#river!verse

[burberrycanary]

For the fic commentary game...I want to ask about so many lines, but ok. I've narrowed it down to three from Lost Vocabularies..., so you can pick—I'd be so interested to get your author's commentary on any (or all) of them! 💛

He will never forget nine months of stock prices from 1950.

(this is the one I'm probably least likely to get an answer to, which is fine, but I'm so very curious about what Steve did during those months in the past, and a girl's gotta try! 😜)

2. But he sure as hell doesn’t want them back, not so long as Bucky is willing to carry them, whatever they mean to him now—though Steve doesn’t like to think how Bucky must have found them and when.

(Basically, I just like to make myself sad about Bucky Barnes, so hey: talk to me about the dog tags!)

3.

“Why were you always signed up for something? You already took more vocational classes than about anybody.”

[…]

“Trying to impress my dad,” Bucky admits on a slow breath out. “But not in the way he wanted. ‘One of the laborin’ Barnes with a proper education,’ he liked to say. ‘Bastards won’t know what hit ‘em.’ He wanted me to live out that better American life he was chasing. Be respectable.” Bucky gives a faint dry laugh. “Sorry Pops.”

(I know this is more than one sentence...but I'm just endlessly fascinated by Bucky's (and Steve's) pre-war life and especially Bucky's relationship with his parents and how he feels about them now, after everything. So, if you'd be willing to elaborate on that snippet up there (I'm particularly intrigued by But not in the way he wanted), I'd be ecstatic!

(📦&🧼&◼&⬜-🔪)

2. But he sure as hell doesn’t want them back, not so long as Bucky is willing to carry them, whatever they mean to him now—though Steve doesn’t like to think how Bucky must have found them and when.

Crying into our beers over Bucky Barnes should be the name of our band. 😭🍻😭

The dog tags were such a distinctive element in TFATWS that I knew I wanted to use them in this post-Endgame fix-it series that ended up sprawling out to a bigger scope than I originally intended. But the first question from canon to consider is: whose dog tags are they, anyway?

In the surgery flashback from CATWS, we see that Bucky is no longer wearing his dog tags, which means they were taken away by Hydra. And this makes sense since Hydra was starting the process of completely stripping away Bucky’s identity. What Hydra does with Bucky’s dog tags depends on what kind of organization Hydra is, culturally and administratively. While you could write any number of stories here, especially since Bucky, as a specific known recovered asset, isn’t what the Japanese scientists in Unit 731 called “maruta” (“wooden logs”) or what the CIA-run black sites in West Germany under Project Bluebird called “expendables,” you could argue that Zola might keep Bucky’s dog tags for any number of reasons: spite, gloating, pride, or a perverse attachment to his greatest success. But the most rational course of action would be to destroy anything that could identify Bucky as a well-known American soldier—because this era of American history shows you could get away with not just murder but crimes against humanity as long as you played by certain bureaucratic rules. And this is the organization that Peggy Carter built, canonically, and the era that Steve returns to in Endgame—"the dark and bloody heart of the twentieth century [that] beat and maimed all the unsteadiness out of Bucky’s hands long ago." 

I’d argue these aren’t the dog tags that we see Steve wearing when he wakes up in the fake recovery room, which would have been replaced as part of the attempted deception, but instead the ones that he was wearing when he went into the ice, which would’ve been returned once the jig was up: 

Hanging around Bucky’s neck on a bright beaded chain are tarnished dog tags with the raised text turned, here and there, the pale green of copper eaten away by time.

I’ll admit I did look up the composition of WWII dog tags and scanned through some research papers on the corrosion levels in metal equipment used in the Arctic before deciding that I could just take a little literary license here and have Steve’s old dog tags be thematically “tarnished,” which in the text is explicitly tied to the theme of things being transformed over time, but the word also carries the connotation of something that’s sullied. For the dog tags, both meanings hold. 

My backstory headcanon is that Sam, who was the executor of Steve’s will and his chosen next of kin, invited Bucky to go through Steve’s surprisingly few personal effects for anything he wanted to keep before Sam donated the rest to museums. All Bucky took was the last, unfinished, mostly empty, little notebook and Steve’s old dog tags, which he restrung on a new chain. That’s it. That’s what Bucky is left with as a stranger in this strange land of the present. 

In the first glimpse Steve gets near the end of Still Left with the River, he interprets Bucky wearing his old dog tags as indicating that Bucky never stopped caring about him, which is true—Bucky kept on caring a whole hell of a lot. This is Steve’s “it taught me to hope” moment in the text that helps push him toward being honest with Bucky about how he feels after several decades of alternating between pining and grieving, pining and grieving. How many times has the worst already happened between them?

There is always an end to the line where the same big black pit is waiting. And eventually Bucky won’t crawl back out.

But the dog tags are deliberately ambiguous as a symbol, since they equally represent the grief that we see Bucky struggle with in TFATWS. They are Bucky’s chosen gesture of mourning when Steve buries himself in the past. It’s telling that even after Steve returns, Bucky doesn’t take the dog tags off or offer to give them back to Steve again. Whatever they mean, they’re Bucky’s now. And Bucky on some level continues to mourn a faith between them—ineffable and up to that point mutually committed to despite the worst the world could do—that Steve broke when he decided to go back to the past and which returning doesn’t unbreak. Because that’s the problem: “Time only moves in one direction.”

(“There’s a creepy stone somewhere that says otherwise.”

“Exactly.”)

Significantly, over and over, these fraught identification tags are described as occupying the space between Steve and Bucky:

Tipping Steve’s chin up with his thumb, Bucky kisses the blazes out of him while the old dog tags swing a little on their glinting new chain in the space between them.

How Steve left is still very much between them throughout this whole series. 

The scene where the dog tags are revealed as Steve’s is significant:

...Steve’s old dog tags swinging in the space between their bodies; then the warm tender weight of Bucky’s forehead, pressed just off-center against his chest, overlapping with the light touch of metal and the pooling chain; [...] Bucky pressed close, and his face hidden.

The contrary actions of Bucky pressing close but still hiding is how Bucky has chosen to deal with the complicated emotional situation Steve has put him in—the combination of intimacy and distance that shades through most of this series. Bucky is trying to both protect himself and give Steve a good-faith chance to do better. Bucky’s strength and generosity win out in the end, because that’s who Bucky is at heart: the bigger person in a way that has nothing to do with being tall or strong or healthy. But part of the problem of any post-Endgame fix-it is that no one fight or confession or “being shoved in a closet together” shortcut could solve these emotional sticking points. 

Steve really did that. Whatever his reasons or motivations, which this series digs into a lot in the subtext, in the moment Steve meant it. And there’s no way to undo the choices that have been made, not without recourse to an ethically flawed concept that’s the opposite of living: because trying to undo past losses is exactly what Endgame gets wrong by attempting.

Fuck Endgame: the only way out is through. And by “through” I don’t mean Steve passively playing white-picket-fence house with Peggy through the ugly back half of the 20th century and then getting some sort of science-fiction second chance for a life with Bucky, once all that’s over. That’s doubling down on the flawed ethics of Endgame.

Life is a process of making choices, over and over. And living with the consequences. How you live with them is another ethical choice you get to make, over and over. That’s the constant and inescapable ethical action inherent in being alive.

This series is deliberately full of minor characters with losses just as profound as Steve’s: loved ones gone, former ways of life lost, all the small gathered-together pieces that we each painstakingly build into a life vanishing, whether bit by bit or calamitously all at once:

Her face lights up. “Thanks, I make them myself. I’m thinking of going to fashion school, maybe. Textile design. I’ve already died—fuck being scared, right?”

Between war, the Blip and the Return, she has lost every member of what was once a huge family. And life just keeps going on.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Fuck being scared.”

Or:

“Been walking since Greenwood Cemetery. I can’t get to where any of my people are buried so you know what I’ve decided?”

Steve gives a hum, meaning what’s that?  

“I’ve decided to collectivize. Every grave on earth with the first name George is my boy’s. I’ve claimed every Elizabeth—in all forms—and Rachael, Robert and Joseph. Never cared for my husband’s people so I don’t bother with them. But I’ve got some favorites down in Greenwood picked out for my boy. ”

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Steve says, quiet, and thinking briefly of his own most recent dead. He doesn’t add, I know what it’s like to let grief triumph over reality. “So you visit.”

“Every day that I can. Lots of graveyards in this city. But Greenwood is nice. All the flowers and so forth.”

This is a story about grief.

Steve is trusted with great power to help set right wrongs the Avengers did during Endgame, setting all these other timelines on roads to destruction to save their own. And in the face of the temptation of that great fantastical power: the possibility of easy facile answers to unsolvably hard problems about change and loss so many people equally have to confront and hurt over and struggle with—all the time, right now, forever, constantly—Steve Rogers falters:

Preemptive—that idea is never going to seem right to him. But isn’t that what he’d tried to do when he’d stayed in the past? Get the preemptive good life by side-stepping the possibility of more loss? Because, for him at least, one way or another everything that mattered would have already happened.

And still the same old story at the bottom of whatever idealized notions got papered over top: trading other people’s lives for your own security.

He’ll never know whether, if his plan had worked, he would have stayed in the past for good.

And now he’s got to live with that.

If the dog tags in this story stand for anything, it’s living with the consequences.

You can make mistakes. We all do, individually and collectively. But there’s no undoing the past—not even in the MCU’s confused theory of the multiverse. All you can try is to do better: to make right what’s been put wrong as much as you can; or find things that are good and help them be better for more people.

There are deliberately four apologies offered in Lost Vocabularies: two from Bucky and two from Steve. But this is the climactic and closing apology that echoes the same language used to introduce the dog tags into the narrative: 

Pushing Bucky back, he touches the tarnished dog tags where the raised text has turned, here and there, the pale green of copper eaten away by time.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, meaning a whole lot.

Bucky’s response, “We got here,” deliberately sidesteps the question of forgiveness and is designed to be read in two ways. The first reading challenges the relative significance of the past—we reached here however that happened—while the second rejects the past more completely: all we actually ever have is right now.

The thing is, Steve has been angry his whole life and he’s trying so hard to be a little more grateful for a change. 

He’s been doing better and he’ll keep on trying.

But there’s still just so much to be angry about everywhere he looks, from the past all the way through to this moment, burning up in front of him right now: this crawling-forward world that should be better, and isn’t, and won’t be unless people step forward to shoulder the hard slow work with no one to punch and no climactic battle you win or you lose.

This sort of work requires the splendid terrible patience of the tide eating away at a face of rock: mighty and irresistible, but wearisomely slow.

You gotta do the work. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

A Man Takes His Sadness Down to the River (The Consolation of Philosophy)

[deermouth]

Let Me Speak First Of Revelations And Next Of Dark Deceit Then I'll Speak Of Champions Of Lovers, Gods, And Beasts My Song Is Long And Twisted It Worms, It Winds, It Wends It Carries Few, It Drowns Many And Those I Love, It Rends My Song Has Taken Hold Of Me It Grips My Tongue, My Throat My Voice Cries Truths I Never Knew And To Fight Is Just To Choke So Let Me Dwell Eternal And In Ruined Flesh Ascend For My Song Has No Beginning... And The Current Flows On Without End If I Could Trace With Bloodless Fingers If My Hands Could Shape The Flow I'd Bear This Song To The Precipice And Rend Us Both To Dust Below We'd Both Go Plunging Downwards One Final Fall From Grace I'd Howl, I'd Scream In Victory And We'd Be Gone Without A Trace But We'll Never Be Rid Of Each Other My Song, My Sorrow and I So I'll Bear It Trembling Onwards To Drift On, To Dream, To Die And Where My Final Footsteps Fall Something Dreadful Shall Arise Its Gaze Shall Fall O'er Trembling Plains Its Wrath Shall Scald The Sun And Where Its Howling Forebears Walked Some Day There Shall Be None The Wise Man Knows The Taste Of Rot All Lovers Part As Dust And Even The Kings In Their Bowers Of Steel Shall Wither In Ruin And Rust This Rotten World Shall Wheeze Its Last This Hateful Hymn Shall Cease But As My Last Breath Splits My Throat I'll Wheeze Through Splintered Teeth One Last Song Of Revelations Of Prophets' Dark Deceptions Of Love, And Gods' Defeat Of Love, And Gods' Defeat

The Silt Verses (2021-2024), chapter titles

[twink-with-an-agenda]

Little preview for my Faulkner cosplay hehe (I'll probably post the pictures in multiple separate posts there's that manyyy)

[evergreensounds]

the reeds my beloved (sister carpenter tsv)

[catwyk]

em and mallory glass!! i drew the original maybe a month ago now, but i finally scanned my traditional stuff for paintovers :] design notes below the cut!!

their clothes are loosely based on some of mine and my brother's slightly more formal clothes from when we were <10y.o - a scout uniform and school pinafore respectively. em's ascot is shorthand for "rural formal" to me

the pattern on em's collar also features on my katabasian designs

the pattern on mal's collar is the same as the broken traditional pattern on faulkner's high katabasian robes, as foreshadowing for her losing her faith

mal is painted wearing greens because she is born to the land. em is blue, because he is born to the water

em is meant to vaguely resemble faulkner. he has dimples, freckles, and similar feature + face shapes

despite the dour air over them, this is just a grumpy boy not wanting his picture taken and his sister caught between his bad mood and her nana's stern direction - truly honestly nothing bad happening to them at this moment. im pretty sure there are pictures of my brother and me with the exact same vibe

[moomeecore]

a love letter to weasels ❤️🩷

[mx-information]

mr press secretary a second crab has hit the moridame

[gentlemean]

I present to you: The Whitegull River Symphony.

A classical symphony in four movements, inspired by @thesiltverses! The most recent episode swept me away in a river of creative inspiration, and I couldn't help but follow this stream to whatever murky depths it wanted to take me.

Creative thoughts and details beneath the cut.

The Whitegull River Symphony is written in f-Minor for a full symphonic orchestra. My rendition was created in FLStudio, using Spitfire's BBC-Symphonic-Orchestra plugin, as I am just one mediocre violinist without an entire orchestra at hand.

First Movement: River Angels, Allegro Assai

The first movement is dominated by the steady rhythm of the celli and violae, who act as the slow waves of our murky river. Among these waves, the faithful have prepared a sacrifice. Their hopeful prayers flick aross the water in the first half of the movement, and are answered by the scutteling, chittering spawn of the river in the second half.

Second Movement: Pilgrimage of the Prophet, Adagio

In the second movement, we focus entirely on our favorite little prophet (whose brilliant performance inspired me to make this. The existence of this symphony is your fault, @sassylich). He marches on through the silt with slow steps, while the clarinet plays his theme. His little schemes behind the scenes are played by the string section, the obvious warning signs are announced by the horns. Nevertheless: In the end, everyone is playing his tune.

Third Movement: The Withermark, Andante

And here we go, the river's might is unleashed. The angels of the river god approach unstoppably, drawn here by the prophet: His clarinet is setting the tune for the overwhelming wrath of the trawlerman. Nothing can stand in its way, but after the tides have calmed, new life can grow in their wake.

Fourth Movement: Katabasis, Allegro Assai

Katabasis, the descent into the depths. Nothing escapes the greedy maw of the Trawlerman, nobody can float above, untouched. All the instruments we've hear so far return, desceding into the roiling depths of the bassline. This is not a comforting or hopeful ending, this is an apocalypse.

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

Also I somehow completely forgot to mention in my last post but like Vaughan just in general!! Was so!!!

Like first we meet them they are clearly such a hopeful person, just casually being genuine friends with Carpenter aka the most asocial person in this podcast uptil now (maybe it's also because Carpenter is young here but still). They want to make it Big in the city and have a great life and even though they know it can be unlikely they still want to give take that chance.

And then the next episode and it's just. Idk if it was just me but Vaughan to me sounded extremely tired, from their very first lines they sounded so exhausted but hiding it behind a playful mask. It was like their upbeat optimistic personality had been gutted and only a shell was left but enough of it to still convince others that they are ok. Which is especially jarring because by all means they have achieved their dream. They are in the creative team of a big company. They did make it big!

And then more of the chapter goes on and the more the bleak reality of this world is revealed the more it becomes that Vaughan won't survive this. They realized that as soon as Paige showed them that email, that the company will sacrifice it's employees and it will include them.

And they still tried to fight it! They went kicking and screaming and completely hopeless but they still tried to fight it even though they knew it was pointless they still tried. And yet it meant nothing. All of their hardwork, their dreams, their friendships, nothing saved them as the dream they worked so hard to achieve literally killed them brutally

And just!!! One of their first lines was "Isn’t this great? We each get to choose the thing that eats us." Except they didn't! They didn't get to choose! They fought and it was for nothing and they didn't even get to choose what would eat them

[sevensecondstilltheend]

PLEASE HELP; DON'T SCROLL!

I have been in contact with @ahmedalnajjer for a while now, and I have just received a message from his friend asking for help because Ahmed is in the hospital.

Transportation to the hospital is $250.

I've sent $50 but AHMED NEEDS OUR HELP AND SUPPORT. I URGE YOU TO DONATE WHAT YOU CAN AND SHARE THIS POST! Please do what you can, please support Ahmed and his family in these times.

[lights-at-night]

listening to tsv by the river is funny but also mildly terrifying like the withermark will be being set off in my headphones and i'll look at the river and go like damn. sure hope that thing dont rise

[burberrycanary]

From <i>Not Language but a Map (The Grammar of Sensation)</i>:

"In a break between songs, Bucky looks over at him. He’s sprawled out in his seat and mostly in the shadow cast by the edge of the window, but his eyes still reflect the ambient glow of the room: blue light layered over that darker, more complicated shade that’s haunted Steve for so long.

Bucky watches him for a hanging suspended moment. 

Then he says, “A lot of bad things happened to me that I’m never going to talk about.”

With that Bucky knocks back the rest of his whiskey that won’t get him drunk any more than a whole bombed-out bar could touch Steve in the rubble—in all that rubble—and Bucky gets up to buy another round.

What do you do with rage in a world with too many broken things already?

What do you do with all that rage when you’re decades too late?

Drink bland beer and raw-boned whiskey and listen to a good set of stripped-down electrocuted blues that runs way past midnight. Turns out, that’s what you do."

More than a line, I know!! But this moment struck me as perhaps the most like a lobbed grenade of all the many Bucky tosses at Steve, sometimes entirely out of the blue like here (and as your Steve-in-the-bombed-out-bar reference so eloquently mirrors), throughout the series. Nothing Steve doesn't know, but what a moment and what a place for Bucky to acknowledge it, then immediately get up and leave Steve to stew in it. Would love your author's commentary here.

Thanks for the ask! I didn't mean to write quite this much meta, but here we are. 💛

In a break between songs, Bucky looks over at him. He’s sprawled out in his seat and mostly in the shadow cast by the edge of the window, but his eyes still reflect the ambient glow of the room:[1] blue light layered over that darker, more complicated shade that’s haunted[2] Steve for so long.

Bucky watches him for a hanging suspended moment. [3]

Then he says, “A lot of bad things happened to me that I’m never going to talk about.”[4]

With that Bucky knocks back the rest of his whiskey that won’t get him drunk any more than a whole bombed-out bar could touch Steve in the rubble[7]—in all that rubble—and Bucky gets up to buy another round.[8]

What do you do with rage in a world with too many broken things already?

What do you do with all that rage when you’re decades too late?

Drink bland beer and raw-boned whiskey and listen to a good set of stripped-down electrocuted[9] blues that runs way past midnight. Turns out, that’s what you do."

[1] How Bucky is lit here is a reference to the scene from CATWS when the Soldier visits Pierce in his home and puts a gun down on the table between them. A lot of fannish ink has been spilled about that gun with the most popular theory being that the Soldier has been programmed to arm his handler, which is typically horrific for Bucky’s time as the Soldier: the utter abjection of being forced to participate in his own subjugation. This association isn’t meant to be consciously made by the reader, but it’s a striking and memorable image of Bucky as the Winter Soldier that helps set the emotional undercurrent of this scene and subconsciously reminds the reader of how much Bucky has suffered. 

[2] The word “haunted” here is deliberate: there are a lot of ghosts in this story.

[3] “hanging suspended moment” is another phrase that’s meant to nudge a subliminal association back to a time between Steve and Bucky that involved hanging over a long bad drop: the moment of suspension when Steve feels that he should have found a way to reach Bucky, and didn’t. Steve’s feelings of guilt and shame, warranted and unwarranted, haunt the language of this story.

[4] This moment is a parallel to earlier in the story when Bucky tells Steve that he doesn’t blame him for anything from the war, and Bucky is being truthful there—he doesn’t blame Steve for his own choice to join the Howling Commandos. And honestly I don’t know where fandom gets the idea that Bucky would have been sent home after Kreischberg since thanks to the serum he would still be physically fit to serve and getting a medical discharge for “battle fatigue”[5] would both carry an enormous cultural stigma and be near impossible to get for someone as functional as we see Bucky be; more realistically Bucky could choose between serving under a person he trusts and respects—even if he’s still a little punk with absolutely no military training and less sense than god gave a gnat who now has a shiny new body that lets him pick insanely dangerous fights but who remains a person Bucky trusts all the way down in his bones to do the right thing when it counts regardless of orders or military discipline. And given that total lack of military training, whether basic combat or as an officer, boy does Steve need the help. So it’s help and protect Steve as part of an elite and structurally unconventional unit under the command of someone he trusts—or he could get processed in London, undergo an intelligence interrogation and then be reassigned to another unit under some other unknown CO. Those are his likely options.[6]

Joining the Howling Commandos and following that little guy from Brooklyn was an easy choice for Bucky to make—and blaming Steve for it would make no sense to Bucky, though Bucky has the empathy and emotional intelligence to understand that Steve could very well blame himself, which is why he wants to set the record straight with Steve about that. Steve and Bucky do have very different views about war and the military, which they discuss over the course of the series, but Bucky respects Steve even when he often disagrees with him.

But the attentive reader may note that Bucky says that he doesn’t blame Steve for anything from the war. 

The bombshell Bucky drops here about never talking about certain parts of his past is driven by a lot of things. As a baseline, Bucky grew up in a very different culture, which is an obvious statement. But I wanted to actually reflect this cultural difference in how Bucky views and performs masculinity, which is going to be less than healthy from a modern point of view. While Steve has been in the modern world for the majority of his adult life, Bucky has only been in the modern world for a handful of years and much of that time in varying degrees of social isolation. So of course Bucky isn’t going to talk about certain things that happened to him: in his mind that’s not what men do. Like Steve, the reader is left to fill in that terrible blank of the unspoken past for themselves.

But Steve “Don’t Bleed on Anyone” Rogers also grew up with and internalized the same cultural ideas around masculinity. So then the question becomes, why does Bucky bring this up at all? Bucky in this series is great at simply never bringing up things he doesn’t want to talk about. 

There isn’t one clear-cut reason but a whole tangled mess. Bucky here is gearing up to take Steve to bed for the first time and whatever each individual reader picks for the imagined specifics, Bucky has undergone a staggering amount of horrific abuse. If things don’t go well later or if Steve were to notice anything off, Bucky is building an escape hatch to avoid any conversations he doesn’t want to have.

Because another touchstone this version of Bucky holds, an important piece of his self-identity, is that he doesn’t lie to Steve (and my headcanon is that this extends to people he loves in general). Throughout this series, every time Steve asks Bucky a serious question, Bucky gives him an honest, good-faith answer even if he has to sit there for a while carefully constructing a response that often contains infuriatingly little specific information. There’s some canon evidence to support reading Bucky as a very private person, which I do, but I headcanon that Bucky also operates under a lot of “fair play” framings, which Steve brings out in him particularly. If Steve has the guts to ask a tough question, then it seems fair to Bucky that he give Steve an honest answer. But for Bucky, “honest” does not mean “fully transparent.”

A whole separate form of traumatization Bucky underwent was an absolutely abject loss of privacy—who knows what records are floating around and who has seen them? Even Steve participated in that by searching for and reading the records about Bucky he could find. Bucky was forcibly stripped of his interiority, which somehow, miraculously, he managed to rebuild on his own. Bucky built himself back up into a person from as close to nothing as exists. This is Bucky at a stage in his recovery where he is actively asserting his privacy and defending his interiority—even from Steve, who is having to earn back Bucky’s trust.

And here is where we get to the bloody pulpy wound that Bucky is trying to both protect and hide. After all, Bucky hiding his hurts, struggles and negative feelings from Steve is the vast majority of their canonical on screen interactions. The natural narrative resolution to this pattern is for Bucky to eventually learn that he can share his struggles and hurts with Steve, and vice versa. Collectively we have told tens of thousands of versions of that story and I hope collectively we tell thousands and thousands more, because I am a fan of that narrative arc. I firmly believe that this built-in hurt/comfort theme is part of the core appeal of bringing these two characters together.

It’s a great story.  

And, in a lot of ways, this is a version of that story, just the version that’s uphill both ways and isn’t trying to reach a form of romanticized codependency.

Because we see in TFATWS Bucky coming to the painful realization he had made Steve’s opinion of him a critical part of the foundation for his rebuilt identity and shaky sense of self-worth. That messy intimate fracturing we see within Bucky during TFATWS is devastating to watch. Bucky isn’t keen to go through that again, thanks. 

Bucky loves Steve and wants him. And Bucky isn’t the sort to cut off his nose to spite his face—from a curious blend of kindness and pragmatism that I see at the heart of the character. He’s happier with Steve than without him, even after everything. He has always wanted good things for Steve and for Steve to let himself reach for a little of the happiness that Bucky believes Steve so richly deserves. And what a marvel for Bucky Barnes, just an ordinary kid from Brooklyn who scraped the bottom of hell and crawled his way back out across a century of horrific violence, to get to be part of Steve Rogers finding some happiness, at last.

But if Bucky doesn’t blame Steve for anything from the war, the question becomes: what does he blame Steve for? 

Because as kind as Bucky is and as hard as he tries to be the same good friend throughout all this—to be the bigger person—he blames Steve for leaving, which is another in the long, long list of bad things that have happened to Bucky.

The psychology here gets messy and the analysis rather meta, so bear with me. Because Bucky is and will continue to be trapped in the stories the MCU writes for him. Bucky Barnes is a victim trapped in a story of retraumatization because the narrative and most of the characters he interacts with will continue to deliver the message that he was responsible for what Hydra forced him to do and the way to get better is to accept this message and make amends for things that are, in fact, not his fault. This toxic belief is being constantly shoved at Bucky—even by Sam—and it makes Bucky, who is a kind and ethical person horrified by what he did, feel in turn like he deserved the bad things that happened to him.

Steve leaving is another item on that list and I think a part of Bucky unconsciously applies this same toxic thought pattern: he deserved it. 

In order to forgive Steve, Bucky has to first acknowledge that he was wrongfully harmed. And in the series so far, Bucky hasn’t been willing to do this. 

Because, at the same time, blaming himself is also perversely Bucky trying to establish some feeling of control after all the situations that left him feeling powerless. Bucky is keenly aware of how little control he has over what happens to him: from the government that mandates visits to a military psychologist as a deliberate technique for maintaining a degree of physical and psychological control over him; from the Wakandans who gave him a weaponized prosthetic when they wanted him to fight only to turn around and show that they are willing to forcibly remove a part of his body as a method for controlling his behavior; from all the people who will judge and condemn him for his past; and from Steve who decided he wanted a life that no longer had room for Bucky in it. 

The attentive reader may note that in this sprawling series “the end of the line” is never referenced once, which is deliberate. Because that’s come and gone. 

It’s understandable but sad how easy it is to grasp on tight to the harmful stories we tell ourselves about the bad things that happen to us as an alternative to confronting our own helplessness and the terrifying moral arbitrariness of the universe. Because that helplessness is ongoing. If you were helpless to stop the bad things that have already happened, you are equally helpless to prevent more bad things from happening now, again, at any point, forever. And the human mind is not really designed to be able to confront our own awful vulnerability.

Rebuilding a feeling of safety in the face of this knowledge is a monumental challenge that requires so much resilience and a defiant, stubborn sort of courage. 

Bucky needs to get to a place where he feels safe enough to begin to let go of this indirectly self-protective but ultimately harmful story: it was my fault.

I deserved it.

We want the universe to make sense. We want life to be an ethically satisfying story. How terrible that it’s not. 

And Bucky Barnes can’t catch a fucking break because rather than help and support, he gets abandonment, retraumatization and everyone still left in his life conveying to him, explicitly or implicitly, that he was responsible for what happened. 

Bucky dropping this bomb—“A lot of bad things happened to me that I’m never going to talk about”—is all these various conscious and unconscious forces crystalizing into this self-protective gesture because Bucky here is under an enormous amount of emotional and psychological stress. And this is his attempt to make himself feel a little safer.

[5] “As more American servicemen entered into combat, the number of psychological casualties steadily rose. During the Normandy Campaign, army psychologists noted that the combat effectiveness of troops sharply declined after 30 days of combat. After 45 days, troops were in a near vegetative state. Psychiatrist John Appel, who studied combat exhaustion cases during the Battle of Monte Cassino and Anzio Campaign, came to the sobering conclusion that, ‘Practically all men in rifle battalions who are not otherwise disabled ultimately became psychiatric casualties.’

Military medicine finally conceded that it wasn’t a question of ‘if’ a soldier would break in combat, but a question of when.

With a war to be won and in the face of a manpower crisis, the military’s primary concern was to return men to duty as quickly as possible. This was done by evacuating psychologically traumatized men to aid stations just to the rear of the frontlines. There, casualties received a dose of Sodium Amytal which put them into a deep sleep for a period of up to 48 hours; afterwards they ate a hot meal, showered and put on a clean uniform, then they were evaluated by medical personnel. Most responded positively to the treatment and 50 to 70 percent of combat exhaustion cases were returned to combat within three days. More severe cases were sent to hospitals and never returned to combat.” (x)

[6] “The few Prisoners of War repatriated prior to the end of the war were primarily evaders (those who had been fortunate enough to avoid imprisonment by the enemy –ed) and escapees (those who had successfully escaped, filtering thru belligerent, neutral, and/or occupied countries in an attempt to rejoin their parent organizations –ed) from German prison camps who had managed to find their way out of enemy territory, aided by members of the ‘resistance’ movements in the occupied countries. These individuals (mostly USAAF personnel –ed) were initially evacuated to London and processed in a small hotel situated 63, Brook Street, London, operated by the Theater Provost Marshal, United Kingdom, and later to Paris, France, where from March 9, 1945 onward, the Hotel “Francia”, was the place where they underwent intelligence interrogation by Allied Headquarters. After their intelligence processing, they were reassigned.” (x)

[7] I really do love the visual expression of Steve’s devastation at losing Bucky in CATFA. Grief is a terrible form of knowledge. To borrow a line: “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”

[8] I was interested in the decision to have Bucky drink in TFATWS. There’s no canon evidence to suggest that Bucky’s serum is less effective than Steve’s since they seem about evenly matched in fights, especially the iconic street fight when neither of them is holding back. So alcohol shouldn’t be intoxicating to Bucky. 

But for all its flaws, TFATWS shows Bucky trying to get back into the world and figure out how to connect with people again. I like the way Bucky’s social skills are depicted as uneven and how Bucky turns on and off caring about the social aspects of situations: sweet-talking a prickly old man into getting lunch or being a slightly shy and flirty sort of friendly to Sarah, but at other points just walking away from conversations he is done with without giving a single solitary fuck. 

But my take is that Bucky likes alcohol as something that’s social—drinking sake with Yori or having beers with Sam on the boat. It makes him feel normal, connected once again to human life and to his past self. (Prohibition was repealed when Bucky was 16.) And there may be some small unconscious placebo effects—I’m thinking particularly in TFATWS when Bucky comes back to the apartment in Riga and takes a drink with such a “fuck it, I need a drink” energy: the gesture itself may be soothing.

Here Bucky is absolutely going: fuck it, I need a drink.

[9] The correct word here would be “electric.” Steve slips to “electrocuted” because he’s got electrocution—and the other glimpsed and imagined horrors Bucky went through—on his mind.

Steve faces a curious sort of agony. Because, for all that Steve has fought and suffered, he’s aware that he can’t even imagine so much of what Bucky has gone through because he lacks the shared life experience. 

Because he couldn’t stop Bucky from falling. And he’s got to keep on finding a way to live with that. 

[autism69]

[ianthewife]

Trawlerman has the vibes of a deadbeat dad but dear god the aesthetics of his cult fuck severely

Like, for example, we know about the fishhook piercings which are fucking awesome, but now im thinking about all the other possible river-themed jewelry. God dammit I need the Parish bejeweled to the gills

I can just imagine all the shiny fishing floats and and colorful lures as earrings. Silvery necklaces of fish scales on fishing lines. Rings with river pebbles, sea glass and freshwater pearls. Kelp and algae in resin! And don’t even get me started on the amount of beautiful shit that can be made from shells and nacre. A girl can dream i guess……….

[defective-and-effective]

I’m so incredibly rational about this piece of media, you have no idea.

[catwyk]

roakes sentinel has been on my mind for months now, im SO HAPPY to finally have it drawn out !!! prelim sketches + notes below the cut :]

i think it's pretty obvious, but this was very much informed by the dog thing from The Thing. Rob Bottin is a huge inspiration to me in terms of body horror

the crab and dogs arent based on any specific species or breed. that's the problem with dogs and crabs -- theyre so diverse, you can't draw them generic without making them look a little weird in one way or another. and then that means picking a specific species or breed, which invites speculation as to why, which means it has to be done with symbolism in mind, and sometimes i just wanna paint a big scary monster with nothing else to it, yknow?

the dogs are (in canon) embedded in the shell, which i forgot about when i was envisioning the sentinel to begin with. thank god for artistic license !! sorry jon ware my crab now