gwyn | DVD Commentary track meme 3

Today is the first of two for

ranalore, this one for Dark Approach : The hospital scene after Bucky comes in, which kills me every time I read it.

So, I wasn't sure if you meant the entire hospital scene or just the stuff with Steve and Bucky, but I'll talk about the entire thing just in case. I knew from the start, even though the process of writing such a long fic took me in different directions many times over the course of the months I worked on it, that I wanted to have a scene where Bucky is being sniper boyfriend keeping tabs on Steve and saving his life from a distance, and I had the whole scene with Thor coming in and thinking Bucky's a threat to Steve and hitting him with lightning and they would fall together, already mapped out. And that that would be the final catalyst to get Bucky back to Steve--even if he's not emotionally there, he's physically there.

And I really wanted Steve to just completely fall to pieces over it, and have his friends be the ones to shore him up--I think that's what's often missing in a lot of what I read, that Steve needs people helping him with his shit just as much as Bucky does. Seeing Bucky there really does him in, he's both happier than he's ever been and maybe more miserable than he's ever been, because all his guilt and sense of failure is hitting him hard, seeing Bucky like that. And even though Bucky chose to come back to Steve for help, that wasn't exactly how he wanted to make himself known and hospitals + Bucky are a really bad combo, so he's panicked, needs to escape. Which I think would make Steve just feel all the worse about everything, even though he knows why Bucky came in. It's a bit over halfway through the story, so things have to change at that point, and even though Bucky's kind of fighting it, he knows that the tough love Steve's giving him is right.

And of course, everyone else is worried--about Steve, about Bucky being a danger to him, and so on--but they see how things are with Steve and they know they need to help him, whatever their feelings about the Winter Soldier are. I think Steve is often portrayed as oblivious to what would help Bucky get better, like he's incapable of getting it, and I wanted him to be not oblivious, but helpless, because he has so much guilt and an overwhelming sense of responsibility for what happened to Bucky that he doesn't know what steps to take and he's feeling his way there. In the hospital, they are both suddenly helpless--Bucky because he's been in cardiac arrest and pretty much dead for a few minutes on top of the terrible withdrawal from the drugs Hydra had him on, and Steve because he can't dig himself out from under the mountain of guilt he's buried in. They are both injured there, in different ways.

And I really wanted to have Sam and Tony see that, and understand that, and try to figure out how they can help, even though they both feel pretty inadequate there too. I really wanted that section afterward to be from Sam's point of view, because he's seeing the shift in Steve and Bucky's relationship there, and he gets it more than pretty much anyone else could.