That trick-or-treat meme!

[magibrain]

You know the drill! Prompt me, and I'll write a snippet of fic for your candy bag. (Y'all should know the fandoms I write in now, and if you want an original snippet, I'll be happy to provide.)

Additionally, as I'm now staying with the former editor of a podcast, I have access to a fancy microphone which is no longer being used in the household. So if you'd like me to read something – say, up to 500 words? Flashfic, snippets of fic, my fic, your fic, poetry from around the web, Shakespearean monologues – you may request those, too!

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[magibrain]

Well, this was fun, with my enduring lack of canon familiarity! I riffed on the RP thread that I think I still owe you a tag on, so here are some broken, broken, extremely fucked-up boys:

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It takes three weeks for Governor Mitchell to agree to meet them, which starts rumors circulating among his aides in the know. That pleases Jack. Rumors, he can work with.

As it is, the Governor invites them to his own house and Jack walks in like he owns it, with the Winter Soldier stepping after him in military style. And maybe Governor Mitchell was hoping for a home-field advantage but Jack knows the look to give him, and the posture to assume, and the Soldier standing at ready next to him blows down the last of the Governor's attempts at taking control of the situation. He crumples before the first word.

"I'd heard rumors that–" the Governor says, and makes a weak gesture toward the weapon walking by Jack's side. Like he's afraid to say a name. "Well."

"That he was lost?" Jack fills in. "You of all people should know not to believe everything people say. Especially people who might not be trusted with all the information."

Governor Mitchell bites his tongue and doesn't answer the things he must be thinking: that the people he hears from are people he'd assumed to be at the very top, and either Jack is lying, or Jack is more terrifying than he thought possible. And Jack does have the advantage of the Winter Soldier at his side.

"Yes," the Governor says. And then, "Please. How can I serve Hydra?"

They always get there sooner or later.

Walking out of the house fifteen minutes later, Jack has another bit of power in his proverbial pockets. And no, he might not be ruling Hydra anytime in the next year or two, but he'll get there if no one else stamps them out first. He's got time.

And plenty of inclination – because Jack knows where he was in World War Two, and knows what side he was on, and he has more than his own expectations to live up to. Cut off the Nazi head and Hydra still slithers on, and Jack could be above all of this but he's as balls-deep in it as he ever is. Yeah, he might be a manipulative sumbitch of Agency torturer scum, fallen from every grace he's had the chance to reach for, but give him a few years and his own skills and he will take these people apart like he took apart Torchwood, turn them to his own aims – to the protection of Earth – without them knowing what hit them. There's more than one way to stamp out the enemy threat.

Anyway, sitting on the sidelines isn't in his nature.

It's not until they've turned a corner and Jack's grabbed his companion's arm and teleported them away that Bucky asks, "How did you do that?" His voice has gone all flat. That way it does. Bucky does't trust Jack as far as he could throw him – which is pretty far, even if Jack doesn't know that from experience (yet) – but he follows Jack anyway. He's aware of the game being played, but apparently that awareness makes it all right. Or makes it something he needs to drink down like medicine. Or disassemble like an unexploded bomb.

"Lots of practice," Jack says. They're in the abandoned condominium building they've made their own, out in the middle of economic-crash nowhere, and Jack shrugs and walks to the window, leans into the wall behind it. Bucky's eyes track him.

"He followed your commands," Bucky says.

Jack gives him a sidelong smile. Yes, and it's interesting that Bucky noticed it – interesting and telling. Jack never voiced a command that most people would recognize as such. But he'd wanted something out of that encounter, and he got it. "You knew what I was when you picked me up."

Bucky frowns. Like he gets that Jack's talking past him – doesn't get the metaphor, gets that there is one, gets that Jack likes doing this, likes slipping words around his ears he doesn't understand. But that's part of the game. Has been since they met.

Which, oh, was a language game itself, wasn't it? Both of them dealing cards face-up. Bloody confessions deployed like executive orders.

No names, just then – just raw truth, and somewhere in it, the piece of hardly-decommissioned weaponry had attached himself to the hardly-retired compliance officer, and off they'd went. Jack primed to use people, Bucky primed to be used. Jack'd wound up calling him Yasha at first – seemed right, for some reason; flecks of a Russian accent when he mutters to himself, flecks of a Soviet sensibility when he considers things, and there's that star on his arm – until he actually asked, haltingly, if Jack could call him Bucky. Amended almost immediately to Buck. Very nearly amended to never mind. Forget it except that Jack had skewered him with a look and held him there and then reached back into the conversation and said "Bucky. Okay," with a kind of firm holding-on, because people like Yasha didn't come up with names for themselves like Bucky without a story behind them.

And he suspects that Bucky doesn't know that story. That he's trying to fit into the name like a snake crawling back into a skin. He suspects that chopping off that -y was an attempt to make it somewhat more serious, because Bucky's entire mode of being at the moment is pensive and serious, but that chopping that y just made it fit worse. Jack should know. It's not like he hasn't got his own collection of names that don't fit right.

(Jack being one of them. Fits like a too-stiff suit. He can feel the air between his skin and all the expectation that name carries with it. But all the other names available – John, Jarec, that other name he left behind on Boe-Shayne – they all hurt just a little bit more.)

Bucky is still working out where Jack is leading him, Jack suspects. Maybe he just knows it's somewhere new – somewhere that isn't a rehash of his Winter Soldier past or the other past he can't get his tongue around.

"I don't understand," he says, at length.

Jack leaves the window. Comes over and puts a hand on the back of Bucky's head, then drops it. "Down dog," he says – not a directive but a label, a reminder. He has a feeling that Bucky's been the down dog for a long time, now, maybe as long as it's been since he lost that name.

Bucky doesn't feel like a down-dog name. It reminds Jack of the old Agency saw, actually, the one that almost translates into English: that there are three types of people like Jack; the bucks, the boars, and the bitches. Jack was always a buck. Ready to tangle antlers, none too worried if he took a fall or two. All in sport, right?

But Bucky's eyes are blazing, frustration and anger and unease all battering at the corners of his self-control. That involuntary self-control. One of these days Jack's going to see that self-control shattered from within, and that will be fun – even if ends with him dying messily, as happens, some days.

But until then, and probably even through then, he's still the up dog here. And that's the difference between them. They're both broken, they've both been broken, and mucked about with, and reshaped into weapons, but Jack was left his agency (and ironic, that; the Agency left him that agency) and Bucky was never meant to be anything more than a tool.

That will change.

Bucky's already feeling his way around it. Watching Jack, measuring out the cadence and the word choice and the coaxing, coercing call to compliance which is just about everything Jack says, these days. Jack could have been an instructor in the Agency, if he'd stuck around for it. And the first thing the instructors do is break all the students.

Well. Bucky's already broken. So this is the hard part – putting him back together again.

"Up," he says, though it's tucked beneath his breath. Where Bucky can hear it, but understand that it's not quite meant for him – not entirely, not yet. A covenant between them.

Then Jack turns back to the window, brings up his wrist, queues up his notes on just how the power of Hydra is to fall into his hands. All he needs now is to know what's next.

[rootsofthestories]

*flailyhands a over the fucking place*

I love this. I love this to sad and pathetic extents The boys being fucked up and broken and navigation this and I love it so stupidly much. <3333