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shieldborneStories placed below were all improvised in RP threads at the time, but in retrospect I enjoy them so much they are now part of my Steve headcanons.
Some of the threads linked to may be NSFW, but the stories themselves are not, for the most part, except for swearing.
Some of the threads linked to may be NSFW, but the stories themselves are not, for the most part, except for swearing.
Steve and Bucky's Soapbox Racer
Date: 2018-12-15 02:27 am (UTC)"Well, there was that one time I decided we should build a soap box car. There was no local derby or anything, it was just something to do. I think we were about twelve?"
Steve rolls over onto his back and crosses his arms behind his head turning his face toward Bucky and smiling. "We scavenged up a couple orange crates and borrowed some tools from a neighbor. You had a way better idea how to use them than I did. It actually went pretty well to start with, except then we needed wheels for it."
"So, everyone knows the best wheels for a soap box car are the kind you get off a baby buggy. Unfortunately, we didn't know anyone with a baby or a buggy. But your sister had a buggy for her dolls, and we figured she wouldn't notice if we just borrowed the wheels for a couple days."
"I'm not 100% sure whose idea it was," he says a little gently. "Probably both of us. But what neither of us realized is that doll buggy wheels don't have to be quite as sturdy as real baby buggy wheels do."
"So. We took the wheels off the doll carriage and put them on the soap box car, and it rolled pretty well. We pushed one another up and down the road a couple times, and then I got the bright idea to try and roll down the hill between Elm and Jefferson. We figured there wasn't much traffic in the early morning, so we'd try then."
"We got there right as it was getting light, and you got cold feet right away. It wasn't a very steep hill, but it was enough that we had to put a stick under the wheels to keep the car from rolling on its own. You kept saying you weren't sure the brakes would stop it, and what if the milk truck came by at the wrong moment, and sometimes the cops would be on Jefferson Street in the morning at this hour...and I got pissed off at you and I got into the car and said I would show you it would be fine."
"I must have gotten in with some extra force, because the wheels jumped the stick before I was all the way in, and it started rolling downhill and picking up speed with me half in the seat and fumbling for the steering-rope. You started chasing after me yelling curse words and calling me an idiot, and the thing was swerving all over the road--"
He's laughing in earnest now, waving his hand as if to show the drunken path the car took. "I don't know how fast the damn thing went, but you managed to catch up about twenty feet from the bottom of the hill and you threw yourself onto me and the car, and we both went spinning into the grass as the side of the road. The car rolled over a few times and two of four wheels got bent or flattened, and you and I didn't even notice at first because we were tussling in the grass and calling each other names."
Bucky listens to this story with a mix of skepticism and fascination. His eyebrows go up and stay up, and all of that is probably a sign he doesn't remember much of this incident, but he's enjoying the story anyway.
He also goes through another s'more while Steve talks.
"That... sounds like us, yeah." He smirks just a little, looking thoughtful, and more like Bucky in some indefinable way. "You were an idiot, by the way."
"It wasn't my proudest moment," he admits, still laughing a little. "I bit you. On the right forearm. It bruised later."
Because sometimes, Steve fights dirty.
"Anyway, we wore ourselves out, and then we had another fight when we saw how badly we'd fucked up the wheels, and took everything back home and tried to hammer them back into shape. We actually managed to get them back onto the buggy, but they still looked like they had been stomped on by an elephant, and they barely rolled at all."
He shakes his head. "Your sister was so angry. I ended up giving you my allowance and whatever I could earn for the next three weeks, because you got told you owed her a replacement. But we managed it."
"You...?" Bucky shakes his head a little, working on toasting another marshmallow over the flame. "Biting is a very effective strategy. And it was definitely on you to buy the replacement." The bit about strategy says something about where he's at in his head, still, but he's smirking a little because he can't seem to get that off his face, and his shoulders have come down from around his ears.
The Squirrel Incident
Date: 2018-12-15 02:38 am (UTC)Steve sets his fork down, one hand curling around his coffee cup just to soak up the warmth, but he's leaning forward, a captivated audience. "Okay, okay, I need details. You beheaded a brass statue...with an explosion? Damn it, I wish you had been at my school. I would have loved to see that. I think the best we ever did was put a live squirrel in the teacher's desk."
Which was not explosive, but was definitely messy and involved a lot of screaming and running from the classroom. The squirrel escaped unharmed. Several students got knocked down and stepped on in the mass exodus, but Steve knew them all and felt most of them deserved the bruising.
...Tony leans forward, elbow propped on the table, eyes bright with mischief. "Steve, how in the hell did you capture a live squirrel? They're like flies they just- they know when you're coming."
"Well..." he admits, rubbing the back of his neck. "In retrospect it was kind of mean to the squirrel, but I guess it has a good story to tell it's squirrel friends at the squirrel bar now. There's a lot of old ladies that feed them, down in Prospect Park. Breadcrumbs or peanuts, sometimes little pieces of fruit. And Bucky'd just been to visit his grandparents, and his grandpa used to hide liquor all over the house through prohibition, right? Well, he forgot where he’d hid some of it, and Bucky found it when he was cleaning out their attic, and he kept it and brought it home. We, uh, we tried it—I mean, who wouldn’t, right?—and it was absolutely the worst. I was laid up for two days trying to keep my guts from crawling up my throat.”
To say nothing of the Adventures had while drunk on terrible bathtub gin. But that’s another story entirely. “So after that I wouldn’t drink any more of it but there was a lot left. Soakin’ raisins in it for the squirrels was my idea. Most of them wouldn’t touch them, but one of them carried a couple off and we followed it. I don’t know if it actually ate one or if just holding them in its mouth made it drunk, but we found it sacked out under the bushes and I felt shitty about it because I didn’t want it to die.”
This is turning into a saga. “Bucky said to leave it alone, but I made him get me a shoebox and brought it home and gave it some water and hid it in the closet when my mom came home. It perked up a little overnight, and I was going to just let it go in the morning, only the only trees I knew of other than in the park were in the schoolyard, so I figured I’d let it go there--buuuuuut I ran late on the way to school and the teacher hustled me inside before I could explain I had a squirrel in a box, and I…never really liked that that teacher. I mean, I had good reasons, trust me.”
Something else to elaborate on later, perhaps.
“Anyway, I got mad and when she stepped out of the room to talk to the principal, I dumped the squirrel into her desk drawer. It was quiet for about fifteen minutes and then it started scratchin’, and finally she opened the drawer to see what the noise was about and—WHAM! Squirrelface.”
...Tony's well on his way to giggles by the time they meander to squirrelface but it's the fucking delivery that has him gasping for breath, crackling with bright, brilliant laughter. "Seriously? Right in the-"
He waves a hand over his face, tears streaming down his eyes. "Steve. Steve that's the best thing I've heard in months."
..."It just kinda...escalated," Steve says, grinning. "But yeah, right in the face, you know how they do when they get startled up a tree?"
He mimics little paws clawing the air. "She didn't know what hit her. And the kids panicked, so next thing we knew, the classroom's empty and half the desks are turned over...we got an extra long lunch period. And that's why I didn't get caught. At least four kids saw me, but no one wanted to snitch since we got out of class."
Steve's brief fifteen minutes of popularity in school. It was fun.
Raspberry Cutex
Date: 2018-12-15 02:47 am (UTC)He's quiet for a few seconds, then says: "Raspberry Cutex. That was the color nail varnish ma wore most of the time when I was little. Raspberry, sometimes Chinese Red, and Pink Pearl on holidays. She worked real hard; I always liked it when she dressed up and got fancy because that meant she was taking a break. Anyway, I must have been about four at the time. I don't remember all of it that well, so I don't know what I was thinking, but I got into her makeup. The usual kid stuff; when she caught me I had rouge on my elbows and mascara in my hair, and she cleaned me all up and put me to bed early, but what she didn't realize is that I'd opened up the nail varnish and stuck the brush in both my ears. I guess it tickled or something, I don't know."
"So she comes to wake me up the next day and I didn't really respond to her, and I was sick so often she naturally guessed somethin' was really wrong. Checked my temperature, made me rest and eat a bunch of extra liver for a couple days--that was the pernicious anemia. Raw liver was the only thing we had for it back then. It was the worst."
He starts to shake his head, then thinks better of it. "When I didn't get any better, she took me to the doctor at the Catholic hospital, and he didn't even want to look at me. He told her with all the other problems I was having, I was probably going deaf and she oughtta think about making me a ward of the state. Well, that part I heard because she went off on him. There was yelling."
"And I was upset because my ma was upset, and it could have been a complete disaster, except then one of the other nurses came in to help calm me down and happened to get a glimpse of Raspberry Cutex in my ear canal. It had hardened in there and blocked it up enough that I could hardly hear, and that's the reason I was acting funny. All it took to clear it up was a few drops of acetone. I think the doctor was embarrassed."
"Served him right."
...“Think of how different it would be if your mom gave you up,” Tony muses, taking more hair from the sides. “You are who you are because of everything in your life. Even your disastrous drag phase. That’s why changing this is going to make the other you different. Maybe not for the better but different enough. Stop wiggling or I’m cutting your ear off.”
He’s not serious.
...
This particular story was most often recounted to Steve by his mother when he was terribly ill, to remind him that the doctors don't know everything, and that sometimes the solution to recovery is just letting go of your prejudices and taking a closer look at the problem.
"I did end up deaf in the left ear," he says, "before the serum. But that was because of high fevers, not nail polish."
He tilts his head obligingly, then rolls his eyes at the threat. "She would never have given me up. I mean, I had nightmares about it, or about being taken away from her, for years and years, but she'd have blown up Manhattan before she'd have let me go. It was hard, though, being a poor widow with a sickly son."