Gonna be shameless a sec since my cold-medicine-addled state is making me hesitant to do any serious editing, and rec myself. I wrote this story last year for a bunch of reasons, not least because my Dude was making latkes; he’s making them again tonight and it made me go back and reread it. I write things because I want to read them, and this is a rarity for me, a gen story with only implied pairings!
It came out of one of the first things that it struck me I *had* to believe about the Avengers/MCU universe, which was that Natasha Romanoff was originally born to a Russian Jewish family. (I am not Jewish myself, but have had numerous Jewish classmates and friends; Natasha was of course raised as a brainwashed child soldier so she knows even less about it than me. Sam and Bucky are just following a recipe. What does any of it mean? It means what you want it to mean, Bucky concludes.)
And then I wrote it because I wanted to write Bucky and Sam being ridiculous bros, and somehow Pepper wanted to be cute.
It’s been, statistically speaking, an entertaining case study for me in what a relatively-short standalone with no smut gets you in terms of audience, and what that is, is– the same exact people, generally, who read my shorter smut, and also a lot of the ones who read the longer smut! Fascinating.
So anyway. My holiday-time story from last year, sort of causally written for the Fandom Hanukkah Challenge 2014:
Truth In Potatoes, General Audiences, Bucky POV.