LET ME TELL EVERYONE ABOUT ACTUAL BROOKLYNITES – NAY, ACTUAL NEW YORKERS – STEVE ROGERS AND BUCKY BARNES
• Have you ever met a New Yorker outside of midtown who doesn’t talk with their mouth full? Me neither. Steve Rogers, garbled: “M’jus say’n s’bullshit,” he manages, and swallows. “Our team doesn’t belong in fuckin’ Cali. Listen. You hear that?” “Is it Jim Morita laughing at us from beyond the grave?“ “Hell yeah, it’s Jim Morita laughing at us from beyond the grave.”
• Steve Rogers getting splashed with water by a cab. “WHADDAYA DOIN, HUH? JESUS!”
• Steve Rogers, by turns incredibly polite and incredibly rude on the subway. “Is this guy bothering you? Because if he tries to grope you again, I’m kicking his ass, miss, pardon my French.”
• Food Trucks: The Autobiography of an American Hero
• Those dumb BKLYN ballcaps. Steve owns like minimum ten.
• Wary of visiting Barton in Bed-Stuy. “I think I liked it better when it was crooks,” he says to Buck, eyeing a hipster in confusion. That sweater has like fourteen different kinds of flowers embroidered on it; it looks like something his ma owned, only ironic.
• “How much is eighteen dollars in future money?” Bucky asks him inside the Balcony Lounge in the Met. Steve blanches, staring at the menu. “For a salad? Oh my God, we’re going to the cafeteria.”
• Haggling in the fish market. Listen to me, this is so important. “That fish is a fuckin’ tadpole, and you want how much for it?” Bucky demands. “Hell no, hell no, kid, I’m old enough to be your granddad. It’s fifteen for the bunch there or none.” “Sir, these are set prices.” Turning to Steve, incredulous: “Does nobody goddamn know how to do business anymore? I swear to Christ. Bleedin’ me dry. I’m moving to Hell’s Kitchen.” “Hell’s Kitchen is just as expensive, sir.” “Well, fuck a duck, Steve, you hear that?”
• Following along with a yoga class happening in Central from six feet away, hidden slightly behind a tree
• “Yeah, Carnegie got hit in the Chitauri attack.” “What?” “It’s fine! It’s fine! It’s still there!” Steve refers not to the hall, but the deli. Priorities.
• Searching for apartments. “I’m starting to get the feeling,” Steve says, “That it’s cheaper to live in Manhattan.” He reaches for the listings for the other borough. Bucky grabs his hand. “Do not,” he says, “If you don’t want to have an aneurysm.”
• Bucky holding a stare-off with the 11 y/o kid on the subway wearing a Yankees jersey. The kid staring-off right back. Little punk.
• “Remember when New York was normal?” Steve asks Bucky, after watching the lady who owns the little domesticated monkey walk down Fifth Avenue, all up in her mink coat &etc. “Pal,” Bucky says, and drops a dollar into the can of a street performer, “New York was never normal.”
okay okay okay but imagine during sam’s (numerous) visits to bucky in wakanda, one day bucky casually mentions the notebooks in kept in his backpack during civil war. or at least, he TRIES to be casual about it but sam can tell he’s really upset about losing them for potentially forever, but also he’s curious and he’s like “what’d you write in these notebooks ? russian soup recipes ?”
bucky chuckles a little and he explains, tells sam about how sometimes he would jump up in the middle of the night and scribble down some scattered memory before it could fade away and be replaced by nightmares. he explains how the good memories, the ones with his family and steve before the war and the serum and everything else, were sometimes the ones that were harder to keep, how they would become blurry and static like a tv that doesn’t work so he decided to write them down, and then the bad ones got written down too because even though they were his own personal hell, he felt like he needed to remember.
sam’s quiet for awhile and then he says, “after my dad died, i kept a journal and everytime me or my mom smiled, laughed, or made a joke, i’d write it down. i was just a kid and we were so sad for so long, the happy moments were few and far between, so i thought i needed to find a way to keep them forever. eventually i started to write about the days when we couldn’t laugh or smile, or the times i cried myself to sleep and didn’t immediatly run to my mom’s bedroom because she had a long day and needed the rest and i didn’t wanna upset her even more. i kept it until i was sixteen and when my mom found it she burst into tears.”
they don’t speak much after that but the silence is meaningful, one more little piece of the puzzle that is their relationship slotting into place.
sam is gone very early the next day (”ex-superhero, ex-captain america business, you civilians don’t quite get it” “i could still bench press you one-handed, wilson”) but when bucky wakes up he finds an expensive-looking, leather cover notebook and an equally expensive-looking pen on his bedside table and when he opens it he reads “for the memories” written on the front page.
a few days later, sam receives a pic on his phone and it’s just a page of bucky’s new notebook that reads “thought about wilson’s stupid goggles and cackled so loud i scared the goats” with a drawing of a very ugly bird next to it, and that makes sam laugh out loud in the middle of a mission briefing, great timing barnes.
In Infinity War, when the army in Wakanda is charging forward to meet Thanos’s army, you see Steve and T’challa fly past everyone because they both run super fast. But Bucky is just as fast. And Bucky was not with them. Bucky looked at the army of weird alien monsters and thought to himself “I’m not in any hurry to get to that. I’ll jog it.”
i'll apple your turnover 