and shooting arrows while standing on the back of a galloping horse. (A white horse, very dramatically white, if you know anything about white horses then you know this means the horse is old, older perhaps than Clint). It’s the circus, so naturally at some point or other the horse is nonchalantly jumping over fire.
Greasepaint to cover the bruises (learn easy, learn hard, as long as you learn)
The horse is hungry,
Clint is hungrier, (the animals eat first, it is ever thus)
the show must go on.
Seventeen years old and two hundred and thirty-two miles from Waverly, Iowa (it’s the farthest he’s ever been from the place he was born, although he doesn’t know that)
white horse (twenty years old, born in Texas, has travelled farther than the archer standing on her back has ever dreamed, Clint has never seen the ocean, the old circus mare has),
fire (eternal),
arrows (stick and string from the paleolithic era)
Yesterday I accidentally drew tiny Bucky knitting and when talking to iamshadow21 in bed about it she mentioned Steve covered in knits and all cranky about it.
“Really Bucky, this is getting ridiculous!”
It’s not so much that Bucky knits for him, it’s that at the first sign of cold Bucky wraps him up in hand knits and wont let him take them off. Really, Steve loves that Bucky spends his free time making stuff for him. He just wishes that it wouldn’t make him feel so weak, wishes that he didn’t actually need it.
When they get a bit older Steve gets Bucky to teach him how to knit so he can knit socks and balaclavas for soldiers.
So I’ve seen head canons of Bucky post Winter Soldier learning to knit but I loved the idea of him learning as a child to make warm things for Steve to wear. Steve was stuck in bed a lot and Bucky would sit watch and knitting gave him something productive to do that maybe might stop Steve getting sick next time.
Knitting was still cheaper than buying clothing at this time. These days it costs me more in yarn than it does to go and buy something in the shop.
I hope to get around to a series of Bucky knitting through out the years. Probably in the war and post Winter Soldier too.
Love this, love the art and I kind of like the idea of Bucky learning how to knit before the war. I know he was probably working a lot and in physical jobs but I can see him learning to knit fairly young so he can make warm stuff for Steve to wear because Steve gets so cold. Maybe it was cheaper to buy yarn and knit stuff then. Now it costs me more to knit something than to buy it but that’s mass production overseas in sweat shops causing that so… I know there are lot of pictures of soldiers knitting when they were in hospital etc. oooohhh! now I really want a war poster of Cap and the Commandos knitting as a promotion thing. Can’t you just see Cap knitting patriotic socks. I may have to try and draw this now if no one else does. (please do, I have very little time I can sit up these days so drawing is difficult)
What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect—what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
lbr, even if they’d have a 50s honeymoon, they’d totally end up kicking ass and busting crime rings by accident
I WANT TO READ THAT FIC TOOOO
Really we just need Howard debriefing them after, sitting at his giant desk in his brand new SHIELD office, the two of them looking sullen and defiant, and he pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “Let’s discuss this again, you went on your honeymoon and how many people are dead?”
And Steve’s like “Look, I only killed the ones trying to kill me, I was good,” and Peggy’s all “And the rest of them were bad people anyway, I honestly don’t see the problem here” and Steve gives her this super doe-eyed look of passion and Howard mutters “I’m never getting married” to himself.
Someone needs to write this. Extra points if Steve has a bitemark/hickey on his neck, clearly visible, when Howard’s dressing them down.
Well, remember, the Hulk as an experiment in re-creating the super-soldier is very recent — I’d have to check with Mage for the precise date but I believe it only dates to the Ed Norton Hulk film. But to make it easy, let’s stick with MCU for now and ignore the comics, because in MCU Hulk was an attempt to re-create the Super Soldier Serum, though Bruce Banner wasn’t apparently aware of that.
I don’t think we’d see the Hulk sooner, at least in America, but the why of that is a complicated one.
If Erskine had lived, the Serum formula would have been in his control, which I don’t think was an accident; Erskine came from Nazi-controlled Germany and he presumably had a very healthy paranoia about authority. Even if the US had no plans to kill him, he knew that they wouldn’t dare think about it so long as he was the only one who knew the formula. It also meant he could exercise the same rigorous quality control on later test subjects that he did when choosing Steve. Phillips, for all his likeable qualities, was a military man in wartime and like most of the people he represented, he wanted the biggest, dumbest asshole to get the treatment — if Erskine didn’t control who got it, then the Army would start shoving men like Gilmore Hodge into the Sarcophagus of Pretty. And as we know, in the Sarcophagus of Pretty, good gets better, and bad gets worse. So you either get a lot of indestructible bullies, or you get a lot of dead ones. Erskine won’t have that.
So you have Erskine who is willing to make super soldiers but who is not going to unless they pass his personal inspection. The government’s still getting its soldiers, even if it’s not getting them super fast. Maybe they want more than Erskine is willing to give, but a bureaucracy at rest tends to stay at rest; as long as Erksine’s willing to play ball, it’s unlikely that anyone but a psychotic would push for parallel experimentation just so they could get more soldiers, and highly unlikely it would get funding.
There was a fanfic once, I wish I could remember where, that had one character talking about how it was a good thing Erksine died, because then the genetic arms race would have kicked into high gear, and you’d get armies of Super Soldiers running around fucking shit up. Another character pointed out that no — if personality affects how one reacts to the Serum, then what you get for candidates are people like Steve Rogers — people who will not use their power for personal gain, who will not blindly follow orders, and who will not stand to see the powerful dominate the weak. So what you end up with are a bunch of rational, thoughtful, stridently anti-authoritarian and nearly indestructible men who are trained to work well together and collaborate to achieve their goals. I can’t think the military would want too many of them.
If we did see a Hulk, I don’t think it would be an American one; I think it would be the product of Russia, post-war, trying to break the cold war stalemate by producing its own super soldiers with partial information taken from spies in America.
Steve knows perfectly well what it looks like, it’s just that, well, he doesn’t really care what the other Avengers think, and plus Tony choking on his spit every time it happens just never gets old.
Sometimes he even pauses before entering rooms so he can listen in on the discussions about what the hell he’s been doing with these young men.
The best one is when Jeff, the dark-haired guy with the scar that bisects his eyebrow, stands on tiptoe to kiss Steve’s cheek on his way out. He says, “thanks, sugar. Let’s do this again sometime,” and Steve watches in the mirror beside the door as Clint coughs into his coffee, spraying it all over his face and the chair behind him.
He tries not to smirk as he shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets. “Gonna head back to bed for a bit,” he says, “didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”
He thinks he might have cracked a rib trying to hold in his laughter as he heads back to his room, listening to Clint sputter behind him.
knitting in the dark 