[by captainnut0817]
An excellent and very well-written AU trilogy! The first part is tragic and heartbreaking, but has a happy ending. The second is a bit lighter but shows their difficulties adjusting to free life. And the third one is quite amusing as the matched set expands to a throuple.
1. the long game by enemyofrome
Author's Summary:
In 1945, Steve Rogers trades himself to the Red Room in exchange for the Winter Soldier. They accept his offer, but don't let Bucky go. After all, their supersoldiers come as a matched set.
Excerpt:
Afterwards he is left alone with the Captain, or as alone as they have ever been, to calm him down while the techs prepare the tank for his long sleep. The Soldier unfastens the manacles and sifts his fingers through the fine hair, stringy and limp with sweat. He leans down and presses his lips to the Captain’s forehead, and they come away salty.
Today facts are not to be bartered, but given away for free. “Your name,” he murmurs, “is Steve.”
Bright feverish eyes track across his face. He keeps his voice low and their foreheads pressed together. There are secrets they have kept for decades, telegraphs passed between them bearing information more vital than that in any classified file. After the Soldier has gone out and done his killing, he too will be wiped and it will be the Captain’s turn to hold on to these fragile matters until he comes awake again. “You said you’d known me all my life,” he goes on, voice disguised by the clatter coming from the cryo chamber. “You said one day, after we killed them all, we’d run away to a place called Brooklyn. You called me Bucky.”
Steve mouths the name against his cheek, lips moving soundlessly, hands clutching at the Soldier’s arms with bruising force. They don’t have much time together. The Soldier talks fast. “They’re planning to sell us,” he adds. He has yet to work out the significance of this, but it seems like something the Captain will want to know. “The buyer is called HYDRA. I don’t want to be sold. But if they want you, they’ll have to have me too.”
Steve’s breathing quickens. He is still in too much pain to speak. The techs are coming back in. Desperately, in the seconds before they are pulled apart, the Soldier says, “Good night, Captain.”
One of the techs laughs, and receives a metal elbow to his cheekbone for his trouble. The others take them away, the Captain to the cryo chamber, the Soldier to be prepped for his mission. A matched set. It could be years before they meet again.
Author's Summary:
After years of captivity, Steve and Bucky still do their best to protect each other in the only way they know how.
Excerpt:
They are in the conference room with sixteen reporters and twenty-one cameras, and it is only T minus a few minutes until someone asks something stupid and everything goes to hell.
Bucky watches Steve with owlish intensity. The only thing his boyfriendpartnerthing hates more than people with questions is people with cameras, and his shoulders are already squaring into fighting stance, the careful showman’s blankness smoothing over his features. Steve can handle anything. When he feels like it, he can charm even the most cantankerous reporter into glazed quiescence. Bucky’s seen him do it.
The main problem: he’s also seen Steve revert under stress to fight-anything-that-moves mode and, while he finds it endearing, law enforcement officials and the general public do not.
The worst thing is that Bucky can see why they ask the things they do. After all, Captain America was something of an urban legend back in the war, until Steve and Bucky vanished from the face of the earth and Pegs parachuted out of the Valkyrie into the Arctic wastes. There are unanswered questions. Conspiracy theories. Even a movie. (Bucky saw it, though he wasn’t supposed to. He quite liked it. Poor sweet heroic Cap, purer than pure, with contact lenses that made his eyes just the right shade of cornflower blue. The Black Widow, scheming, voluptuous temptress, the Eve to his Adam. And his sinister Sergeant, brainwashed by resentment, who faked his death to lure the Captain into the Red Room’s arms.
Natalia found it hilarious. So did Bucky, until Steve put his fist through their flat-screen TV and they had to get a new one.)
3. guardian demons by enemyofrome
Author's Summary:
The one where the Winter Soldier, the other Winter Soldier, and their ridiculous cat try to win Sam Wilson's heart.
Excerpt:
“Next time,” . . . [Steve says to Sam], “count to fifty before you go rushing into any gunfights.”
“A hundred,” Bucky says.
“Nah,” says Sam. His vision is so blurry Steve and Bucky seem to have melded into a single tank-like body, two-headed, eight-limbed, bristling all over with guns and knives and leather straps. “Gotta be fast. I keep showing up to missions only to find all the mooks dead already, or beaten into submission. S’weird.”
Above him, his uninvited guests exchange a glance. They look like a pair of seraphim with flaming swords, except far more demonic. So maybe just like demons, then. Bucky says, “Oh?”
“Yeah,” says Sam, squinting up at the indistinct halo of his face. “For weeks now. Funny, huh? Almost like someone made sure to get there first and do all the grunt work before I showed—“
Finally, finally, the conscious parts of his brain clank into motion. He says, “Wait, what?”
“What?” Steve echoes. Unlike Bucky’s rusty creak, his voice has a certain vintage sweetness that Sam is beginning to associate with suspenders and stockings and red-lipsticked women brandishing rivet guns.
“S’you,” says Sam thickly, with altogether more Archimedean triumph than the situation warrants. If he had been in a bathtub, and had any bodily strength left to speak of, he would have shouted Eureka. “You’re the ones who keep doing my missions for me, and beating everyone up before I—“
“—before you get yourself killed,” Steve says severely. His jaw is very square, but his eyes are large and round and oh, Sam thinks, really quite alarmingly blue. “So give us a head start. Like I said. Count to fifty.”
“A hundred,” Bucky says again. He lifts the bloody rag, sticks out his lower lip at the wound, and puts a fresh towel over it. “He’s faster than us in the air, Stevie.”
“Is not,” says Steve, sounding affronted.
“Is too.”
“Guys,” says Sam. “Guys, I’m right here.”