Buck, I've been feeling like my head's splitting open on-and-off since Tuesday, and now I'm getting other symptoms too. Please distract me with embarrassing stories about Steve? i love those.

when steve was twelve, he broke his arm. surprisingly, it wasn’t in a fight–he was carrying a twenty-pound bag of potatoes up the stairs for his ma and he tripped. went down the whole flight, potatoes bouncing everywhere. after he’d recovered a bit from the tumble, he sat up, looked at old mrs. mackinnon– who was just coming out of her apartment–and said “sorry for the mess.” and then he looked down and noticed that his forearm was bent in the middle. and then he started crying. so his ma ran him to the hospital and they set his arm and put it in a cast. and thus began the first era of the Unstoppable Steve. (the second era was after erskine made a limited edition Jumbo Steve, and the third was Steve: Reheated.) see, if you’ve ever had a plaster cast, you know that those things are shockingly sturdy. steve went from being a sixty pound asthmatic with rage issues to being a sixty pound asthmatic with rage issues and a right hook like a piledriver. at first, his arm was too tender for him to do much, but after it started healing up, and he started getting in fights again, he figured out that his right arm was better than a baseball bat when it came to hitting stuff. that plaster cast started white, but it didn’t take long for it to get brownish with dirt and bloodstains. he still got his ass kicked, but it took a bit more work, and the other guys actually looked like they’d been in a fight. anyway, steve was half in love with that cast.  sometimes i thought he never wanted to take if off, and if it hadn’t messed with his drawing, i think he’d’ve worn it for about a year. but about a week before it was supposed to be taken off anyway, stevie got in a fight with gerry, the shoemaker’s kid from up the block. gerry was a mean sonofagun. he was thirteen, and he’d hit puberty early, so he had a solid eight inches on wee stevie. and he was as dumb as a box of bricks.he hated steve. steve was tiny, sure, but he was sharp as a tack and well-liked. there wasn’t an old lady within miles that didn’t love stevie, so he was always getting penny candy for running errands for them. gerry had a habit of cornering stevie in alleyways and beating on him until candy fell out. steve had a habit of not letting him do it without a fight.gerry cornered stevie and started shoving at him. steve shoved back. gerry shoved harder. stevie stumbled, and gerry threw a punch. stevie took it full in the face, and then swung back, full-force, with that sledgehammer cast of his. gerry dodged. steve plowed his cast into the old brick alley wall. the brick shattered. stevie’s cast broke. so did two of stevie’s fingers.steve started screaming.  gerry ran. now, understand–it was old, old brick, but all gerry saw was little crazy stevie rogers punch a hole in a brick wall and then start shrieking like a berserker. rat-brain gerry wasn’t bright, but he knew a losing battle when he saw one, so he ran like the hulk himself had just showed up in that alley. smartest thing he could’ve done, really, because i’d just shown up and if he’d kept after stevie, i’d’ve handed him his ass. as it was, i pried stevie’s cast off and walked him back to the hospital. the doctors said his arm was plenty healed and didn’t need a new cast, and splinted up his fingers. steve didn’t like the splints nearly as much as he’d liked the cast. they made absolutely terrible weapons.

This–and the two previous storytime asks–can be found with corrected type here on Ao3. –Mod Hell

Bucky, can you tell us about one of the times you had to take care of poor, sick, pre-serum Steve? I'm fighting off the last of a virus and could use a good story.

look you guys. i dunno what the hell kinda history books youve been reading about pre-serum steve, but ‘poor sick’ steve was pretty much the literal devil.

i am not joking. he was pretty much the definition of ‘lead you right into temptation’ if you assume that what youre being tempted to do is get in so many fistfights. 

so. many. i coulda really used a sickass robot arm back in the day, because my goodness did i do a lotta punching.

anyway, sick steve went through four stages, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, except he turned from a tiny angry man with the ability to breathe into a tiny angry man with the ability to pass out with zero warning. stage one was called ‘Im Not Sick, I Always Breathe Like This,’ and did indeed involve steve wheezing a lot. usually that was the first sign. but tiny steve had asthma, so sometimes he really did just breathe like that. at this stage, steve would insist that he was ‘fine, bucky, honestly stop glaring at my lungs. you cant even see them.’

the second stage was called ‘So Maybe I Might Be Sick But Im Still Fine Though,’ and pretty much came into play when steve stopped being able to get a whole word out without gasping in the middle. fun fact? steve’s eyebrows did not grow when he got the super serum, so if you think his angry face is bad now, just imagine allll that scowl packed into steve’s itty bitty please-punch-me starter face.

stage three was ‘If Im Dying Im Gonna Go Out The Way I Came In, Screaming And Covered In Blood’ which was the stage where steve, despite the fact that he was supposed to be in bed, would try to sneak out and go do things. this wouldnt be so bad if 1. he wasnt prone to just suddenly passing out when he was sick, or 2. had had any control at all over what came out of his mouth. that thing steve does where if youre doing something he objects to morally, he will 100% of the time come over and inform you that you should be expecting a punch in the near future? yeah. tiny steve did that too. luckily his brain-to-mouth filter was improved by the serum, or im pretty sure he’d have started fights with a lot more than 117 countries and literally every nazi ever. Anyways, he’d try and sneak out, and if he succeeded, he would almost always wind up picking a fight with somebody, because having bad luck and terrible impulse control is what steve do.

the final stage was called ‘Bucky I Promise I Wont Do Anything Stupid, Please Stop Sitting On Me,’ and it was the point at which i started ignoring everything he said until he could say a whole sentence in one breath.