Tag: cap 2 spoilers

msbeeinmybonnet:

amuseoffyre:

msbeeinmybonnet:

So yesterday I posted a meta on how the Winter Soldier essentially is the world’s deadliest child and how he threw tantrums over Steve treating him like a friend, and I’d like to expand on that today. Because I honestly believe that it was Steve’s kindness that managed to crack the Winter Soldier’s programming and send it crumbling.

(I’m going to differate between Bucky and the Winter Soldier, because I believe the Winter Soldier is a semi-personality of his own, built upon Bucky’s original personality like a Medieval church built upon a Greek temple. If that makes sense.)

Neither Steve nor Bucky recognize each other at first, for understandable reasons. The Winter Soldier is active and thus Bucky is completely dormant, so he has no possible way to remember Steve. Steve is faced with a masked assassin who has even got Natasha unnerved; he has no reason to suspect it might be his not-quite-as-dead-as-previously-suspected childhood friend.

And their fight is vicious. Since neither recognize each other, neither pull their punches and it’s the closest we get to see someone wiping the floor with Captain America. A lift filled with SHIELD elite? No sweat. The Winter Soldier one-on-one? Steve fights defensively and only gets a few hits in because the Winter Soldier is that effective a murder weapon.

But then, then, we get to the iconic scene where Steve recognizes the Winter Soldier as Bucky. The Winter Soldier, still in control, doesn’t react to it other than in a what the hell are you on about way.

This changes when Steve doesn’t act.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if “targets” has tried to fib the Winter Soldier in the past, to stall for time or prepare for a counter-attack. But it’s painfully obvious that Steve has no cards up his sleeves. He is genuinely stunned and probably couldn’t tell you his own name at that moment.

Lots of people have commented on how the Winter Soldier hesitates for a moment before throwing himself back into his mission. This is the first crack in the programming, and I think that hesitation we see is the ghost of Bucky. HYDRA managed to program the Winter Soldier to not recognize Steve’s face, but they couldn’t bury Bucky so deep that he wouldn’t react to Steve calling out to him.

The Winter Soldier has never known kindness or friendship or love – he’s a tool, what point is there in wasting such attention on a weapon? So when faced with Steve not defending himself, the Winter Soldier does not know what to do, it’s not part of his programming, and deep down within him Bucky starts to throw himself at the walls. I think that is what makes the Winter Soldier aim at Steve again; the world is shattering around him, inside him, but his mision is always his mission.

This carries over in his next scene, with Pierce. He’s unsure, questioning, a little bit violent. When ordered to have his mind wiped, he doesn’t fight it. Maybe he thinks things will return to normal, that he will be rid of the voice screaming inside of him to save his target protect him save him.

Of course, that doesn’t work. Not at all in fact. Because on the helicarrier we get this:

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The Winter Soldier doesn’t attack Steve. He is an assassin, a sniper, his advantage is in his unexpected first attack. But here he just stands before Steve, acting the part of a mountain, firm between Steve and Steve’s target.

And Steve? Steve talks. He tells Bucky he needs to get past him, please remember we’re friends, I really don’t want to this, I’m sorry.

marlowe-tops has an excellent meta on this fight which I highly recommend, and the gist of it is that while the Winter Soldier has his Mission, he can’t remember it because Bucky is screaming at him to not fight Steve. This time both of them are pulling punches, not wanting to hurt each other; before things escalate, they are almost having a shoving match.

Of course, things do escalate, and the Winter Soldier shoots Steve three times. (But deliberately avoids the head). Then Steve, because there is no Rogers without Barnes, runs down to save the Winter Soldier from being crushed to death, and the Winter Soldier snaps.

His mission saved his life. His mission, whom he can’t bring himself to kill, saved him and now calls him friend. His missionfriendmissionfriendmission says he won’t fight him. Calls him James Buchanan Barnes and the voice inside him screams louder and everything comes shattering down.

The following fight isn’t as much a fight as it is a physical scream of anguish. The Winter Soldier is crumbling, Bucky is fighting to get out, and Steve takes the punches and won’t fight back. He only pleads for Bucky, it’s me, Steve, remember me, please, remember me, I’m your friend.

Just look at the Winter Soldier’s face here.

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Look at the last one. Look at it real closely. Do you see how it goes from fear/confusion/anger/shock to… something softer? As he subtly turns to Steve and tilts his head down, Bucky recognizes Steve.

Steve. What have I done?

I’m not saying that Bucky returned to stay and that the Winter Soldier is gone; quite the opposite, I think Bucky only managed to break out at that exact moment. But he’s awake, no longer dormant, and could make the Winter Soldier dive into the river to save Steve and make sure he was breathing before leaving him.

There’s a long journey ahead and it will be filled with pain and heartbreak, but the cracks have been formed and will spread. The Winter Soldier’s programming is breaking down, and I cannot see any other cause for it than the combined force of Steve’s undying loyalty and love for Bucky, and Bucky’s bone-deep one for Steve – and how Steve proved that devotion all over again.

(gif sources: rebloggy.com & glassconduit & fluffalos & kirknspock)

This final moment, this moment where the man who had always protected little Steve Roger has him on the ropes is the moment where Bucky can’t and won’t be contained anymore. He always, always protected Steve. Always. In the back alleys of Brooklyn, on the front lines in Germany. It didn’t matter. No matter how big and powerful Steve got, Bucky would always protect him.

And now, Steve is on his back, bleeding, helpless, vulnerable, and for the first time since Bucky can remember, Steve isn’t fighting back. He isn’t running either, but Steve always fought back. Steve never lay down and let someone hurt him. No matter how big. No matter how strong. He would always fight.

And Bucky, somewhere under the armour of the Winter Soldier, knows that and knows that he can’t and won’t let this be the first time he isn’t there to save his friend. Bucky may hate what he has become and know all the things he has been used for and to kill, but the one person he can’t and won’t kill is Steve. Not now. Not ever.

There’s a line from the first film which sums up their whole relationship: not without you. And that is the essence of who these two men are. They are two halves of a whole. Not without you. And Bucky, under all the drugs and pain and torture and conditioning, will never let Steve down.

That is so beautifully put and exactly, exactly.

babbuisms-deactivated20161120:

captain america: the winter babbu

Sooo here’s the deal. I obvsly wasn’t going to subject a child to torture, so I had to spend a long time deciding how to tone down the winter soldier’s origins without destroying them, which landed me at “dr. zola invents worlds first brainwashing candy”. It ended up being no less creepy, I know, but atleast the poor thing is not getting physically harmed and atleast he has toysies. It makes sense in the babbu world.

I’m going to do more panels of this obvsly, but thought i’d start somewhere today lolol .u. enjoy

agent-hils-coulson:

lilkisara:

“I watched a lot of documentaries on post-traumatic stress and a lot of army documentaries about the training programs and some of the extreme sort of circumstances that some of those guys that are training to be Navy SEALs and some who are a part of it go through. I was trying to understand what it is, what it means for someone to be desensitized, to no longer question hurting something. I did as much research on all that stuff as I could in order to kind of know what that was like. And then my stepdad actually has Alzheimer’s, so there were parts about watching and studying that kind of disease, also, observing people like that that kind of helped me a little bit.”—SEBASTIAN STAN

I got to the bit about his stepdad and legit started crying

jabberwockypie:

afislife:

timelordsandkittens:

give-me-brandy-on-my-breath:

okay no but knitting headcanons are so important.

like, who follows patterns to the letter and who tries to follow but ends up kind of making their own pattern and who says fuck it and throws the pattern out the window and tries to figure it out for themselves

and who likes using circular needles over double pointed needles and stubborn ones who refuse to use anything but straight needles

who are the stress knitters and who are the people who knit when they’re bored and who are the knitters who always have yarn in their bag

so important

Steve learns to knit from Fury, of all people, and in turn he teaches Tony, who teaches his robots and never bothers with it again. Steve keeps up with it, though, knitting because it’s comforting and it’s one of the few things that is actually pretty much the same between now and the forties (not that he knew how to knit then; he just never thought to learn). Whenever he goes and visits Peggy, he comes back and knits at least one full hat, nonstop.

Sam only knows garter stitch but he and Steve get together and learn more stitches together and look up Youtube videos and get into competitions. Sometimes Steve comes home to messages on his answering machine from Sam saying, “You should look up the so-and-so stitch. I’ve knitted two pairs of gloves with it already” and he leaves a message in return saying “What about the such-and-such stitch, it’s great for hats, you can do it on circular needles really easily” and so on and so forth. They complete about who can knit faster, too. They get really good at it.

Sam, in turn, teaches Bucky to knit. It happens kind of accidentally; he’s knitting a scarf when suddenly there’s Bucky, and Bucky’s just watching him, like, avidly. Watching how his hands move and self-consciously covering his metal hand until Sam sits down and shows him how to cast on and before you know it, Bucky’s got a scarf started. (It’s kind of a shitty scarf, all uneven and the tension’s wonky and there’s dropped stitches all over the place, but damn it, he made it with his own hands, and that has got to count for something.)

Next time Fury drops by, the three of them are all knitting and Fury’s like “What have I started.” Over the course of the next week he gets, like, four scarves and three hats, in mysterious packages delivered by Natasha, probably, although she denies involvement.

Some of them are kind of shitty. But he wears them anyway.

Only when Steve and Sam and Bucky aren’t around, though.

You know, I wonder if Steve might already know how to knit? Maybe from his time in the army (maybe someone was really good at knitting balaclavas or gloves and taught Steve)?

Natasha, at some point, reveals she crochets (learned from her grandmother at a very young age) and knits too. It’s a thing she does – a comforting action for her hands on those nights when she just can’t sleep. Clint taught her the knitting — it’s one of his crafts for passing the hours during long stakeouts. So when Steve finds Natasha awake, crafting in the very early hours of the morning because she can’t sleep, he understands, and joins her by getting his knitting out too.

I prefer the idea that Steve learned how to knit as a kid. He was a sick little boy during the Depression. Either his mom or Bucky’s had to knit new things out of old. He went from helping unravel old sweaters to asking how it worked because he couldn’t afford a ton of paper for drawing and “Hey, this is a thing you can do in bed”. And Steve got cold a lot.

It’s entirely possible that BUCKY remembers bits and pieces, too, for similar reasons – but he has to re-learn after being the Winter Soldier and stuff.

Both of them primarily do Useful Things because man, in war time there’s nothing – NOTHING – you appreciate like a warm pair of socks, but they’re branching out a little in the 21st century.

Natasha knits, but nobody really wants to ask her about it unless she brings it up first because. That’s silly because it’s just a hobby regardless of gender, but it’s just one of those side effects of being badass and scary. She does fancier stuff and it always looks awesome when it’s done. (Though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t swear creatively at the yarn in Russian and every other language she knows when she’s making it.) But she makes it look SO EASY.

Bruce finds it meditative.

I have more, but I’m tired and my battery is dying.