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i-dreamed-i-had-a-son · 3 years

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Alright I'm not *entirely* sure I know where I'm going with this but I'm gonna vaguely pull on my previous thought that the Loki series portrays Loki as other people see him to make sense of episode 4

I know some people were upset about how it seemed like the series was agreeing that Loki was a narcissist, so let's explore that, because I don't really think that's the case. In the Sif time loop scene, we see Loki say,

Please, please, no more. Please, I beg you. I'm a horrible person. I get it. I really am. I cut off your hair because I thought it'd be funny. And it's not. Uh... I crave attention... because I'm... (Sighs) I'm a... I'm a narcissist. And I suppose it's... It's because I'm scared of being alone.

He's clearly exhausted and wants the beating to stop. He also knows what Sif thinks of him (helpful that she's been repeating it), so he says what he knows she wants to hear--but here, as with Mobius in episode one, although he is being strategic with what he says, he's also being genuine, at least mostly. He's too drained to do anything else, and he knows it wouldn't work anyway.

Loki absolutely is scared of being alone. That's the core fear he has, which is why he wanted to be Thor's equal--he didn't want to be abandoned or forgotten about (which, coincidentally, is exactly the punishment Odin gives him in TDW...). That's why it's the last thing he says, why he stutters and pauses so much before getting there--and it also happens to be the thing that Sif keeps throwing back at him. By putting it last, he's hoping he won't have to hear it again. Beating her to the punch, per se. (I also think it's interesting that he says he "never thought about it again" after this event happened, but yet it is the one Mobius puts on a loop in order to "soften him up". Clearly, Loki did remember this as a very painful memory--probably because it hits on his deepest fear--and it's effective in exhausting him emotionally, just like the footage of his life was. It's interrogation prep so that he's already vulnerable when he gets to Mobius. But anyways.)

I think he somewhat believes the other things he says, but only because it's been beaten into him so many times. Loki wouldn't think he's a horrible person, but he knows Sif does, and Thor, and Odin, and the Avengers, and Mobius--so maybe he is? This self-doubt is particularly clear with the "narcissist" line. It's framed like an admission, and I think it's because he's started to believe it. But that's not because it's true, and we're not supposed to believe it either.

Loki has always adapted himself to meet other people's expectations, and that's exactly what he does in this interaction as in so many others. He doesn't really know who he is, just who other people think he is, and that person is a horrible one, so that's what he says about himself. And other characters certainly aren't disagreeing. Mobius throws the same kind of lines at him when interrogating him in episode 1:

Look at that smile! You're enjoying that!

(LOKI: I know what I am.) A murderer?

You're really good at doing awful things, and then just getting away.

You were born to cause pain and suffering and death.

And by the end of the episode, Loki is emotionally exhausted. He calls himself weak. And when Mobius says, "You do know yourself!" Loki responds with, "A villain?" All of Mobius' attacks on Loki's identity were effective enough that Loki supplies him with another negative identifier--playing into what he wants to hear, just like he does with Sif, to make the attacks stop.

But it's different in episode 4. Mobius tries the same tactic again, using a word Loki had just used to describe himself:

What a incredible seismic narcissist. You fell for yourself!

This comes after he tried to convince Loki that Sylvie was dead (thus leaving him alone), and it's very much structured to further play on that fear--the only person he could ever be close to (in any way) is himself. He is alone. And it's that thought that's juxtaposed with the narcissist barb. Mobius is defining Loki as a narcissist, not because it's true, but because he's trying to break Loki down.

In reality, Loki isn't narcissistic at all--wanting attention does not a narcissist make. The very fact that he can say "I'm a narcissist because I'm scared of being alone" shows that he isn't one; you aren't a narcissist "because" of something, you just are one! And he's just been told he is one so many times, by people strategically attacking him, he starts to internalize that thought. It reminds me a lot of how people would call Tony narcissistic (even in his Avengers file) and how despite that being untrue, he began associating self-preservation with narcissism and instead took on the responsibility of protecting the whole team at cost to himself. Tony wasn't narcissistic--he used attention-seeking as a cry for help. It's the same with Loki. He wants to be noticed because he doesn't want to be alone.

And it's that desire that's being attacked. Mobius calls him a narcissist for finding companionship in Sylvie, the only person who's even tried to genuinely get to know him. Mobius is trying to keep Loki isolated and emotionally distraught, since Loki is less formidable that way. But Loki holds his own, even getting in the final line. Because of Sylvie, those barbs don't have the same effect as they did before. In episode 1, Mobius says:

It's funny, for someone born to rule, you sure do lose a lot. You might even say it's in your nature.

But look at what Loki says in episode 4.

SYLVIE: Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we're destined to lose?

LOKI: No. We may lose. Sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive. I mean, you did. You were just a child when the TVA took you, but you nearly took down the organization that claims to govern the order of time. You did it on your own. You ran rings around them. You're amazing!

And that's what starts the Nexus event. Loki directly goes against the definition and expectation of what a Loki is supposed to be. He finally defines himself, thanks to and through Sylvie, as someone who survives, someone who is independent, someone who can do anything, someone who "can be whoever and whatever he wants to be"--and the universe breaks.

#marvel #loki #loki series #loki series spoilers #meta #yet another one for which i have no real idea as to whether or not it makes sense but here you go!!#sometimes i take simple thoughts and make them way too complicated ok #basically i don't think the series was trying to say 'loki is a narcissist' i think it's trying to say 'loki defines himself as one...#...because other people do. but they are wrong.' because clearly we're not supposed to respect mobius' view on loki as he interrogates him #he's framed as hostile so a lot of what he says can be discounted as a barb #not @ me finding other reasons that the romantic framing actually WASN'T real lol am i deluding myself? maybe but maybe not #anyways lol #we will soon see if i am remotely right but this is my two cents #took me like. 4 hours to hash out. i'm ridiculous #kay can i just catch my breath for a second #my meta posts #quality meta seal of approval #not to hype my own post up i just put that on all meta posts so that i can find them #kay has a party in the tags #mobius #sylvie

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ohmygoodnessgraciouss · 3 years

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could I request a story where Loki and the reader are both magic time variants captured by the TVA, and they become closer and plot to escape together, but even though the reader wants to help him they're afraid of getting too close or opening up about their past because in the past they had been really hurt by the alternate Loki in their timeline? I'm sorry that's very long, you don't have to write it if you don't want to I just love your work so much and Reality Check is so perfect :')

I'm sorry this took forever! Honestly, I should've just made this a whole miniseries to really flesh it out, but with MOM I wasn't sure if I wanted to dedicate all my time for that. Hope this is alright! <3

You watched the man before you smirk once he recognized who you were. "Y/N L/N, I never expected you to wind up here," He commented, scanning you. You scoffed, turning your head away to look at Mobius.

"You expect me to work with him?" You asked, pointing lazily. Mobius nodded.

"You two are the best of the best. He never seems to die and you have the ability to control him. Not many can say they can do that," He responded.

"I don't want to work with him," You replied, sharply.

"And why is that? I want a better explanation than he hurt your feelings a while ago," Mobius said. You rolled your eyes, knowing Loki must have grinned at his statement.

"No hard feelings, promise! I'm not the same Loki you knew after all," Loki said.

"No, but the sacred timeline forces it to be exactly the same. I know you haven't done it yet, but you will. Eventually. If you ever decide to stop being a little shit and go back to your timeline." You walked closer to Loki, trying to seem intimidating.

"Ouch," Loki winced, stepping forward, "I see Midgard taught you some vulgar language."

"Seemed only appropriate for a man who killed 80 people in a matter of two days," You suddenly realized how close you were to him, eyes widening as you backed off. Loki rose an eyebrow at this.

Mobius chuckled. "This is going to be interesting."

"I need you two to go to a small town in Oklahoma from a few hundred years ago to inspect something," Mobius said, pulling up a file on the desk in front of you. You sat next to Loki (Though it was not willingly) and waited impatiently to hear more about the mission.

"Oklahoma?" Loki questioned.

"It's on Midgard. It's a lot of farmland. Prone to tornadoes." You briefly stated.

"Seems like you know the place quite well."

"I lived there for a while. Until the TVA decided that I messed up something in their precious timeline. I mean, really. Do you guys think another war would happen when most people don't even know this place exists?!"

Mobius chuckled. "See, that's why I like you. You're realistic. But, unfortunately, rules are rules, and the timekeepers aren't ones for breaking tradition."

You shook your head in response, leaning back in the chair. Loki leaned forward towards the desk to get a better look at the file. It had several reports scattered across it, all describing the deaths of several minutemen from the T.V.A. "What happened?" He asked.

"Someone supposedly time traveled to the 1800s and broke the timeline. When our minutemen arrived at the scene, they set fire to the surrounding grasses and burned them all to crisps. We suspect the variant is another timeline's you, Loki." Mobius explained, showing several photos of the scene.

Your eyes widened. "Another timeline of him is running rampant and you imbeciles can't catch them?" You asked.

Mobius shook his head. "Loki is hard to catch. This one," He pointed to the man before him, "Not so much. The other one? Different story."

"And you expect us to just find Loki and bring them back?" You asked, leaning your head against your hand.

"It's either that or being reset by the woman who wants your heads on a silver platter."

Both you and Loki looked at each other for a brief moment, nodding slightly. Looking back at Mobius, you spoke at the same time.

"We'll do it."

You arrived in Oklahoma with Loki, taking a look at the burned farmland around you. Several bodies laid around the area, their weapons scattered. "God, these men didn't stand a chance," You said, crouching down to take a closer look.

"And neither do we if we can't find a trace of myself," Loki replied. He used his magic to trace where the fire started. "Over there," He pointed.

You looked over, seeing nothing special. "Looks just like everywhere else," You said.

"No, it's an illusion. I must have cast an illusion to make sure only those with magic would be able to find it. Or, well, another me did it. Why would he have done that though?" Loki asked, contemplating it for a moment. You walked up to him, showing him the collar and remote you had stolen from the agency only moments before arriving in Oklahoma.

"If anything goes wrong when we see them, I've got backup."

Loki grinned. "You're always so dependable. That's why I love you." You knew it was a weak attempt to make you soft. You shook your head, walking away from him.

"Not the same Y/N you know."

"The Sacred Timeline makes you the same."

"The same to an extent, but for me you're in the past. A lot changes in the upcoming years." You mentioned.

"Oh come now, old feelings can't die that easily, can they?"

"No, but you sure can."

You made your way to the Loki pointed to. The spot seemed to be as burnt up as the rest until Loki unveiled the illusion. It didn't take much of his magic to lift it, probably because the universe recognized it as the same signature. When it was revealed, the area hadn't been burned by the fire at all. The grasses were tall, reaching up to your shoulders at times. One spot was completely flattened though, with a singular note on the ground.

You picked it up, unfolding the paper carefully. Loki stood directly behind you, looking over your shoulder. "What does it say?" He asked.

"Meet me where we once called home," You read it out loud. The note crumpled as you tightened your hold on it.

"What does that mean? Once called home?"

"It means this Loki is in fact my Loki."

"Please tell me I don't have any hard feelings that you clearly harbor for me."

"That depends on whether or not you forgive me for the incident."

Loki quirked an eyebrow at this. You shook your head. "Not here. Let's find a place to stay. I know where home is. We're not far from it."

"Then shouldn't we go there first?" He asked, placing a hand on your shoulder to ensure you didn't walk away. You shook your head.

"No, I can't go there yet. There's a lot to explain before you see Loki."

You found an inn close by and decided to rest there. Because it was the 1800s you had to be careful about what you did. In a different century they wouldn't have minded you being in a TVA shirt and jeans. Now, they would.

Luckily for you, Loki was able to cast an illusion so that only you two knew what you were wearing. He even had to cast an illusion on himself to blend in more. He used fake currency to buy the room, which was about as small and cramped as you expected.

With only candles to light the room, it would've been considered quaint and cozy by most. A single bed with comforters, a drawer and chest, and a small desk. It was all you needed for your journey after all.

You sat down at the desk as Loki sat on the bed, feeling the comforter. "Softer than I expected," He commented.

"You lived through the 19th century, you should know it wasn't as bad as history books make it out to be."

He nodded in response, relaxing slightly. "Well? You said you would explain it to me. I should know what's going on before we go face off against myself."

You sighed, fiddling with a pen you had found in your shirt pocket. "Time travel isn't as uncommon as people may think. You and I both know that."

"Of course. You've time traveled a few times yourself."

"Exactly. Well, in my timeline, after the events in New York in 2012, you went to prison in Asgard and were eventually freed during the Dark Elves attack."

"I know what happens there," He said, sharply. You knew he must've known what happened to his mother.

You looked down at your hand, placing the pen down on the desk. "Well, you know what happens in the Sacred Timeline. Remember, you're a variant in this timeline too. In this timeline, you ended up going back to the 1800s, to this time."

"Why would I do that?" He tilted his head.

"To see me."

"What were you doing in this time?"

"I was running. I got into some nasty trouble with not only the Avengers but the federal government as well. It was just easier to go back to a time where I wouldn't have to worry about it. Plus, I didn't know what I was doing, so I wanted to hang out in a place where I knew I would never run into myself. I didn't account for you finding out." You sighed, fiddling with your fingers.

"And what happens after that? We were just fine before I... Well," He hesitated, "Tried to take over Asgard and then Midgard," He said, sheepishly.

A soft smile graced your lips as you thought about what had happened next. "We shared a life together. We were married, secretly of course, but we were happy. We moved into an old farmhouse around here and decided we would start a family here. It was in the middle of nowhere. No one was going to find us after all. We could be happy here."

"What changed?" He asked, leaning in. He couldn't understand where it would've gone wrong.

"The T.V.A," A scowl corrupted your smile as you looked up at him for the first time in minutes. "We were variants. What happened between us should never have happened."

Loki shook his head. "I can't believe that's what divided us. What did they do?"

"You gave me a chance to escape. You kept them off me and I ran off. See, I ran off and you went into the T.V.A to be charged for your crimes. They were going to prune you. Unless you told them where I was," You scoffed.

"Did I?"

"You did. Because no matter what you would always do everything in your power to save your own skin. Even if it meant ratting me out when I was protecting the child we had just taken in." Your tone quickly turned to ice at the thought.

Loki stayed quiet at the revelation. He didn't know what to say. "What happened next?" He asked quietly.

You shrugged. "I went in, you got out. You were reset. I don't know how you became a variant again. I guess they couldn't wipe your memory if you were able to remember our home."

"I don't understand. I don't understand how I could do that," He said as he stood up from the bed, pacing the room.

"The version of you in this timeline is different. He changed after escaping. I just hadn't realized it until it was too late."

Loki stopped in his tracks suddenly, staring you dead in the eyes. "Is that why you're with the T.V.A? To get revenge?"

You nodded. "The T.V.A, while I despise them, are my one way of getting to him. I want to make sure the agency brings him in once and for all. I'll prune him myself if I have to. And then I'm out of there. I have a plan to escape."

"And what will you do after that?"

You looked out at the window, "Find my little girl, I suppose. Make sure she's okay."

"Then perhaps you would like a partner to join you," He grinned.

"No."

Making your way to the farmhouse, Loki decided to stay back a little. The plan was for you to make sure Loki was in a vulnerable state, giving you just enough time to alert the T.V.A. Then, your partner Loki could capture the criminal Loki using the collar and remote you brought. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was enough for you to feel comfortable facing off against him.

Loki stayed outside, watching from a patch of wildflowers that sat outside the house. They were your favorites.

The house was cold and creaking from weight and pressure it hadn't felt in years. It looked abandoned. No one must have moved in after you did. The sight sent shivers down your spine. All seemed quiet except for a single door opening across from you. There stood the man that ruined your life - Your version of him.

"Hello, darling," He greeted you, a small sheepish smile plastered on his face.

"Loki."

"I know these are probably not the circumstances you would've wanted for this-"

"Not the circumstances?" You interrupted harshly. "I never wanted this situation to ever happen. You're lucky I haven't tried to shoot you in the face with a magnum."

Loki raised his hands up in mock surrender. "What I had done was uncalled for."

"Uncalled for?! You exposed me which put our family in harm's way! I have no idea where Rose is! None!"

His expression softened at the mention of Rose. You knew it struck a chord in his heart. It had to. Rose was adopted just like he was. All he wanted was to be a better father to her than his own was. If he were a better person you may have cared about hitting a sensitive spot like this.

"That's unfair. I had no idea she would possibly be reset by them," He said.

"Oh come on! What else did you think would have happened?! They were after us and so they were after her too." You moved your finger slightly to the communicator in your jacket pocket, signaling for the T.V.A to arrive and for Loki to step in.

"I never meant for her to get hurt," He said, his voice shaking slightly.

"No, but you meant for me to get hurt."

"I never wanted either of you to get hurt. It's just that-"

"Just what?" You grit your teeth.

"I was scared. You know how I am. I'm a coward!"

"That's no excuse for what you've done," You glanced up, seeing your partner sneak up behind the man. He wrapped the collar around him and quickly backed away, holding the remote up.

"What are you doing?!" Variant Loki exclaimed.

"Getting justice. Revenge. Everything I've wanted for years from you," You glared at him. The other Loki smirked, proud of you for what you had done.

The minutemen from the T.V.A quickly stepped in, arresting Variant Loki as soon as possible. Mobius followed them, looking the man up and down. "So you're the one who's caused all this trouble. And all because of a girl you crumbled. Gotta admit, it's not a good look for you," He said. You nearly laughed. "Take him away."

The minutemen began to drag Variant Loki through the portals, though he didn't go through without one last word to you, "Y/N! I will get out of this!"

You scoffed. "Sure you will."

Mobius decided to allow you and Loki to stay behind, giving you a moment to examine the home around you. He trusted you two enough to have a few minutes of peace alone. "So what's the plan, love?" Loki asked.

"Mobius has given us this much. If we gain his trust for a little while longer then we'll be able to have far more time and perhaps even a way to travel through the multiverse on our own. I hate to say it, but I'll stick with the T.V.A a little while longer. The endgame is long-term here."

Loki nodded thoughtfully. "It's smart. But I'm smarter," He held his hand up, revealing one of the portal remotes in his hand. Your eyes widened.

"How did you get that?!"

"I stole it from one of the men as they went through. I'm sure they won't miss this, but if they find out we have this when we go back it won't be pretty," He said, walking up to you, grinning.

You stifled a laugh as you looked down at the remote in his hands. You shook your head looking back up at him. "You're insane."

"Perhaps I am," His grin widened, "But I know you want this as much as I do. So, what do you say?"

He held his empty hand out to you, waiting for your response. Instead of giving it a moment's hesitation, you held out your own, taking his.

And with that, you never looked back.

#loki x reader #loki laufeyson #loki odinson #thor #loki series #2021 #marvel #mcu #disney+#disney plus #tva #agent mobius #fanfic #fanfiction #romance #fluff #angst sorta?

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theonewiththefanfics · 3 years

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Shield (one-shot)

Synopsis: To the new Captain America she might just be a human shield. But Bucky can see there’s more to it. What he can’t understand is why she stays.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x fem!Reader

Genre: angst, lil bit of fluff

Warnings: mentions of blood and guns, swearing, torture, low mental state etc.

Word count: 3591

I am going absolutely feral about the fact that a portion of the series takes place in Latvia as I am Latvian :D Just seeing the signs and streets (which are not really ours cause they filmed in Prague, but are similar enough I can envision it), especially because we’re such a small country is amazeballs, so to be in such a huge show with my MCU faves is insane. Had the same kind of reaction to Brooklyn Nine-Nine with Nikolaj and the Captain Latvia episode. Riga hammer for the win :D

P.S. John Walker is not Captain America cause he does not posses America’s ass. Also Zemo is one hundred percent Bucky’s and Sam’s sugar daddy. I won’t accept any dispute over this.

P.S.S. please also remember - John Walker is a character not a real person. John Walker is played by an actor who is doing his job the same way the actor who played Joffrey did. Do not harass him etc. but rather appreciate the insane talent he has. This place is a Wyatt Russell stan place.

P.S.S.S. Kinda spoilers for the show so if you haven’t seen it, don’t read this.

He hated him. Bucky genuinely hates him. He never thought he had despised something or someone so much, not even HYDRA, as much as he hated John Walker – the new Captain America. He wanted to scream at that, at the fact that this arrogant asshole was carrying Steve’s shield, the symbol of freedom and everything good, while in reality, he embodied none of what it stood for.

Walker and what he’d learned his sidekick was Battlestar, had swooped in from a helicopter while Sam and he had been following the Flag-Smasher vehicles, and, well, they hadn’t been a lot of help, which he shouldn’t be too surprised about. But what he had been surprised about was when they’d all been thrown off of the semi-trucks and scattered all around a field, someone else had been in the mix as well.

A young woman with Y/H/C hair and determined Y/E/C eyes was rushing towards them, screaming for them to stay on the ground. When Bucky looked behind, he could see why given how one of the radicalised people had jumped from the trucks and was barreling at them with an automatic cocked at them

But it wasn’t Walker who jumped up running past her, shield at the ready to take on the fire. No. He just remained sitting as the stranger kept her pace. She leapt at the two with a grace of a cat, pushing him and Sam back to the ground and immediately got blown back by the received ammunition, gasps leaving her mouth as the bullets entered her body.

Sam’s wings extended and created a body length shield as Bucky snatched one of the knives strapped to the man’s side and flung it with deadly accuracy into the Flag-Smasher’s neck, dropping him to the ground.

There was blood when he looked back. There was so much blood, and once again it was all over Bucky’s hands, and he couldn’t breathe properly, pressing down on her abdomen and shoulder and side, and. oh god, there were too many bullet wounds...

Two wide Y/E/C eyes stared back up at him, mouth gasping down shallow breaths as he held down on her wounds trying to stop the blood from pouring out. God, there was so much of it.

“Don’t close your eyes,” he gritted, his body trembling. “Well get you help. You’ll be alright.”

But then Walker spoke up, and Bucky saw read because of a different reason. “She’s fine, just leave it.”

His head snapped to see that arrogant bastard cross his arms as he hissed. “Leave it? She’s fucking bleeding out! She took those bullets for you, and you just want to leave it?!”

Walker just smirked, nudging his chin towards her body. “You’ll see.”

“You let her use herself as a shield while you did nothing!”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “Because that’s her whole point.”

And that’s when Bucky felt her skin shift underneath his hands. Slowly the blood stopped pouring out, Y/N’s breathing evened, and her eyes closed not because death was calling, but because of relief as the regenerative cells kicked into high gear.

Bucky gazed in wonder as the wounds closed up, and when only scar tissue remained he snapped his blue eyes to her, Y/E/C ones already staring back at him.

“Who are you?” he whispered

“A human shield that’s what,” Walker answered in her stead, but Bucky just sneered.

“I asked who, not a what. She’s a fucking person.”

Once more he looked back down and saw a strange look in her eyes. It was as if she was trying to decipher what those words meant, but once the shock from such a huge assault had ended, she gulped down a breath and gave him a crooked smile. “I’m Y/N Y/L/N.”

A lopsided one came to grace his own face. “I’m James Buchanan Barnes, but you can call me Bucky.”

“Bucky.” Her eyebrow rose. “Well, it’s very nice to finally meet you.”

He smiled at her, and not the painful smile he’d given the senator before her arrest, but a real genuine smile, one that made the skin around his eyes crinkle.

“And it’s very nice you didn’t decide to die on us.”

“Yeah, yeah, can we cut this meet and greet shorter?” Walker interrupted them, and if Bucky hadn’t been holding onto Y/N’s shoulder as she tried to rise from the ground, he would’ve punched the guy.

“I told you she was going to be fine.”

Bucky threw him his best murder glare but stopped when he felt Y/N squeeze his hand as if saying ‘don’t bother.' His brows furrowed in confusion. She just shook her head.

“We should still find you a hospital.” He talked to Y/N directly, ignoring what the new Captain was saying. “It doesn’t matter that you can survive something like that, I’d rather make sure you’re checked out by professionals.

“It won’t be necessary.” Walker slipped the shield on his arm and nudged his partner to start walking with him, pretty much expecting the rest to follow. “It was her choice anyway to take the hits.”

“It doesn’t mean she should!” Bucky pretty much hollered, startling even Sam.

At that, he saw Y/N’s eyes widen and her head snap up to look at him. All the breath got knocked out from Bucky at the emotion in her face. It was like she didn’t believe what he was saying like she didn’t know it was a possibility to not put her own life before someone else’s, that maybe someone is supposed to do it for her, someone could protect her.

“She absorbs fucking bullets and infuses them in her body.” John mocked. “I’d say it’s a win-win on both sides. Everyone else stays safe, and she gets stronger, right? The whole bleeding thing is a hitch in the system, but our guys say with enough scuffles that should stop as well.”

Walker looked at her. Y/N just gulped, staring back down at the ground between her knees.

When he looked back at everything the moment he’d seen Zemo in the cell and the asshole had said something still remained in him from the Winter Soldier, came back to connect with the scene. He’d hated that sentence because Bucky knew it was true. The Soldier would always be a part of him, but that was what therapy was for – to accept it and let go. But in that minute, he wouldn’t have cared one bit if the ruthless assassin came to the surface if it meant snapping Walker’s neck like a stick.

He treated the woman as if she was below him, as if Steve’s shield somehow made him better than her, better than anyone, and yet, even when he’d been given the privilege to carry it, he’d rather use a human person, no matter if they had powers, as a shield.

A soft hand touched his side, and Bucky looked at Y/N, his breathing heavy at Walker’s words.

“I’m alright.” Her voice was softer than he thought it would be. Maybe it was because she was trying to stay out of John’s earshot, but even the gentle whisper made something in Bucky’s chest stir. “Thank you,” she said. “For checking up on me.”

Bucky stiffly nodded, standing up and offering both his hands for her to take, but even with that, it took Sam holding her by the waist to be able to stand. The Falcon had to catch her, in fact, when she took her first steps, an awkward chuckle escaping her mouth.

“It’s been a while since a hit like this.”

Sam quirked a brow and smirked. “You always have a tendency to do stupid shit like that?”

Y/N’s whole body relaxed as he said so, and a sting went through Bucky’s own. How bad were they treating her if basic kindness and a little bit of joking made her feel so safe?

Just as he was about to ask her more, to offer to take her with them, Walker spoke up again. That conversation was an absolute disaster, and the fact that Walker thought Sam and him would actually ever consider working with him on this mission was idiotic.

It ended with the two Avengers watching how Walker threw an arm around Y/N’s shoulders, making her knees buckle with the weight, her from still regaining strength, but he didn’t care, just dragged her along with him and Battlestar.

“Are we just gonna let ‘em do that to her?” Bucky sneered, arms crossed watching their retreating forms over the field.

He felt Sam glower next to him. “There’s not much we can do.”

He hated that he was right.

Bucky couldn’t stop thinking about Y/N. One meeting had left him shaken to the core not just about her, but about how there was something deeply off with the new Captain America, that if they didn’t take action something horrible would happen, not just because of his arrogance, but because of some seed he could feel had rooted itself in the other man’s heart.

But by that point they’d been in Madripoor, had met Sharon who’d been on the run from the US government ever since the dismantlement of the Avengers, and had now followed a lead to where the Flag-Smashers had settled in Latvia.

Zemo seemed to not only have a billion cars, but a billion apartments scattered around the world, this one being in the heart of the Old Town.

Bucky was on the roof looking over the twinkling lights of the city. His bed had been too soft as it always was, and even the floor wasn’t it for him, not a wink of sleep coming his way as his thoughts were flooded by Y/N.

Well, the sleep part wasn’t true. He had been able to drift off, only to dream of how the woman didn’t get better, didn’t absorb those bullets and had died right in his arms. That’s when he decided he needed a breath of fresh air.

The sound of shuffling feet made him whip around from the scenic view only to be greeted by a form he’d now recognise in a full-on ski-suit in pitch-black darkness.

“What are you doing here?” Bucky stood up wanting to stride over and check her for any wounds she might’ve gotten while around Walker. Any new scar on her body would mean the same number of teeth he’d knock from that Walmart-version-Captain-America’s mouth.

“Came to warn you.” She shrugged, soft winds making her coat flutter. “John and Lemar are resting, but come morning they’ll be on your ass, so you might wanna make a move now.”

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t get you. You’re nothing like them, I can see that you know how wrong it is, for him to be carrying that shield, that he’s making a mockery out of the name and legacy Steve built, and yet…”

Y/N hung her head lifting her shoulders, hands in her pockets. “I gotta do what I gotta do.”

“He’s an asshole,” Bucky hissed.

Y/N gave him a painful look. “I know. But I don’t have anywhere to go. Besides… you have your own way of making amends. Well, this is mine.”

Dark brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

She let out a painful chuckle, not because of the memories now plaguing her waking thoughts, but because her wounds were still healing, and instantly Bucky came closer and took her hand, running a soothing thumb over her palm. Wounds he was sure were new.

Y/N froze at his touch, and Bucky was about to pull away when she put her own thumb over his. He had to bite back tears at how tenderly she was looking down at his palm. Like no one had ever comforted her when it hurt.

“When the Blip happened,” she started, voice low and quiet. “I watched how my sister and mom disappeared right in front of my eyes. We were driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, and there was a truck before us. It was carrying loads of metal scraps. The driver of the truck got blipped as well.” She swallowed harshly. “I can still feel how the beam went through my shoulder, how it broke the bone and skin, and how I just wanted to disappear like they had just to make the pain stop. But I didn’t. It hurt so bad.” Y/N looked at Bucky, tears running down her face. “It was burning and tearing, and so much pain… and all I could do was scream, but no one heard me because everyone else was screaming, and I was just one of the thousands doing it.”

Y/N shook her head, and when Bucky leaned closer to wipe away the tears, she sighed at the feeling. “I passed out sometime later. From the pain the… well, everything. And when I woke up, I heard people outside the door, trying to rip it open, I could see red lights flashing, but where I expected that beam to be was nothing. When I looked down at myself there was a hole in my shirt, but instead of a hole in my shoulder, a round scar was the only thing left from that moment.”

“They took me to the hospital, and when they tried to put an IV in, my body just swallowed up the needle.” She took a shaky breath, and Bucky squeezed her side. ‘Go on’ he tried to convey with the touch. ‘I’m here.’

“That’s when the tests started. They were fine at first. Blood samples when they managed to get any, saliva and all that good jazz… but then they started poking. And poking turned into slicing which turned into stabbing until I was their personal pincushion, as they tried to see what my body would and wouldn’t take.”

Y/N was shaking by that point, but not because of the wind that had picked up, but because of anger, of the horror, she’d had to go through. It took everything in Bucky to remain calm and let her continue.

“Two years they did that. And then one time they went a bit too far. Someone had stolen a vibranium spear from the Dora Milaje.”

Bucky’s breath got caught in his throat. He wasn’t moving a muscle.

“They wanted to know if I could absorb the strongest metal on Earth, so slowly…” Her hands went to her front, to the white blouse she was wearing and started popping open the buttons. Bucky was just about to protest when he understood.

“They pushed the spear too far.” Her finger ran over a rhomb shaped scar right in the centre of her chest. Right over her heart. “Pushed it right through.”

“How did you survive?” Bucky was appalled, but in awe at the same time.

Y/N shook her head. “I didn’t. I died then and there on the table. They took my body and dumped it in some ditch. From my own calculations, it took me about a day to heal. They’d sown in a scalpel in my stomach a few hours before, so I’m assuming it used that as the binding material for the cells.”

“I was so angry.” She looked at him. “At everyone, at myself, that I couldn’t help my family, that I allowed them to just use me like that, I just went off the deep end. I did so many bad things…” A tear slipped down her cheek. “I read about the Winter Soldier, y’know. His whole thing was efficiency, quickness. I – “ She choked on her words. “I wasn’t. I wanted to drag it out. Wanted to find each and every one of the bastards who laid their hands on me and make them suffer as I did.”

Bucky’s hand settled on her waist as he pulled her closer, feeling her body keen at the motion as she looked for reassurance. “I’m not a good person, Bucky. This.” She motioned with her head to her body. “This is my repentance for what I did.”

“What he’s doing is not right. What they’re making you do is not right.” Bucky shook his head. “Just because it might not kill you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. No one had any right to touch you.”

“It’s the price I pay for what I did.”

“Pain?”

Y/N nodded. “Eye for an eye. Pain for the pain I caused.”

Bucky shook his head. “That’s not right.”

“How else am I supposed to do this?”

“By getting help yourself first.”

Y/N’s eyes widened, and Bucky sighed. He understood how impossible that thought seemed, that someone who’s done so much bad could deserve help from others, but he understood her situation better than anyone. “Being here,” he said, “being able to say these things… I can only do that because I got help. It was mandated by the state, but nevertheless…” Both chuckled at that, and Bucky’s heart lightened at the sound, at the genuine sound of joy from her. “But the therapy… I hate to say this, but it helped. It’s not easy. I sometimes detest going to the sessions, and I might be failing them quite miserably right now, especially with rule number two –“

“What’s rule number two?”

“Don’t hurt anyone,” Bucky mumbled. “And I’ve broken it quite a lot recently, I know that which will either make me end up behind bars or will add more therapy sessions to the list, but I’m not afraid anymore.”

Y/N gulped, gazing just as intensely at Bucky as he was at her. “Of what?”

“Of reaching out.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Of asking for help. Of understanding that I deserve help, and I deserve to receive it.”

“Yeah, but the thing is I’m not like you.” Y/N looked away from him. “No one forced me to do this, no one brainwashed me. I did everything out of my own volition. Me. No one else. You deserve that help because HYDRA did all those things to you. You are a victim of war. I’m not. All those horrible things I did… I did them. Not some alias of mine.”

Bucky’s heart hurt at the fact that Y/N couldn’t see she was a victim of her own circumstance, and how now the government was punishing her for it. And that’s when another brick hit him – it was exactly like Isaiah’s situation. Both came from marginalised groups, parts of society where the ones in power have been trying to oppress and control them for as long as he could remember, he just couldn’t see it. He could see Sam’s point of view now. Maybe not as clearly as he should, but he was starting to wipe away the fog.

“They used you just as much as HYDRA used me.” He asserted, and Y/N’s eyes widened at his sure statement. “Just because a pile of shit has a bowtie on now, doesn’t mean it’s no longer a pile of shit… Come with us.” Bucky’s forehead pressed to hers. “Let’s do this the right way.”

“It’s mandated by the US government that I stay by John’s side and help him.”

Bucky smirked at that, nudging his nose against Y/N’s. “Well, it’s a good thing we’re in Latvia then. Besides Captain America has no pull here.”

She laughed, warm breath slipping over Bucky’s skin, and he had to close his eyes as the thought of her breathless and underneath him invaded his mind. “Unfortunately, this deal stands whether I’m inside the borders of USA or outside.”

Y/N looked over the skyline to where the country’s national monument stood. A woman, hands up in the air outstretched with three stars in her palms, with words she couldn’t understand when she'd arrived etched on the granite at the bottom. Some local had translated them for her. For the Fatherland and Freedom.

After the blip and the experiments, she didn’t feel like she had a home. She’d been imprisoned and prodded like some lab bunny to see what her body could do. What her body could be used for.

Bucky followed her gaze as she kept looking at the statue. Different stars, different saying, but still with the same meaning of what he saw when he looked at the Captain America shield. Freedom. Justice. For the love of their home.

Something deep started to burn in her chest, and even Bucky could feel the shift.

A ferocious look appeared in her eyes as she looked at him. “Let’s get that shield.” She wasn’t going to let Walker taint that star, she knew would happen if he had it for much longer.

They’d had a single meeting beforehand, and during that half-hour, he’d been terrified for more than two-thirds of the time about how Y/N might die in his arms, die because she’d taken bullets meant for him.

He was so glad she hadn’t, not because it would be another life lost because of him, but because he felt like he’d found a twin flame – someone who’d understand him and his troubles. Someone he could help.

Maybe that could be the true way he could make amends – help someone in the same situation.

Bucky smiled.

Y/N did so too, and his heart skipped a beat looking at the woman.

Her body might be able to absorb the metals piercing it, Walker might call her a human shield, but he knew she was so much more than that. And he’d spend however long it took him to prove so to her. Maybe even in more ways than one.

_________________________________________________________________

Please reblog if you like this. For whatever reason my Bucky fics aren’t appearing in the tags :(

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geenawrites · 3 years

Text

'Black Widow' and undermining Dramatic Intent (II)

[PART ONE]

The 'Civil War' Effect

4): Elements that could’ve made Black Widow Natasha's personal journey are reduced to quick conversational bites told to Natasha instead of experienced by Natasha and the audience first hand.

The film could've built the story around her family selling her off to the government (on some eugenics mess). It could've set the stage for the subplot regarding her mother’s search for her until she was murdered, and Natasha trying to learn about her past pre-assassin.

For all the moments where we simply see her on her own, a lot of that alone time isn't used to explore how she feels, what she's thinking, or a personal throughline. It's just a montage of her looking gloomy and wearing comfy sweatshirts.

The only time Natasha truly feels like she is the emotional center of the movie is the opening act of the film. There, she’s portrayed by Ever (Gabo) Anderson and not Scarlett Johansson.

And as a film touted-as a vehicle for Johansson, that is bad. But also underlines why Florence Pugh’s Yelena was considered the real protagonist of the movie.

Black Widow could've been about Natasha wanting to reclaim her past from the Red Room (her abductors) because she reunites with her sister and parents (her surrogate family), and needed to finally deal with the consequences of killing Antonia (her ghost).

Instead, Black Widow is really Yelena’s story and emotional journey. Yelena justifies the presence of Alexei and Melina more-so than anything in Natasha’s history. As centered as Natasha was in the prologue, it works more as a establishing point for Yelena versus something like Natasha’s lost family or working with Clint Barton in Budapest.

Yelena being tasked to save the Widows (by the elder Widow who created the mind control cure), killing Dreykov, and destroying the Red Room are immediate issues that directly impact her arc and development as a character. Natasha is largely along for the ride, bringing Yelena where she needs to be in each act.

Natasha isn't as centered in her own her film as she should be. Simply compare the structure of her story to the structure in the Captain America (x2), Ant Man (x2), Thor (x3), and Iron Man (x3) films, and how those narratives focus on Steve Rogers, Scott Lang, Thor Odinson, and Tony Stark. Those films are about their emotional journeys while maintaining a healthy supporting cast that don't overshadow them.

Black Widow in comparison feels more like Captain America: Civil War, which is more of an Avengers film than it is a Captain America story. The emotional center of Civil War is Tony Stark and Zemo. Steve and his cast are simply underpinning Stark and Zemo's arcs. It also tries to introduce a new character (Black Panther) with the exact same story beat (revenge) as Stark and Zemo, and a MCU-wide subplot (Sakovia Accords) that ultimately goes nowhere later on.

The consequences of Civil War "Avengering" a solo film are on display in Black Widow in a big way. It's introducing new characters, and trying to tackle a trilogy's worth of storylines (the Red Room, Budapest, the Widow family, Civil War-fallout).

She doesn't even get a decent postmortem send off. The post credits, wherein Yelena mourns Natasha, is turned into a comedic skit and a teaser for the Hawkeye series. It's not allowed to remain a moment of mourning between two sisters separated by literal death.

As an Executive Producer of the film, I know this was not lost on Johansson. She might be an awful person, but she doesn’t strike me as someone so unaware of her environment that she set the stage to be undermined by her co-star. No, I think, given the timing, Johansson knew this was always going to be about setting up her successor.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Choosing to set Black Widow after Civil War was just a poor choice on Marvel’s part. Natasha circa 2016 has more or less come-to-terms with her history as a state-sponsored assassin for both Russia and the United States. Her arc as seen throughout the Avengers and Captain America films has come full circle following the events of The Winter Soldier. Now all she has left going forward is the arc dealing with Thanos' genocide and resurrecting everyone.

There is nothing to mine in terms of personal character drama because, at this point, she has laid it all to rest. It's nothing that torments her akin to Bucky trying to square away with his past as an amnesiac assassin.

All of Natasha’s threads are focused on the break-up of the Avengers. At first, seemed like her arc was going to be about not falling back into bad habits (being mistrustful of everyone). That it was going to deal with how she felt let down by the team (after trying to be the reasonable party among everyone), but the film doesn't really commit.

After that one conversation in Budapest, "getting the Avengers back together" isn't even a focal point. We just get awkward callbacks that tell the audience that Natasha isn't on the same level as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor.

Yelena forgiving her family is used to tack on the sudden parallel idea that Natasha has been convinced she can personally bring the Avengers together again as a surrogate family once things work with her Widow Family.

Again, even in her own film, Natasha is playing the sacrificial matriarch of a Boy’s Club (whose event films she features only as a supporting character. Something I think people are only just realizing). That says to me the MCU never valued her beyond her ties to the male Avenger cast.

”You’re such a mom!” becomes a lot less funny in that context.

If this film was immediately set after The Winter Soldier or even Age of Ultron, wherein all of her history and SHIELD’s was leaked for public record, then there might’ve been a chance for an emotionally resonant story arc.

How would a Natasha scrambling to create new covers, and new ways to protect herself, deal with the sudden public attention of the world knowing that she was a foreign assassin that bought her way into the United States and became a celebrity superhero? How would a post-Winter Soldier solo film deal with Natasha’s past in way that she didn't become overshadowed by her own supporting cast?

How would a post-Age of Ultron solo film handle her past as informed by her nightmare (which stuck closer to her history as a trained dancer in the comics) on top of the events of The Winter Soldier?

But even as a post-Civil War narrative, Black Widow should've really cared to explore how Natasha felt about having to revisit her history with the Red Room, on top of being betrayed by Alexei and Melina. Instead of giving all those emotional beats to Yelena, actually show us Natasha confronting them beyond “it wasn’t real!”

How would the story turn out if parent with the biggest hand in the facilitation of her abuse (Alexei) wasn't turned into a flat comic relief character? What if he actually got chance to really consider her grievances, show remorse for his actions, without being turned into a “ha, ha, he’s do dumb (and fat)!” punchline (after setting him up as the total opposite in the prologue)?

Melina could've been an interesting co-antagonist working with Dreykov, but the film skirts past how she is complicit in the harm that her daughters faced (Yelena especially) with a fake Heel Turn moment that only undermined Dreykov as a threat.

And that’s really the problem with Black Widow. The film, or rather Marvel Studios, doesn’t want to really tackle Natasha’s past or pain like they were willing to do with Steve Rogers in The First Avenger, and The Winter Soldier.

Maybe because that would mean approaching the story with the emotional maturity of The Bourne Identity, a PG-13 film that was plenty violent without being excessive. It was also emotionally resonate by dealing with the fact that Jason Bourne was, pre-amnesia, a US assassin that did awful shit.

Instead we get a plot about mind-control, and magic red dust that can break said mind control (that apparently requires invasive surgery of the brain).

Whedon seemed comfortable with getting close to the actual violence that was asked of Natasha (vs. done to) by the Russian government as a kid. The screenplay for Black Widow can talk past Natasha willingly doing awful things, but doesn’t want to confront that by having her or Yelena deal with an army of assassins who are walking down the same path Natasha did, fighting and killing for another government without any sort of mind control.

This is why Natasha's assassination of “Dreykov’s Daughter” (Antonia) as the thing that happened in Budapest also doesn't land. The movie doesn't want to deal with how Natasha learned to live with murdering a child to buy her freedom into America. They make it so that she didn’t kill her, actually, just gave her a bad case of pizza face. She’s not even the one that pulls the trigger, the film suggests that it was Hawkeye.

Her mustache-twirling villain of a father, who somehow survived the explosion and building collapse with zero burns or broken bones, is the one who does all the truly horrible things to his daughter (turning her into a mindless slave).

The Original Sin that Natasha is defined by is swept under the rug in the same way her history as a killer is blurred by the script. It’s akin to rewriting Xena’s history with Callisto as the killer of her family and village, and deciding, “No, Xena didn’t kill them. They all survived with minor burns! Callisto can now forgive Xena!”

Natasha's Antagonist

Dreykov is a weak antagonist/villain because the screenwriting seems determined to accredit the abuse of the Red Room entirely to him instead of making a systemic issue. What started off as a clandestine organization for the KGB throughout most of the MCU is rewritten in Black Widow as the personal playground of a thinly veiled Harvey Weinstein analogue who puppeteers his personal assassins to do bad things, thus rendering them all innocent of their wrongdoings. It makes them "perfect victims" in way.

(Johansson has gone on record saying that this film was influenced by the #MeToo Movement. Well, celebrification of it, anyway)

Dreykov doesn’t challenge Natasha, or her family. There’s never an immediate danger or stakes being driven by Dreykov. He’s not doing something they have to stop “before time runs out”, he doesn’t have anything on any of the characters that could push their actions.

He takes a backseat to the family hijinks, so the journey to finding and destroying the Red Room has no urgency (Natasha being dead already notwithstanding). As the supposed architect of their misery, he’s about as threatening as Mason (Natasha’s Black Best Friend who buys her things while in hiding).

Dreykov fails like the rest of the MCU’s villains (not named Erik Killmonger) because there's no depth to the character. There's no real loyalty to the character as a demonstration of his power or influence. Again, all his victims are blameless in their violent actions. No one with speaking lines or face time (that isn't a G.I Joe grunt) is working with him because they believe in his goals or ideology.

Complicating that matter is that the script never reveals what his goals or ideologies are besides, "I can create chaos with an army of assassins. I am so evil."

It’s wild to me that so many are rushing to defend the implementation of this sloppily written (and miscast) character because, “he works as a villain because he's a human trafficker” and “he mind controlled his own daughter.”

“He does terrible things”, or a character representing awful things that happen in the real world, isn't enough to make an effective villain. If that was all it took, then 90% the MCU’s villains wouldn’t be so forgetabble.

(He’s not real, I shouldn’t be reading posts like, “he doesn’t deserve screentime b/c he’s an awful human being! He earned his lazy death scene.” Girl, what???)

If you’re gonna tackle human/child trafficking as defined by one antagonist, then really make it part of the story. Make it something that Natasha and Yelena are actively trying to stop. Don’t montage it over a bad Nirvana cover and then shift gears into a G.I. Joe scenario in a floating fortress.

If you're gonna make Dreykov the abuser of so many women, then make it crucial to your protagonist's narrative. Don't add a silly Angry Beavers plot where his stinky musk can control a woman's bodily functions because as a weak analogue to "how men police women's bodies".

Because Natasha has no real conflict with Dreykov, confronting him in the climax goes nowhere. Dreykov is Yelena’s antagonist. It's why Yelena gets to kill him instead of Natasha, so it would've made more sense for her to confront him instead.

The film eventually establishes he's no real threat to Natasha because the writing pulled a Xanatos. The character feels like he exists only so Johansson can sass him, and make a callback to the Loki Interrogation scene (a scene that only worked because of the audience misdirection.)

Dreykov could've been an effective villain if he was anything like the Headmistress characters in the Samee-Waid Black Widow series from 2016.

The Headmistress and Anya (the new Headmistress later on) were characters with emotional connections to Natasha and the Widow children she was trying to save. They taught these girls to believe in the totalitarian philosophy of the ruling class. Natasha and the other Widows couldn't live without them until they were able to escape their influence.

The Headmistresses were women, which makes it plain that women are also perpetrators of abuse. It isn’t just something that men do, which is how this script has approached this subject entirely (Captain Marvel did the same thing as well). Abuse being exclusively a male theater of action.

Antonia's death could've been meaningful in regards to Natasha and Dreykov as characters if Dreykov cared that Antonia was murdered by a Red Room assassin. Natasha admitting that she killed his daughter and regretted it would've made a lot more impact than just having him shrug it off because he's so heartless and so evil.

Or, as other people have said, imagine if it was Antonia who was the antagonist gunning after Natasha because of what she did, not only to her, but her father as well.

It would not only render the mind-control plot pointless, it would re-center the focus on Natasha, and force the writers to do something else with Yelena, Alexei, and Melina (assuming they're even necessary in this scenario). Then, Natasha would have a genuinely threatening antagonist because the stakes are personal on both sides.

It would've been a hellva lot more meaningful than using Taskmasker as a plot-twist (after hyping the character up as the controller of the Red Room and Natasha's personal nemesis).

Callisto’s story as a villain resonates because she cared about what she lost, and Xena knew there was no real forgiveness for what she did to her. Imagine if they approached Natasha’s role in Antonia’s death like that.

(But that's probably asking for too much nuance from Disney and Marvel.)

Conclusions

In story that wants to be about the abused reconciling with their past and family, the film effectively robs the abused of their autonomy by going the extra of mile of making them zombies. In the same way the Star Wars sequel trilogy avoided Finn’s history as an indoctrinated and enslaved Stormtrooper, Black Widow doesn’t want to deal with the ramifications of indoctrination.

How people buy into and protect organizations that strip them of their humanity by making them complicit in violent systems. Oh, sure, they’ll nod and wink at it (as they do with Natasha and Melina’s past), but they won’t go any further than that.

Instead of dealing with how a forced hysterectomy effects Natasha physically and emotionally, we get a joke that isn’t any better than Natasha calling herself a monster, or the “time of the month” joke that got rebuked by the director and the cast.

Instead of reflecting on her time with SHIELD and the United States, the United States is portrayed as "the good-guys who gave her a real family” (ignoring even the half-hearted criticism of the US that The Winter Soldier made), while Russia is still out there doing nefarious Cold War Things and ruining people's families. All of which just feeds into uncritical Russian stereotypes and Red Scare that the film’s foundation is built on.

I enjoyed the film, but the more I think about it, the more I realize Black Widow really does nothing except undermine Natasha's darker elements and self-imposed redemption arc (as written by Whedon).

On top of rewriting key elements about the Red Room (the movies being broken as the comics is a true irony), It minimizes Natasha's violent past to make her into a clean, and boring superhero whose solo film thinks lamp-shading sexism is the same as subverting it.

#geenawrites #black widow #natasha romanov #mcu critical #scarlett johansson #ever anderson #writers on tumblr #bw spoilers #black widow spoilers #mcu meta

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captains-simp · 3 years

Note

Alrighty, my friend, whenever you get the chance, I would like a HeroxVillian AU with Carol, where somehow the reader ends up a villain and Carol is hesitant to fight them. Trying to reason with them. With the prompt(s) 3. “It wasn’t meant to go like this,” and 6. “You can't fix this,”

Obviously, I don’t want to rush you, so take all the time you need my love. 💜💜

Ilovethis ilovethis ilovethis. I'm getting some major FATWS vibes here. Thank you for being so patient with me, I hope it's as good as you deserve

Alexa, play Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley

"It wasn't meant to go like this."

"You can't fix this."

Warnings: corrupt reader and violence

2k words

[ masterlist ]

Buy me a coffee ☕

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You remember the day you took the super soldier serum better than any other. It had changed you in more ways than one. It had changed your world view. It had changed the relationships that had taken years to build.

Carol was in danger. She had been hurt, rendered powerless. Someone had shot her with a specialised bullet made just for her to temporarily disable the hero's powers. You had been terrified you were going to loose her.

Fortunately, the same people who had made the bullet had been working on a super soldier serum. You were meant to take it back to the lab. It was meant to be destroyed. But you had no powers prior and in that moment you knew the only way you could save the love of your life was by taking that serum.

You had gotten Carol back safely just in time for the side effects of the serum to kick in. It wasn't completed and it sure as hell wasn't safe. You had spent weeks in the medical ward in the tower, right next to Carol.

You did a good job with your newfound powers at first. As soon as you were able to fight again you did just that, better than you ever had in your life. The lives you saved doubled maybe even tripled. You could go on more dangerous missions and fight worse people. You thrived off of your powers, eager to do anything and everything you could to help.

Everyone became so blinded by your eagerness no one ever stopped to think about what else it would do to you. It wasn't like you had ever shown any signs of what was to come.

After a while, it slowly began to twist your world view. Carol picked up on that. Your silent and suppressed nature troubled her. Deeply. She never knew exactly what it was you were thinking. She never understood the things you convinced yourself.

Eventually it was something that couldn't be contained to just some in the moment thoughts. You wanted to accomplish all of the things you wished were real.

As an Avenger you had seen the injustice in the world. It wasn't new. But when the power went to your head you convinced yourself you could change things. For the better. Get rid of all the dirty cops, corrupt judges, sadistic governments. You thought you could change it all. What you never understood was that there were limits.

Changes like that couldn't happen over night. They shouldn't. The world wouldn't be able to adjust fast enough. You never considered the effort it would take to rebuild, because that wasn't your role.

You managed to talk to people who believed the same things you did. People who wanted to put the world right. Your convosations were limited to online and the times you knew you wouldn't be discovered. Then it was rare meetings. Then covert operations. But those things didn't make a difference. You needed to do more. However you couldn't do that while you were an Avenger. They wouldn't understand you. They would try to stop you. So you left.

You loved Carol. That was the hardest thing about leaving. You never wanted to hurt her, only protect her. You convinced yourself that was the ultimate way to protect her, to do what you needed to.

That night you held her close to you as she slept. She knew something was wrong because of that. In growing distant it was a rare act of affection that you had always felt for her and always would. She asked you to talk to her, begged you to tell her what had been consuming every inch of your mind. You never did. You held her until you were certain she was asleep, then you held her some more.

Then you left and never returned. The next time she saw you was on the news. You had broken wrong convicted inmates out of prison. You and a large group. It was the first of many attacks.

Every single one she missed. So did the Avengers. Everything was planned so precisely your operations were done and you were long gone by the time the Avengers showed up. It was hard to catch someone who knew how they worked.

Carol always told herself she would be able to talk you out of it, even when the attacks got worse. Things progressed rapidly and the whole world was there to watch it.

Buildings were set aflame and destroyed. The people you wanted gone from the world were killed without mercy or trial. You assigned yourself the role of judge, jury and executioner with no one stopping you. The group you worked closely with encouraged it all, respected it. Even when innocent people got hurt.

Without even knowing it, you became one of the people you had once sworn to protect the world from.

By the time Carol finally found you it was too late. You weren't the person she once knew. And yet Carol still looked in your eyes and saw the woman she loved, even if no one else recognised you.

Your final operation had been an overall success, but your escape had been delayed. Hence bringing you face to face with Captain Marvel herself.

"Y/n." She whispered, calling to you like an abandoned puppy. You narrowed your eyes at Carol, knowing she wasn't just going to let you go and say 'keep up the good work'. No. You would have to fight your way out.

There was a few feet between you. You were in a now abandoned warehouse alone, only the distant sound of sirens somewhere else, chasing down anyone from your group that remained.

"This isn't you." Carol continued. You still didn't speak. "Please y/n, people are getting hurt."

"Only what's necessary." You finally said, eyes flicking to to the doors behind Carol.

"Innocent people." Carol pleaded, her eyes widening. She may have been in her suit, but Carol didn't show any signs of fighting you anytime soon. Her stance wasn't defensive, it was cautious.

"I need you to get out of my way." You had never wanted to say something in such a cold tone to Carol. You still loved her, she just didn't understand.

"The others wanted to take a different approach to this...to you. Just corporate and and I'll make everything okay." So they wanted you dead, you guessed it would get to that point eventually.

"You can't fix this." You said defiantly. Did Carol really expect people to eventually welcome you back with open arms?

"I'm not going to give up on you. Ever."

"Get out of my way." You said firmly, not wanting to continue the convosation any longer.

"I don't want to fight you." Carol protested, still not becoming defensive. Her voice sounded like it was on the verge of breaking, you tried to ignore that. It was hard.

You took a testing step forward. Still nothing from Carol.

"Please don't make me." She pleaded.

"I'm not making you do anything. Let me walk away."

"You know I can't do that."

You decided you wouldn't wait around any longer, every moment you talked to Carol pulled on your heart strings. You couldn't let that weaken you.

You ran at Carol and jumped into the air a couple of meters to drive yourself down. Carol caught your attempted attack and pushed you back firmly, still giving you a hopeful look.

"Stop." She attempted, but you came back at her from another angle to try and swipe her off her feet which she was able to dodge swiftly.

"Get out of my way." You grunted, quickly growing frustrated.

"I can't." You ran directly on this time and delivered several short and powerful blows that Carol struggled to avoid. You kept going, trying punch after punch after every short range attack Natasha had taught you that was driving Carol back towards the door.

"Stop!" She tried again, sounding more desperate this time. Even when your attacks came dangerously close to being successful Carol refused to use her powers. You could handle them to some extent, the serum could tolerate some of it's force. But Carol refused to do it.

You finally landed a kick to her stomach that made her stumble back a few paces. You pushed aside the feeling of guilt and instead made a break for the door, using every bit of self control you had not to look back at those brown eyes.

Carol had been dazed and didn't realise until you were too close to the exit. She could have stopped you if she used her powers. It would have been efficient and easy. You thought she did.

An indescribable feeling of pain shot up through your back for a mere second but was enough to make you fall straight to the floor. Your back stung as though you had been attacked by a sworm of bees and made your whole body feel suddenly very fragile, like it was only made of thin needles. Your whole body was shaking as you tried to comprehend what had happened.

Carol's powers didn't do that. You knew something else that did.

Natasha? Had you just been on the recieving end of a widow bite? You could faintly hear steady footsteps approaching you that made you sure you were right.

You breathed in deeply and tried to get to your feet, reminding yourself exactly what would happen of you were caught.

I will not be put in a cage. You hissed internally.

You were barely on your knees when you gave a strangled cry at the feeling returning with more power. You fell down onto your stomach again and tried to reach around to get the device off but you were faced with the terrifying realisation that you couldn't move. Natasha had told you all about that widow bite. It meant she had used the highest setting on you. It would have killed anyone who didn't have that super soldier serum.

"Stop!" Carol shouted again, except this time it clearly wasn't at you. "That's enough."

The blonde kneeled down at your side and instantly brought you close to her, cradling your head in her lap as she combed her soft fingers through your hair in the comforting way you remembered so clearly and missed. A tear finally fell down her cheek as she watched you gasping, eyes wide.

Carol was all you could feel and focus on as you slowly lost consciousness. No matter how much of a fight you tried to put up you couldn't move an inch of your body and you couldn't run from the looming darkness that was gradually gaining on you.

You dreaded where you were going to end up. What would happen to your group. Mostly, you dreaded the impact it would have on the blonde you once planned to spend the rest of your life with.

"It wasn't meant to go like this." Was the last thing you heard as the darkness enveloped you entirely.

#brie larson #captain marvel #captain marvel imagines #captain marvel x reader #carol danvers #carol danvers imagines #carol danvers x reader #marvel

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preemshots · 3 years

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johnny + the nomads lore

alright, i know this is a screenshots blog but i'm going to go ahead and start dropping some juicy lore tidbits as i dig them up. part of what i'm doing outside of just photo diarying is shard hunting, and BOY is there a lot the game likes to hide in those little shards for idiots like me who like to read so we can write unnecessarily accurate fanfiction!

full disclosure, i know jack shit about the TTRPG/cyberpunk 2020 rulebook except what i read in the wikis.

so here’s my lore roundup so far of everything i know about johnny joining the nomads

we know johnny likes to narrate v’s quest objectives. here’s the first mention where he says it himself:

during the voodoo boys quest "transmission" there's a shard in the maglev tunnels beside the ice bath, presumably from brigitte's research into johnny in the first place:

okay, so the timeline is this: johnny joins the nomads after trying and failing to rescue alt. johnny hides out in the badlands for some years. then he and rogue come back to night city and nuke arasaka tower help alt escape the arasaka subnet by uploading liberator to their network once and for all.

this ultimately makes sense. in alt’s flashback, we meet santiago, who is a nomad/connected to nomads, joins rogue and johnny when they're trying to get alt back, and eventually becomes the leader of the aldecaldos.

part of santiago’s TTRPG lore is that he, johnny, and rogue have to lay low in the badlands with nomads after they storm arasaka headquarters (i am aware the game takes many liberties with the original lore so who knows the full accuracy of anything from the original rulebooks)

ENDING spoilers: in the rogue+johnny storming AHQ ending, it's revealed that rogue has a son while they're prepping for the job. if you eavesdrop on her calling him while you're at the afterlife, you hear her tell her son to (paraphrasing here) "pull over and look at the stars", which immediately made my brain go to: nomad, badlands, santiago = dad? maybe. (santiago also canonically has a son according to the TTRPG lore)

this immediately reminded me of another interesting shard that i believe you can find in multiple locations around night city: “"what REALLY happened in arasaka tower?“

i love this dang shard. at first i thought it was just a cute conspiracy with some juicy gossip (and i love how 99% of the shards that mention johnny in this game are reminding us that he's not a real rebel, he's a poser) but it brings some interesting shit together

one: it tells us where johnny got his hands on the nukes! he and the nomads jumped a militech convoy and jacked some bombs!

which is never directly explained, even as saburo arasaka is interrogating him shortly before using soulkiller. very nice of johnny to protect his homies like that.

...or maybe he didn’t. saburo emphasizes that the dead don’t lie like the living do, and we don’t know what exactly arasaka did to johnny’s construct in mikoshi.

it also explains why the obvious media narrative is that militech nuked arasaka, a nice neat political bow to the end of the fourth corpo wars, which is an entire section of the TTRPG lore that makes my eyes cross when i read it.

it also makes the star/nomads ending extremely interesting, because i originally believed it was the ending where V’s journey deviates the most from rewalking johnny’s path... which also has weird implications if the johnny’s nomad era is being kept from v.

(this also leads into my belief that the star ending/the devil ending are narratively two sides of the same coin, but that’s a WHOLE ANOTHER POST for another day.)

TWO, just straight up the fact that they turned the raid where they actually obtained the nukes into an action flick BD that pretty much ANYONE could watch. who the hell was doing that??

well, who else other than the guy who johnny (optionally) punched the shit out of for filming alt's death: thompson, media guy, and according to rogue, “bad luck”. because you know, recording your crimes is straight up evidence that can be used against you.

during the alt flashback we meet thompson, and just after that in cyberspace before meeting alt, johnny tells v that he has no idea what happened to him and that they never worked together again.

oh, johnny, you lying bastard man

this is blatantly untrue, and if V even had two braincells and better memory than a goldfish they'd know this--in the first flashback sequence where johnny and rogue nuke arasaka tower, thompson is on the comms as they ride the AV towards AHQ, questioning their plans and use of violence.

which leaves me with some questions, like where the fuck is thompson, why does johnny keep lying about this, why doesn't johnny say almost anything about how you interact with the aldecaldo clan nonstop throughout the game when he himself may have been a member of the family for some time?? is he continuing to protect the nomad clan that saved his ass? we know that a lot of his flashbacks are unreliable at best, that johnny changes shit up as desired when presenting V with his memories.

in 2077, you can also find that there’s a remake of “badlands raid” in the shard “new release braindances” that is pretty much everywhere. that shard doesn’t add much, but does mention something along the lines of “many people don’t know the ending of the original” which probably means johnny punched thompson out for filming again, or something.

my running theories: rogue ditched santiago and the aldecaldos with johnny and thompson to nuke arasaka tower, and when johnny died she was stuck looking for (heavily implied by johnny here:) corpo sellout ways to survive.

adam smasher obviously has something to do with this since johnny/rogue's vendetta against the guy isn't entirely clear beyond the smokescreen of "he killed johnny and he sucks". i have done 0 research into this though i'm tired of typing okay

i obviously cannot be certain i have found everything related to this in the game as i’m not even done with this playthrough where i’m trying to pay attention, but i hope this is fun for someone else to dig into.

enjoy, fellow silverhand freaks

EDIT: additional findings

ALRIGHT I HAVE DONE MORE DIGGING AND I AM BACK WITH MORE NOMAD/JOHNNY FINDINGS. these ones are kind of a bummer but VERY interesting.

there’s a shard called “excerpts from a history of the nomads by bb pires” that goes into detail about how nomads came to be

there’s an interesting quote in it: It's hard to imagine a group less inclined to wandering than farmers, but in fact they were the ones who sparked the age of nomads. Natural catastrophes, crops ravaged by bioplagues, armed conflicts and martial law allowing corporations to speculate and privatize land - all this forced them into a life on the road.

when you ask johnny why he wants to take down arasaka, he begins by referencing this himself!!

it’s a little awkward to imagine a nomad V doesn’t also know what he’s referencing, but hey, V is the fool because we are as players and that’s only one life path... so sure.

johnny also has unique dialogue during this scene about a nomad origin V, telling them that he’s been trying to understand how V thinks, and came to the conclusion that “their family was a crutch” and essentially made them stupid because they always had a safety net (lmao johnny calling v privileged basically)

BUT this also may reference why johnny would find it confusing as hell that V doesn’t immediately share the views he does when nomads, in terms of values, seem to be more aligned with johnny than V is. but once again V is the fool for a reason and this is all my own speculation so YOU KNOW.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, at the end of chippin’ in, when you ask johnny what he meant by letting down his friends... santiago is named directly

i thought this was interesting since the only glimpse of their relationship that we get is seeing johnny meeting santiago via the alt flashback for the first time.

so now it’s obvious that while johnny and rogue were with the nomads their friendship developed, and johnny went on to disappoint santiago in some way by being his normal dickhead self

but HOW? how did he disappoint santiago? is santiago even still alive?? did smasher kill santiago and is this why rogue mentions during chippin’ in that she wants smasher to “settle a score” moreso than avenge johnny??

the only additional hints i have are from this shard, which you can find at the aldecaldos camp: “nomads at ground zero”

i’m just gonna transcribe here and bold for emphasis:

It was no secret that Night Corp offered generous pay and, in some cases, free cyberware and biomonitor upgrades to anyone willing to help clean up the crater of radioactive rubble at AHQ ground zero. Some firsthand accounts recall the incessant ticking of Geiger counters, like the loud buzz of cicadas in summer. In retrospect, we can only guess how many "crater cleaners" lost their lives to radiation sickness shortly thereafter. Both the city government and Night Corp have claimed casualties were kept to a minimum, while providing no official statistics to substantiate the claim. That being said, they have never been under pressure to release such figures. After all, most rescue, engineering, and rubble cleanup teams were not local Night Citizens, but nomads. Surprised you didn't know? Don't be. It is a fact many history courses tend to overlook. The city employed hundreds of nomad mercenaries, primarily from clans in Aldecaldo nation. These nomads were hungry for gainful work and the city needed experts who were not only experienced but brave enough to knowingly put their lives on the line - all so Arasaka could one day erect another tower in its place. But history is not without its sense of irony. These nomads, who so deliberately live outside our so-called "system," came to its very rescue. Not for the first time. And not for the last.

a main theme we find in this game is the idea that the system of corps and exploitation cannot be stopped by grandiose rebellious gestures--no amount of samurai songs, assassinating mayors, or even planting nukes in towers will change things. yet johnny, his friends and mercs at atlantis in the 2020s, including rogue, chose to rebel any way they could, thinking it better than not. johnny criticizes her lack of rebellious spirit CONSTANTLY in 2077.

but ultimately, johnny, trapped in mikoshi, didn’t get to see the outcome of what detonating the AHQ nukes did to night city’s fragile ecosystem. rogue, however, did--and likely watched their former allies, the aldecaldos, be forced to take dangerous work at AHQ’s ground zero (from lack of other opportunities as detailed in this shard), then die from radiation sickness throughout the following decades, all as a result of what she and johnny did to try and fight the system. and she also watched all the former mercenaries of atlantis be hunted down by arasaka.

so rogue sees firsthand what the cost of rebellion is and johnny doesn’t. and nomads, considered the most free of any of the factions we encounter in the game, are the cost.

#lore post #johnny silverhand #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk2077 #cp2077 #cyberpunk lore

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artist-issues · 3 years

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@snowybookworm

I’ve seen the logic behind both schools of thought: that Old Steve could only have sat back and allowed events like Bucky’s torture to unfold (thereby being super out of character) OR that he created an alternate timeline where he stayed in character by solving all sorts of problems while living out his happily ever after. And I’m not going to go into that, I’m not going to swing one way or the other. But suffice to say, I don’t think that the portrayal of time travel rules in Endgame supports the idea that Old Steve could only return to prime 2023 via the same portal he left from, because if that were true, how do you explain the Avengers’ big push to get the Infinity Gauntlet into Scott’s van in the final battle? If the only way they could be returned to the timeline they were snatched from was with the same portal, tossing them into the van, a DIFFERENT portal, would’ve been reality-suicide for our heroes.

But I’m not here to argue about what Steve Rogers did when we DIDN’T get to watch his actions. I’m here to argue about what we DO know for sure based on what we WERE given to watch. I’m here to prove that if you think it’s not like Steve Rogers to leave Bucky in the present to live his days out with Peggy, you’ve missed his whole character arc. You’re one of those people who doesn’t see that he HAS a character arc. Captain America has DEPTH. He has LAYERS to who he is. It’s not just “do the right thing,” as close as that may sound to the truth.

He is not the same exact guy Bucky had to lead out of back-alley fights in the 40s. He might have all of the same excellent qualities that we know and love, the BEST qualities, but we’re not at the same point in his story. He’s learned and he’s grown and Peggy Carter is symbolic of him moving on.

Now, that may sound oxymoronic to you, “because he literALLY TIME TRAVELED TO THE PAST to be with the lady he missed out on! HOW IS THAT MOVING ON?!” you ask. Because you’re missing it. Let’s rewind and look at Steve Rogers and his character development, shall we?

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve Rogers goes from a guy with everything to prove, who is so willing to take on the world and all it’s evil that it doesn’t matter if he’s 90lbs of asthmatic shortness, he’ll fight bullies and stand up for what’s right! And he’ll do it ALONE if he has to! That’s important, the word “alone.” He’s so committed to that identity that Bucky Barnes, his best friend and brother figure, keeps having to remind Steve that through all of life’s challenges, he’s not alone, that he’s got someone with him “til’ the end of the line.” And Steve believes it: Bucky will be there for him when he needs dragging out of the gutter and cleaning up, when he has nobody else and nothing else. But Steve knows, or thinks he knows, (AND YOU AND I DO TOO, if we pay attention to the actual movie instead of our fill-in-the-blanks headcanons) that however LOYAL AND TRUE Bucky is to him, he doesn’t believe Steve can win. Bucky doesn’t believe in Steve. Now hold your offense: it’s okay that Bucky didn’t believe in Steve. Have you seen Skinny Steve? He’s an amazing moral giant, but physically he’s not going to live past middle-aged. Bucky believed Skinny Steve was righteous, and a hero, and would never give up, but Bucky was resigned to having to help that righteous hero or watch him die eventually because all that gold was locked up in the wrong-sized package. Sebastian Stan has hinted at what the films portray subtly; that Bucky’s is more cynical than his friend Steve from the get-go. He’s always poised and worried that he’s about to watch his hero Steve get killed standing up to the darkness of the world—not WIN against it. Bucky was ready to help Steve out of fights, but—and here’s BUCKY’S character development in that first film—he’s not ready to follow Steve into fights until after Azzano, when Steve finally has the physical capabilities to back up what Bucky has always known was there on the inside: the will to fight the darkness of the world and win. That’s when he realizes, “he’s the little guy from Brooklyn, too dumb to run away from a fight—and now someone’s actually gone and juiced him up with the means to literally take on the jaws of death.” All that heroism and goodness Bucky’s always seen in Steve has gone from being what might get him killed to something that Steve can actually use to do the right thing, however dangerous. And Bucky chooses to keep his promise and follow Steve back into battle after enduring torture, because he is with him til the end of the line. But initially, cynical yet loyal Bucky Barnes didn’t believe his best friend could win.

Steve sees this about Bucky. He knows how Bucky sees him. In the Erskine Enlistment Scene, this line from Steve is so telling: “Look, I know you don’t think I can do this...” and Bucky responds after Steve’s ‘men-laying-down-their-lives’ speech with “right...cause you got nothing to prove.” sarcastically. Steve knows that Bucky loves him and is there for him, but he sees that Bucky doesn’t believe in him. And they’re still friends. They’re still brothers and everything we know them to be, because the word that defines their relationship is “LOYAL.” But you know who did believe in Steve?

Peggy Carter.

She takes notice of Steve’s heart of gold while he’s still skinny, and asthmatic, and everything that Bucky has seen since they were kids. But where Bucky sees a heart of gold about to be snuffed out by harsh circumstances, PEGGY sees something else. She sees something else because she has a similar hopeful outlook on life, a kindred spirit with Steve’s forever-the-fighter character. Peggy Carter, a woman in the 40s, has had to fight and fight and take one step forward for every three steps she’s been pushed back. She’s had to prove herself over and over, every moment of her career, when nobody (except her brother Michael) believed in her. That’s their conversation in the cab. That’s the crux of why they love each other. Peggy has always noticed Steve as never giving up, but until he talks to her in the car on the way to get Super Soldiered, she might have assumed that he was just trying to prove himself for HIMSELF. Then he explains that he doesn’t have anything against running away, and his philosophy about bullies. And she relates to him. She sees that heart of gold and she wants to STOKE it, not just protect it. She knows what it is to want someone to not only acknowledge her potential, but BELIEVE in it. That’s why she has a picture of Skinny Steve on her desk and not a newspaper clipping of Captain America; she loves Steve Rogers for what is inside, for his moral character, and for their kindred fighter spirits. You can see that through her urging him to not settle for being a dancing monkey. “You were meant for more than this, you know.” “If it could only work once, he would be glad it was you.”

And Steve Rogers recognizes that Peggy Carter believes in him. Here’s how. When Bucky and Steve argue at the World Fair before Bucky’s deployment, Bucky leaves with a sort of “I give up,” so-done, snarky “don’t do anything stupid until I get back” attitude. We know and love it. But that’s important. Steve is about to go lie on his enlistment and try to go to war. He’s about to do this risky thing. And Bucky leaves it like “even though I’m against it, I know I can’t stop you, so please just be careful.” When Peggy is faced with a more extreme, but still similar situation where Steve is about to jump headfirst into a risky thing, that’s not her attitude. “I can do more than that.” “Get back here! We’re taking you ALL the way in!” She’s not going to follow him, and she’s not going to shrug and say “fine, go get yourself killed.” She’s not even going to say, like Bucky might’ve, “if you’re dying, I’m dying with you.” JEEZ, the last thing she says to him before he gets on a plane that becomes his tomb is “GO GET ‘IM.” When he says to her “this is my choice” before he ‘dies’ she accepts it, but she still makes that appointment for the dance- almost like a sad, sweet little ‘if you can get out of this, I’ll still be waiting.’ But whenever he goes into danger, throughout that film, she’s going to HELP him. Because she believes in him. She really believes he can do this. She has faith. That’s the word that describes Peggy and Steve’s relationship. “FAITH.”

Bucky = Loyalty.

Peggy = Faith.

And how does Steve grow in this movie? He learned from both Bucky and Peggy: “I don’t have to fight alone.” Whether it’s because he’s scrawny and everybody else would run away from a fight they can’t win, or because he’s an icon and the world’s first super-soldier-miracle, he’s always had this loneliness complex. He lifts the weight of the world because he knows that if you can, you should. But Peggy says to him “you won’t be alone.” It’s a quote important enough for him to experience it in a flashback the first time we see him in The Avengers.

In The Avengers, Steve has to share the spotlight with a whole other cast of heroes, PLUS the writers had to show us what it would be like for a 1940s superhero to lose 70 years of time and wake up with nobody left of his old life, so his growth is smaller. It’s setting up for more growth later. But still, there’s that quote. “You won’t be alone.” And now here he is. Alone. In the 21st century. Worse than a skinny kid nobody believes in, now he’s a cultural phenomenon in a world where everyone looks up to him but nobody believes in him, really, not directly. Whether it’s how well he can stand up against gods and iron men, what makes him special, or why cops should listen to him in the heat of interplanetary battle—in this bold new world he’s woken up in, Steve is on a lonelier pedestal than ever. He’s quickly disillusioned with the government that used to give him order and structure when it loses the Tesseract, which it was making weapons of mass destruction out of, then tries to nuke an island full of innocent people to win one battle. But Steve finally realizes, toward the end of the film, that just because SHIELD and the larger world are new and different and don’t know who he really is, that doesn’t mean he’s alone. When the other Avengers join him in going to take on Loki in their own way, and when Tony, in particular, proves that he’ll sacrifice himself for the greater good, Steve remembers his lesson from Peggy. He’s still not alone.

But being surrounded by other misfits, even ones who are willing to sacrifice everything for the greater good like he is, isn’t the same as being surrounded by people who know Steve Rogers, the punch-drunk kid from Brooklyn. He’s looking for purpose at the end of the Avengers. What do we see the other characters doing? Thor’s off to deal with the family drama that defines a lot of his character arcs in his movies. Tony is seen embracing the whole “work with others” thing by starting construction on Avengers Tower. Bruce is going with Tony, proving that he’s learning to trust himself with the Hulk like Tony suggested, and Nat hands him the bag, meaning she trusts him too. Clint is reunited with her and getting in a car with the SHIELD logo stamped on it, and where is Steve? What’s his foreshadowing/cap to the movie character arc? Is he getting in the SHIELD car, too? No. He’s on a motorcycle. Alone. Driving off to Lord-knows-where. He’s the only Avenger that drives off alone—but before he went, he shook Tony’s hand. That send-off says he’s willing to be on this team, with these other fighters and misfits...but he’s still lonely. Nobody really knows him yet. He’s not alone in fighting, but he doesn’t know what he wants or where he’s going.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier Steve’s character development is centered around solidifying what parts of him need to change now that he’s “The Man Out of Time” and what parts of him stay true. The whole film is about trust. And yes, that trust is best driven him when Steve is literally willing to die rather than give up on Bucky, the man literally beating him to death. Because loyalty. But don’t miss the scene with Peggy, however brief. Their conversation has nuances, especially in light of Endgame. There’s a lot going on in the scene that shows how in love he is with her, but the part that’s most important is just his reaction when she relapses and realizes that he’s alive all over again. The last thing Old Peggy says is “it’s been so long.” And she repeats it, for emphasis. And he points out the dance. Because remember, there’s this theme that she would have waited for him. That’s their relationship: faith. But she didn’t know he was alive, and how could she? It’s been so long. She’s not smiling. She’s crying when she realizes he’s still alive. Because they missed all that time they would have had together. And his face is the perfect micro expression of grief. To me, it doesn’t read “I’m so sad because I missed out on Peggy,” though I’m sure there’s some of that in there. To me it reads more like Steve always reads because he thinks of others first: “I’m so sad because Peggy had to mourn me and our relationship for so long.” I mean, look, it’s 70 years later and she’s devastated that he’s alive but they weren’t together. (You can be devastated about your lost love AND accepting of your life and other children without him, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, but more on that another time.) Steve never moves on from Peggy because that’s not the kind of guy he is. It’s not nothing to say she was the love of his life. And he wanted to go back to her not just for himself, but for her. Because he’d seen the future where she was still heartbroken that he missed their dance, and I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s literally RIGHT THERE in probably the best-written Marvel Film, Winter Soldier.

In a film that’s all about how what he thought was good and right is literally crumbling or growing Hydra tentacles around him, there are two things he doesn’t let go of. The first is Bucky. Bucky is an assassin now who any other hero would have put down. Heck, STEVE would have mournfully put down any other threat to the greater good, for the sake of Doing What’s Right. But there’s two (2) exceptions to that rule, and the first is Bucky. Loyalty. He won’t kill or even fight his best friend. And the second thing he won’t let go of, thematically, is Peggy. It’s how we go from “I’m alone in the future” in the Avengers to, “and if I’m the only one, so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.” Peggy founded SHIELD. Steve didn’t have to take time out of the very carefully synchronized and tense mission to stop Project: Insight to make that announcement. He could have assumed everyone was HYDRA and got to work. But he stopped, he made a FAITH-BASED decision to let HYDRA know they were there and shoutout to any good people in the building because the movie was about trust. And Peggy showed Steve how to have faith and trust in people because she extended it to him. He puts so many eggs in the Big Risk basket during this movie based on trusting others even though Nick Fury’s crucial words were “Don’t Trust Anyone.” That’s the part of Steve that won’t get corroded away by the new world he’s come out of the ice into. And he shows it by loyalty to Bucky, brainwashed warts and all, and belief in people, which Peggy taught him. There’s a lot that could also be said about Sam and Natasha, too, but more on them later.

The main thing, in CA:TWS and Avengers, to remember about Steve’s character arc is that while he’s learning to hold on to IDEALS like belief in people and defending freedom and innocent people from bullies like HYDRA and Loki, how does he express those ideals? The only way he knows how. By fighting. By finding a mission to complete or a cause to serve and going for it. How else? He doesn’t know how to do anything else. “I guess I just like to know who I’m fighting.” Sam asks, “You thinking about getting out?” And hid knee-jerk reaction is “no.” Then, “I don’t know.” AND WHY DOESN’T HE KNOW? Because he doesn’t know what makes him happy. Seriously! What makes him happy?? People who know him. He won’t go on a date because he has “no shared life experience”. He has no fun plans Saturday because his “barbershop quartet are dead.” Hes straight up politely walking away, kind-celebrity-style, from a potential new friend in Sam until Sam starts talking about being a veteran. He tries to relate to others through fights because that seems to be the only thing left. People see Steve as Captain America, leader of the Avengers, Fighter for Freedom, in the future. Nobody sees the kid from Brooklyn anymore. And he doesn’t know who he is without a war.

Bringing us to Avengers: Age of Ultron. This one’s character development is so obvious it feels like they’re beating you over the head with it Hulk-style if you just take half a second to focus on Steve’s scenes. It starts with how he views the Maximoff twins—he can relate to their lab-rats-of-justice ideals, but nobody else shares that sympathy, as seen in the conversation with Maria Hill by the elevator. Then there’s the scene at the party. No, not the one where he reminds Bruce that he waited too long for Peggy, although HELLO HE’S STILL IN LOVE WITH PEGGY. But I’m talking about Steve and Sam’s conversation. Sam mentions home. In the middle of a party, Steve is asking about Bucky, his one remaining person who knows him, and reminiscing about Peggy, the other person who knew him. Home is in the people who know you. Steve wants that to be the Avengers. He wants them to be the people who get who he is, and I think they come close. Nat, Sam, and Tony especially. But Tony never separates who Steve is from this idea of him handed down from Howard Stark, and Steve is made aware of that over and over. Plus Tony doesn’t trust Steve; the team keeps clashing over trust issues in this film. And Tony even says, in the pivotal argument with Steve over the lumber pile, “isn’t this why we fight? So we can END the fight? So we can go HOME?” Steve can’t go home because Steve feels he has no home. He’s made The Fight his home. And he defaults right back to it in this argument: “every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts, innocent people die.” So, again, he’s not ALONE anymore, in the sense that others will fight with him. But he’s still stuck on FIGHTING. And nobody really knows him. At the end of the film he says, almost reluctantly, “I’m home” and proceeds to go in and try to train new Avengers. Sam comes flying in among them—that’s a subtle reason why Steve is willing to make the Avengers/the Fight his new home. The one guy who might actually know him and represent who he is when he’s not behind the shield is missing, and Sam was supposed to be looking for him. Sam is with the Avengers, NOT looking for him.

But all of that is wrecked in Captain America: Civil War. Peggy, the love of his life, dies. Bucky, the friend he’d all but given up on finding, reappears and is in trouble. Without Peggy, there’s only one person left who knows who Steve really is, and with all that Bucky means to him, Steve isn’t going to give him up. It just so happens that that goal of remaining loyal to Bucky is synonymous with hanging on to his ideals: combatting the Sokovia Accords with a little moral kick in the seat from posthumous Peggy. I’m not going to go into why his actions about the Accords were in-character in this film. But it should be obvious from everything I’ve written, anyway. And remember, his faith is in people. Peggy taught him that, as we’ve established.

The main point of character development in this film for Steve is that he’s realized that he can’t give up who Steve Rogers is to be who everyone thinks Captain America is. When the rest of the world says that the Avengers should be little better than Government weapons and operate out of fear, Steve remembers that he’s the kid from Brooklyn who will fight for what’s right, shield or no shield. And Bucky symbolizes that aspect of who he really is, because Bucky knows him in a way that no remaining living character does. So when Steve is fighting Tony to keep Bucky safe, it’s not devoid of their conflict over ideals, either. Stave drops the shield but promises to still be there for Tony if he needs him. He’s not going to be everyone’s Captain America. He’s going to stay the good man Erskine gave a chance to, the good man Peggy believed in, and the good man only Bucky is alive to remember.

Now we get to Infinity War. And here there’s so much going on with so many characters that for Steve, it’s just important to realize that, although he’s finally hit a rhythm in this post-ice life as Steve Rogers, Fighter from Brooklyn, HOW is he hitting that rhythm? Settling down in Wakanda to hang with Bucky and the goats? Leaving the justice and peacekeeping to Tony Stark and the law-abiding heroes? No. He’s still fighting. And not just in response to Thanos—we’re shown hints and evidences that Cap and his Secret Avengers have been doing some behind-the-scenes peacekeeping. So why isn’t Steve finding peace with Bucky? Ask yourself that. He had time. He had anonymity, in Wakanda. He’d given up the Captain America mantle. They could’ve been roomies in that little hut, like when they were kids, right?

Wrong. But why?

It’s not because the Russos didn’t think of it. It’s not because of lazy writing. It’s because of Bucky.

Bucky is still Steve’s friend and Steve is still loyal to him. They don’t mean any less to each other than they did in 1945. But Bucky is not Bucky anymore. If you believe that Sebastian Stan did a good job playing Bucky, you have to remember that Sebastian Stan played him as if he would “never go back to being that guy you see in The First Avenger.” Bucky has evolved. He’s part Winter Soldier, now. Does he still know Steve better than anyone? Yes. But that is corrupted by the fact that Bucky was programmed to see Steve, the country Steve represented, and all of Steve’s ideals of freedom as targets to be destroyed for 90 years. That changes things. Steve is always going to do what is best for Bucky, because that’s the kind of friend he is. It was the kind of friend he was in 1945 when he rescued Bucky from Azzano, it’s the kind of friend he was when he wouldn’t fight him aboard Project: Insight, it’s the kind of friend he was when he gave up the Avengers and the shield for Bucky...and it’s the kind of friend he was when he left Bucky in the present.

In Avengers: Endgame Steve Rogers has experienced what it’s like to fight and lose again. He’s lost everything. He’s lost Peggy, and now Bucky, too. He’s lost everything and everyone that ever symbolized home...except, perhaps, Natasha. His friend who knows what it’s like to give up everything for ideals and fight to prove yourself. His friend who can’t stop fighting, either. But he loses her, too. Before he does, though, what does Steve say? In that first conversation before everything sets into motion? He says that maybe the fight doesn’t need to be fought by them. He says they need to get a life. But Nat says “you first.”

Who knows him the closest at this point? Nat. So who’s the best-qualified to point out where he’s at, character-development-wise? Nat. He sees his flaw. Steve Rogers sees that he can’t figure out who he is, without someone who knows him helping him. He sees that he defaults to finding a cause, a mission, a fight. Heck, the posters of him say “one last mission.” Not “one last sacrifice (of everything for Bucky).” One last MISSION, because that’s the only thing Steve knows how to do when he has nothing else.

“But he DID have something else! He had BUCKY! And his new family with the Avengers!”

Now we get to the part people don’t understand. They think, “how could Steve just leave everybody, especially Bucky, to fend for themselves?”

You didn’t see all that character development, especially in the first film where the differences between what Bucky means to Steve and what Peggy means to Steve are established.

Bucky is not the streetsmart protective charming brother figure he was in TFA. But listen. He’s not the broken Winter Soldier anymore either. Not in a way that needs Steve’s help. He’s not on the run. He’s got his memory back. He’s pardoned. He’s got Sam. Don’t you see, Bucky’s biggest problem is Steve’s, at this point? They MIRROR each other. Steve can’t figure out who he is if he isn’t fighting for everyone else because he’s been fighting for so long. And Bucky can’t figure out who he is with his friend, his brother figure, doing that and him. Because if Steve is fighting, Bucky will always be there to have his back. But fighting isn’t what Bucky needed anymore. It’s not what he wanted. Fighting is what Bucky is tired of.

And Steve Rogers can’t not be where the fight is.

Because without a fight, who is he?

Peggy Carter knows.

Steve Rogers left Bucky because Bucky needed him to leave. They needed to be friends from afar. And Steve left Bucky because Peggy Carter was home. Being with the woman who knew who he really was, as Steve “Kid From Brooklyn” Rogers, was the right move for his character because it shows that he’s finally ready to stop fighting. Stop being Captain America, lonely hero, man out of time. He’s ready to go and figure out who he is apart from all of that, with someone who really knows him. Could he have done that with Bucky? I don’t know. Seems to me, from what we’ve seen, that Bucky represented passively understanding Steve while Peggy, at the point they were separated, represented understanding Steve and moving him forward.

Bucky was “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

Peggy is “I had faith.”

Bucky was the guy to have Steve’s back in the fight. Peggy was the woman to show him he was meant for more. She represents his potential. She represents his ability to move on, see who he is when he’s doing more than following orders or standing up for honor or proving himself. It would have been out of character for him to stay in the present because new fights would have arisen, and he never would’ve put down the shield. He would’ve fought until someone killed him. And guess what? Bucky would’ve been right behind him, dragging himself into a fight when what he really needs is to step away from Steve and the baggage of his past for a bit. Not completely, but enough.

But this way? With Peggy? We get to see the guy who was always lonely and always learning how to be less alone actually do it. If you miss how significant that is, and you miss how much sense it makes, you don’t understand Steve Rogers at all.

#snowybookworm #I could’ve said less better #but here we are #avengers #steve rogers is an asshole #steve rogers #captain america #captain rogers #steggy #anti-stucky #captain America endgame #avengers:Endgame endgame #mcu #marvel #Marvel Cinematic Universe

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avengerscompound · 3 years

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Moving On - Chapter 3

Moving On: A Falcon & Captain Marvel Fanfic

Masterlist PREVIOUS //

Buy me a ☕ Character Pairing: Sam Wilson x F!Reader, Carol Danvers x F! Reader

Word Count: 2003

Rating: E

Warnings: just a little canon complaint drama this chapter

Synopsis: You thought Sam Wilson was the love of your life. You had planned to do it all with him - marriage, kids, see the world. Even when you’re life gets turned upside down, and you both end up international fugitives, he’s there by your side.

Then Thanos comes.

When Sam is one of the many turned to dust, leaving you alone and pregnant, you don’t think you’ll ever stop grieving. Yet, everyone tells you that Sam would want you to move on and live your life - that he’d want you to be happy. Gradually you open your heart up to another. Carol Danvers has lost people too. First her daughter, then her wife. As the two of you lean on each other, feelings grow and you move on together.

So what happens when Sam is returned to you?

Chapter 3: The Accords

When Sam had left on his mission to Lagos, you had been worried but not in a major way. You had thought maybe he might come home bruised up or with a cracked rib. The last thing you had expected was for a lapse in attention would allow Rumlow to detonate a block leveling amount of C-4, and that when Wanda had tried to contain it and it had taken out a floor of a building instead, she’d get the blame.

Still, while that was bad, it wasn’t something that you had thought would directly affect you. It might mean there was some argument with governments about Wanda being in the custody of the Avengers and how training should be done to prevent things like that from happening again. You were fairly sure the insurance policy the Avengers held for such things was going to be hit hard. But for you and Sam - life and love and wedding plans wouldn’t have been affected.

And then Tony Stark had shown up with General Thaddeus Ross.

Ross had dropped a bomb into the compound and run. Not a literal bomb, but one that had the potential to be just as damaging. The Sokovia accords had been dropped off - a document stating that any enhanced individual would have to register themselves with their country's government and the UN and provide them with biometrics as a way to keep tabs on them. Along with that, anyone working for facilities such as SHIELD, SWORD, or the Avengers as operatives, and any of these enhanced individuals were unable to act on matters of security without the go-ahead from their countries government or the UN.

While that didn’t change too much for you, according to the document, Sam’s wings counted as enhancements. Steve Rogers and Wanda Maximoff were also both enhanced and would need to provide DNA to the government. Wanda would be registered as a weapon of mass destruction.

It meant you and Sam had to decide what you wanted to do. You knew there was no way Sam would sign. He had already left the airforce, he wasn’t going back to working for the government again so soon. Especially not with the added condition of registering humans with them. You also knew he was unlikely to stop fighting - it just wasn’t in his nature.

Unfortunately, you didn’t have a chance to even talk about it before Sam was out the door again.

“Look,” Sam said as he got his best suit out of the closet. “This is a big deal. It kinda changes everything for us. So maybe decide what you really want to do and what you’re okay with? I mean… worst case scenario I could end up an international war criminal.”

“How likely is that though?” You asked as you watched him zip the suit into a suit bag.

“I doubt it’s very likely but you gotta consider it, babe,” he said. “I love you. I want a life with you, but I don’t want you to end up resenting me because we end up on the run from the law together or something.”

“Right,” you said with a nod. “You wouldn’t consider… I dunno… retiring?”

“Of course,” Sam said, moving on to the underwear drawer. “And if these things go through and they make me sign, that’s what I’m gonna say I’m doing. But you know me, I’m never gonna take some back seat when a big bad goes down.”

“No, I know,” you said. “Me too. You sure you don’t want me to come to this?”

Sam shook his head. “This is Steve’s thing,” he said. “I didn’t even know Peggy. I’m gonna be there for him. I’ll be back in a couple of days. You think while I’m gone.”

“You know I’m just going to do whatever you do,” you said. “Right? I mean, the whole premise sounds a little -” you paused and rocked your hand back and forth “- the whole ‘registering people for being different’ thing? And then to muzzle them and treat them as dangerous weapons. It’s fucked up. And besides. You’re my man. Where you go, I go.”

He smiled and came over and kissed your forehead. “I’m your man, huh?”

“Mm-hmm… my fine man,” you hummed.

He laughed and touched the tip of your nose with his finger. “Stop trying to distract me, woman. I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

“Alright, alright,” you said, zipping up his bag. “You’ll call me when you get there?”

He kissed your forehead again. “Of course.”

You grabbed his t-shirt before he could pull away and dragged him down into a deep kiss. He hummed softly and caressed your jaw, before pulling back and grabbing his bag. “You think on it. Okay? No rash decisions.”

You agreed you would and watched him leave, not realizing how this was the point where everything would change.

You had been watching the news in your room when the word about the attack on the UN at the Vienna International Centre. It hadn’t taken you long to realize if the number one suspect was James Barnes that Steve would be quick to take after him. Sam had been on the trail of the infamous Winter Soldier since the day you’d met him, there was no way that Steve would let anyone else bring him in.

You also knew that if Steve went, Sam would likely go too. Not because Sam was Steve’s shadow, but because they both had their moral compasses so inline that they ended up having the same thoughts at the same time.

Which would mean they were breaking international law and that unlikely scenario where they would become fugitives was a little more likely than you thought.

You needed to contact him, but you knew it was dangerous. You sent him a text. The two of you had gotten into the habit of sending large groups of emojis with little messages hidden inside. Most of the time they were for no reason. There would be a string of eggplants and peaches and then a random egg and milk carton to let the other person know you needed eggs and milk. It was a habit that was built out of the paranoia you had drilled into you as a spy. If something happened and you need to message each other covertly, seeing a string of random emojis would at a passing glance just look like the cute-coupley thing you both always did. It wouldn’t withstand any deep probing, but it would be enough to let each other know that one of you was in trouble or to go grab the burner phone and run.

You texted Sam a string of hearts in kiss emojis with an American flag, a bird, a jogging emoji, and a snowflake mixed in.

He texted back a similar string with a thumbs up in the mix.

You replied with the more sexual emojis, eggplants, peaches, the droplets, the tongue, and among them was the girl with the hand raised in the air.

Sam replied with the same only instead of the girl was a thumbs down.

Yes, they were going after James Barnes. No, he didn’t want you to come.

You didn’t hear from Sam again for two days. Two days that only seemed to make matters worse.

Steve had indeed tracked down Barnes, but so had just about everyone else. It ended with a car chase through the streets of Romania where Steve, Sam, Barnes, and weirdly the new king of Wakanda had been arrested by Rhodey of all people.

Sam called you when they had been taken back to Germany.

“I know you’re antsy, baby,” Sam said. “But you need to stay put. Right now they’ve confiscated my wings and Cap’s shield, but we think we’ll be let go. We went after Barnes. He’s captured. That’s it. Slap on the wrist, don’t do it again, type of bullshit. Worse comes to worst… well, it’s not the first time they’ve tried taking my wings off me, is it?”

“Sam!” You yelped. “This line…”

“I’m joking! I’m joking!” Sam said, holding his hands up in front of the screen. You knew he wasn’t.

“Anyway…” Sam continued. “I think Tony’s trying to talk Steve into signing the accords. I dunno if he will or not. Maybe just to keep the peace. But there’s no way I’m going to.”

“I want to be there with you,” you pouted. “I could help.”

“It’ll just make things messy,” Sam said. “Trust me. You’re better off there. It’s not like I can get in any more trouble now Barnes is captured.”

He was wrong.

The next you heard Barnes had broken out and Sam and Steve had taken after him. You received a text not long after the news broke with a series of hearts and a cellphone emoji.

You went to your closet, grabbed the burner phone, and went out for a run. You were just leaving the perimeter of the compound when the burner rang.

“Sam?” You said, pressing the phone to your ear.

“Yeah, baby,” Sam said. “It’s me. Did you hear?”

“They’re saying you’re on the run with Barnes,” you said. “Please tell me you were just recapturing him.”

Sam laughed. “That was the idea,” he said. “This shit is going deep and we need help. There’s this guy - wanted to get to Barnes to find out about some other Super Soldiers and where they’re kept. So now we might have a bunch of really psychotic super soldiers being released on the world by someone even more psychotic than they are.”

“Where are you? What do you need me to do?” You asked.

“I’m tempted to tell you to stay put,” Sam said.

“Sam, I’m not…”

“No, I know,” he said. “But think about it. You do this - you come after me and we’re fugitives. We can’t go home. All this talk of weddings and babies? It’s not happening. It’ll be you and me on the run from everywhere. Best we can hope for is one day when we’re both too old to run we settle in some country that doesn’t extradite.”

“I heard Montenegro didn’t sign,” you half-joke. “It looks pretty nice there.”

Sam laughed. “See I was thinking Cape Verde.”

You let out a breath and smiled a little. “Always thinking, you are.”

“You know it, baby,” Sam said. “Now, Clint’s coming…”

“What? But his family?” You yelped.

“I know… but like you, you can’t tell him no,” Sam said. “He’s going to grab Wanda. When you get back, go to her, but say nothing. Just a little girl’s bonding time. Okay? I’m sure Vizh will be hanging around her. He always is. Don’t leave her side even if they do make it clear that you’re third-wheeling.”

“Should I pack?” You asked.

“No,” Sam said quickly. “I’m even a little worried you grabbing the burner might be too much of a giveaway to what’s going on.”

“I did it while I changed into my jogging gear,” you said. “Nabbed it with my heart rate monitor.”

“Good. Well hopefully that covered that gorgeous ass of yours,” he said. “But aside from deciding you want to hang with Wanda you’re not doing anything strange, okay? Clint will get there and you go. Tony’s an asshole, but not that big of an asshole, I don’t think he’d burn our things, so we’re gonna have to trust that the compound will act as our storage until this is sorted out. If it ever is.”

“Okay,” you said with a sigh.

“I love you,” Sam said softly. “You take care of yourself.”

“You too, Sammy,” you said. “Don’t do anything dumber than you already have until I get there and can join in.”

Sam laughed. “You got it. I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah. See you.”

You disconnected the call and shoved it back behind your heart rate monitor and turned to run back to the compound. You had a fight to prepare for.

// NEXT

#sam wilson #carol danvers #sam wilson x reader #carol danvers x reader #falcon #captain marvel #falcon fanfic #captain marvel fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #reader insert #moving on

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imhereforbvcky · 3 years

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Watch Me Run - Part 18

Masterlist - Series Masterpage - Part 19

Summary: You inherit a family relic that gives you the gift of foresight but there are others who are interested for more nefarious reasons. You turn to the Avengers for help. (Bucky x reader)

Chapter: You begin to discover your own strength while Loki moves another step closer.

Word Count: 1849

A/N: Another chapter that’s more plot than pretty. I’m sorry. I tried to re-work it so many times and it just came out contrived. I’ll be back on my bullshit next time with over-wrought metaphors, don’t you worry.

“Are you… Are you in a public library?” Tony punctuated the last two words with every ounce of the frustration that had been building into a headache.

Bucky merely shrugged.

“My tech is suspect, but you trust some bum-fuck nowhere government public computer from 1996?!”

“There’s not a single goddamn thing linking any of us to this computer,” Bucky explained, patting the side of the yellowing box of the monitor. “No one will think to hack this thing. And if they do, good luck with this dinosaur.”

“I wouldn’t even check my fantasy football draft on that thing,” Tony complained over Bucky.

“If anyone traces this connection from your end, however…”

“Oh, my end! Hilarious. You think it’s even possible to merge with my servers?”

“It will lead to this bumfuck library. For all anyone knows we drove 2 days to get here. Or five minutes. Or any distance in between.”

Tony huffed out a sigh of defeat. He hated this. It was reckless. Reckless, and pointless, and a waste of time. Most of all it was unbelievably insulting.

Bored by details irrelevant to himself, Stephen Strange rolled his eyes in the frame next to Tony.

“Can we just get on with it? What’s the new guy bringing to the table?” Bucky grumbled, thrusting his chin at the screen.

“Who me?” Strange leaned forward, pointing at himself and glancing about the room of veteran Avengers. “Oh, no. No. I’m not interested in joining your… team.” Sarcasm was an undeniable impulse to Stephen Strange. “My only interest here is the protection of this realm. Making sure the Eye is safe.” He nodded with raised brows toward the screen. More directly, toward the family heirloom hanging around your neck.

Bucky’s jaw ticked, and you knew a sigh was sure to follow. He was angry. This sorcerer who allegedly held all the answers was arrogant and cold. He talked like you weren’t even a factor in the equation, when to Bucky, you were the center of it.

“We’re listening,” you said, placing a hand over Bucky’s.

Dr. Strange was clearly a very intelligent man, but you assumed he’d never had the inclination to share his knowledge before. He spoke quickly and confidently, as if everyone in the room thought as he did.

“I suspect your DNA lends you some ability. What is most important though is how far along you are in your training. We need to assess whether you’re ready to wield and protect an Infinity Stone. The Eye of Agamotto is a powerful tool.”

“Training?”

“Yes, I can help you fill in the gaps. The tome I sent—“

“Yes!” you nearly jumped, finally tracking him, “Got it! It’s a lot like the photo album my grandfather sent.”

“Good, so it’s familiar. Let’s test your proficiency. As a Stone Keeper, I’m assuming you’ve mastered Eldritch Manipulation, so let’s get right to tapping the stone’s power. You should create a time loop for us to work in so we can perform the spells without destroying the future.”

Bucky looked to you, brow creased with curiosity, but you simply froze. Not one word Dr. Strange said had struck you as even recognizable, much less something actionable!

“I’m sorry, I…”

“Too ambitious. Okay. Let’s just manipulate time only slightly: go back one minute.”

World-famous heroes imbued with strength and cunning and courage crowded the pixelated old screen, eager to see your power. They wanted to see exactly what they’d been working so hard to protect.

You stared forward with wide eyes, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

“I didn’t actually read the book yet. I didn’t know…”

“Did the last Seer not teach you about the stone?”

“In-in stories, yes.” Frustration slipped up your chest in hot flutters, stinging at your cheeks. “I was a child the last time I saw him. Until he sent me the stone and I saw him when I dreamed of his murder.”

Strange took a deep breath and leaned back. His frown deepened into a grave and focused stone visage. “So you know about the stone, but you don’t know what you know. Did he teach you anything to access it? Any spells? Even basic…” He asked motioning with his hands.

“Magpies?” You were more confused than ever, watching the shapes he made. “The signals you’re making. It’s how I got my nickname. It was a game we had,, making hand signs for things on my grandfather’s ranch. We’d go on scavenger hunts and name the clouds and trees and he’d show me signs for them so we could find the shy animals.”

You remembered the harsh crunch of snow as you’d knelt to examine a wide lynx track. The bite of a frosty wind as you'd plucked a tuft of its fur from the bark of a ponderosa pine and rubbed it between your fingers.

“So he did teach you.”

“I—no! I don’t know. They were just kid’s games. That one!” You shouted, pointing at the screen, and the gesture Strange had made: his final fingers angled toward his thumbs like a beak on each hand, the others extended, like the tipped wings of a bird. “That’s our sign for magpie. One for sorrow, two for joy. So you always have to make two,—AH!!”

As you recited the rhyme, mimicking Dr Strange with the motions you’d learned as a child, the copper tines on the amulet began to turn. The stone, unencumbered by its metal cage, began to glow brighter than you’d ever seen. The green light pushed outward in streams. It seemed to have an energy of its own.

“Holy shit!” you whispered, too stunned to move. A wave of fear swept over you like a beam of hot sunlight. “What do I do? I could really… I have time in my hands right now. I could really mess things up! What do I do?”

“Let’s see what you can do. I’ll walk you through it. We’re going to move time back just a little. You need to stay focused. Sargent Barnes, can you open the text to page 394?”

And together, you very anxiously manipulated time. Carefully, one second at a time, you pushed the clock backward then forward.

“This could work!” you practically leapt with excitement, squeezing Bucky’s arm with one hand and clasping the now closed Eye of Agamotto with the other. “You could teach me how to use the stone to protect myself and how to keep it safe. Keep everything… stable!” After months of running with no end in sight, several lifetimes of possibility seemed to have unfolded in just one afternoon.

“I could,” Strange agreed. “But I don’t think that’s our wisest course. A trained and experienced practitioner of the mystic arts is our best shot here. We’ve got a very clever alien with powers we don’t fully understand. I’m sorry but we don’t have the time to figure out which bird signs link to which spells. The eye must come to the Sanctum. One of us will wield it.”

“But you have Loki. We have as much time as we need, you have him!”

“To do what with?” Tony interjected. “The universe has yet to see a prison that can hold him. Even on his home planet. We’re doing our best but…”

“The Eye is safest with a sorcerer,” Dr. Strange insisted.

“With you.” The tone of your voice was flat and heavy with indignation, with accusation.

“Yes.”

“You really think you’re not susceptible to this guy’s tricks don’t you?” Bucky scowled.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You think you’re so smart. That’s why you want it, isn’t it?? You think being a doctor and knowing these spells makes you smarter than everyone. Think that’ll protect you. Loki took a world renowned astrophysicist and had him raving in the street in tight-y white-ys. So tell me again what all that knowledge is gonna do for you when his sceptre turns you into a puppet?”

“I think I’m the only one here who has any idea what we’re dealing with. We’re talking about time and reality, the future of the universe as you think you know it, in the hands of someone who doesn’t know the Shield of the Seraphim from a peace sign.”

“She knows this stuff! And seems to me, an instinct for it.”

“Hey!” you finally snapped. “As far as we know, the stone has always been safest with my people. It is a legacy left to me through considerable pain and effort. I will not give up my duty because a man I met less than an hour ago thinks I should.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Strange urged. “When your grandfather told you to get the Avengers’ help do you think he meant a full time body guard with a memory problem?“

“I don’t know what he meant!” you whisper-shouted at the screen. “And neither do you because he let my entire family die for this stone. And then he died for it too. I know you’re scared and you want to be the hero. But my life is wrapped around this stone now, and at every turn there’s a tidal wave of blood and my tears. So the answer is no. No, I don’t trust you, or anyone else with it. But you can help me. So. Will you?”

“I need a list of addresses,” Steve barked as he strode into one of the clusters of offices in the Avengers Tower.

If Bucky had been there he’d have noticed something slightly off. Steve always walked like there was a speech to give, shoulders back, chest high, hard, confident steps thundering down the halls. Strong and bold, he was not a man made for stealth.

Today, on the way to Shipping and Receiving, Steve’s gate was smoothed out, gliding like a skater over unmarred ice, eyes darting left and right, not locked on any target. Something was off. But Bucky wasn’t there to notice, nor anyone else who might’ve.

“I can help you with that, sir!” an eager agent volunteered with a waving hand. “Which addresses are we looking for?” The receiving and transport of confidential materials for a group of celebrity-level heroes running a para-military outfit in the middle of New York City was a highly regulated business.

“Let’s start with all outgoing packages in the last week weighing under twenty pounds.”

“Would you like me to send the list to you, sir?”

Steve sighed and narrowed his eyes. “Not yet.” Still as granite, a crease deepened between his brows. “Does the return address on any of them say ‘care of Stephen Strange’?”

“Well that really narrowed it down,” the agent beamed. “Anything else, sir?”

“Print that address for me.”

“I could send the coordinates right to your—“

“Do I need to repeat myself?”

“No, sir!”

The elevator door had hardly closed before the visage of Steve Rogers melted away in a shimmer of green-golden light. Loki stood holding the paper – still warm from the printer – and grinned. He always did love a good game of chase.

Part 19 >>

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes #bucky x reader fluff #bucky x reader angst #bodyguard bucky #infinity stone bucky fanfic #avengers fanfic #bucky x reader infinity stones

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weheartchrisevans · 4 years

Link

BOSTON — So you're Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who opposes Roe v. Wade and wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and you get a call from Chris Evans, a Hollywood star and lifelong Democrat who has been blasting President Trump for years. He wants to meet. And film it. And share it on his online platform. Can anybody say "Borat?" “I was very skeptical,” admits Scott. “You can think of the worst-case scenario.”But then Scott heard from other senators. They vouched for Evans, most famous for playing Captain America in a series of films that have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. The actor also got on the phone with Scott’s staff to make a personal appeal.

It worked. Sometime in 2018, Scott met on camera with Evans in the nation’s capital, and their discussion, which ranged from prison reform to student loans, is one of more than 200 interviews with elected officials published on “A Starting Point,” an online platform the actor helped launch in July. Not long after, Evans appeared on Scott’s Instagram Live. They have plans to do more together.

“While he is a liberal, he was looking to have a real dialogue on important issues,” says Scott. “For me, it’s about wanting to have a conversation with an audience that may not be accustomed to hearing from conservatives and Republicans.”

Evans, actor-director Mark Kassen and entrepreneur Joe Kiani launched “A Starting Point” as a response to what they see as a deeply polarized political climate. They wanted to offer a place for information about issues without a partisan spin. To do that, they knew they needed both parties to participate.

Evans, 39, sat on the patio outside his Boston-area home on a recent afternoon talking about the platform. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans and spent some of the interview chasing around his brown rescue dog. Nearly 100 million people didn’t vote in the 2016 general election, Evans says. That’s more than 40 percent of those who were eligible.He believes the root of this disinterest is the nastiness on both sides of the aisle. Many potential voters simply turn off the news, never mind talking about actual policy.“A Starting Point” is meant to offer a digital home for people to hear from elected officials without having the conversation framed by Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow.

“The idea is . . . ‘Listen, you’re in office. I can’t deny the impact you have,’ ” says Evans. “ ‘You can vote on things that affect my life.’ Let this be a landscape of competing ideas, and I’ll sit down with you and I’ll talk with you.”

Or, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has appeared on the site, puts it, “Sometimes, boring is okay. You’re being presented two sides. Everything doesn’t have to be sensational. Sometimes, it can just be good facts.” Evans wasn’t always active in politics. At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, he focused on theater, not student government. And he moved away from home his senior year, working at a casting agency in New York as he pushed for acting gigs. His uncle, Michael E. Capuano, served as a congressman in Massachusetts for 20 years, but other than volunteering on some of his campaign, Evans wasn’t particularly political.

In recent years, he’s read political philosopher Hannah Arendt and feminist Rebecca Solnit’s “The Mother of All Questions” — ex-girlfriend Jenny Slate gave him the latter — and been increasingly upset by Trump’s policies and behavior. He’s come to believe that he can state his own views without creating a conflict with “A Starting Point.” When he and Scott spoke on Instagram, the president wasn’t mentioned. In contrast, recently Evans and other members of the Avengers cast took part in a virtual fundraiser with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala D. Harris.

“I don’t want to all of a sudden become a blank slate,” says Evans. “But my biggest issue right now is just getting people to vote. If I start saying, ‘vote Biden; f Trump,’ my base will like that. But they were already voting for Biden.”

(In September, Evans accidentally posted an image of presumably his penis online and, after deleting it, tweeted: “Now the I have your attention . . . Vote Nov. 3rd!!!”)

Evans began to contemplate the idea that became “A Starting Point” in 2017. He heard something reported on the news — he can’t remember exactly what — and decided to search out information on the Internet. Instead of finding concrete answers, Evans fell down the rabbit hole of opinions and conflicting claims. He began talking about this with Kassen, a friend since he directed Evans in 2011’s “Puncture.” What if they got the information directly from elected officials and presented it without a spin? Kassen, in turn, introduced Evans to Kiani, who had made his fortune through a medical technology company he founded and, of the three, was the most politically involved.

Kiani has donated to dozens of Democratic candidates across the country and earlier this year contributed $750,000 to Unite the Country, a super PAC meant to support Joe Biden. But he appreciated the idea of focusing on something larger than a single race or party initiative. He, Kassen and Evans would fund “A Starting Point,” which has about 18 people on staff.

“There’s no longer ABC, NBC and CBS,” Kiani says. “There’s Fox News and MSNBC. What that means is that we are no longer being censored. We’re self-censoring ourselves. And people go to their own echo chamber and they don’t get any wiser. If you allow both parties to speak, for the same amount of time, without goading them to go on into hyperbole, when people look at both sides’ point of view of both topics, we think most of the time they’ll come to a reasonable conclusion.”

“What people do too often is they get in their silos and they only watch and listen and read what they agree with,” says John Kasich, the former Ohio governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate. “If you go to Chris’s website, you can’t bury yourself in your silo. You get to see the other point of view.” As much as some like to blame Trump for all the conflicts in Washington, Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) says he’s watched the tone shifting for decades. He appreciated sitting down with Evans and making regular submissions to “Daily Points,” a place on the platform for commentary no longer than two minutes. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Coons recorded a comment on Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the Affordable Care Act.“ ‘A Starting Point’ needs to be a sustained resource,” Coons says. “Chris often talks about it being ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ for adults.”

It’s not by chance that Evans has personally conducted all of the 200-plus interviews on “A Starting Point” during trips to D.C. Celebrities often try to mobilize the public, whether it’s Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus hosting the Democratic National Convention or Jon Voight recording video clips to praise Trump. But in this case, Evans is using his status in a different way, to entice even the most hesitant Republican to sit down for an even-toned chat. And he’s willing to pose with anyone, even if it means explaining himself on “The Daily Show” after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posted a selfie with Evans. (Two attempts to interview Trump brought no response.) Murkowski remembers when Evans came to Capitol Hill for the first time in 2018. She admits she didn’t actually know who he was — she hadn’t yet seen any Marvel movies. She was in the minority.“We meet interesting and important people but, man, when Captain America was in the Senate, it was all the buzz,” she says. “And people were like, ‘Did you get your picture taken?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I sat down and did the interview.’ ‘You did an interview? How did you get an interview with him?’ ”What impressed Murkowski wasn’t his star power. It was the way Evans conducted the interview.“It was relaxing,” she says. “You didn’t feel like you were in front of a reporter who was just waiting for you to say something you would get caught on later. It was a dialogue . . . and we need more dialogue and less gotcha.”

“Starting Points” offers two-minute answers by elected officials in eight topic areas, including education, the environment and the economy. This is where the interviews Evans conducted can be found. “Daily Points” has featured a steady flow of Republicans and Democrats. A third area, “Counterpoints,” hosts short debates between officials on particular subjects. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, debated mail-in voting with Dusty Johnson, the Republican congressman from South Dakota.

“Most Americans can’t name more than five members of the United States House,” says Johnson. “ ‘A Starting Point’ allows thoughtful members to talk to a broader audience than we would normally have.”

The platform’s social media team pushes out potentially newsworthy clips, whether it’s Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) discussing his meeting with Barrett just before he tested positive for the coronavirus, or Angus King, the independent senator from Maine, criticizing Trump for his comments on a potential peaceful transfer of power after November’s election. Kassen notes that the King clip was viewed more than 175,000 times on “A Starting Point’s” Twitter account, compared with the 10,000 who caught in on CNN’s social media platform.

“Because it’s short-form media, we’re engineered to be social,” says Kassen. “As a result, when something catches hold, it’s passed around our audience pretty well.”

The key is to use modern tools to push out content that’s tonally different from what you might find on modern cable news. Or on social media. Which is what Evans hopes leads to more engagement. He’s particularly proud that more than 10,000 people have registered to vote through “A Starting Point” since it went online.

“If the downstream impact or the byproduct of this site is some sort of unity between the parties, great,” says Evans. “But if nobody’s still voting, it doesn’t work. We need people involved.”

#chris evans #mark kassan #joe kiani #a starting point #the washington post #news

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queeenpersephone · 3 years

Note

14. A kiss so desperate that the two wind around each other, refusing to let go until they are finished. Ironwidow, please?

so this kiss is a different kind of desperation than you might’ve been thinking of but trust me, it’s desperate lol. (also the ‘keep going’ line is stolen from the x files!)

anyway, here you go anon!

timeline: post endgame. tony and nat are alive. very very slight wandavision spoilers. just in terms of how wanda gets vision back.

Natasha unlocks the door to her room, shoulders relaxing only slightly at the familiar darkness of an outdated motel, though its emptiness is unfamiliar. For the past three months, she has been on the run, but that isn’t the unusual part. No, the unusual part is that she is not on the run alone. Three months ago, mere weeks after they put Thanos down for good, Wanda had asked her to go for a drive. They had left in silence; there hadn’t been anyone to tell. The Compound had been quiet since the final battle, everyone’s minds on the sacrifices that had been made. Peter Quill, who none of them knew very well, had sacrificed himself to kill Thanos, bringing an end that was years overdue.

But no Avenger’s mind spent much time on Quill. Not when Clint had vaulted over a cliff to earn the Soul Stone.

The months are especially bad for Tony and Natasha. Natasha, of course, is flooded with guilt whenever she thinks of Clint’s family, of the way he had begged her to let him go. He saved her from the KGB all those years ago, watched her back for decades. Now, he has saved her once again, at the expense of his own life.

Tony’s guilt is different. As much as he loves Clint, who has been a brother-in-arms to him, Natasha’s presence is such a relief that he can’t help but be grateful that Clint is the faster runner. And the worst part of it is: Natasha knows that. Every time Natasha looks into his eyes, she sees that relief, and it’s unbearable. He can’t bear to say anything to her directly, terrified of making things worse than they already are. They haven’t slept in the same bed since the battle, but at least they are under the same roof. At least she still wears her wedding ring.

Tony wakes up every morning, scared to death that he will find that ring on his bedside table and Natasha herself, gone.

Natasha knows all this too.

Which is why, when Wanda explains that she wants to find Vision’s body and give him the burial he deserves, Natasha takes the selfish opportunity to dive back into the spy world as they attempt to work out which of the shady government agencies is holding him.

This evening, they’ve made a break - an agency called SWORD had one scientist whose sister had been saved in 2012 by the Hulk. When they had contacted him, he had told them where Vision’s body is being stored. Tomorrow, they are going to get him back.

In celebration, Natasha gets them separate motel rooms. After checking on Wanda, who is deep into an old Sabrina the Teenage Witch program, she retreats to her own room.

The darkness feels a little oppressive, searching, even though she’s already checked high and low for listening devices or cameras. Still, Natasha keeps her gun tucked into her waistband as she moves to undress, her fingers finding the hem of her shirt and lifting it.

“Keep going, Agent Romanoff.”

Natasha recognizes that voice, she knows that voice, sultry and dark and oh, she knows he’s angry too, but her reflex to turn a gun on him is natural and swift. Sure enough, over the barrel, she sees Tony Stark, sunk deeply into the armchair in the corner of the room. He must’ve come in when she went to check on Wanda. “What are you doing here?” She asks, eyes narrowed. She puts down her gun, tucking it back into her jeans.

“What am I doing here? What the hell are you doing here? Nat, what is this?” He demands, standing. There is a fire burning in his gaze.

Natasha refuses to take a step back. He has another thing coming if he thinks she’s not going to stand her ground. “Wanda and I are tracking something down. It doesn’t concern you.”

He scoffs. “Would that something be Vision?” Her silence speaks for itself. “Wanda is my teammate, my friend. Vision was my creation, also my friend.” The air between them crackles with tension as he takes a step toward her, hands clearly clenching in his pockets. “And you, Natasha. You are my wife. Remember that? You vowed to love me, to stay by my side, to trust me.” She blinks slowly; the desperation on his face is painfully obvious, and she just wants a mere second or two of darkness. “But you can barely look at me,” he calls her out, eyes narrowed.

Part of her wants to hurt him. Part of her wants to be honest. She knows how to accomplish both. “Clint is dead,” she retorts, her voice breaking on the last word. Tony and Clint are the only people she has ever broken down in front of, but never completely. Never like the way she wants to now. “He’s dead, and I’m back, and you’re glad, Tony. You’re happy.”

Tony shakes his head, removing his hands from his pockets and holding them out to her ever so slightly. Still, she does not move closer. “You think I’m happy Clint isn’t with us?” He asks, swallowing hard. “I wish he was here every day. But you’re the most important thing in this universe to me. It’s you I can’t live without. ” He sighs, searching her face for some indication that he’s saying the right thing. “If I could make it different, if we could change it… if I could throw myself off that cliff to make you happy, I would do it.”

Those words suck up all the oxygen from the room. Neither of them breathe at the brutality of his honesty; Tony himself goes pale. Natasha looks horrified, eyes glistening. “That’s not what I want.” She can hardly get the words out fast enough. “Don’t put those words in my mouth.”

He is close to tears himself. “Then what do you want?” He demands, voice cracking. “Tell me, and if it’s in my power, I’ll give it to you.”

She stops. Thinks. What she wants is Clint back. She wants Thor and Steve and Bruce and the others to have no more nightmares, to find happiness, to find peace. She wants to bury Vision’s body for Wanda, who has suffered immense loss. She wants to live in another time, another universe, where she is never a spy and Tony never the Merchant of Death, where someone else saves the world because their only responsibility is to each other.

But none of that is possible. None of that would close the distance between her husband and her in this moment, which is what she wants more than anything else.

Oh.

“Will you hold me?” She whispers, and the fire in Tony’s eyes fades into something else, something achingly tender.

“Of course,” he murmurs, striding forward and pulling her into his body.

Without heels, she fits comfortably under his chin, and they press together at every point. The angry words between them are still there, but they are softened by the embrace. But this isn’t enough. Natasha pulls back, ignoring his grunt of displeasure, before circling her hands behind his neck and pulling his mouth to hers.

It’s soft, gentle for a mere moment. But they’ve been apart for too long, and in seconds his tongue is in her mouth and her leg is hitched around his hip as she guides them so he presses her against the wall. It’s wet and hard and she thinks she might be crying, that he might be crying, but she focuses on the way his hands feel on her thigh and her neck. Hot. Stifling. Like he’s going to leave bruises, but the marks are tangential to the way he wants to dig his way inside of her and never come out. She knows, because she feels it too.

Her nails scrape at the nape of his neck, her other hand cupping his cheek and guiding his movement. His hand moves to her ass, and he hitches her up, kissing her all the while. She knows he loves it when her legs are wrapped around him, always ready with a joke about how quickly she could squeeze the life out of him if she wanted. Things that would intimidate most intimate partners excite her husband; it’s just one of the many things she loves about him.

“I love you,” he murmurs against her mouth, licking his way back inside before she can respond.

He moves to the bed, sitting back with her on his lap. The movement separates their faces for a moment, and she hurries to say: “I shouldn’t have left.”

He looks up at her. “No,” he says, dark eyes both solemn and gentle, pulling her back down so he can whisper the rest against her mouth. The separation of a few inches is too much after everything. He could die happy if she were pressed up against him for the rest of his days. “But we’ve been separated by so much, Nat. Circumstances, time, ourselves. And we always come back together.” He lays back, bringing her with him. She kisses him then, gentle and chaste and so wrapped around him that there is no air or light or dark between them.

“I love you,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry.”

He runs his fingers through her hair, bringing her forehead to his. “I’m sorry,” he replies. “I’ve avoided talking about Clint because I thought it would hurt you more. But I was wrong.” He pauses. “Can we just…?”

She smiles. “We can,” she tells him, moving so that she’s tucked into his side, still twined together. They exchange soft kisses in the darkness.

Tomorrow, they will help Wanda find peace.

Tonight, they will find peace in each other.

#ironwidow #tonynat #my writing #marvel writing #marvel #tony x natasha

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missing-marvel · 3 years

Text

The Shape of You (Pt. 4)

Pairing: Vision/Reader

Part 3, Part 5

Words: 5698

A/N: *shows up several months late with coffee and a new chapter* What’s up y’all, who’s ready for more metal husband?

You awoke feeling sluggish and hazy, practically choking on dust and resisting the need to sneeze. The feeling quickly shifted to panic as you opened your eyes to even more darkness which only worsened when you tried to move, something blocking the space in front of you as well as tangling around your legs. It wasn’t until you rolled to the floor with a loud ‘thud’ that you remembered falling asleep on the sofa. You didn’t remember grabbing a blanket, however, which had gotten wrapped around your legs in your sleep.

You recognized Vision’s silhouette as he appeared hurriedly from the other room. You couldn’t see much in the dim light, but you could recognize him by his eyes alone. They glowed softly in the dark, that electric-blue bringing some familiarity to your surroundings.

The lights came on and you were momentarily blinded, shielding your eyes with your hand as they adjusted. “Sorry,” you said, blinking the last remnants of sleep away. “I just fell off the sofa. I’m okay.” You took a good look around the room for the first time since arriving, still not bothering to get up off the floor. It looked like a fairly basic living space. There was a patterned rug, a coffee table, some shelves with a few random knick-knacks, the usual. You did notice the lack of a TV, however. You supposed it wasn’t worth investing in one if no one would be living here ninety-nine percent of the time.

Still a bit groggy, you almost didn’t see Vision walk over to you and extend a hand to help you up. To be completely honest, you were perfectly comfortable on the floor but you weren’t going to turn him away. You uttered a quick ‘thanks’ as you got to your feet.

You had absolutely no idea what time it was but it was definitely dark out. Not a speck of light filtered in through the drawn curtains. Whether it was evening or early morning, however, you hadn’t a clue. “What time is it?”

Vision pointed to a digital clock sitting on a bookshelf close by. It read 6:30.

“I only slept for a few hours?” Well, more like several hours, by your estimate. It was broad daylight when you’d arrived. Still, that was surprising given that you’d basically passed out as soon as you got indoors and hadn’t slept in like two days.

Vision shook his head, however, cutting off your train of thought. He held up one finger on his right hand and put it down before holding up nine in total. It took you a second to understand what he meant, thinking he was saying ten before realizing.

“Are you saying I slept nineteen hours?” Vision just nodded and you let out a sigh. That explained why you felt so stiff. That much time on a sofa, even a surprisingly comfortable one, would take its toll. One other thing struck you, however. “Wait a minute, so it’s six in the morning, then? It’s awfully dark out.” You chanced a peek out the window to actually confirm that it was, in fact, dark outside.

You turned back when you heard the familiar scratch of pen on paper. It looked like Vision had found a new notepad somewhere. By the time you walked over, he had finished writing. “Clock is an hour ahead. Haven’t fixed it. Only got power back on a couple hours ago.”

“Oh, that makes more sense.” This time of year, it was perfectly normal to be dark at 5:30. However, it was also cold outside and you were beginning to notice that in here as well. You picked up the blanket off the floor and draped it over your shoulders, pulling it tight around yourself. “Is there heat at all?”

Vision wrote his response as quick as possible, handwriting still impeccable as always. “It’s on but not very strong. Building isn’t in best condition anymore. There’s fuses missing so I prioritized some things. A few lights aren’t going to work.” He stepped aside and gestured somewhere down the small hallway behind him. On the wall was an open panel.

“Wait this place still has a fuse box? The Avengers couldn’t afford someplace with circuit breakers?” You couldn’t help but crack a smile at your own joke, if you could really call it that. You were just happy your custodial knowledge was relevant for once.

“Old SHIELD building,” Vision quickly noted. If this place had been built by the Avengers, it would be far more modern, probably to an unnecessary extent. Tony Stark would only stand for the best, even if it was a safe house that would almost never get used.

“Shield? Are they still around?” You only sort of understood what SHIELD was. No more than any other member of the general public. They were a kind-of, sort-of government agency or something like that. They always kept their stuff super secret so most people never really knew what they did. Then there was the whole deal with Hydra which nobody understood. You decided a long time ago it wasn’t worth worrying about, much like most of the American populace. Perhaps you should have paid closer attention.

Vision simply tilted his hand side-to-side in a gesture that implied that the answer was complicated and really not worth getting into. He shifted the conversation to you instead. “How are you feeling?”

“I should be asking you that. You weren’t doing so well yesterday.” You tried not to let the worry in your voice show, though you weren’t sure what good it would do.

You thought you saw a hint of a smile cross his face as he turned back to his paper. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright.”

“Vision...” You recalled back to the other night, when you’d told him nearly the same thing after a couple solid days of no sleep. Before you could retort, however, he’d turned and headed toward the other room, gesturing for you to follow.

The small office space was an absolute mess. The only reason you called it an office was the papers and folders scattered around the room as well as the computer tucked away on a desk in the corner. Underneath a blanket of dust, it looked almost exactly like the first computer you’d ever owned. Actually, it might just be the first computer. You were pretty sure it should be in a museum.

Vision navigated the difficult terrain with ease as he made his way to the desk. You, on the other hand, felt like you were doing a balancing act as you tried to limit your steps to the few parts of the floor that were visible. You didn’t know what all these stacks of papers and folders were exactly, but you figured it was best not to mess with them.

“There’s no way that thing works,” you said once you’d cleared a spot to stand by the desk, your own little island of shag carpeting amongst the sea of paper.

Vision pried open a panel on the side of the computer, carefully removing a CPU board with all the expertise of a seasoned technician. The actual monitor was half buried in a pile of miscellaneous cords and plugs next to the desk. After a brief moment of inspection, wherein he must’ve decided all appeared fine, he went ahead and booted the thing up.

It chugged to life like a patient coming out of surgery, slowly and with great difficulty. It made sounds you were pretty sure should only be coming from a lawn mower but all the lights eventually blinked on in time. As it did so, you braved the sneeze-inducing dust pile for the monitor, the air turning cloudy as you shifted all the junk that had been untouched for years. “I’m guessing you’ll need this?” You hoisted the dinosaur of a monitor up onto the desk, Vision taking it gratefully and nodding a thanks your way.

For a minute after he plugged it in, it seemed the screen wasn’t going to work. Only after staring at it did you realize it was working, albeit extremely slowly. A symbol was appearing on the screen, the shape becoming more discernible the longer the machine whirred. As far you could tell, it looked like some kind of government emblem, like an eagle with a crest in the center. It wasn’t until it had spent a solid minute loading that you were able to read the text surrounding it. “Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement... Logistics Division? What on Earth does— wait, that’s what SHIELD stands for?”

Vision nodded in a way that suggested he wasn’t overly fond of the acronym either. You were beginning to think he wasn’t so difficult to read after all, not like you thought when you’d first met, at least. It just took time, much like reading the decades-old monitor had.

“I think someone just really wanted the initials to spell out shield.” You gave a breathy laugh, more air than sound. “What’re you going to do with this old thing? Can it even get internet?”

Vision shook his head and reached for his paper from the edge of the desk. “Not that kind of computer,” he wrote. You resisted butting in as he tore off a new sheet, still not used to the pauses in conversation that resulted from the rather roundabout method of communication. “It’s wired directly into an old SHIELD system and by extension, hopefully, the Avengers emergency system.”

“Really? I would’ve guessed this place predated the Avengers.” As you spoke, Vision got the keyboard hooked up which had been stuffed into one of the desk drawers. It was missing at least a quarter of its key caps, the really chunky, old kind that made a satisfying click-clack when pressed. Apparently they’d prioritized actual computer hardware over keyboards considering there were offices at your job that still had keyboards just like it. Correction: your old job. You’d almost forgotten.

“SHIELD software was integrated with Stark tech after the Battle of New York. In theory, we should be able to put out an emergency signal on a secure Avengers server from here.” You almost hadn’t noticed Vision writing again as you zoned out a bit.

You would’ve been more excited over good news, but you’d learned over the years what happened when you got your hopes up. “So when you say in theory, I’m guessing the odds aren’t exactly...” You trailed off, unable to continue without sounding horribly pessimistic.

“It will work,” was all he wrote, a noticeable firmness in his grip as he held the pen. You didn’t say anything else but moved closer to the desk, directly by his side now. There was what could only be described as a hint of doubt in his expression before he turned back to the monitor as green text cluttered the screen.

“We can only hope so.” You let your hand brush his shoulder as you navigated back towards the door, no longer particularly caring to avoid crumpling the paper on the floor.

You weren’t sure how long it would take Vision to finish what he was doing, especially with the tech he was stuck with. You found it more than a bit ironic that possibly the most advanced machine on the planet had to use a decades-old computer to call for help. It felt weird to think of him as a machine. After what you’d been through in the past 24 hours alone, you’d begun to think of him as just another person. Well, not just another person, that wasn’t what you meant. How to put it...? You just couldn’t explain it. There was no precedent in your mind for a situation like this. Vision was a living being. As alive as anyone, maybe more so. That much you could say confidently.

Trying not to get too lost in your thoughts, you busied yourself investigating the rest of the apartment, not that there was much to find. Living room, connected kitchen, hallway with the office and stairs that led up to a bedroom and bathroom. All pretty standard. All of it looked fresh out of the 80’s. Well, maybe not fresh.

Just as you completed your lap of the place, you were interrupted by a low grumble from none other than your own stomach. That was a problem. There was definitely not food here. You had no other choice really than to shove the feeling to the back of your mind for now. You got yourself a glass of water to make do. At least the plumbing worked.

By the time Vision came back, it had been less than twenty minutes. “That was quick. Any success?” You sipped your water, ignoring the slight metallic tang it had.

Vision wrote as he crossed the room to stand opposite you from the island counter. “The beacon is active. Now someone just needs to hear it.”

Despite his lack of vocals, you sensed a definite lack of confidence in his words. “How long do you think that’ll take?” You hoped not too long. You were concerned about your food situation.

He didn’t bother writing a response. The expression on his face made it clear; he had no idea. Maybe never, if no one was out there to hear it. You only hummed a response, neither confirming nor retorting. The sound of you sipping your water seemed immensely loud in the heavy silence of the room.

“Well, what do we do now?” You were becoming anxious again. You didn’t like being forced to sit and wait. At any minute, you felt like law enforcement would start breaking the door down.

“We wait. There’s nothing else we can do.” He seemed apologetic. He wished he could give you a more concrete answer, some sort of assurance that this would all work out, but he couldn’t. Not truthfully, anyway.

It looked like you had some time to kill. You weren’t sure what all there really was to do. Still, it wasn’t all bad. At least you had company. “I wonder if there’s a better way we can communicate,” you mused, turning your mind to less dire matters.

Vision seemed to brighten up a bit as he was struck by an idea. “You don’t happen to know any ASL, do you?”

You shook your head. “Unfortunately, no. I assume you do?”

He responded by holding up his right hand in a closed fist and sort of nodded it up and down.

“I’m guessing that means... yes?” It wasn’t a far stretch. You’d actually thought about learning ASL before but never gotten around to it. There were more uses for it than people realized. Too bad work left you too busy and tired to make the time for lessons. Well now you had nothing but time.

Vision just nodded his head in the more familiar interpretation of the word. He grabbed the pen and paper again off the counter. “I could teach you some. At least the important parts, if you want.” He hesitated a split second between sentences, just a bit nervous, though the pause was nowhere near long enough for you to notice. It was barely a stutter in his programming, a single digit skipped somewhere in his code. Nothing to be concerned with.

“Yeah,” you said, maybe just slightly too enthusiastic. “Yeah, that’d be great! I— I mean, it would be useful, you know? Way more efficient than pen and paper. Uhm...” You were struggling to ask how he wanted to start when your stomach growled, providing a convenient segue into another topic. “Heh, sorry. Didn’t realize how hungry I was.” You tried to pass it off as no big deal, although you really were starving. You hadn’t eaten anything since before setting Vision free. It had been well over a full day since then.

He looked surprised for a moment, which he was, before he began writing. For a genius super-computer, he could sometimes be very forgetful of the needs of his human cohorts. They were very fragile things, humans. The need for sleep and food was something Vision never had to worry about, something he realized he took for granted. Something akin to guilt began to gnaw at him when he too realized how long it had been since the escape. He should’ve brought up the matter earlier. “We need to get you food,” he wrote very matter-of-factly. It wasn’t something up for debate.

“I don’t exactly have a lot of cash on me, Vis.” You flinched at the nickname, quick to move on before he could call you out on it. It had been merely a slip of the tongue, just shortening his name for the sake of convenience. It could have been a gesture of friendship towards the android, though you weren’t sure you’d quite earned the right to call Vision a friend, even if you were fond of him. “I’ve got like 10 bucks, tops.” You pulled a few crumpled bills from your pockets to emphasize your point. You obviously couldn’t use your credit card, either. You’d seen enough movies to know that.

Vision thought a moment before coming up with an idea. “It’s not the most ethical thing to do, but I could get cash out of an ATM. It’s technically a matter of survival, after all.” He demonstrated exactly what he meant by phasing his hand through the paper as you read, something that could just as easily be done to a cash machine.

It wasn’t so much the legality of the idea that bothered you. After all, you’d stolen multiple cars. It was the matter of Vision’s safety. Not that he couldn’t protect himself but he would be spotted quite easily if he went outside. That was just a matter of fact. And if someone called the police on a strange magenta man or anything along the lines of ‘robot,’ you could pretty much guarantee trouble. “I don’t know... What if someone sees you? The last thing we want is to compromise the safe house. I can just wait awhile longer, I’ll be fine.”

Your stomach chose that moment to grumble again, completely undermining your point. Vision shot you a look that more than sufficed to communicate what he was thinking but he wrote it down anyway. “It would seem we don’t have much of a choice.”

You sighed, all but forced to agree. Although, it would be nice to get some actual food before your stomach started eating itself. “Fine,” you relented. “But we wait until it gets dark out. It’s safer that way.”

Vision wasn’t about to argue.

Memorization wasn’t really your strong suit, but you seemed to do surprisingly well with the start of your sign language lessons. It helped that your teacher was so patient.

Vision thought it would be best to start with a few simple phrases for the sake of saving paper. Common things such as ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you.’ You had the benefit of only really needing to recognize them as opposed to being able to do the signs yourself, since Vision could obviously hear you, but you took it upon yourself to mimic the gestures anyway.

It had been a few hours and your head was starting to ache but you insisted on continuing. You were certain you were doing well and you wanted Vision to be impressed. Not only could you remember how to spell your own name, you could spell his as well. The rest of the alphabet may not have stuck as much but oh well. For now, words and phrases were more important.

“That’s... someone?” You guessed as Vision held up his index finger and waved it in a sort of circle. He’d been quizzing you for a few minutes now, to which you’d done pretty well. He shook his head this time, however, and tried not to look amused by the almost comically offended look on your face. “What? Yes it is! I’m certain that means ‘someone!’” You were insistent on the fact. Vision hadn’t tried to trip you up yet but he must be this time. You tried to mimic the motion, repeating the word as if that would change anything.

He shook his head again, not bothering to hide his smile this time. He reached for your hand, raising it higher to show you that there was, in fact, a slight difference between what he was signing and what you were. For a moment, you looked almost startled, like a deer in headlights. He didn’t miss the hint of color that tinged your cheeks. His assumption was merely that you were embarrassed by your mistake, though it was an easy one to make. He switched back to paper in order to explain. “This,” he repeated his first gesture. “means ‘always’. What you signed was ‘someone.’ See the difference?”

You nodded in understanding although your attention was beginning to drift. You felt like you were cramming for an exam in a class you hadn’t been attending. You may or may not have actually had to do that before. The point was, you’d learned just about all you were going to for the day. And just in time, it seemed, as you glanced toward the curtains, no longer backlit by the afternoon sun. You’d managed to kill most of the day, between checking that the computer was still working and just generally talking with Vision. There wasn’t much else to do, not that you were complaining. You were quite enjoying the android’s company and not just because you were stuck with him. And to top it off, you’d managed to distract yourself from how hungry you were. Until now, that is.

“How about we call it a day on the lessons, hm? I’d say now’s about the best time to head outside. There’s just one thing we have to do first.” You turned and exited the room without explanation, only saying you’d be right back. You ran upstairs to the bedroom, hoping you could find what you needed. You hadn’t voiced your plan to Vision, although you saw no reason for him not to go along with it. It was a smart idea if you said so yourself. At least that’s what you told yourself as you began rifling through drawers.

Vision wasn’t sure what to think at first when you came bumbling down the stairs again with a messily folded bundle in your hands. But your intention became clear quite quickly once you’d returned, immediately holding out the clothes to him before bothering to explain.

“I hope this isn’t rude but you kind of… stand out. I just thought, maybe it’d be a good idea to disguise yourself. Just for safety. Is that okay?” You hoped there was no offense taken by the gesture. In truth, you were glad Vision was going with you and not just because of the money thing. You didn’t feel particularly safe walking the streets alone at night, especially when you didn’t know the area. But having Vision by your side made you feel nigh invincible. There was just the small issue of technically being wanted criminals.

He smiled, more to himself than anything. It was just strange, he thought, how concerned you were with his opinion. Of course he wasn’t offended. It was a smart idea. He chuckled a bit, although it was a strange action given his physical state. The motion of a laugh was there, his shoulders shuddering as any human’s would despite his lack of need to actually breathe, but there was no sound. It was one of those mannerisms that was ingrained in his programming, though he wasn’t sure quite where it came from. Not from Jarvis, certainly, since the AI had no physical form, and Ultron likely hadn’t been terribly focused on such gestures at the time of his creation. In reality, it was simply something he’d picked up on his own, even if he wasn’t aware of it.

You let out a breathy chuckle of your own as he took the clothes, glad to see he agreed with you wholeheartedly. He got dressed quickly, leaving only his face visible when he was done. Luckily, it was cold enough outside for him to get away with wearing gloves, a scarf and a hat. The clothes were a bit old-fashioned but in a professional way. The long wool coat and slacks in particular gave the impression of a scholarly type, perhaps even a professor. You couldn’t help but think it was a good look for him.

“Well don’t you look just dashing,” you teased. You’d found a coat for yourself as well, deciding your own jacket wasn’t going to be enough. You silently thanked whatever SHIELD employee set this place up for supplying a myriad of spare clothes. “Oh, one more thing.” You turned to the coat rack by the door, grabbing a scarf that had been left hanging there. “Just in case.”

You hesitated at the front door. Despite the fact that you were merely going to look for a convenience store or something similar, your anxiety spiked as though it were a dangerous mission. You could just imagine all the ways you could get caught. It was almost enough to make you stay here, slowly starving to death waiting for something to happen. Vision noticed your apprehension, however, and did the first thing that came to mind to soothe your worries. He gave you a warm smile, holding out a bent arm for you to take. He thought you might find the somewhat old-fashioned gesture funny and he was right. You laughed, taking his arm anyway. It was a nice reminder that the odds of anything bad happening were tremendously low, which you mentally repeated to yourself as you stepped outside.

Everything had gone off without a hitch. There was a small grocery store a few blocks down which you’d run into just before closing time so the store was nearly empty. Vision had waited outside near the ATM, which had provided the funds you needed. Other than the bored clerk at the store, you hadn’t seen so much as a single soul this whole trip. By the time you and Vision were walking back, burdened by just a few days worth of groceries (which would ideally be more than enough), your previous worries had all but melted away.

You only wished the weather matched the feeling. Nothing was melting in this cold. In fact, a few snowflakes had begun to fall. They were almost mesmerizing under the blueish haze of the streetlights, whipped into a frenzy by the faintest of gusts. The sight wasn’t enough of a distraction, however. You couldn’t help it when a shiver wracked your body, your coat not doing nearly enough to prevent it. Vision noticed this, however, and stopped you both in your tracks.

He was quick to reach for the paper and pen in his coat pocket, a look on his face of more concern than you thought necessary. It was only a little chill. “Are you cold?” The question wasn’t particularly necessary, the answer being obvious. Still, it was polite to ask.

You tried to shrug it off, noticeably tensing to suppress a second shiver. “I’m fine. Let’s just hurry back.” You turned to keep walking, knowing there was still a decent walk ahead but he stopped you, putting a hand on your arm for the briefest of seconds. He just looked at you a moment, seeming to forget about his paper. You caught the faintest hint of conflict in his expression, though you didn’t know why. “What is it, Vision?”

Realizing he’d made you worry, Vision seemed to snap back to his senses. He gave you a reassuring smile and reached for his scarf, undoing it quickly. You were facing him, standing close enough to see the circuitry in his eyes. He paused again, however, debating his next action. For a being that didn’t have nerves, he sure felt nervous and didn’t fully understand why. He moved at a pace far slower than he was used to, hesitantly wrapping the scarf around your neck for you. His touch was light as a feather as if he were afraid to touch you. You could do nothing but watch him, lost in the details of his eyes and face as your grip on the grocery bags began to loosen involuntarily. There was a moment where neither of you moved, his hands still lingering on the loose fabric of the scarf.

Your heart skipped a beat at the gesture, mind racing to find a logical conclusion that didn’t concern such things as the vague and confusing emotions that spiked in your chest just then. It was cold, so Vision gave you his scarf. Your hands were full, so he put it on for you. But what you couldn’t answer was why he lingered the way that he did and more importantly, why your chest began to feel tight in a way that wasn’t as unpleasant as you’d think. The most sensible reason you could think of was that he was simply a gentleman, and perhaps a little unfamiliar with personal boundaries. That was the only possibility you had the strength to consider. Anything else would open doors you were afraid to even imagine.

Footsteps scraping heavily against the pavement cut the tender, if rather nerve-filled moment short. You turned toward the sound, though Vision remained facing slightly away, bowing his head somewhat in an attempt to conceal himself. You froze when a figure emerged from the alleyway; a heavy-set man whose posture listed to one side, most likely from some kind of injury. His clothes were noticeably old and ragged, most definitely not warm enough for this weather. You would’ve asked him if he needed help were it not for the knife he brandished at you.

“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” he said, his voice wavering. Funny, you were just about to say the same thing. Clearly, he wouldn’t be doing this unless he was desperate and in a bad situation. Unfortunately, you weren’t much better off. “I saw you, I know you have cash. Just hand it over and no one gets hurts.”

Under normal circumstances you would’ve complied but you’d used up pretty much all the cash you got and you couldn’t risk giving him your wallet. If your ID found its way into police hands there’d be government agents swarming this place before you ever got the chance to bail. “We don’t have any money left, I swear. Please, just walk away.” You moved slowly, setting the grocery bags on the ground and raising your hands in surrender without making any sudden movements that could set him off. You weren’t as afraid as you probably should’ve been, choosing to try and reason with the man rather than flee, which would probably be the smarter option.

The man stepped closer to you, his grip on the knife visibly tightening. He was nearly within arm’s reach now which wasn’t ideal but you held your ground. Vision caught the man’s movement out of the corner of his eye, his hand reflexively grabbing at your arm protectively. The man furrowed his brow, glancing between the two of you in confusion. At this distance, even without Vision facing him, he could almost definitely tell something was strange here. Having given you his scarf, the only things covering Vision’s face were a hat and upturned coat collar. You spoke up again, drawing the man’s attention before he could get too close of a look. “This doesn’t have to get messy. Please… ”

You weren’t sure exactly how long the three of you stood there, time frozen around you. The only things that moved were the snowflakes that had grown more frequent in the past couple minutes. The man finally shifted, albeit barely, one foot scraping harshly against the concrete as he braced himself. He glanced between you and Vision again, jaw clenched tightly. “I ain’t walking away empty-handed. I can’t. Just gimme your damn wallet.”

Vision tugged gently on your arm. You weren’t sure exactly what he was trying to say, either trying to pull you closer to him or signal that you should run. You didn’t think running was a good idea. You feared Vision’s injuries acting up again and you didn’t want to test your own speed either. You turned back to the man, desperately pleading at this point. “I can’t …”

“Then I’ll just have to take it from you.” He didn’t give you another chance to argue, immediately lunging at you haphazardly. He couldn’t even get close to hitting you, however, as Vision’s reflexes were far superior to the man’s. The android grabbed his arm, twisting it painfully to the side and forcing him to drop the knife. The man yelped and threw a punch at Vision, who dodged it easily. The man didn’t seem to understand just how drastically outmatched he was, not even now that he had a clear view of Vision’s face. Whatever was going through his head, he still seemed to think fighting was his best option. He took another swing at Vision who, up until this point, had no intention of fighting back. But he was left with few other options. He pushed back against his attacker, sending the man sprawling to the ground with a painful ‘smack’ as he hit the pavement. There was genuine fear in his eyes when he looked back up at the two of you.

“Vis, we gotta go.” It was you holding his arm now, pleading with him to leave. He nodded quickly, completely in agreement. The two of you paused only long enough to scoop up the dropped grocery bags before making your escape. The man didn’t dare follow you as you disappeared down a side street, desperate to avoid any more prying eyes. This was the exact sort of thing you’d been afraid of when you’d left the safe house. You could only hope the man kept his mouth shut about what he’d witnessed tonight but it seemed luck may not be on your side.

A/N: I want to mention that I don’t personally know much ASL and had to rely on videos, etc. so if anything at all is wrong, I apologize. Feel free to call me out.

#vision/reader #vision x reader #marvel fanfiction #avengers fanfiction

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catherdrashepard · 3 years

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Darrow is Not Going to Die at the End of the Series Part 2

There are probably going to be at least one or two more parts depending on how much I can stop myself from blathering on. Anyway, spoilers ahead for the following: Dark Age, Hunger Games, Castlevania, Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans, Avengers Endgame, The Hobbit, Voltron, FMA, HttYD, Death Note, Madoka Magica, Merlin, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, HunterxHunter, Dragon Prince, He-Man (the new one), Yu Yu Hakusho, Persona 3. Mass Effect, The Hollow, Camp Cretaceous, and whatever else I can think of.

I last left off on talking about how my thoughts implied that Darrow could die at the end as long all the loose ends are tied. But, I don’t think that that’s really something that can actually happen. A lot of this is speculation on my part and really relies on what happens during the 6th book.

The first thing that came to mind was Mass Effect. The ending of Mass Effect 3 was...not very well received. I’m not going to say that I’m particularly happy with it either but I also think it fits the narrative. However, one thing to note, video games are different than books and the story that Shepard goes through is reliant on the player. Also, stories in games are going to be shorter than stories in books (for the most part, there are definitely exceptions) due to player involvement.

I’m going to start with Shepard’s first death, at the beginning of Mass Effect 2. Of course, being the second game, their death couldn’t be permanent unless BioWare switched protagonists mid trilogy. There are a few reasons, in my opinion, that Shepard was killed during the opening credits of the second game.

First of all, the combat changed between games (a lot between the first and second and only slightly between second and third), and I think Shepard’s two year absence gave a reason for a tutorial on the new combat system. They were dead and had to learn how to use new technology. This is also done between the second and third games, with a 6 month gap, but the combat only changed slightly. Secondly, having the main protagonist die really highlights the threat that the player is dealing with in the second game but, Shepard’s return also shows that they still have unfinished business and that their story isn’t over. Thirdly, I think the absence gives time for the secondary characters time to develop on their own. This is shown more with the characters who appeared in the first game but also it gives an idea of just how much of an impact Shepard had. I feel like this is a parallel to the time Darrow spent in the table between GS and MS.

Now to move on to Shepard’s more permanent death...although if you complete the game entirely (at least in the legendary edition; thank goodness I hated the battle readiness thing) there is a dubious ending where Shepard may or may not have lived. But in any case, Shepard is considered dead and their story is over. Whatever my feelings about this may be, this type of ending didn’t come out of nowhere. The main threat, the Reapers, have been dealt with in a permanent manner, or at least it’s heavily implied that they won’t be coming back. However, just because the Reapers are gone doesn’t mean there aren’t still things to be done. Specifically, recovery. Shepard very well could have been involved in this but it’s not necessary. Their story is over, they have dealt with the threat and it’s not coming back.

Darrow, on the other hand, has not finished his mission. Even if he does by the end of the next book, however, it’s a very different circumstance from Shepard. The threat in Mass Effect was a very large and tangible thing, whereas the problem Darrow faces is an ideology and the people who hold those views. Something like that doesn’t end with a large space weapon pointed directly at the threat; it permeates everything. So even if Darrow defeats Atalantia, Lysander, and whoever else, there’s most likely going to be more people who shared belief that Golds are best. Also, we saw how the Vox Populi felt about the things Darrow was doing. Darrow is essentially reconstructing an entire system of government and, no matter how correct Darrow is, there will always be people who disagree with him.

Assuming Darrow defeats the remnants of the Society, stops the Ascomanni, deals with Quicksilver and whatever he’s doing, takes care of Atlas, handles Apple, what’s left? Much like with the end of Mass Effect, what’s left is recovery. The difference between these two, however, is that while Shepard was not necessarily needed for the rebuilding, Darrow would be.

Now, both Shepard and Darrow spearheaded their respective causes, but (and this relies heavily on how the sixth RR book goes) defeating the Reapers was a group effort, utilising every species and as many resources as they can spare. No doubt the rebuilding of the entire galaxy will require the same. Not that Darrow’s goal hasn’t been similar in that regards, with the help of so many different Colors being necessary. It’s just....Darrow’s circle feels a lot smaller than Shepard’s.

I mean, obviously being the face of a war is going to get you a lot supporters and people to work with, but the most important players are Darrow’s close friends and family. I’m sure part of this is the fact that the books are first person with specific POVs. Mass Effect does focus on Shepard’s story, but it’s in third person and you get a lot of different information through sidequests and talking to other characters. I mean, there’s a whole codex in Mass Effect with a lot of information and there isn’t one for RR (PB should make one tho). Our knowledge of the universe and its history is more limited in RR than Mass Effect, but I think that’s mostly because the lore in Mass Effect has more of a direct impact on how the story goes.

But back to the original point, it’s explicitly shown in Mass Effect that it requires everyone to stop the Reapers. And even though we see Darrow’s army, the main players, the ones who are taking care of the big things, are still Darrow’s inner circle. As an example, Mass Effect would be more like a pyramid (ironic) where Shepard is at the top. Even if it crumbles away (they die), the pyramid will still stand. For RR, it feels more like a chain. If one of the links (Darrow) breaks, then the chain is also broken. You could re-attach the pieces but it wouldn’t be as strong as it once was.

One last thing I wanted to bring up (which I will bring up again in part 4, yes I said part 4), is technology. Both Mass Effect and RR take place in the future and therefore have better technology than we do. There is something very important about this technology though that makes it more likely for Darrow to live. The Reapers are a race of sentient squid machines hellbent on the genocide of every other sentient species in the galaxy. But they are the ONLY things with access to that kind of technology. Even when they share it with Saren or the Collectors, it’s not something others can replicate. And once they’re destroyed (control ending notwithstanding) at the end of the third game, that’s it. They could still have people who are indoctrinated (although I think that stops when the Reapers were destroyed?) or people who are just stupid and think they were right, but...those people aren’t a threat. They can’t bring back the Reapers, I doubt anyone would be able to recreate such a thing (at least not within Shepard’s lifetime even if they did live). So once the Reapers were gone...that’s it.

Now, the technology in RR is, for the most part, accessible to everyone. Assuming Darrow defeats Atalantia, Lysander, etc. their way of thinking would still be around. But with the way the universe works, I think it would entirely possible for supporters of the Society to rise up and start a conflict all over again. This means Darrow is not finished yet, even if the immediate threats are gone. It wouldn’t make sense for him to die when there’s still stuff for him to do.

I do think, though, that it is worth mentioning that the definite ending of Mass Effect is probably related to the fact that it’s a video game and especially for stories like that, a more open ended conclusion with the implication that I COULD do more would only be frustrating. With tv shows, movies, and books, I notice, having a more vague ending works better because you’re just separated enough from the story that you can enjoy the implications of more stuff without feeling unsatisfied. There’s always exceptions of course.

ANYWAY, it part 3 I’m going to be talking about Persona 3 and 5 so....stay tuned.

#darrow of lykos #dark age spoilers #character study #long post

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wiypt-writes · 3 years

Text

Stark Spangled Banner

Ch39: The Reunion Part 1: As Long As There’s Hope, We Have A Chance.

Intro: As the remaining Avengers continue their search for Tony, Steve and Natasha take a trip to Clint’s farm to find out what happened to the Archer and his family.

Warnings: Bad Language words. Discussions of miscarriage- if this is a trigger please stay away)

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC Katie Stark

A/N: Please heed the warnings…biggedy up to my girl @angrybirdcr

Disclaimer: This is a pure work of fiction and classified as 18+. Please respect this and do not read if you are underage. I do not own any characters in this series bar Katie Stark and the other OCs. By reading beyond this point you understand and accept the terms of this disclaimer.

Chapter 38

Stark Spangled Banner Masterlist // Main Masterlist

It was eleven days post the Snap when Nat decided she couldn’t take it anymore and told Steve she wanted to go to Clint’s.

“I have to know.” She pleaded, looking at Steve. He sighed and glanced over her shoulder to Katie who merely shrugged offering him no back up. She knew where Nat was coming from, it was killing her not knowing what had happened to Tony.

“Alright.” He acquiesced. “Let me grab a jacket.”

“I’ll meet you on the jet?” She asked. Steve nodded and watched her go before he turned to his wife who was studying him over her coffee. “If Barton was alive he would have been here by now.” Steve dragged a hand down over his beard as he dropped onto the sofa next to Katie. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t see or get that?”

"Put yourself in her shoes.” Katie sighed as she curled in on herself under a blanket on the sofa as a particularly nasty cramp hit her stomach. “You’d do the same thing for Bucky, or Sam, or me.”

"You know that I would.” He replied, noticing her shift in position and he frowned, but before he could say anything she placed her hand on his bearded cheek.

“Then just go, let her see. Plus, you could be wrong.”

“I suppose it’s happened from time to time.” He quipped and Katie smiled as he leaned over to press their foreheads together.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Not really.” She replied honestly, “But I’ve taken some painkillers, and Dr Kellet is coming over later. Thank fuck she wasn’t snapped.”

“I can ask Thor to go with Nat instead.” Steve looked at his wife who shook her head. “She asked you for a reason.” Katie said gently, “She trusts you. And I think if its bad news, she’s gonna need you, not Thor.”

“Are you sure?” He looked at her again and she nodded. He gave her a soft kiss, bumping his nose against hers, a soft smile on his face. “I love you, Doll.”

“I know.” She smiled back. “And I love you too, Soldier. Now go.”

As Steve had predicted, Barton’s farm was deserted. The two of them walked around, checking for any signs of life and Steve found his attention drawn to the picnic table not too far from where they had landed. It was loaded with condiments, plates, cutlery and scraps of food as a squirrel darted off the top from where it had been scratching through whatever other animals had left. Steve couldn’t help but remember the first time he had visited, when he had marvelled at the normality of Barton’s life outside the Avengers. Clint had kids, a wife, a complete alter ego. At the time Steve had almost been jealous, wondering if he and Katie could ever get that life. And then he’d gone and caused them both to be on the run, essentially ending that domestic dream.

And if he hadn’t, then Thanos certainly had when he’d snapped away their baby.

Natasha, meanwhile, had stalked straight into the house. Steve, hearing the door snap shut behind her turned and watched as she stomped straight back out and over to the barn at the far side of the yard

“Natasha?” he called.

She didn’t respond. With a sigh, Steve jogged after her, his boots slapping the damp grass of the lawn as he followed her into the barn. She dodged round the tractor in the middle, making her way to a door at the far side. Steve noticed a key pad at the side and Natasha clearly knew the code as a moment later there was a beep and it swung open to reveal what he supposed could only be referred to as an office of sorts, or as Katie would call it, a ‘man-cave’. There was a desk which sported some hi tech coms devices along with a computer. At the other side was a large flat screen TV mounted on the wall, a small couch, a stereo but none of that was what Natasha was looking at. She’d headed directly to some form of smaller room at the back and opened that to reveal a shelving unit of sorts. On one of them was an empty case that had clearly held a bow and arrow. Natasha then bent over and when she stood up Steve noticed she was holding a government issued ankle bracelet that had obviously at one point been around Clint’s ankle.

Not anymore, it was in two pieces.

“He’s alive,” Nat’s voice cracked. “Steve. he’s…he’s alive"

It was good news in a way, but then again, where was he? Surely if he and his family had survived then Clint would have brought them to the compound to find the rest of the team. But this looked like he had left in a hurry. Alone.

Which made Steve think that his family hadn’t been so lucky.

Natasha, satisfied that Clint was alive but clearly nowhere to be found at the farm, suggested they head home and see if they could track him from the compound. Steve hadn’t the heart to tell her that he didn’t think they’d have much of a chance and he knew deep down that if she was being honest, she probably thought the same thing. Instead, he nodded and they headed back over to the jet, which is when the pair of them heard something skulking around the side of the house. Natasha whipped out her gun as Steve spun, drawing himself up to full height. Exchanging a look, they both rounded the porch, cautiously approached, but as soon as Steve saw what it was, he relaxed.

“Hey buddy.” He courched down to pet the sandy coloured one-eyed dog that belonged to Clint, scratching behind his ear as the dog gave a little, desperate whine.

“Clint just left him.” Nat sighed, blinking back her tears. “He loved that dog, I don’t understand.”

“He won’t have been thinking straight, Nat.” Steve looked up at her, then around slightly, chewing the inside of his cheek before he made a decision. “We’ll take him home with us.” He stood up and, giving a sharp whistle, he was pleased to find the dog simply trotted behind him, up the ramp and happily curled up in a corner on a fleece Steve laid out for him.

“Do you know how old he is?” Steve asked, scratching the dog who rolled over, offering up his belly for a rub.

“Well when they found him the vets estimated he was about six months old…so seven now, give or take.” Natasha watched Steve who smiled, and made a cooing noise at the dog as he continued to pet him. “Never had you down as an animal lover, Rogers.”

“Always liked dogs.” He smiled. “I used to beg Ma for one all the time when I was a kid so she let us dog sit the neighbours. It set my asthma off, damned near killed me. So that put paid to that.” He took a deep breath and stood up, looking down at Lucky who flipped himself the right way up, pulling himself to a sitting position, his head cocking to the left. “Besides, I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“Katie’s right about you.” Natasha smiled. “You’re nothing but a huge softy under all that muscle.”

“Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone.” His brow raised. “I got a reputation to uphold.”

As they settled into the cockpit, Steve glanced at Natasha who was looking at the pieces of Clint’s ankle tag which she’d brought with her for some reason. But as he watched her turn them over in her hands, he had a sudden thought that there was someone else they should probably check in on as well. He voiced his thoughts to Natasha who nodded, and plugged in the co-ordinates for an airfield in San Francisco which was about thirty miles away from the address Scott Lang had listed on his house arrest details.

In little over an hour and forty later they pulled up outside Lang’s house and both hopped off the bike. No one answered so Steve simply kicked the door in and, once they were inside, they found it had been deserted some time ago. The remnants of a breakfast lay on a plate on the side growing mold and there was a mug and a plate in the sink. Natasha headed up the stairs, as Steve checked around the ground floor to see if there was anything that might give them a clue. The only thing he noticed was a calendar. The date of the Snap was circled, 23rd April, and next to it was written ‘QR- Research’. He didn’t have a clue what that meant. Letting out a deep breath he walked back into the hall and Nat came back down the stairs.

“No sign of anything being packed from his closet and his bed wasn’t made.”

“Well, his calendar seems to suggest he had a research date or something but other than that…” Steve trailed off as he spotted the red-light on the answer phone was blinking. He glanced at Natasha who inclined her head towards it and he reached out hitting the play button.

“Hi, Daddy” a little girls voice spoke and Steve and Natasha exchanged a look. Steve knew Scott had a daughter, but it struck him then that he had never even bothered to ask her name. “I tried your mobile but you’re obviously busy doing cool stuff with Hope and Dr Pymm…Mom said that you should come over tonight for five now your tag is off and it’s your favourite for tea. Oh and I got a new ant farm for you to try out. I love you, byeeeee!”

“Scott took two years house arrest to be with his daughter.” Steve shook his head, raising his eyebrows. “He wouldn’t just run out.”

“Think we’ve seen enough?” Nat sighed.

“Yeah.” Steve looked at her. “Let’s go home.”

***** “Well,” Dr Kellet looked at Katie as she sat up on the bed in the medical area of the compound, “there’s nothing physically wrong. Everything looks okay. I expect the cramps will settle down soon. It’s not uncommon with miscarriages, Mrs Rogers to feel some discomfort, especially when there’s been a procedure involved. And this, well, it wasn’t a normal miscarriage either so…”

Katie nodded and looked at her hands.

“How are you?” The Doctor asked and Katie looked up. “And I don’t mean physically.”

“I’m okay, I suppose.” Katie let out a deep breath. “I mean, I know there’s nothing I can do about it but it doesn’t stop me wondering you know, if I could have done something or-”

“Even in the case with normal miscarriages there’s nothing that anyone can do.” The Doctor spoke softly. “It’s a natural reaction, Mrs Rogers, you’re still in the grief cycle.” She clicked her bag shut. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Give it time.”

“That’s what Steve keeps saying.” Katie mused, softly.

“How has he been?” “Amazing.” Katie smiled instantly. “He’s been an absolute rock, I know he’s upset himself but he just…” she trailed off. “It’s good that you have one another.” Dr Kellet smiled as she handed Katie her bag containing her pill. Neither of them spoke much, it was a silent gesture that made them both feel a little strange. They hadn’t even discussed the subject of her birth control going forward, but with everything that was going on Katie was suddenly struck with the thought that even the simple things like obtaining medical treatment was going to be much more difficult as they’d lost half the people that kept medical centres open.

Doctors, Nurses, receptionists, porters…

“I’m going to be meeting with the Local Authorities.” Dr Kellet looked at Katie as if she had read her mind. “All the remaining specialists have talked about how we need a, well, sort of a how we go forward planning session.” “Let me know if we can help in anyway.” Katie nodded. “That’s what we have the Stark Relief fund for.” Dr Kellet smiled before the two exchanged goodbyes and the Ob-Gyn left, leaving Katie alone with her thoughts which were disrupted when she heard her phone going. It was a message from Steve to tell her they were on their way home with good and bad news. Katie wasn’t sure if she wanted to know, to be honest, but she assumed the good news was Clint was alive, the bad news well, it didn’t bear thinking about. Deciding she would rather hear it in person, she replied and told him she’d leave some dinner for them both in the communal kitchen, and with that she headed off to find something he could cook.

****

Steve and Natasha landed home at just gone eight in the evening. And, given that they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, they headed straight to the kitchen with Lucky in tow and found two plates of lasagne waiting for them in the fridge, one substantially larger portion than the other. Whilst it was warming up. Steve gave Lucky a drink and then found some left over chicken and scraps of vegetables from the roast dinner the night before and placed them down in a dish for him to eat. Lucky wolfed his make shift dinner down, and so did they. Between them they ate their helpings, plus the leftovers, along with a helping of salad and then walked down the dimly lit corridors, dog on their heels. It was completely deserted.

“Feels odd doesn’t it?” Nat remarked “I mean it was always so busy.” “We will fix this Nat.” Steve spoke, and he wasn’t sure where his optimism was coming from, but seeing Clint was alive gave him more hope than he’d had that morning.

“Thank you for coming.” She said as they stopped by the stairs that led to her apartment.“I really appreciate it.”

“You don’t need to thank me, Nat.” Steve smiled, giving her a hug. “Do you wanna take our guest or should I?” he gestured down to the dog. She shook her head. “Katie has a soft spot for that dog, plus you said yourself you’re a dog person. I prefer cats.”

That didn’t surprise Steve in the slightest and he found himself smiling slightly as he replied. “Alright, see you in the morning,” before he watched her up the steps and was pleased to see some of her usual Black Widow swagger had returned.

“Come on, buddy.” He turned to the dog which obediently trotted besides him, tongue lolling, his one eye trained on the super soldier.

Katie was awake in bed, the speakers in the room playing what sounded like the Trouble Man soundtrack as she lay on her side, facing the door, her hands absentmindedly playing with the pillow she had clutched to her chest.

“Hey.” he said as he walked in and she looked up, smiling softly. He leaned over to give her a gentle kiss before he frowned. “You’re crying.” It was a statement, not a question, as it was something she seemed to do quite a lot of recently. He sat on the edge of the bed and with tender hands, wiped her tears away with his thumbs as she sat up. “Is everything okay, I mean with…”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking about Sam, that’s all.”

Steve bowed his head, swallowing a little. Sam had been such a constant in their lives since they’d met him some four years previously, and two of those years they’d basically spent as house mates. It felt strange not to have him round, laughing and joking. Quite frankly, Steve felt like someone had ripped away his arm.

“I miss him too.” He admitted gently, and Katie looked at him, reaching up to cup his face. Steve sniffed a little before he shook his head.

“So, what did Dr Kellet say?” He changed the subject. “Nothing much. Says I’m physically alright, any discomfort I’m feeling should be gone soon.” “Do you need anything? Pain relief or…” She shook her head “I’m okay, honestly.” She took a deep breath. “So, what did you find?”

“Clint’s alive.” Steve stood and shrugged off his jacket, laying it on the back of the chair by the dressing table. Katie gave a sigh of relief which was short lived as she spotted the look on Steve’s face.

“What is it?”

“There’s no sign of him. He’d bust off his tag and left. I don’t think his family made it.” Katie bowed her head “They’re gone? All of them?”

“I think so yeah.”

“Fuck.” Katie screwed shut her eyes as her head fell back and she looked to the ceiling.

“We do, however have a guest.” Steve added, looking over at her.

“Who?”

“Lucky.” At the sound of his name the dog came pounding into the bedroom and jumped straight up on the bed.

“I couldn’t just leave him there.” Steve explained as Katie smiled and leaned over to scratch the dog behind his ears, promptly causing him to lay down, his head in Katie’s lap. She wrinkled up her nose.

“He stinks!”

“Yeah well he’s been alone since Clint left, God knows what he’s been up to or eating.” Steve shrugged as Katie looked down at the dog who rolled over for a belly scratch and she obliged. “And it doesn’t look like Lang made it either.” Steve finished heavily, watching as Katie tickled the animal.

Katie shook her head sadly, a tear falling onto the bed as Lucky rolled back over and moved to lick the side of her face before he jumped down on the floor.

“Nat wants to give Barton a few more days to cool off before we look for him but I’m not sure he wants to be found.“ Steve dropped back onto the side of the bed, removing his shoes and then his shirt thinking back to what he had seen at Clint’s. He laid his palms flat on the bed and dropped his head gently, letting out a sigh. He heard the sheets rustle as Katie edged her way closer to him, leaning her head on the back of his shoulder, nuzzling her cheek against him.

"How is Nat?” She asked.

“A little bit better now that we know he’s alive.”

Katie nodded as she dropped a kiss to the back of Steve’s shoulder before he stood up, “I’m gonna take a shower, I won’t be long.”

“Okay. Where’s Lucky gonna sleep?”

“I dunno.” Steve eyed up the dog who was now led on his back on the floor as if he’d been with them all his life “Looks like he’s comfy there.” “Yeah, it does.” Katie smiled.

Whilst Steve was in the shower Katie went into the closet and pulled out one of the old duvets for Lucky to sleep on, folding it up and placing it at the end of the bed. Steve was out of the shower shortly and climbed into bed besides Katie, reaching over and turning off the light before he settled down on his back and Katie cuddled up to him, head on his chest

“So what have you been up to today?” He asked gently, his hand rubbing her back.

“Still trying to get a lock on where Tony is. Other than that, well, I saw the doctor, made dinner and then I wasn’t feeling great if I’m honest. So I came back here and Thor sat with me for a while, just talking.”

Steve took a deep breath, pulling her a little closer as they both fell silent for a moment, before she broke the silence.

“You now, knowing Clint is alive makes me feel a little more optimistic.”

“Optimistic?”

“Yeah, think about it.” Katie’s hand traced hapes on his bare chest “That’s six out of seven of the original Avengers confirmed alive. Tony has to be as well, it makes sense.” “I’m not following.” Steve frowned. She propped herself up, so that she was leaning on his chest, her eyes locking onto his. “Thor was talking before, those stones, they have a magic beyond anything we know. Thor doesn’t believe for a second that who’s left is merely a coincidence and neither do I. It’s happened for a reason. Tony’s out there, I can feel it. We just need to find him.” “Honey, I understand what you’re saying-“ Steve started, he wasn’t sure he agreed. He didn’t believe in fate, it was bullshit. But before he could say anything else she cut him off.

“Please don’t.” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t what?”

“Take this hope away from me.” She whispered, her eyes still locked onto his in the dim light of the room “Apart from you it’s all I have right now.”

He sighed and nodded, chastising himself. If it made her feel better who was he to try and make her think any differently just because he did? Eventually they would have to face facts but now, well he just wanted her to get through the next few days, one at a time. With that in mind, he bit back his response and kissed her head.

“Sorry, you’re right. As long as there’s hope, we have a chance.” She kissed him gently before settling back down, and it wasn’t long before she drifted off. *****

A week or so later, Thor returned from another scouting trip with no news or sign of his people and this time he set deep into a brooding depression, appearing only for meals. Not even Katie could talk him round. Pepper was keeping herself busy liaising with who was left at Stark Industries, turning her attention onto how they could help after Katie had told her about Dr Kellet and the Health Authorities. It kept Pepper busy and gave her something to focus on.

Steve, Natasha and Rhodey spent most of their time talking to the people who were conducting the census and the authorities, whilst Katie buried herself away with Rocket and Bruce trying to calibrate the scanners to reach further into space, bouncing off the NASA satellites to boost their range. But they continued to get nothing. The elephant in the room, however, remained Fury’s pager. In the two weeks they’d had it no one had managed to get working, not even Rocket, despite his attempts to fix the booster that was attached to it.

As the Nineteenth post snap afternoon drew to a close, the Racoon let out a frustrated sigh and downed the small screwdriver he had been using and shook his head.

“If I had the right parts I could sort this easy, but without getting up to Contraxier I wouldn’t know where to start.” “What’s Contraxier?” Katie asked.

“A market-slash-junk-slash-booze hole” Rocket shrugged.” You can find most stuff there. That’s where I stole Thor’s eye.”

Katie knew better than to ask.

“It’s so goddamned annoying.” Rocket continued. “I mean it’s a simple technology too, they’re ten a credit. All it needs to do is produce a magnetic field across each of these coils and bingo.” Katie looked at Bruce whose head had instantly shot up.

“Say that again?” The Scientist instructed gently. “These coils.” Rocket pointed to the item as Bruce walked over. “Each of them needs a magnetic core and then all of the little individual magnetic forces add together and it powers the…what?” He asked as Bruce looked at Katie and she grinned.

“An electromagnet?” She shook her head, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. “That’s all it is?” “I’ve no idea what you Terrans call it, but if that’s what that does then yeah.” “I can’t believe it.” Bruce picked up the device and slid it under the large magnifying glass Rocket had been using, letting out a groan of frustration. “I took my eye off the ball, I could have sorted this straight away…” “You’re kidding me right?” Rocket sighed “Seriously?”

“Bruce, we’ve had a lot going on, don’t...” Katie began to sooth the man who was now frantically rushing around, grabbing various bits of material as he continued to curse his stupidity.

With a final curse, he settled down at a seat, bending over the device, his nose barely an inch away from it.

“It was an electromagnet. A god-damned electromagnet.” Bruce shook his head as he stood up and placed the Pager on a plinth inside one of the glass cases he used to experiment in. He fiddled around with some wires, muttering to himself before standing back. As the three of them crowded round, the screen on the pager lit up and the word “SENDING” flashed across the screen.

Katie looked at Bruce, her face splitting into a smile as he looked at her, the corner of his mouth twisting upwards.

There was another glimmer of hope…

**** Chapter 39 Part 2

#stark spangled banner #steve rogers #Katie Stark #steve rogers x ofc #steve rogers x original female character #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fic #mcu #mcu fanfic #chris evans #chris evans characters

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