Foreign Currency [Captain America, Sam/Bucky]

Foreign Currency (20454 words)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Steve Rogers
Additional Tags: Not Canon Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Touch-Starved, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Sam Wilson's Wings, Mission Fic, POV Sam Wilson, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Hurt/Comfort
Series: Part 3 of Exchange
Summary:

Finding Bucky Barnes will be a long road. Sam knows how to pace himself. Going in circles after supersoldiers is sort of his job description these days. He could probably use a vacation, though.

The Exchange-verse events and then some, as seen by Sam from passenger seats and hospital bedsides and eight hundred feet up in the air.

Today's Keyboard Smash

Oh, insert ALL the unhinged laughter here. I did it! It only took me six years, but I finally posted the final part of the Exchange-verse series I started after watching Captain America: Winter Soldier. I had started drafting it pretty much contemporaneously with the rest of the series, but I stalled out. It took something like three years before I managed to write the rough draft. And now it's taken another three to revise it.

While the non-linear narrative structure I used did present some additional challenges to revision, it wasn't THAT big a deal. So I can offer no good explanation for why it took me so long to, if nothing else, stop dicking around with it and say, this is good enough.

I also have no idea why today, specifically, was the day I managed to post it. I had told myself it was one of the stories I would like to get off my plate at last, one of several that are only a little short of being ready to post/publish. But hey, I've been telling myself that for three years, so what gives?

Part of it was seeing the uptick in Bucky and Sam posts on tumblr, now that Falcon and the Winter Soldier has kicked off. I don't have Disney+ and I am currently disinclined to resubscribe to it, despite the extreme temptation that the show represents for me. I suppose it was partly the sense of the moment for this fic finally and irrevocably slipping away. Not that I'm not entirely willing, eager even, to slap the "not canon compliant" tag on a story and go on my merry way. It just seemed like "now or never."

I really didn't want it to be "never." So I gave it one final pass of line edits, dumped it into AO3, let Grammarly browbeat me into moving some commas around, and posted it before the rest of my brain could notice what I was up to and stop me. I am so glad just to have it done and the series finished, I barely even care if anyone reads it*. It is officially no longer my problem.

Then I went and cooked every goddamn scrap of food in this house for the rest of the day, like a crazy person. A crazy person with one less WIP to their name, so ha-fucking-ha!

*Liiiiiesssss... I will always crave attention.