This week marks the third birthday of my Sam/Bucky Bake Off AU fic sugar pie, honey bunch, a story that’s very dear to my heart. It was very much a labor of love and I remain honored that so many people found it and loved it like I did, and three years of that feels like something worth celebrating!
Prompted ficlets won the extremely unscientific poll that I ran, so here’s a list of themed prompts. Send one in and I’ll write you a (hopefully) short ficlet from the expanded Bake Off AU universe.
Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I’m tired of being the only one brave enough to write “I am chewing on this fic” in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it
What would I give for a playboy who couldn’t keep it in his pants and who runs through women, but what I have is a son who shows no interest in them. Oh, you thought I didn’t know? I’ve been keeping pictures of our family out of the free press for years. What you do at night with your boys after your show of skirt chasing is a disgrace. If you were my second son, I wouldn’t care, but for a king it’s not possible. Not possible. We give up what we want when we want power. Believe me. Now, you want to show me you have the heart to be king? Show me you can control it. Wrestle it to the ground. Numb it with ice. But you cannot be what God made you, not if you mean to take my place.
The way I did not spell jewelry correctly on the first try even once in this fic Thank you for the prompt! The image of the jewelry dish came first. Everything else followed.
The jewelry dish sat between their two sinks, looking out of place in an otherwise tidy, if homey, bathroom. The ongoing occurrence of dragging someone into the bathroom and yanking a first aid kit out to attempt at-home stitches or bandage changes limited the amount of kitsch that could be permitted. But, there was the jewelry dish.
It was clay, shaped like a crawfish standing on its tail, pinchers raised above its head. It was lumpy and poorly painted and it had been knocked over once, so one of the eyes was missing and a leg had been reglued and was askew. Cass had made it when he was twelve in some kind of pottery class that had been so short lived, Sam and Bucky hadn’t been around for any of the duration of it. Yet the jewelry dish had ended up at their house instead of Sarah’s.
Usually it only held Sam’s air force ring in one pincher (only because something had go on it) and Bucky dutifully left his watch in the little bowl every night. Pins and buttons lived there too, between coming off a new coat and being put up where they belonged. Ticket stubs and event bracelets too, until they were eventually thrown away. Sometimes loose change. For the most part, it was a very temporary location. The ring and the watch stayed, but most things moved on.
So, stepping into the bathroom one night and finding metal draped over the crawfish and pooled in the bowl made him pause. The house had been empty when he left that morning. It had been empty for a while. He and his partner had become ships passing in the night lately, someone always trying to pull them apart. He’d had the place to himself for more than a week. Yet, these had not been here this morning.
Curiously, he picked up Bucky’s dog tags, turning them this way and that in the light, glancing at the familiar text. They weren’t warm, which meant Bucky had taken them off a while ago because his body heat generally made the tags easy to feel through his shirt.
For a second, Sam wondered if this was some coded message, left only for him. Something only Sam would notice and no one else would think twice about.
This week marks the third birthday of my Sam/Bucky Bake Off AU fic sugar pie, honey bunch, a story that’s very dear to my heart. It was very much a labor of love and I remain honored that so many people found it and loved it like I did, and three years of that feels like something worth celebrating!
Prompted ficlets won the extremely unscientific poll that I ran, so here’s a list of themed prompts. Send one in and I’ll write you a (hopefully) short ficlet from the expanded Bake Off AU universe.
I would devour any of those soft prompts from you, but in the spirit of what you asked for in the tags either movie night, black out, bare feet on a cold floor, or a blanket over a sleeping form?
46. bare feet on cold floorboards
Wyll is seven years old when he and Father move to the Upper City. They leave behind the only home he’s ever known, where his mother had planted roses in the garden and always left out food for the stray cats. He asks Father if he can stay there on his own, promises he’ll be brave and always remember to make his bed, but Father just laughs and asks whether he always remembers to make his bed now. (He doesn’t, but he’s not sure what that has to do with anything.)
His new bedroom is big, with windows that overlook the Lower City and tall bookshelves filled with stories of heroes and monsters, knights and princesses. It’s alright in the daytime, but at night, the shelves loom and the ceiling arches too high and Wyll misses the home where he grew up, with its scrubbed floors and cozy fire. Normally, when he can’t sleep, he crosses the corridor and slips into Father’s room, curls up in the big four poster bed and draws the curtains so the world doesn’t feel so big and empty.
