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[socket2me]

the SHOWER SEX meme
> Your character is in the shower with another character because they're close enough to do that together.

> You're helping each other get clean.

> You start getting freaky. Maybe this is the sequel to earlier sex or just unwinding after a bad week.
> If you're from a canon that is set in the olden days or a world without showers, you're in a bath or a hot springs or a bathhouse.

Comments

Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier ☭ MCU ☭ OTA

[gavemyleftarm]

[vintagecaptain]

It was cramped in his bathroom, especially for men their size but they managed to make it work. Bucky, or whatever was left of Bucky was slumped in his tub with the shower raining down on him, washing away what looked and smelled like weeks of grime and sweat.

Gently Steve ran a washcloth over Bucky's neck and chest, deliberately ignoring the scars and ugliness of his left shoulder. He didn't know why Bucky had shown up on the door step of his Brooklyn walk up but he didn't care. Bucky had come back to him, Bucky remembered enough to come to him for help and care and God, Steve was grateful beyond words.

"We should cut your hair," he said quietly over the gentle thrum of the shower. "It'll be easier for you to take care of."

He glanced at him, his best friend, his brother, his everything and knew he would have to let him go again. Bucky wasn't his again, not yet, not fully. Steve had to be patient but all he wanted to do was hang on and never let go.

[gavemyleftarm]

He was quiet since his arrival. It wasn’t terribly hard to find him, not with the skills the Soldier had. His search for himself brought him to New York, to Brooklyn. From there it wasn’t hard. Pieces came back, flickers of memory like sunlight pouring through the blinds, like an old movie reel. He knew his name was James Buchanan Barnes, called Bucky by friends. He knew he served in the war, he read so very much about the man he used to be, but it still didn’t feel like his past.

Arriving on Steve’s doorstep he felt like a ghost stepping into another’s life. There was just something so familiar about him… It was more than pictures in the museum and captions in books that told him he knew Steve. They’d been friends, brothers before and something of that lingered. How else could such a brief meeting in the midst of fighting trigger the breakdown of decades of brainwashing?

It was hard to go from being a thing to being a person. It was hard to make decisions on his own after being at the whim of others for so long. It left him quiet, unsure what to expect when he showed up at Steve’s apartment. He’d been staying in shelters, in houses left empty by people on holiday or away for work. He stole some clothes that fit and enough money to eat for a few days at a time, nothing significant. He was still lost, toiling with his own mind and forging his own identity. He’d not yet reached the point where he wanted to reach out with both hands and take back the life Hydra took from him.

That made him easy to wrangle, easy to usher to the bathroom and strip of his foul-smelling clothes. Not a word of question or protest came when he was guided to the shower nor when Steve stepped in behind him and began to peel the dirt and grime away layer by layer as if he might find the old Bucky hiding underneath.

“Okay,” he answered, voice flat and distant.

[vintagecaptain]

The dead tone of Bucky's voice hurt him, cut him down to his very soul. The last time he had heard that sort of tone Bucky had been strapped down to a table and mindlessly repeated his rank, serial number and nothing else.

He bit his lip against promising Bucky it would be okay. There was no guarantee of that Bucky was ever coming back and he had been working to accept that. It didn't matter either way, Steve would still help him.

The first step was washing away all the grime. He started with Bucky's shoulder, stubbornly treating both the same. He didn't want to ignore the arm, the mark of his failure and what his friend endured because Steve couldn't stop him from falling. The arm didn't seem to be effected by the water so he washed that too even though it was probably the cleanest part of Bucky right now.

"You aren't hurt?" he asked softly as he moved his hands and the soap down Bucky's flesh and bone arm, washing the space between his fingers. "You look alright."

He did, except for the scars that littered his shoulder and the rest of him. Bucky looked like he had spent a lifetime fighting but the truth was worse because Bucky spent a hundred lifetimes fighting a war without a choice.

[gavemyleftarm]

It was strange to be cared for like this. He couldn’t say he’d never been, he just couldn’t remember. It was there on the edge of his consciousness like a ghost, gone if he turned his head to see it. The harder he tried to dredge up his past, the harder it became to find those fragile pieces. For now it was enough to remember Steve, even in the vaguest of sense. Once, they’d be friends, brothers in arms, as close as two people could be without sharing blood. It was enough to know that bond cut through decades of programming, of brainwashing.

He could trust Steve, he reminded himself.

“No, I’m not hurt,” he answered in that same distant tone. Always so quiet now, so lost in searching his own mind to make sense of himself. No one cared for conversation with him in seventy years. One could say he was out of practice socialising and leave it at that, but there was so much more to his silence. It was deep, thoughtful silence, not the hollow silence he’d experienced before the crash. He canted his head, looking back at Steve over his shoulder. A faint smile pulled his lips and for a second, just a brief second, life came back to his feature just as an amused sort of exasperation came to his voice.

“I’m fine, Steve. I can manage this myself.”