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c-is-for-circinate · 7 years

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More Unfinished Fic Rescued From Drafts

I started writing this in response to a prompt from @raisel-the-riveter at LEAST three years ago, and have not managed to touch it since. But upon rereading, it’s not half bad, and hey--the world always needs more BuckyNat.

So. Bucky/Natasha post Winter Soldier, long before Civil War ever occurred. Rate it a hard R or a very soft NC-17. IIRC, the prompt that kicked this whole thing off was ‘spanking’.

SHIELD didn't know about all of Natasha's boltholes for some very good reasons. 'In case all of SHIELD turns out to be compromised by HYDRA and Natasha has to help blow all of their files wide open' wasn't supposed to be one of them, but unforseen contingencies. Natasha's good at them.

That's what it is, when something scratches at the door of the two-bedroom shack on the outskirts of Miami, where none of the neighbors live close enough to give her a second glance and the roof still leaks from the last hurricane. An unforseen contingency.

Last time Natasha saw the Winter Soldier, he was trying to kill her, and coming a lot closer than she likes in people who apparently know how to find her hiding places. Steve's been after him for almost two months.

Steve's a smart guy, but ferreting out a trained assassin when they don't want to be found, well. That's work for another trained assassin.

The Winter Soldier is wearing a light windbreaker and gloves even though it's September in Miami, completely hiding his metal arm, and also a pair of blue jeans. Natasha counts at least two guns on him, not to mention any other knives or more exotic weapons he might have. There's a sunburn peeling on the bridge of his nose.

He doesn't move--not to attack, not to flinch away, nothing. "Bucky?" Natasha tries on a hunch.

"I guess so," he says.

Natasha spent weeks sharing quarters with Bruce, around the thing with Loki. She knows how to exist in a confined space with somebody she's afraid of.

"Are you coming in?" she asks. Bucky doesn't come through the door until she steps back to give him room. He shuts it behind him.

Bucky Barnes is a man on a memorial wall in a museum in Washington D.C. He remembers bits and pieces of that man's life, but it happened to somebody else. Even if it really was him, it was long enough ago and far enough away that it happened to somebody else.

The Winter Soldier is a perfect assassin who follows orders. All orders.

He realized, somewhere between DC and Mexico, that there were no more orders to follow. Somewhere around the Bahamas he figured out that he could still follow his own. By the time he hit Florida again, he'd decided that he would only follow his own orders. Ever.

He needs a name, and he keeps thinking of himself as Bucky. Steve always called him Bucky, even in DC when they met again, after all that time.

Yeah. He remembers Steve.

Steve's the brightest, most sunlit part of every grayed-out ancient memory. Steve is real. Steve is maybe too real.

Natasha Romanoff is real, too. She can fill Bucky in on everything he's been missing about his own life and the decades passing him by. She can tell him about Steve. She knows about his old life, even though it all happened forty years before she was born.

She hides her tracks like he was trained to hide his, and everything she holds in her hand looks like a weapon. She's real in a different way than Steve. She fits into the world the Winter Soldier knows, the one that's not seventy years past and dead. She makes sense.

He needs to sleep somewhere, and this house is as safe as the Black Widow can make it. The only one he's in danger from here is her. He's not afraid enough of his own death to let her keep him from sleeping.

After the third night, he moves the chair away from underneath the doorknob. If she is going to come for him, he'd rather she do it sooner than later. He can probably take her on anyway.

Bucky doesn't want her to call Steve, so Natasha doesn't call Steve.

It's not quite as simple as that--she owes Steve a debt several times over, and Natasha might actually go so far as to call them friends. On the other hand, if she did call Steve, she wouldn't be doing him any favors. Bucky would be out the door and in the wind before Natasha even hung up the phone. She knows his kind.

Natasha knows the look on the man; she's seen it out of the corner of her eye for fleeting seconds in mirrors, before she fixed her expression into something more safely neutral. He's a dog without anybody holding the other end of his leash. It's a heady feeling, the very first time. She remembers.

Natasha's had half a dozen masters over the years, and she'll have another, once she finds some employer she's willing to trust after the end of SHIELD. She owns herself and she takes care of herself, but she knows her limitations, and she was trained and broken too well, too early. She needs somebody to point her. She's done this before and she can spend the few months on her own recognizance, fixing new covers and making sure she has safe places to go the next time everything falls down around her ears, but a freelance assassin is just a murderer for hire, and an assassin working entirely on her own is pretty much just a straight-up murderer. Sue her, Natasha likes to have a cause.

As far as she knows, Barnes hasn't been without a master since they first made him into the Winter Soldier. Before that, he was property of the US army, and maybe of Steve, if Natasha's got all the pieces together right. This might be the first time in his whole life he's free from everybody but the contents of his own head.

No wonder he's not ready to see Steve yet. Natasha can respect that.

He'll figure it out sooner or later, when he realizes how much of a burden it is to carry every single decision on his own. He's been an assassin for seventy years, in fits and spurts. He can't stop moving. Sooner or later he'll figure out that it's easier to go somewhere if somebody you trust is holding a map.

Until then, no Steve. Just the two of them in this little house. He's got a laptop, but he actually has to ask Natasha for the wifi password. She borrowed some of Stark's tech to get the encryption, so it's not really Barnes's fault. Natasha probably wouldn't be able to hack it either. Probably.

Natasha crawls spider-like around the 'net, tracking down and sending out feelers towards old contacts, laying the groundwork for a new life now that she's trashed so much of the old one. She's got a file for the HYDRA intel she's been gthering, once she has backup or some kind of direction to go after it. Maybe once Clint resurfaces again, they can get on it together.

She makes it a point to leave the house at least a few times a week, goes grocery shopping, to the laundromat, to walk along the beach. Sometimes Barnes is there when she gets home, sometimes he's not. She doesn't ask where he goes, but if she orders pizza or cooks herself some dinner, she leaves the leftovers in a covered bowl for him, just in case.

He's like a cat. They never stop coming back, if you feed them.

He'd rather go out at night, when he attracts fewer eyes, and stay in during the day. He draws more attention for the jacket when it's hot and sunny out, and he'd draw plenty more if his arm were on full display. It's not the kind of prosthetic other people have. He's noticed.

His mission, the one he gave himself, is to find out everything he can about himself, his history, and Captain America. If he thinks of it that way, it makes sense. Once he gathers that intel, he can decide what his next mission is.

His mission is to have a mission. Nobody else can send him out to kill, maybe to die. He just needs to send himself. Once he figures out where he's going, he can leave Miami forever.

Natasha never asks where he's going when he leaves.

Barnes may not be ready for a new master yet, but if somebody doesn't give him a little direction at something, he's going to crack.

Natasha's not Steve. She doesn't do the kind of big-picture thinking Captain America can do. That's what SHIELD was for.

He's been pacing for ten minutes. Natasha plants herself at one end of his route and waits for him to stop in front of her.

"Do you need another way to burn off some of that energy?" she asks.

"Like what?" he asks. He's still more monosyllabic than most, but that's fine. Cuts down on the noise.

"Sex usually works, if you're interested," she says. Natasha kind of doubts Barnes has gotten laid in seventy years. She knows he could use it. The endorphins alone would probably do him some good.

"With you?" Barnes asks, and Natasha shrugs, twists her shoulders back to leave her chest wide open, breasts on display if he's interested. He's been watching her plenty lately, but she catches the glance he darts down at the low neck of her tank top.

"I don't see anybody else in the room," she says. "If you want to go pick up a prostitute, I'm not going to stop you, but you're not bringing them here."

She only has a tiny twitch around his collarbone as warning before Barnes has grabbed her left shoulder roughly, pulling her towards him. A second later, Natasha’s got them turned so the wall's at Barnes's back, her elbow at the soft part of his throat, lightning reflexes just enough to save the cartilage from being crushed. She was definitely right. It's been a long time for him.

"Nuh-uh," Natasha says. Between the two of them they've closed their distance down to a few inches, and he's still holding her shoulder. Natasha's spent a lot of time pressed up this close to people, more of it in fights than in bed. It's always interesting when it's a little of both. "My house, my bed, my rules."

Barnes licks his lips, and Natasha doesn't move. He doesn't want to deal with rules that aren't his own, fine. But he's going to need to start realizing sooner or later that trained assassins make shitty sovereigns of their own personal nations. If she's ever going to make good on her debt and get him to Steve, Natasha needs to start pushing him in that direction sooner than later. Now's as good a time as any to start.

"What are the rules?" he asks.

"You say stop, we stop," Natasha promises. "If I say stop and we don't stop, I can have a knife through your throat before you have time to wonder what went wrong." The Winter Soldier's a formidable opponent, but the man in front of her, Barnes with all his issues, too sex-stupid to pull back if she's trying to push him off? Natasha can take him.

"What other rules?" He hasn't moved yet, and neither has she. With all the tension building up, Natasha's starting to hope this really does happen, for her own gratification. She's not above recognizing that it would be hot.

"Don't try to choke me," Natasha says. "I want to be on top until I trust you more." He nods his head, or half nods, bobs it down without raising his chin back up.

"Anything else?" he asks.

"You tell me," says Natasha. Stepping all over the triggers of a killing machine like Barnes is a good way to get herself seriously injured in an incredibly embarrassing way.

"I'll let you know when we get there," he says, and then, "Stop."

Natasha pulls away immediately, takes her elbow from his throat and steps back a full stride so there's four feet between them as fast as he can blink. He does blink, but otherwise he watches her impassively. Calculating, Natasha figures.

"Well?" she asks.

"Fine," he says.

...

He's had sex before. He's starting to get used to the way his body remembers things his brain doesn't, yet, or might not at all. He doesn't remember sex, not a single girl (woman? man?), not even a clear sense memory of naked skin, but the movements settle familiar with every thrust.

All of his Winter Soldier reflexes feel wired into his bones, the kinds of moves and muscle memory that make it feel like, even now, his body belongs more to the people that programmed him than it does to him. This is different, distant, faraway, rusty, like all of Corporal James Barnes's memories are. He's re-learning something he used to know.

Some of it's new, he thinks. Natasha rolls over onto her back and grabs him by the shoulders, pushes him down until his head and neck are vulnerable, caught between the muscles of her thighs. She has enough strength here to snap a man's neck.

"Eat me out," she says, and he stops, looks up over the curves and planes of her body. "What, you don't remember how? Don't tell me you never learned."

This isn't familiar in the same way as Natasha sliding down, wet heat tight around his cock and rolling her hips along with his, but that's not why he's stopping. "I don't take orders from you," he says.

"Is that a rule?" Natasha asks.

He doesn't say anything. Not yet.

"Say stop and we'll stop," says Natasha, her fingers gentle combing through the long strands of his hair. "But I think you like having a mission." Her fingers twist around, tighten, and pull, hair yanking sharp on his scalp. "Eat me out, Barnes."

It's new, not Bucky's or the Winter Soldier's; the taste of Natasha sharp and musky on his tongue and the press of her thighs, just one twist of her body away from deadly, clamped tight around his ears, her fingers tight in his hair making it hurt just enough that it all feels real. She's like him, weapon without a master, more a razor than a rocket launcher, and she knows what a mission is worth.

She keeps her legs over his shoulders and her knees bent around his arms, trapping them so he can't use his hands at all without a fight he doesn't give, and keeps him there until she's come three times. His jaw aches, and the sides of his face where she's been squeezing him, and everywhere on his scalp that he's almost surprised to still have hair. He should cut it. He probably won't.

"Mmm, you like it when it hurts a little, don't you?" Natasha says, rolling sated and lazy on her side to watch him. "We can work with that."

The first time she fucks up and gives Barnes something that sounds too much like an order, out of bed, will probably be the last time she gets the chance. So Natasha doesn't fuck up.

It helps that she's not like Steve, really. Steve would care what Barnes does when he goes out by himself. Natasha doesn't. So long as Barnes doesn't get himself killed or captured, he's old and plenty well-trained enough to be responsible for his own well-being. So long as he doesn't go bringing danger down on this house and her in it, he doesn't really have any impact on hers. Beyond that, he can do what he likes. It's not her business. It's really not.

If he starts killing innocent people for sport, Natasha's going to have to take him down, but that's not the kind of thing she can stop by forbidding it. She's hoping it won't come to that--it'll be hard to deliver Barnes safely to Steve if he's dead, and even in this strange, confused state, she already knows he'd be one of her hardest kills yet. And, fine, she's starting to get fond of him, too, with all the time he's spent quietly hanging around and emptying her refrigerator. But honestly, the best thing she can do to prevent that, right now, is probably exactly what she's already doing: giving Barnes one place in his life where he gets to feel like a good, obedient little soldier whose world makes sense.

It's been pretty satisfying. Natasha knows a lot of subtle ways to exert control in bed, and she usually uses them all, but it's been a long time since she's been in a position to dom somebody who needed to be dommed quite as badly as Barnes obviously does.

"Let's try something different," she murmurs against his lips. She's half-sitting up, propped against the pillows at the head of the bed, and he's on all fours crawling up to meet her, and they both know as well as instinct that, with the springy unsteadiness of the bed as terrain, she's got the advantage in leverage and stability.

There's a spot on the back of his head, right above the base of his neck, and if Natasha fists her hand in his hair right there and tugs, tension bleeds out of every line of his body. She kisses him again, and Barnes' eyes go half-lidded and almost what Natasha would call trusting. One false move and he's still more than able to go for his claws, so Natasha keeps a couple of knives stashed closer to her hand than his on the bedside table, just in case, and doesn't move wrong. Every time they do this and she doesn't screw it up, she gains herself another couple of milliseconds of leeway and trust for next time.

"Like what?" Barnes asks.

"You like it when it hurts, right?" Natasha says. He rarely touches her with his metal arm--she doubts he has much feeling in it at all--but his right hand touches her cheek, her shoulder, gentle enough that it's probably some half-remembered snippet from Bucky. "I think we can do that for you."

He tugs back, and she relaxes her hand to let him, though he doesn't go far. "How?" he asks, and doesn't say no.

(She's never had to figure out if he'd been tortured, though sometimes she's wondered just how much. He's not asking 'how' so he can decide if he's up for it or not. He's asking to find out what he's in for. It's a mix of how much trust and control she's won so far and how much concern he has for his own well-being, how much he expects from the world at large to begin with. She'll take it.

It's not Natasha's job to teach Barnes about basic universal human decency and treating himself like something of fundamental value. She'll leave that to Steve. Right now she's just here to reassure him that the world hasn't tilted so completely off its axis as it seems.)

"You know me," Natasha says. "I don't even need to draw blood."

His jeans are somewhere on the floor, and Natasha's still in her bra and underwear but Barnes doesn't seem to bother with any. He's taller than her and lower down the bed, but she's got just enough distance to raise a hand and bring it down against the curve of his ass, a hard resounding smack. It probably hurt her palm more than it hurt him, but Natasha doesn't bother to give any sign.

Barnes jumps. There's a split second where she can see it in his eyes, the brief moment of fight-or-flight, before he relaxes into it. There they are.

"On your knees, over my lap," Natasha orders. He's swift to comply.

She planned for this, and the chances that the palm of her hand, with all its many nerve endings, can outlast the Winter Soldier's HYDRA-engineered resistance to pain and damage, are approximately nil. She picked up the paddle last time she went out for groceries. There's no point to this if it doesn't hurt.

"I'm not going to make you count," Natasha says. Left hand tangled in his hair, and she sits up on her knees so she can reach him better without pushing him facedown into the mattress. This isn't about humiliation. "You're not a little boy, and this isn't a punishment. You say stop and we stop."

She's said that a dozen times. It makes him complicit in everything she's about to do, everything she's been doing to him since the first proposition, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the biggest piece of personal autonomy you have just comes down to deciding which orders you want to obey. It won't hurt Barnes to get used to the idea.

He's tested her a couple of times now. She always stops. He always comes back. She thinks he gets the idea.

"I didn't say stop," Barnes says, as close to a hurry up as she's going to get.

"Don't move, then," says Natasha. It'll take some effort for him to stay perfectly balanced on all fours in the face of the impact, the pain. He always comes out of these sessions more settled when she gives him a mission he actually has to work to complete.

He's already tensed before she even raises the paddle, and stock-still like a good soldier following orders, not a muscle of him moving besides the ones working his lungs, just a little faster than normal. Natasha doesn't give him any more warning before she swings her arm down.

The polished wood of the paddle cracks sharp against the meat of his ass, full force of Natasha's muscle strength behind it because neither one of them believe in pulling punches. In the split second of impact, half drowned out by the sound of the smack but just a couple of instants longer, Natasha can hear the slightest hitch in Barnes' breath.

Other than that, he doesn't move. Not a twitch.

"Good soldier," Natasha murmurs, and pulls back for the next.

There's a moment, every time the paddle cracks down, when he tenses into the pain. He tightens everywhere, clamps down on every possible flinch, and lets it bloom hot over him.

It doesn't hurt enough to damage, which means it barely hurts enough to count as hurt. There's nowhere near enough pain to white him out in real agony. There's just enough that he can lock onto it, focus, if he tries. His ass is awash in hot sharp ache. Grounding. Centering. Real.

He doesn't entirely know who he is but he knows this, knows pain. Knows Natasha's fingers tangled tight in his hair and holding him in place. He can lock himself down and not move, not one twitch, not a single restraint in place.

He could hurt Natasha if he tried to. She hasn't said it, but she's too smart not to know. She could probably kill him, but he could hurt her, badly, maybe kill her too.

He's pinned in place. He lets her have her way. The stretch and pull and sharp yank on his hair runs straight down his spine to the pit of his stomach. He doesn't want to get away. He doesn't want to be anywhere but here.

He focuses in. He can hang suspended like this forever, if he has to, on all fours without a muscle twitching out of place. Maybe he will.

She kicks him out to sleep in his own room, after.

#C writes stuff #C's month of posting deliberately #dredging up the drafts folder

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ahopefuldoubt · 6 years

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Notes: “Memory and Reunion”

I decided to go through my “PoE Drafts” folder on my laptop, and while doing so I rediscovered these old and previously unposted notes from all the way back in May 2016. None of the points below are honestly really new (my “Deliver Us” scene analysis from September 2016 borrowed a lot from these old notes, for example). But I’m posting them partly because I’ve been worried that I’ve hit a creative block, and because it’s nice to see/affirm some of my earliest thoughts and feelings about the biological family (...and how things came full circle well yes “full circle,” but also evolved and expanded — wow it really did take a long time for me to figure things out and “open the box,” as it were).

In the official art book, writer Charles Solomon observes that “by making childhood experiences a significant force in The Prince of Egypt, the filmmakers enrich the characters and their changing relationships.” This statement has stayed with me; it makes sense from a real reunion standpoint because adoptees and their families are confronted with the past as they work with the shifting realities and demands of the present.

In the film, the day that Yocheved relinquishes Moses drives the way in which the siblings individually process the adoption and reunion as well as interact with one another. Although Yocheved is physically present in just the beginning scene, by honoring her memory, she remains an integral part of the entire story. In order to understand the personalities and perspectives held by Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, it is important to first identify each character’s memories of that day.

Moses’ memory is subconscious; after all, he was a small infant when he was relinquished. Yet the movie shows that he has an imprint of his mother’s lullaby, since he is able to whistle a bit of the melody. I know that the source material sees Yocheved in a more active role in her son’s life after she surrenders him — she becomes his wet-nurse — but in The Prince of Egypt there’s no indication of this.

Moses’ subconscious impression of the song represents his entire origins: They too are unknown to him. Secrecy is a common and complex issue in adoption, even for adoptees who know they were adopted. This is because adoptees’ histories, and the people who can tell them about their histories, are largely unavailable or inaccessible. As a result, anything and everything can feel like a secret. The lack of information can create a sense of rootlessness and unreality; frustration at simply not knowing certain kinds of personal information, such as medical history; and a negative self-perception. While identity struggles are universal, some of the issues and questions that arise for Moses reflect a distinct lived-reality for adoptees. Moses’ arc involves confronting the secret that was withheld from him, resolving issues of guilt and self-worth, and negotiating his relationships with his families. His character and journey are directly influenced by his subconscious memory of that day.

By contrast, Aaron’s lasting memory is a painful, incomplete one. Even if not sharply remembered, his sense of that day includes running urgently through Goshen amid shouts and violence, and then watching his mother cry and his baby brother disappear. Throughout the opening scene, his expression and actions reflect confusion and insecurity: At various moments, he stays close to his mother, looks to Miriam and reaches for her hand, for answers and reassurance. The scene focuses more on Miriam’s face, actions, and reactions, which are of course vital to our understanding of the plot, but this also makes it difficult to discern how these events are affecting Aaron. Yet, it is also necessary to depict Miriam in the “lead” in this scene because it hints at the two characters’ dynamic as adults. Aaron’s position as a protective, but younger, brother to Miriam is essential to understanding him, his motivations, and his attitude towards the reunion.

Many of the official materials for The Prince of Egypt note that Aaron represents the skeptical and mistrustful side of the Hebrews. This idea is carried through on multiple levels: the broad, collective scale and the intimate, character-specific sense. Aaron symbolizes and verbalizes the frustrations and concerns of an entire people, and it is this skeptical and guarded nature that guides how he himself approaches and processes his reunion with Moses. Assigned this role by the filmmakers, Aaron naturally becomes the character who feels all the bumps along the road and is made to break in some ways. He bears the traumas of slavery and of that day by the river, which are shown in the way he responds to potential threats and the actions he takes to survive. However, these very challenges also allow Aaron to display the depths of his devotion to his family and ultimately deliver the message that “though hope is frail, it’s hard to kill.” Though perhaps more subtly depicted in the film, the effects of the day Moses was relinquished are no less impactful for Aaron: His character and arc are deeply shaped by the chaos of that day.

Finally, Miriam’s memory is a hopeful one because she pursues her baby brother as he is carried on the Nile and then watches the queen pick him up. Her memories of that day, so different from Moses’ subconscious memory and Aaron’s painful memory, provide a solid foundation for her faith and hope. While Aaron represents his people’s doubts and he is initially resistant to Moses as a result, Miriam expresses her people’s prayers and she has accepted and trusts Moses even before they reunite by the well. Their differences work on both a film-wide, thematic scale and a more intimate, character-based level. [Italics added - but I would delete “as a result.”] Truly, it is Miriam’s complete picture of the day’s events that allows her not only to retain hope, but to plan and incite action, provide a balance to and safeguard for Aaron, and help Moses become aware of himself and achieve a whole sense of self. Though she too experiences setbacks, Miriam’s lasting memory and knowledge are indispensable to the story and her family’s reunion because she is able to be the natural leader and guide for her brothers (and people).

The well scene marks the first major moment in the reunion. As the siblings interact for the first time since the day Moses was relinquished, the impact of their individual memories becomes apparent. Each character is acting according to what they remember, and do not remember, which creates conflict and confusion, as the past is dragged into the light. One of the major themes of this part of the movie is “changing realities.” Realities that were taken for granted change and are challenged amid and as a result of this scene. Reunion forces people to confront the adoption and acknowledge that it occurred. [Italics added — This sentence is probably out of place because, like I wrote at the top of this post, this is just a draft.]

At this point in the movie, Aaron still perceives Moses as a threat. He is Prince Moses. This is reflected in the way he [Aaron] acts: that intake of breath, his panic, his dialogue.

Miriam is the only one with the knowledge, but even then, she is missing a critical piece of information, which is that Moses wasn’t told he was adopted. Miriam, however, presses on, ignoring the unexpected new reality in favor of the one she knows is right: the truth; the bit of the past that once bound them together as a family, the piece of information that Moses has the right to know. And Miriam, armed with her childhood memory, is the only sibling who can provide that information to Moses. [I’ll clean this annotation up later: I’m thinking about the word ignore and hope that it comes across the way I intended. Because I don’t think that Miriam is being naive, or anything along those lines that the word may connote, but I do feel that she is distraught and upset enough that she can’t accept what’s happening. She can’t, perhaps doesn’t want to, believe it. *worries incessantly and needlessly*]

All three characters have their “normal” disrupted in this scene. They are presented with a different reality than the one they had known. It dredges up the past: that untrustworthy memory (Aaron), that hopeful memory (Miriam), that subconscious memory (Moses).

[The end of an incomplete — but still really long — draft!]

#the prince of egypt #miriam #aaron #moses #adoption #reunion #new stuff #but it's actually really old stuff!!#poe analysis #my writing #this is... healing ngl #a few annotations added in brackets

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