Prompt Post 1

[capkinkmod]

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At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

As of May 3, 2014, the spoiler policy is no longer in effect.

Update, April 22, 2014:
For fills, please use the following format:
Fill: Title
Including the pairing, warnings/CNTW, and any other information after the fill and title in the subject line or in the first line of the comment.

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Fill: Remote Part I, PG (for now)

[(Anonymous)]

Vignette, hopefully the first of several...


* * *


He could handle the cold. He'd spent years frozen, and anyway his body didn't really feel the cold; he could tell the cold was there, but noticing it and feeling it were two different things.

What he had a hard time with was the solitude. Wherever Bucky was, he was alone. Had been alone, for what seemed ages now. It was an entirely different kind of cold. Steve knew, because Bucky knew, that when he emerged from the freezer, he would be among people again, and yet alone.

I am changed; I am not what I was. There is nothing on Earth like me.

Steve woke in the night with these thoughts in his mind, woke with tears streaming down his face, reaching out to nothing in the darkness. Bucky, I know exactly how you feel. You are not alone. I'm like you. I'm here for you. Not that being here did either of them any good; Steve needed to be wherever Bucky was. Please God let me find him. He'd said the short prayer so many times that it came to mind every few minutes now. Let me find him. If only there were more information to go on... most of the time, Steve knew that Bucky was frozen in a chamber, and nothing more.

Steve also woke in the night with sharp pains running through his arm, pain like lightning that sped up and down and never localized, so you could never get used to it. That was worse, because then he knew that Bucky was awake. Awake, and doing terrible things somewhere. Somewhere.

The touch of his mind was so different, since Hydra had changed him. Steve would have thought that nothing in existence could change Bucky's essential nature; he had relied upon that nature all his life. Of the two of them, Bucky was more solidly himself. Steve was more adaptable. It had it's benefits; he had reconciled himself to his new body within minutes, and the new age he lived in had taken all of his adaptability to face. But for Bucky, having his body changed meant a feeling of alien distance from himself at all times. That helped him in his current work, but it was hell for Steve to experience his friend changing without the resources for tolerating that change. All Bucky ever felt (when he was awake) was that he wasn't supposed to be whatever he was, and there was no way to fix it.

Steve felt Bucky's frozen prison. He felt Bucky's torture. He felt the way his mind was reworked and rewritten, again and again until neither of them felt at home inside a brain that had once been as pure and solid and beautiful as a diamond. He felt Bucky shattered and broken and glued back together.

Steve felt Bucky kill, and that was the worst thing of all.

He was never sure who the victims were. Sometimes the news told him, the timing too close to be coincidence, the methodology too familiar. After several years, he had stopped obsessing over stopping the killings; there was no way to do so until he found Bucky.

One thing that was reassuring and maddening at once: he could feel Bucky's sense of the wrongness of what he was doing. No matter how Hydra warped and molded him, they couldn't change him completely. But they could change him enough to force him to act the way they wanted him to. Deep inside Bucky's mind, a shadow of his old self was screaming in agony at the things he saw himself doing. Steve could feel it, could feel the way Bucky's two selves refused to reconcile, could feel the way it caused a poisonous ingrowth of hate and fear that grew and grew. Steve sensed that Bucky would not survive for much longer like this. The frozen periods were all that had kept him alive. Before long, even that wouldn't work anymore. Bucky's mind would destroy itself. If that happened, Steve knew that it would destroy his own mind... that was almost reassuring, to know that if Bucky descended into madness, so would he.

Let me find him. Please let me find him. Every cell in Steve's body was bent to the task, every atom of his soul. Loki had been a distraction; once he was finished, Steve pursued his search with renewed urgency.

Half his soul was locked in ice, and when it wasn't, it was tainted by an utter repugnance for its own existence. Bucky hated himself. He hated himself.

Steve lay awake in the night, feeling either ice surrounding him, or far far worse, feeling air and light and the requirement to kill, and Steve called out to Bucky. I love you. Don't hate yourself; I love you, I have always loved you, I will always love you. You are my heart. Please, please don't destroy yourself. Someone loves you, no matter what you have become, no matter what you have done. He would repeat it in a whisper hoarse with tears: I love you. I love you. I love you.

I WILL find you.

Re: Fill: Remote Part I, PG (for now)

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. This is excellent and I just...I don't have words to describe how much I love this.

Re: Fill: Remote Part I, PG (for now)

[(Anonymous)]

Heh, thanks! It's been a looooooong time since I've written for a fandom, it's refreshing to come back to it. I only just saw the movie last week for the first time, and I was happy to see that there was still some recent activity on the kink meme.