Chapter Text
My thought process behind the chapter and song choice. ❤️🔥
I knew this chapter was going to end up being a giant trauma dump between Nat and James to their respective besties, as well as to each other. The fact that they both really never got to properly deal with the trauma of having a child together, having a less than normal emotional bond and now coming to realize that their daughter is still alive and potentially being used in another HYDRA based operation is devastating. Not to mention, Natasha obviously knowing about the entire thing in one way or another from the get go and never having a proper outlet to really deal with it. Therapy has probably helped but having all the evidence laid out flat in her face is a whole other thing. And now, to put it all out there for James as well is another layer of trauma added to the situation. She never knew if he remembered or even realized they had a daughter together and to see him break down over it is a special kind of trauma hell. 'Gasoline' was my choice because A) I kept seeing SOOOO many Bucky edits on tiktok to it and it makes sense, and B) lyrically speaking, it fits the narrative of feeling like a screw up. Just gliding through life, trying to be better than your mistakes and trauma. It speaks to both of them. It's one of the things I try to think about when choosing music. Having it personify one or both of them.
This is really the chapter that started driving me to want to be more emotionally and visually descriptive. I wanted to start really making sure it was understood how they all felt. Whatever kind of emotions were happen, whatever kind of feeling were floating around. I needed to make sure I put it down in words in a way that would make everyone understand in the way I did. This chapter also really started my need to try and make all future chapters at least 6k words or more. I wanted chapters to be something of sustenance. I want them to get the point across while also being visually appealing in the way that, as you read, you can imagine as much as feel the story. Does that make sense?
I always knew I wanted to write Bucky in a way that showed him as emotional. Despite everything, I wanted it to be obvious that he is still human. That healing is letting yourself feel your emotions and let them go. HYDRA basically brain washing him to not feel anything for 70+ years leaves a lot of pent up emotional trauma in play. I feel like the time he spent in Wakanda with Ayo and the Dora would slowly start to pick apart the seaming of that. Visually, I see it like sewing (which I guess is weird?); HYDRA sewed him back together so tightly that they made him into a whole new item. Ayo and the Dora took a seam ripper to him and started letting out all the things they closed him off from, and now he's being resewn back together as something new again. Not quite Bucky, not quite the asset.
In another way, It's emotional for Natasha because she has to admit lying to Steve for YEARS about knowing Bucky's fate. Having to admit to all of the secrets she's compiled through the years working under the KGB and SHIELD. I also think, in a way, it's why they end up being such close friends too. Especially in the MCU, they played up Romanrogers (IMO) through The Avengers, CA:TWS, CA:CW, Infinity War AND End Game only to kind of throw a weird wrench in with Nat and Bruce in AoU? I think, especially since they DIDN'T give us BuckyNat in the movies, Romanrogers just ended up making more sense because of the connection they inadvertently also had through Bucky. Is it correct? PROBABLY NOT BUT I STAND ON THIS HILL OK OK.
This chapter also starts to talk about the 'Winter Widow' project in detail. It's always been a thing that The Winter Soldier trained Black Widow in The Red Room (if i'm not mistaken), so I knew I wanted to do a story about their past. What I also wanted to do was give it some sort of highly traumatic point to lead up to. It was already a thing that, just like the soldiers, the widows had been tested on and genetically altered to be the best spies they possibly could be. They both have their own kinds of serum running through their veins, altering their DNA. So the thought was, 'If these two people have been genetically altered to be better than just human, What would happen if you took them and made them have a baby?' This is what became the main plot for their time together. Not to mention the emotional trauma bonding. Stockholm syndrome was also something that was discussed throughout hashing out ideas with my bestie Ash. The two of them making a safe space within each other because of the nature of the things they were forced into doing. It's not at all a healthy relationship, but it ended up being theirs in the most awful romcom kind of way.
The other big thing that was discussed as an issue was the age. I believe it's canon that widows become sterilized at the age of 14, and in the original drafted idea of this story, Natalia ends up pregnant and has the baby at 15. I didn't like the idea of her being that young, so I ended up pushing it back to 16. According to the paperwork you see in the next chapter, Katya's birthdate is only 10 days after Natalia turns 17. Technically she's 17 when the baby is born but she spends the entirety of being 16 pregnant. Twice. I unfortunately have family memebers who have miscarried so when it comes time to discuss that in a chapter, I have a rough idea of how I want that to play out, but for a 16 year old girl, being forcibly pushed into getting pregnant by a manipulative piece of shit who has his own agenda, I can't honestly fathom what comes from that. I'm gonna try my best but thankfully, I never had to deal with that experience myself, and I am so sorry to anyone who has miscarried in their lives. 🫂
My favorite thing to do is break up tension and trauma with comedy. (It's not my own form of coping, I don't know what you mean. 👀) Getting to give them a respite with Tony's one liners or their casual flirting kind of gives them as characters more layers in my opinion. Getting to see how they interact with the good and bad times feels more human, in my opinion. I think a lot of people tend to deflect with comedy. With the 4 people currently in discussion? Comedy and humor is very much the move to ease tension, even just for a moment.
The ending part being Steve cutting Bucky's hair also felt right in a way to draw these characters back to their roots. Like I said, Bucky and Steve have always been a package deal. Doing little things like this is a way to tie Bucky back into who Bucky was. Having Steve do his hair like he use to in the 30s and 40s is a great way for Bucky to reclaim that part of himself that HYDRA tried to erase, that same part that Steve consistently tries to remind him of. It's always going to be there; locked away somewhere in the depths of his mind that HYDRA's tried to electrically erase. The fact that Bucky has so much brain trauma through years of electric shock therapy is something I want to be so careful about while also exploring the ideas of slowly unlocking things that they tried to take away from him. We know the serum fixes a lot of things, but repeated trauma probably becomes a grey area over time. Like a scar, the damages is done and forever shown as the trauma, but the skin is still there. It doesn't just go away, it doesn't not grow back and form the scar. It's there, just different. I built a lot of ideas off metaphors, can you tell?
Bucky talking so openly with Steve about what happened while Steve tries his best to aleviate some of his pain was hard to write. As friends, and i'm sure a lot of us can relate to this, you don't want to see your person in a place where they end up so upset that they start to despise themselves as a person. You try to make up excuses or say things to make them feel better and understand, but the reality is, we don't ever get to understand wholly what any one else is feeling in moments because we don't have the same stories. What we feel may be named and labeled the same ways, but the way we feel them is what makes people so individually unique. It's why it crushes Bucky in ways that Steve tries to make excuses for, as his best friend, that end up just making him more upset. Is it 100% Dreykov's fault for using The Asset against Natalia all those years ago? YES. Is it also not surprising that Bucky holds an immesurable amount of guilt for what he did to her? Yes! At the end of the day, it is still his person, his physical being that carried out all these terrible things through life. It's not just mentally taxing, it's physical as well. Waking up in your body when you know what other people have done to it or made you do to someone else? Again, I live off metaphors in my writing, I GUESS.
In the end, I think realizing no matter how much you feel like a failure, how much you think you can't deal with in life, as long as you have SOMEONE who believes in you through thick and thin, it tends to kind of rebuild your psyche. It gives you an anchor to hold onto. Steve is Bucky's anchor, even when he doesn't remember things like he should. Even when he feels like he should be punished and looked down upon for the things he's done. Even if it wasn't the boy from the 40s actively making the decisions to do the terrible things they did. Everyone deserves a Steve in life. Everyone deserves to know that, despite life making things hard and terrible, you always have someone who'll be there for you. If you make a mistake or bad things happen and you feel less like a person, there's always someone out there who can help. 💖