye, a face half-covered in blood, and assorted scratches and scrapes all down the left side of his face from meeting the brick wall of the bar, courtesy of punches twelve through sixteen. "We're young. We're men. What is Friday night for?" He tries to lift his arms over his head, but that hurts, so he stops and winces, and wincing hurts, too.
From experience, you know that it's only going to get worse, once the bruises really get a chance to settle, and you look at him for another moment, then go and get supplies. Disinfectant. Cotton balls. And because Bucky is going to need it, the bottle of burn-your-eyes, scald-your-throat, steal-your-breath Russian homebrew that your upstairs neighbors gave you for your birthday because you watch their kids sometimes.
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you.
...
"Jesus, that hur -- " Bucky pushes your hand and the cotton ball dipped in disinfectant away.
"You think it doesn't hurt when I do this? I usually have to do this myself. Hold still."
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you.
...
"If you're going to be a coward about it, here. Have some of this."
You hand Bucky the bottle, watch him pop the home-sealed cork off, and watch him take a long, long pull at the bottle, and come up gasping. His eyes are watering.
"What is that?"
"Something that'll make you hold still. You need more to stay still, you take it."
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you and is by all appearances, a mean, mean drunk.
What do you think about when you're getting the shit beaten out of you? Not a lot. Pain has a way of stealing thoughts, and this beating hurts. He didn't wait for the two of you to square up and get your fists in front; instead, the two of you were in the alleyway. You wanted to walk a few steps further to get around the trash cans so that at least you wouldn't fall over them, but he took the opportunity to shove you into them. You went down; you tried to get back up, but met his fist. You went down.
He made a move, as if to throw the trash can at you, and after the fist, you were almost sort of hoping for it, because who wants to administer a long, bloody, profoundly painful beating to a guy who is covered in trash? It tends to end in everybody smelling like garbage, but no, he doesn't. He bends down and hauls you up by the shirt with his left and punches you with his right in the face. Your nose is bleeding. He got you in the eye. You manage to get a hit in, so that he lets go of your shirt, but when you stagger back, he kicks you in the stomach. You double up, and you realize that you've come up against the back of the alley. You feel brick wall under the fingers of your left hand, and brick wall under the fingers of your right. Gap of space between your shoulder blades. The fact that both of your shoulders touch brick, too, means you're well and truly backed into the corner.
Your vision is a little shaky from how hard he hit you in the head, but you look to your left. You look to your right. Your hands are shaking. You look down by your feet, even though that means the whole world sways and you can feel the blood from your nose run over your lips faster. Is there anything you can pick up and use as a weapon? Pipe? Maybe a board? It looks like the bar and the restaurant on the other side break down their pallets here, so maybe you can get something and at least threaten him with it. Get him to back off.
Nothing. Leaves. Some blown trash.
You take two steps forward, so that you aren't exactly dead against the corner, but your legs are unsteady. You might have a concussion at this point, and everything, everywhere just hurts. The mouth of the alley is a long, long way aways, and you're already breathless and almost on your knees from trying to walk two steps. But you do see a couple small rocks. You take the biggest of them and just manage to close your fingers around it when he catches up with you and kicks you in the stomach again.
Where do you have to go except for backwards, back into the corner? You try to keep ahold of the rock in your hand, but your ears are ringing. There is an electric light in this part of the alley, orangey and not too bright normally, just enough light so that the kitchen and bar staff can take trash out with tripping, but with it is almost painfully bright to you on the left side of your face. Almost definitely a concussion. You've been hit in the head a couple times. You hit the back of your head when he threw you into the trash cans. You have a vague memory of your mother telling you about the signs of concussions,. Do you have one? The man picks you up by the shirt collar. He pulls you up to something like standing position, and you wobble on your feet for a second before trying to hit him with your hand. Not the hand with the stone in it, actually, because you're too disoriented. Your fingers go slack; you actually drop it and spend a half-second thinking about how you should bend down and pick it up, because it's the closest thing you have to a fighting chance, but he hits you again and the world explodes into lights and pain.
You manage to make contact with one of your hands against his stomach, but it isn't enough to get him off you, and in return, he hauls back and hits you in the stomach again, right in the solar plexus. You try to get away from him, but somehow, you're down on your stomach. How did you end up on the ground? You try to get back up on your knees, but it doesn't work, and he grabs you by the collar and hauls you up onto your knees. Your heels are against the wall; there isn't anywhere for you to run.
It's hard to make out his face.
"Your friend is an asshole," he says.
You're in a lot of pain, or you'd sort of agree, and then he shakes you. You make a noise that you can't be proud of.
He hits you again, possibly just to hear you make that noise. You do. You can't stop yourself, and he drops you back onto your own heels, and you sway, but having the walls so close is actually a help. It keeps you from going flat onto your face, and you see the guy's hand coming in, and you assume that it's the concussion that makes it look like it's going so slow, but he's not actually trying to punch you. He is saying something about learning consequences. Consequences? Women. You realize his fingers are, in fact, moving slowly.
A series of things things happen: first, the hand is moving that slowly. Instead of hitting you in the face, they go to the back of your jaw and grip you there, hard enough, painfully enough that it cuts through the general pain in your face, in your stomach, in the back of your head. He is standing directly in front of you, he blots out all of the light in the world except for what comes over his shoulders from the light at the back of the alley.
You realize his other hand is --
...
"Jesus Christ," Bucky says, bottle in hand and staring at it. He is still sitting on the couch; his face still looks terrible. "What is this?"
"Like I said." You're working on the knuckles of his right hand. They're scraped to hell and back, so you're dabbing disinfectant on them. "My neighbors upstairs make it."
"What is it made out of?"
"Potatoes? I think. Sometimes, fruit. They actually distill it. Have a setup and everything."
"Potatoes? Fruit?"
"Flex your hand," you say to Bucky. He looks at you disbelievingly, bottle still in his hand. "Try to make a fist. Broken bones? Nerve damage? My mother was a nurse, remember?"
He sighs, but flexes his hand, then takes a shot from the bottle before you start on his left hand, which is actually scratched up worse than the right, because he got kicked a lot while lying on the ground.
...
He is standing directly in front of you, he blots out all of the light in the world except for what comes over his shoulders from the light at the back of the alley.
You realize his other hand is undoing his belt buckle. He is right handed, you've realized, and is holding your mouth open with his right hand, so he's a little clumsy. You try to look up at him, say something, but the pressure on your jaw increases, and you just open your mouth wider.
You close your eyes, brace your yourself, and try not to make any more sounds that you can't be proud of.
...
Your neighbors upstairs are emigrants from Russia by way of France. The father is in a munitions factory; the wife sews buttons at a place that assembles shirts for the Army. The oldest daughter married out of the family; the fourteen year old daughter does most of the work of watching her three younger brothers, but they can get a little much, even for the mother. You met the family one morning when you were leaving your apartment, and just barely managed to keep the three year old from launching himself down the stairs. He was on the run from having his face washed; his mother and sister were in full pursuit.
So you help watch the kids sometimes, to give the parents a break. To give the daughter a break. You don't mind, even though their apartment is only slightly larger than yours, and you're sitting at the table with the seven year old and the nine year old boys, watching them do your homework. The three year old is doing something with your shoelaces that you're going to regret letting him do, and the radio, an older model with as much fuzz as signal, is playing a serial about brave soldiers abroad. Dinner warms in the oven, and the daughter comes and stands by your elbow as you look at your sketchbook, trying to figure out what you want to work on next.
"Who's that?" she says.
Her mother speak some English, but the children are all Brooklyn born and bred, so the daughter doesn't sound any different from any other girl in Brooklyn, though when she yells at her brothers, it's always in Russian. You've picked up a couple phrases. Stop that. Drop it now. You're getting a handle on you filthy beast and I'm telling mom.
"My boss at work," you say. She turns the page.
"And this?"
"My friend, Bucky."
"I recognize him. He comes over sometimes," she says, with a tone in her voice, and you grin a little and look over at her with your eyebrows up.
"What?" she says and smacks you on the shoulder. "I recognize him. That's all."
She turns the next page and says, in a slightly strangled voice, "Who's that with him?"
You look down. Two figures, worked around in black soft pencil, faces standing out against it. He's whispering something in her ear. She's smiling. "Oh," you say. "Just somebody he met at a bar."
Her face goes flat and a little sulky -- not not quite sulky. Disappointed is a better word, and the hand she'd smacked you with goes slack.
"Hey," you say, as gently as you can without making her angry. "Hey, you want me to draw you?
...
Bucky has worked his way more than a couple fingers through the bottle, and he is, at this point, well and truly drunk. You had a suspicion he got started before you met him at the subway station; neither of you got anything at the bar for obvious reasons, but the stuff from upstairs is ridiculously strong even if it is just -- homemade.
"What do you use it for?" Bucky says. "I can't imagine you can drink a lot of this."
You look back at him, flatly.
"It's strong stuff," he says, and there is a long moment of silence. You have a small apartment with thin walls; your downstairs neighbors are having a party. Someone on your floor is having a fight.
"When I'm in a pinch and the shop is closed, I use it to thin paint," you say, finally.
Bucky crows, tries to stand in triumph, but winces and sits back down quickly, because apparently, he's twisted his ankle. You slide onto the floor and undo his shoelaces, ease his feet out, so that you can see what the damage is.
...
How far does it get in the alleyway? The guy who has been beating the shit out of you makes plenty of noise about how if your asshole friend is going to take his woman, he's going to make a woman out of you. On the one hand, even though you're in too much pain to really fight him, he is drunk. He is very drunk. He smells like a whole crate of whiskey.
On the other hand, even very drunk, he's been able to hit you until you're kneeling in front of him while he puts his dick into your mouth. You push back a little, but the hand on your jaw is strong, remorseless. You make a noise in your throat from fear and struggle some more, putting your hands on his thighs and trying to push away, but you're dazed. Your vision is blurry. It hurts every time you take a breath, and you're worried he may have cracked some of your ribs.
How far does he get with it? How much noise do you make? Is he actually able to get hard? After all, he isn't actually a man who wants to get a blowjob from another man. He just wants to control; he wants to have power, and you know he likes it when you push back and struggle, so you go limp, try to make yourself just breathe through your nose and not breathe in any part of the way he smells. Maybe it isn't wise all the time, in every situation or even in most or even in any situation at all, but it works this time, though you don't really have a choice. You were having a hard time effectively resisting before.
So in the end, does he just shove you back against the wall and piss all --
At what point does the bouncer come by to check if you're all right?
...
Two weeks go by. It turns out he didn't crack or even bruise any of your ribs. He just knocked you around a little. Your torso is a big mass of bruises for a while, and you're dizzy all weekend, but nothing worse than that. Nothing permanent. nothing bruised. Maybe your tolerance for beatings isn't as good as you think it is. Afterwards, you go home, dose yourself with a little of the moonshine from upstairs, and wipe your own face up as best you can in the mirror above your sink.
"Jesus Christ," Ekaterina says, the next time you go up to give her a break. She goes by Katie at school and likes it better, but you're under strict instructions never to call her that when her parents are around, because they get upset. Her mother is just heading out the door, heading out for the night shift, and she shoots her daughter a look for using language until she sees your face.
Ekaterina had let you in; the mother sits you on one of the kitchen chairs and bustles about, boiling up some water for -- something.
"No, ma'm," you say, trying to squirm out from under her hands. "I'm fine. I'm -- "
The mother looks at the daughter. The daughter looks at the mother. The three boys are arrayed against the wall, wide-eyed and, for once, quiet.
The daughter looks at the mother. The mother looks at the daughter. The daughter says a few words in Russian, and you catch the English phrase fired if you're late again. There are a few more words in Russian, and then the girl says, in accentless English, "I promise, Mom. I've got it."
So the mother goes, and you take a deep breath.
"How did it happen?" the daughter asks, once the footsteps down the hallway are gone and the boys start playing again.
"Alleyway. Behind a bar," you say, wondering if the reason why you feel lightheaded is because the concussion hasn't entirely healed, and she goes and boils water so she can give you hot towels to put on your face.
The family is very fond of you; Ekaterina explains, while putting hot compresses on your face that feel nice and smell nice, but aren't going to do anything -- she explains that her older sister's name is Irina, and older than Irina, there was a cousin that had lost his parents. He had been like an oldest son to her parents. Ekaterina never met him, but he died in the journey from Russia to France, and her parents sometimes think of you as a blonder, shorter, scrawnier version of him. You had laughed and said thanks, you think, and you laugh again when Ekaterina shows up outside your door a few days later.
"So you won't have to do your drinking in bars," she says. "It's from the stock that Dad put up last year."
You laugh and hold an ice bag over your eye and use your other hand to take the bottle from her.
...
"No sprain," you say to Bucky. Both of his shoes are off. He still has socks on his feet.
"You sure?" he says, a little skeptically.
"Sure as I can be. It doesn't hurt when I do this, does it?"
Bucky admits that it doesn't, and you're down on the floor, between his knees. He is sitting up on the sofa with the bottle of moonshine in his hand; he's gone almost half of the way through it, and is lying back in a boneless way that you recognize. You look at his face, bruises, the wide mess of his face where it got dragged along the wall for a while, the lip split in multiple places. You look at the bottle of moonshine in his hand. Bucky sees you looking up at him and smiles, sort of blearily.
You lean forward, and --
...
The bouncer doesn't help you off the ground. He tells the guy to go home, then walks out of the alley, back very stiff, and you sit in the ground for a few minutes, then take off your coat and your shirt, scrub your face and hair and arms as much as you can on a clean part of them, and then ball them and drop them into the nearest trash can. You walk a third of the way home and come across a closed auto shop with a hose out front, presumably for when they wash cars, and you turn that on yourself. The water is shockingly cold, but you screw up your eyes and run it over your face and hair and arms, and then do it again and again. If anybody sees you, they'll just assume you drank too much and got sick over yourself and got hosed down. You're shivering afterwards, but it's already late May, so it isn't too cold, and at least you no longer --
You arrive back at your building. You climb two flights of stairs, lock all the locks behind you, and slump against the door.
You breathe.
...
You lean forward, and you breathe. You look up Bucky's legs, and he doesn't move besides blinking at you, sort of slowly. The bottle is still in his hand, and you judge the level in the bottle one more time, then lick your lips.
He still doesn't move, and you press your mouth to his dick through his pants. You breathe.
Bucky sighs and leans back on the sofa.
...
How many times have you done this? No times at all, either with Bucky or with anyone else. You aren't counting what happened in the alley. How many times have you thought about doing this with Bucky? You can't come up with a number, because you've never let your mind go very far before making yourself think about something else. Bucky told you the first time he'd had it done to him; he was laughing and trying to explain the mechanics and giggling every time he said her mouth, and you have been trying to push it out of your mind at odd moments ever since. What would he sound like? What would his face look like? You don't want yourself to ask these questions, but you lick his dick through the fabric of his pants, feel him shift a little, and your breath catches.
You close your eyes. You try not to smell wet asphalt or overturned garbage. Bucky shifts on the couch and moves a little, as if to touch you.
Are you going to let --
...
You reach up and start to undo his belt, but when Bucky doesn't stop you, your hands falter.
"Give me the bottle," you say, putting one knee on the sofa. Bucky, wordlessly, hands it to you. You take a slug of it, choke a little, maybe choke a lot, feel tears come to your eyes, and hand it back to him. You feel yourself flush from the neck on down. Your tongue and throat burn. "Your turn."
His eyes are on your face; they look a little glazed, but he takes a sip.
"Bucky?" you say.
His eyes are still on your face, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't even raise a hand to sort of acknowledge that you've spoken, so you take another drink from the bottle before putting it back on the sofa next to his hand and kneel back between his knees. Your hands shake, but you get his belt undone.
...
Bucky gets easy when he drinks. Bucky, when he has drunk enough that his eyes glaze over and he stops talking, but can still follow things with his eyes, never remembers what happened the next morning.
How far do you go? Farther than you think you'll be able to take it. You get his belt undone, and you pull his pants and underwear down. You are mindful of teeth, like Bucky mentioned when he was talking about the girl, and you slide your lips over your teeth and put him in your mouth. When he starts to get hard in your mouth, you make a noise, and he gets harder, and you grip the base of his dick with your hand and slide your mouth.
Bucky puts his hand in your hair. If the first touch had been hard, you might have panicked and stopped, but Bucky touches your hair gently. You pull all the way off and lick the tip of his dick, rolling it under your tongue, and he sighs and slides his hand down your cheek to touch your jaw, all the way at the back, so you have to quit for a moment and fight down the fear and take another drink from the bottle.
He takes another drink, too, and after a moment of looking at his mouth, split in multiple places, still faintly stained with blood, you get back on your knees and go back to it.
You go farther than you think. In fact, you get all the way to Bucky coming in your mouth.
...
Are you going to let that man in the alley change anything?
You don't like bul --
...
Afterwards, you help Bucky get his pants back on and put the belt back on and take the bottle out of his hand. You roll him onto his side against the back of the couch, then go over to the sink to rinse your mouth. You're straightening up and wiping your mouth when your stomach suddenly tightens, and you spend the next five minutes noisily throwing up in the kitchen trash can. It's everything in your stomach and then some, and you put the lid back on it hard and tell yourself to remember to take it out tomorrow. After that, you rinse your mouth out in the sink again out again, then pull the Murphy bed down from the wall, turn off the lights, strip down to your underwear, and lie on your back in the bed, staring up into the darkness. After what feels like a very long time, Bucky starts to snore.
In the morning, you wake because Bucky has helped himself to your pantry and refrigerator and is making up two plates of toast and coffee. He also went out to get the newspaper, and you come over to the corner of the apartment that acts as the kitchen and get plates down. He never thinks to look for them down low, but where the hell else are you going, Steve Rogers, going to put plates? Bucky winces when he sits down to eat. He winces again when he tries to put toast in his mouth.
Sunlight is pouring in through the windows. The only table you have in the place is a card table set up next to the windows. There are two chairs there because Bucky actually eats a fair number of meals here.
"I got the shit kicked out of me last night, right?" Bucky says.
You look back at him. "Yes."
"Christ," he says and gingerly brings his hand up to the scabs on the side of his face. "Was it worth it? I don't remember anything."
You don't say anything for a while, then say, staring, looking down at the newspaper talking about dam-buster bombs and showing planes lined up on an airfield, "No."
A month later, when Abraham Erskine offers you a chance at a new body, a chance to go to war, and you take it.
1. Even more than most productions, this was the result of
destronomics saying filthy, filthy things until I broke down and wrote it. I told her that I was curious about pre-Serum sex between Steve and Bucky, possibly including alley sex, and she spun out (i) the girl that Bucky really shouldn't have messed with, (ii) the bouncer that doesn't let them in, as well as chunks of the dialogue that Bucky and the bouncer exchange, (iii) the fight between Bucky and the bouncer, including the line about punch numbers, (iv) the two weeks which was MUCH MORE HEARTBREAKING IN HER VERSION, (iv) the vodka and Steve turning red from it, as well as Bucky's joke about Steve not ordering alcohol at bars, and (v) mouthing Bucky's dick through his pants. I KEEP REMEMBERING MORE THINGS THAT I GOT FROM HER.
2. During those two weeks, for the record, Steve totally doesn't talk to Bucky. He just. Drops off the face of the earth with respect to Bucky.
3. Yes, Steve is on the fine, awful gray line of dubconning/having sex with a Bucky who can't really consent. Yes, Steve intentionally has sex with Bucky when Bucky is so drunk that he won't remember.
4. Yes, Steve is not really dealing well with having been physically and sexually assaulted.
5. Thorough and extensive research (read: checking the "vodka" entry on Wikipedia, followed by a general Googling) did not indicate whether people were drinking vodka widely in the US in the 1940's. So I went with homebrew liquor. See: flag of historical inaccuracy.
6. In my mind, this all ends up OK because seventy-years-later Steve tells Natasha his roughly four phrases of babysitting Russian out on her, and she laughs like she hasn't laughed in years.
This entry was originally posted at http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/193252.html, and has
comments.
One night, you go alone to that bar.
...
One night, two weeks later, Bucky gets into fight with a bouncer at that bar. Not one of the big places, not a fancy place, just a neighborhood spot a subway stop or two away. They've been there plenty of times before, and the guy says the place is full. You suggest that the two of you should leave, but Bucky decides to be an asshole and snakes his head around and sees plenty of empty seats, plenty of empty floor space, so he pushes the issue. He wants a drink. This is a place that sells drinks. Have they gone out of the business of selling drinks?"
The bouncer looks from Bucky's face, then to yours. Back to you.
"I'm not sure he's eighteen."
"I'm not sure your vision doesn't need checking. He's twenty-two. We've been here before. Steve is the asshole who always orders a ginger ale."
There is a period of silence; inside the bar, some people are laughing, and a car passes behind them. It rained in the afternoon, and the sidewalk and asphalt all smell wet. Neon signs line the street. You puts your hand on Bucky's arm. "Come on. There're -- "
The bouncer looks at your hand on Bu --
...
One night, you go alone. Maybe Bucky was working the night shift. Maybe Bucky had a date. Maybe you just wanted some time alone, so you bring your sketchbook, the small one that fits in your coat pocket, but when you get there, you don't feel like drawing any. You lay it out in front of you, closed, with the pencil stuck in the spine. You nurse a beer; you eat some peanuts; you listen to people talk around you, and after thirty-five minutes, a man comes and sits down on the stool next to you.
"I know you," he says. He has a beer in his hand. Possibly not his first of the night.
"Do you?" you say and take a pretzel from the bowl.
"You come here sometimes."
"I do," you say, letting yourself be a little bit of a punk. "I'm here now."
He looks at you for another second. "You were here -- a week and a half ago with a guy."
You look back at him, take a bite of your pretzel
Eventually, it comes out that Bucky --
...
There is a period of silence; inside the bar, some people are laughing, and outside the bar, a car passes. It rained in the afternoon, and the sidewalk and asphalt all smell wet. Neon signs line the street. You puts your hand on Bucky's arm. "Come on. There're -- "
The bouncer looks at your hand on Bucky's shoulder, then up at your face.
"Take your business elsewhere," he says.
"You don't want our business?" Bucky says, in his most asshole voice. "You don't want our money?"
Eventually, Bucky takes the first swing.
...
Eventually, it comes out that the girl Bucky ditched you for that night was this guy's girlfriend.
Eventually, he pushes the yelling too far, and you tell him that he should stop asking you where your best friend lives or works, and maybe he should take it up with his girlfriend if she keeps going off with men, and then he says that oh, he has. He yells that last part, and the bar is still just about empty, but the two men down at the end, talking and smoking quietly, stop talking and smoking. They look down: you look over at this hands, at the red flush on his face, which is visible even in the half-lighting of the bar. The way he is leaning forward at you, eyes narrowed.
"Is that what you did?" you say. He has what, you estimate, eight inches in height on you. Probably at least sixty pounds in weight. Do you remember anything about the girl from that night? Small. Dark hair, dark eyes, bright lipstick. Once she and Bucky started talking to each other and tuning you out, there wasn't anything for you to do, so you have a sketch in your notebook. Two figures, an exercise in thinking about negative space; you'd been thinking about filling in the background with soft black pencil afterwards to capture the lighting, and when you were doing the line work in the bar, you remember frowning at the paper, trying to capture the girl's quick, nervous way of holding herself and her quick, nervous way of looking to the side by only moving her eyes.
The memory of that nervousness -- it makes you say something that you shouldn't.
"Big man," you say, beer in your hand. "Maybe if you didn't hit your woman, she wouldn't go out looking."
The man looks at you, asks if you're willing to say that to him outside. Are you? You look down at your beer, your notebook. You curse yourself briefly, then take a deep breath. What can you do at this point? Even after all these times, your heart is beating a little fast. You'll admit to being a little bit scared.
"I'll say it anywhere you want," you say and finish your beer down and slide off your stool. You come up to just about his shoulder, maybe his jaw, but you say the words very clearly, very slowly, and you tilt your head back so you can look him in the eye.
"You're a bully who hits women," you say. "And now, if you want, we'll go outside."
...
What can you do? Bucky gets the first punch in, but the bouncer is in the business of getting the second, third, fourth, and all the way up to the twentieth consecutive punch. Bucky goes down like a sack of bricks, and the bouncer gets a kick in, for good measure; Bucky insists that he can still go out, that he's fine, and you're arguing with him because you can actually see his face and what he looks like. Thankfully, half a block down, he goes legless, and you can't quite catch him, and you reach into his pocket and take out his pay for the week and dip into it to get a cab back for both of you. You tip handsomely because Bucky is in -- in a bad way.
Thankfully, him being in a bad way also means he doesn't notice how quiet you are on the ride home.
"What the fuck was his problem?" Bucky says as you half-walk, half-drag him up the stairs to your place. "I mean, what was his deal?"
You prop him against the wall while you get the door; he sort of leans his head back and pinches his nose, though you're pretty sure that all the blood in his head is already all over his shirt.
"How much did you have before we went out?" you ask, and he flops his arm back over you again for the final stretch to your couch. You have a small apartment, thankfully. Being an artist, even one gainfully employed at an ad agency, does not exactly pay, as Bucky has pointed out. He makes better money than you do.
So: your apartment is small. You drop Bucky onto your couch and then straighten up, rubbing your shoulder, because Bucky is heavy and roughly, you estimate, forty percent legless.
You turn on the small lamp on the side table and whistle. "He did a number on you, Bucky."
Bucky tries to laugh, but he has a split lip, a black eye, a face half-covered in blood, and assorted scratches and scrapes all down the left side of his face from meeting the brick wall of the bar, courtesy of punches twelve through sixteen. "We're young. We're men. What is Friday night for?" He tries to lift his arms over his head, but that hurts, so he stops and winces, and wincing hurts, too.
From experience, you know that it's only going to get worse, once the bruises really get a chance to settle, and you look at him for another moment, then go and get supplies. Disinfectant. Cotton balls. And because Bucky is going to need it, the bottle of burn-your-eyes, scald-your-throat, steal-your-breath Russian homebrew that your upstairs neighbors gave you for your birthday because you watch their kids sometimes.
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you.
...
"Jesus, that hur -- " Bucky pushes your hand and the cotton ball dipped in disinfectant away.
"You think it doesn't hurt when I do this? I usually have to do this myself. Hold still."
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you.
...
"If you're going to be a coward about it, here. Have some of this."
You hand Bucky the bottle, watch him pop the home-sealed cork off, and watch him take a long, long pull at the bottle, and come up gasping. His eyes are watering.
"What is that?"
"Something that'll make you hold still. You need more to stay still, you take it."
...
You come up to the guy's shoulder. He has sixty pounds on you and is by all appearances, a mean, mean drunk.
What do you think about when you're getting the shit beaten out of you? Not a lot. Pain has a way of stealing thoughts, and this beating hurts. He didn't wait for the two of you to square up and get your fists in front; instead, the two of you were in the alleyway. You wanted to walk a few steps further to get around the trash cans so that at least you wouldn't fall over them, but he took the opportunity to shove you into them. You went down; you tried to get back up, but met his fist. You went down.
He made a move, as if to throw the trash can at you, and after the fist, you were almost sort of hoping for it, because who wants to administer a long, bloody, profoundly painful beating to a guy who is covered in trash? It tends to end in everybody smelling like garbage, but no, he doesn't. He bends down and hauls you up by the shirt with his left and punches you with his right in the face. Your nose is bleeding. He got you in the eye. You manage to get a hit in, so that he lets go of your shirt, but when you stagger back, he kicks you in the stomach. You double up, and you realize that you've come up against the back of the alley. You feel brick wall under the fingers of your left hand, and brick wall under the fingers of your right. Gap of space between your shoulder blades. The fact that both of your shoulders touch brick, too, means you're well and truly backed into the corner.
Your vision is a little shaky from how hard he hit you in the head, but you look to your left. You look to your right. Your hands are shaking. You look down by your feet, even though that means the whole world sways and you can feel the blood from your nose run over your lips faster. Is there anything you can pick up and use as a weapon? Pipe? Maybe a board? It looks like the bar and the restaurant on the other side break down their pallets here, so maybe you can get something and at least threaten him with it. Get him to back off.
Nothing. Leaves. Some blown trash.
You take two steps forward, so that you aren't exactly dead against the corner, but your legs are unsteady. You might have a concussion at this point, and everything, everywhere just hurts. The mouth of the alley is a long, long way aways, and you're already breathless and almost on your knees from trying to walk two steps. But you do see a couple small rocks. You take the biggest of them and just manage to close your fingers around it when he catches up with you and kicks you in the stomach again.
Where do you have to go except for backwards, back into the corner? You try to keep ahold of the rock in your hand, but your ears are ringing. There is an electric light in this part of the alley, orangey and not too bright normally, just enough light so that the kitchen and bar staff can take trash out with tripping, but with it is almost painfully bright to you on the left side of your face. Almost definitely a concussion. You've been hit in the head a couple times. You hit the back of your head when he threw you into the trash cans. You have a vague memory of your mother telling you about the signs of concussions,. Do you have one? The man picks you up by the shirt collar. He pulls you up to something like standing position, and you wobble on your feet for a second before trying to hit him with your hand. Not the hand with the stone in it, actually, because you're too disoriented. Your fingers go slack; you actually drop it and spend a half-second thinking about how you should bend down and pick it up, because it's the closest thing you have to a fighting chance, but he hits you again and the world explodes into lights and pain.
You manage to make contact with one of your hands against his stomach, but it isn't enough to get him off you, and in return, he hauls back and hits you in the stomach again, right in the solar plexus. You try to get away from him, but somehow, you're down on your stomach. How did you end up on the ground? You try to get back up on your knees, but it doesn't work, and he grabs you by the collar and hauls you up onto your knees. Your heels are against the wall; there isn't anywhere for you to run.
It's hard to make out his face.
"Your friend is an asshole," he says.
You're in a lot of pain, or you'd sort of agree, and then he shakes you. You make a noise that you can't be proud of.
He hits you again, possibly just to hear you make that noise. You do. You can't stop yourself, and he drops you back onto your own heels, and you sway, but having the walls so close is actually a help. It keeps you from going flat onto your face, and you see the guy's hand coming in, and you assume that it's the concussion that makes it look like it's going so slow, but he's not actually trying to punch you. He is saying something about learning consequences. Consequences? Women. You realize his fingers are, in fact, moving slowly.
A series of things things happen: first, the hand is moving that slowly. Instead of hitting you in the face, they go to the back of your jaw and grip you there, hard enough, painfully enough that it cuts through the general pain in your face, in your stomach, in the back of your head. He is standing directly in front of you, he blots out all of the light in the world except for what comes over his shoulders from the light at the back of the alley.
You realize his other hand is --
...
"Jesus Christ," Bucky says, bottle in hand and staring at it. He is still sitting on the couch; his face still looks terrible. "What is this?"
"Like I said." You're working on the knuckles of his right hand. They're scraped to hell and back, so you're dabbing disinfectant on them. "My neighbors upstairs make it."
"What is it made out of?"
"Potatoes? I think. Sometimes, fruit. They actually distill it. Have a setup and everything."
"Potatoes? Fruit?"
"Flex your hand," you say to Bucky. He looks at you disbelievingly, bottle still in his hand. "Try to make a fist. Broken bones? Nerve damage? My mother was a nurse, remember?"
He sighs, but flexes his hand, then takes a shot from the bottle before you start on his left hand, which is actually scratched up worse than the right, because he got kicked a lot while lying on the ground.
...
He is standing directly in front of you, he blots out all of the light in the world except for what comes over his shoulders from the light at the back of the alley.
You realize his other hand is undoing his belt buckle. He is right handed, you've realized, and is holding your mouth open with his right hand, so he's a little clumsy. You try to look up at him, say something, but the pressure on your jaw increases, and you just open your mouth wider.
You close your eyes, brace your yourself, and try not to make any more sounds that you can't be proud of.
...
Your neighbors upstairs are emigrants from Russia by way of France. The father is in a munitions factory; the wife sews buttons at a place that assembles shirts for the Army. The oldest daughter married out of the family; the fourteen year old daughter does most of the work of watching her three younger brothers, but they can get a little much, even for the mother. You met the family one morning when you were leaving your apartment, and just barely managed to keep the three year old from launching himself down the stairs. He was on the run from having his face washed; his mother and sister were in full pursuit.
So you help watch the kids sometimes, to give the parents a break. To give the daughter a break. You don't mind, even though their apartment is only slightly larger than yours, and you're sitting at the table with the seven year old and the nine year old boys, watching them do your homework. The three year old is doing something with your shoelaces that you're going to regret letting him do, and the radio, an older model with as much fuzz as signal, is playing a serial about brave soldiers abroad. Dinner warms in the oven, and the daughter comes and stands by your elbow as you look at your sketchbook, trying to figure out what you want to work on next.
"Who's that?" she says.
Her mother speak some English, but the children are all Brooklyn born and bred, so the daughter doesn't sound any different from any other girl in Brooklyn, though when she yells at her brothers, it's always in Russian. You've picked up a couple phrases. Stop that. Drop it now. You're getting a handle on you filthy beast and I'm telling mom.
"My boss at work," you say. She turns the page.
"And this?"
"My friend, Bucky."
"I recognize him. He comes over sometimes," she says, with a tone in her voice, and you grin a little and look over at her with your eyebrows up.
"What?" she says and smacks you on the shoulder. "I recognize him. That's all."
She turns the next page and says, in a slightly strangled voice, "Who's that with him?"
You look down. Two figures, worked around in black soft pencil, faces standing out against it. He's whispering something in her ear. She's smiling. "Oh," you say. "Just somebody he met at a bar."
Her face goes flat and a little sulky -- not not quite sulky. Disappointed is a better word, and the hand she'd smacked you with goes slack.
"Hey," you say, as gently as you can without making her angry. "Hey, you want me to draw you?
...
Bucky has worked his way more than a couple fingers through the bottle, and he is, at this point, well and truly drunk. You had a suspicion he got started before you met him at the subway station; neither of you got anything at the bar for obvious reasons, but the stuff from upstairs is ridiculously strong even if it is just -- homemade.
"What do you use it for?" Bucky says. "I can't imagine you can drink a lot of this."
You look back at him, flatly.
"It's strong stuff," he says, and there is a long moment of silence. You have a small apartment with thin walls; your downstairs neighbors are having a party. Someone on your floor is having a fight.
"When I'm in a pinch and the shop is closed, I use it to thin paint," you say, finally.
Bucky crows, tries to stand in triumph, but winces and sits back down quickly, because apparently, he's twisted his ankle. You slide onto the floor and undo his shoelaces, ease his feet out, so that you can see what the damage is.
...
How far does it get in the alleyway? The guy who has been beating the shit out of you makes plenty of noise about how if your asshole friend is going to take his woman, he's going to make a woman out of you. On the one hand, even though you're in too much pain to really fight him, he is drunk. He is very drunk. He smells like a whole crate of whiskey.
On the other hand, even very drunk, he's been able to hit you until you're kneeling in front of him while he puts his dick into your mouth. You push back a little, but the hand on your jaw is strong, remorseless. You make a noise in your throat from fear and struggle some more, putting your hands on his thighs and trying to push away, but you're dazed. Your vision is blurry. It hurts every time you take a breath, and you're worried he may have cracked some of your ribs.
How far does he get with it? How much noise do you make? Is he actually able to get hard? After all, he isn't actually a man who wants to get a blowjob from another man. He just wants to control; he wants to have power, and you know he likes it when you push back and struggle, so you go limp, try to make yourself just breathe through your nose and not breathe in any part of the way he smells. Maybe it isn't wise all the time, in every situation or even in most or even in any situation at all, but it works this time, though you don't really have a choice. You were having a hard time effectively resisting before.
So in the end, does he just shove you back against the wall and piss all --
At what point does the bouncer come by to check if you're all right?
...
Two weeks go by. It turns out he didn't crack or even bruise any of your ribs. He just knocked you around a little. Your torso is a big mass of bruises for a while, and you're dizzy all weekend, but nothing worse than that. Nothing permanent. nothing bruised. Maybe your tolerance for beatings isn't as good as you think it is. Afterwards, you go home, dose yourself with a little of the moonshine from upstairs, and wipe your own face up as best you can in the mirror above your sink.
"Jesus Christ," Ekaterina says, the next time you go up to give her a break. She goes by Katie at school and likes it better, but you're under strict instructions never to call her that when her parents are around, because they get upset. Her mother is just heading out the door, heading out for the night shift, and she shoots her daughter a look for using language until she sees your face.
Ekaterina had let you in; the mother sits you on one of the kitchen chairs and bustles about, boiling up some water for -- something.
"No, ma'm," you say, trying to squirm out from under her hands. "I'm fine. I'm -- "
The mother looks at the daughter. The daughter looks at the mother. The three boys are arrayed against the wall, wide-eyed and, for once, quiet.
The daughter looks at the mother. The mother looks at the daughter. The daughter says a few words in Russian, and you catch the English phrase fired if you're late again. There are a few more words in Russian, and then the girl says, in accentless English, "I promise, Mom. I've got it."
So the mother goes, and you take a deep breath.
"How did it happen?" the daughter asks, once the footsteps down the hallway are gone and the boys start playing again.
"Alleyway. Behind a bar," you say, wondering if the reason why you feel lightheaded is because the concussion hasn't entirely healed, and she goes and boils water so she can give you hot towels to put on your face.
The family is very fond of you; Ekaterina explains, while putting hot compresses on your face that feel nice and smell nice, but aren't going to do anything -- she explains that her older sister's name is Irina, and older than Irina, there was a cousin that had lost his parents. He had been like an oldest son to her parents. Ekaterina never met him, but he died in the journey from Russia to France, and her parents sometimes think of you as a blonder, shorter, scrawnier version of him. You had laughed and said thanks, you think, and you laugh again when Ekaterina shows up outside your door a few days later.
"So you won't have to do your drinking in bars," she says. "It's from the stock that Dad put up last year."
You laugh and hold an ice bag over your eye and use your other hand to take the bottle from her.
...
"No sprain," you say to Bucky. Both of his shoes are off. He still has socks on his feet.
"You sure?" he says, a little skeptically.
"Sure as I can be. It doesn't hurt when I do this, does it?"
Bucky admits that it doesn't, and you're down on the floor, between his knees. He is sitting up on the sofa with the bottle of moonshine in his hand; he's gone almost half of the way through it, and is lying back in a boneless way that you recognize. You look at his face, bruises, the wide mess of his face where it got dragged along the wall for a while, the lip split in multiple places. You look at the bottle of moonshine in his hand. Bucky sees you looking up at him and smiles, sort of blearily.
You lean forward, and --
...
The bouncer doesn't help you off the ground. He tells the guy to go home, then walks out of the alley, back very stiff, and you sit in the ground for a few minutes, then take off your coat and your shirt, scrub your face and hair and arms as much as you can on a clean part of them, and then ball them and drop them into the nearest trash can. You walk a third of the way home and come across a closed auto shop with a hose out front, presumably for when they wash cars, and you turn that on yourself. The water is shockingly cold, but you screw up your eyes and run it over your face and hair and arms, and then do it again and again. If anybody sees you, they'll just assume you drank too much and got sick over yourself and got hosed down. You're shivering afterwards, but it's already late May, so it isn't too cold, and at least you no longer --
You arrive back at your building. You climb two flights of stairs, lock all the locks behind you, and slump against the door.
You breathe.
...
You lean forward, and you breathe. You look up Bucky's legs, and he doesn't move besides blinking at you, sort of slowly. The bottle is still in his hand, and you judge the level in the bottle one more time, then lick your lips.
He still doesn't move, and you press your mouth to his dick through his pants. You breathe.
Bucky sighs and leans back on the sofa.
...
How many times have you done this? No times at all, either with Bucky or with anyone else. You aren't counting what happened in the alley. How many times have you thought about doing this with Bucky? You can't come up with a number, because you've never let your mind go very far before making yourself think about something else. Bucky told you the first time he'd had it done to him; he was laughing and trying to explain the mechanics and giggling every time he said her mouth, and you have been trying to push it out of your mind at odd moments ever since. What would he sound like? What would his face look like? You don't want yourself to ask these questions, but you lick his dick through the fabric of his pants, feel him shift a little, and your breath catches.
You close your eyes. You try not to smell wet asphalt or overturned garbage. Bucky shifts on the couch and moves a little, as if to touch you.
Are you going to let --
...
You reach up and start to undo his belt, but when Bucky doesn't stop you, your hands falter.
"Give me the bottle," you say, putting one knee on the sofa. Bucky, wordlessly, hands it to you. You take a slug of it, choke a little, maybe choke a lot, feel tears come to your eyes, and hand it back to him. You feel yourself flush from the neck on down. Your tongue and throat burn. "Your turn."
His eyes are on your face; they look a little glazed, but he takes a sip.
"Bucky?" you say.
His eyes are still on your face, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't even raise a hand to sort of acknowledge that you've spoken, so you take another drink from the bottle before putting it back on the sofa next to his hand and kneel back between his knees. Your hands shake, but you get his belt undone.
...
Bucky gets easy when he drinks. Bucky, when he has drunk enough that his eyes glaze over and he stops talking, but can still follow things with his eyes, never remembers what happened the next morning.
How far do you go? Farther than you think you'll be able to take it. You get his belt undone, and you pull his pants and underwear down. You are mindful of teeth, like Bucky mentioned when he was talking about the girl, and you slide your lips over your teeth and put him in your mouth. When he starts to get hard in your mouth, you make a noise, and he gets harder, and you grip the base of his dick with your hand and slide your mouth.
Bucky puts his hand in your hair. If the first touch had been hard, you might have panicked and stopped, but Bucky touches your hair gently. You pull all the way off and lick the tip of his dick, rolling it under your tongue, and he sighs and slides his hand down your cheek to touch your jaw, all the way at the back, so you have to quit for a moment and fight down the fear and take another drink from the bottle.
He takes another drink, too, and after a moment of looking at his mouth, split in multiple places, still faintly stained with blood, you get back on your knees and go back to it.
You go farther than you think. In fact, you get all the way to Bucky coming in your mouth.
...
Are you going to let that man in the alley change anything?
You don't like bul --
...
Afterwards, you help Bucky get his pants back on and put the belt back on and take the bottle out of his hand. You roll him onto his side against the back of the couch, then go over to the sink to rinse your mouth. You're straightening up and wiping your mouth when your stomach suddenly tightens, and you spend the next five minutes noisily throwing up in the kitchen trash can. It's everything in your stomach and then some, and you put the lid back on it hard and tell yourself to remember to take it out tomorrow. After that, you rinse your mouth out in the sink again out again, then pull the Murphy bed down from the wall, turn off the lights, strip down to your underwear, and lie on your back in the bed, staring up into the darkness. After what feels like a very long time, Bucky starts to snore.
In the morning, you wake because Bucky has helped himself to your pantry and refrigerator and is making up two plates of toast and coffee. He also went out to get the newspaper, and you come over to the corner of the apartment that acts as the kitchen and get plates down. He never thinks to look for them down low, but where the hell else are you going, Steve Rogers, going to put plates? Bucky winces when he sits down to eat. He winces again when he tries to put toast in his mouth.
Sunlight is pouring in through the windows. The only table you have in the place is a card table set up next to the windows. There are two chairs there because Bucky actually eats a fair number of meals here.
"I got the shit kicked out of me last night, right?" Bucky says.
You look back at him. "Yes."
"Christ," he says and gingerly brings his hand up to the scabs on the side of his face. "Was it worth it? I don't remember anything."
You don't say anything for a while, then say, staring, looking down at the newspaper talking about dam-buster bombs and showing planes lined up on an airfield, "No."
A month later, when Abraham Erskine offers you a chance at a new body, a chance to go to war, and you take it.
1. Even more than most productions, this was the result of
destronomics saying filthy, filthy things until I broke down and wrote it. I told her that I was curious about pre-Serum sex between Steve and Bucky, possibly including alley sex, and she spun out (i) the girl that Bucky really shouldn't have messed with, (ii) the bouncer that doesn't let them in, as well as chunks of the dialogue that Bucky and the bouncer exchange, (iii) the fight between Bucky and the bouncer, including the line about punch numbers, (iv) the two weeks which was MUCH MORE HEARTBREAKING IN HER VERSION, (iv) the vodka and Steve turning red from it, as well as Bucky's joke about Steve not ordering alcohol at bars, and (v) mouthing Bucky's dick through his pants. I KEEP REMEMBERING MORE THINGS THAT I GOT FROM HER.
2. During those two weeks, for the record, Steve totally doesn't talk to Bucky. He just. Drops off the face of the earth with respect to Bucky.
3. Yes, Steve is on the fine, awful gray line of dubconning/having sex with a Bucky who can't really consent. Yes, Steve intentionally has sex with Bucky when Bucky is so drunk that he won't remember.
4. Yes, Steve is not really dealing well with having been physically and sexually assaulted.
5. Thorough and extensive research (read: checking the "vodka" entry on Wikipedia, followed by a general Googling) did not indicate whether people were drinking vodka widely in the US in the 1940's. So I went with homebrew liquor. See: flag of historical inaccuracy.
6. In my mind, this all ends up OK because seventy-years-later Steve tells Natasha his roughly four phrases of babysitting Russian out on her, and she laughs like she hasn't laughed in years.
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