amicablug

[amicablug]

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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if i ever tell you "i cant possibly read a book in a day!" i am LYING. i am a FUCKING LIAR. because last night i read a 50k word fanfic in three fucking hours.

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🎶 Deep down I would trade the world to see my son and wife🎶

Kind of obsessed your honor 😑

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it's true and you should say it.

[amicablug]

Written for the day 2 prompt "holding back tears" and posted yesterday on AO3, but not yet to the tumble dryer, so here! Hydra Trash Party (hopefully I'm using that term correctly, new to this fandom) Stucky fic!! Mutual non-con, Steve topping Winter Soldier Bucky while undercover. Angst ensues! :D

https://archiveofourown.org/works/62738929

Fic under cut. TW: rape/non-con, being watched, brainwashing

He can’t do this. He can’t fucking do this. He wants to scream it, loud, for the whole world to know. And then stab every single one of these Hydra bastards. Multiple times. And then himself, so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at—

Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes—three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight; see, he remembered. Steve remembered, so why couldn’t Bucky?—who was now standing right in front of him. Alive. It hurt, that Steve knew he should be grateful, should want to fall to his knees and praise the god he wasn’t sure he believed in anymore. Bucky was alive. Steve had prayed for it for years, even when he didn’t do it consciously, even when his rational mind lost hope completely—he would still wake up from nightmares and reach to the other side of the bed in the dark, pawing for someone wakefulness soon rudely reminded him wasn’t there. But not like this. Never like this.

He didn’t have that godawful mask on now, at least. Steve didn’t know if he would be grateful for that, but in this moment he wanted nothing more than to keep gazing at that slightly-cleft chin, that stubble that was just long enough to prickle his cheek, those red lips—

He couldn’t be thinking about things like that—no, actually, what the fuck was wrong with him, that he could think about those things at a time like this?

“I’ll leave you to it,” the handler—Steve knew his name, but he didn’t give two fucks about that right now—said, lazily. Like he did this every day, whoring Bucky out like some mindless toy. Never mind the dead ice in his eyes, the brainwashing, the absolute lack of consent—it felt a little silly to even be surprised about this. They’d violated him in every other way, why not?

There was a window in the room. Big. Probably a bulletproof one, but Steve’s serum-enhanced body didn’t always care what something was supposed to be able to withstand. He imagined the force of his rage might be able to crack it without even laying a hand on it, if he was allowed to reveal it.

That was the problem. Steve couldn’t reveal how much he hated all of this, couldn’t grab Bucky and break out of the Hydra compound and deal with everything else later, because he had to stay undercover. He had to get that information for the sake of thousands, maybe millions of people. But if getting that information required…

To hell with the world, a small, angry part of him snarled. The boy he’d been before the army, the serum, the ice, the Avengers, SHIELD’s compromises and HYDRA’s evil—the one who still believed he could fix things by breaking them, instead of just leaving the shards on the floor for some other sorry idiot to step into. He pushed it down.

He’d get Bucky out later. Now he knew where they were keeping him. He knew the identities of multiple of his handlers. He would come back, like an true avenging angel, an inferno of fury ready to cut them all into fucking glitter for the July 4th parade. He would save Bucky.

They’d be watching.

Steve’s stomach flipped over and over with hate and rage and disgust at the thought. He hated himself. He should have expected this, should’ve—

“He’ll do anything you ask,” Rumlow purred, one hand behind Bucky’s back, touching god-knows-what, and the other grasping his chin. Stroking.

Bucky just stared ahead with that dull expression that walked the line between terrifying and horrifying. Right now it was solidly in the latter camp—what had they done to him?

“Anything?” Steve said, forcing his voice to stay steady. He couldn’t stomach feigning appetite, but he could pretend boredom. He could force his own blue eyes to match Bucky’s—to reflect the bone-dry emptiness. To not let any of his true feelings be soiled by this dirty, wretched, sinful place.

The handler grinned. “Anything.”

He’d known then, obviously. He’d thrown up the second he was alone in the bathroom, resolutely avoiding the mirror while he rinsed his mouth. He’d tried to rinse his brain, too. Force himself not to think about it. But now they were in the room and there were tools on the wall, whips and dildos and harnesses and a fucking cattle prod in a dizzyingly horrible assortment. And Bucky was there, still wearing that tight black kevlar uniform they’d put him in. He didn’t have any weapons strapped to him—other than the metal arm—which was both a relief and a curse.

Steve wished that Bucky would fucking shoot him, at this point.

Not that he seemed like he would. No, HYDRA’s asset was well-trained. He wouldn’t fight back. Rumlow had said that, with a smirk that now would forever haunt the dark corners of Steve’s brain, and a story that would go straight into the locked box in there, never to be thought of again. A story of Bucky when he’d only been with HYDRA a few years. Still in training. The first time, he’d apparently struggled so much under the pain and the violation of being raped that he’d bitten a technician’s dick clean off. He’d been punished, Rumlow said. He hadn’t provided details of the punishment, but Steve was sure he wouldn’t want to know.

They were watching.

He just had to—be smart, and act like he enjoyed it, and then nothing would seem amiss. He wouldn’t hurt Bucky. He couldn’t.

This was already hurting Bucky.

There was a bed of sorts—or maybe more of a bench, since it was made completely of metal and there wasn’t any padding on it—in the center of the room. Why the center instead of pressed against any of the walls, Steve briefly wondered, and then abruptly stopped thinking about that, too, when he realized that it had to be for—access purposes. For more people to touch Bucky and shove things into him and—

There were metal cuffs on it, for Bucky’s wrists and ankles, judging by their position, but Steve didn’t think he’d need them. Bucky could probably break them, too, if he wanted to. That was the problem. Bucky in this half-dead, brainwashed state—he probably wouldn’t even try to escape.

“Strip and lay down here,” Steve ordered.

Bucky obeyed, pulling the shirt off with a speed that made Steve feel sick imagining all the things HYDRA might have done to him for hesitating, for not being eager enough. Then the pants and underwear.

Steve had seen Bucky naked before, of course. They’d been soldiers together, and best friends before that. They’d even—

No. He refused to think about that. For his own sanity, he had to keep any sort of connection between that sweet, holy night and this horror show.

It wouldn’t work, but by God he was going to try.

He blinked, and Bucky was laying on the bench on his back. It had to be hell on his spine in this cold room, but Steve wasn’t going to give him more orders than he had to to get this done. If Bucky wanted to lay face-up—Bucky didn’t want anything, anymore, and Steve knew that, but it was easier to pretend, to make-believe that he could have this with even only a little willingness—he wasn’t going to stop him.

Fuck.

Bucky was—Steve hated it. Hated every god-damn part of this with a passion, but this might be the just be the worst. It didn’t feel like anything could be worse than this in the whole wide world. Steve would rather be anywhere, anywhere else but here, looking down at Bucky’s naked, muscled, beautiful body, lying on cold steel without so much as a pillow under his head. Eyes still so fucking dead, but lidded now. Obedient, though in the sense that a sandwich was obedient when you picked it up to take a bite, or a punching bag was obedient when you spilled its contents on the floor with repeated strikes. In another life, Steve knew he might’ve enjoyed the soft expression on Bucky’s face.

He didn’t now.

But that didn’t stop his dick from expressing its enjoyment of the situation. Heat rose to his face. He’d always blushed hard—his skin was far too pale not to. Bucky had teased him about it back when they were kids. Back then, it had made his stomach turn twisters in entirely different ways than it was now.

He swore he’d cut the damn thing off once he got out of here.

They were watching.

Bucky’s legs were already spread, placed into the ankle cuffs like his wrists were. Did that mean that Steve was supposed to lock them? There was a key hanging off of the shelf with the torture implements. Would that be—standard practice? Would it make any of this easier for Bucky?

Steve didn’t know, but he did know that he couldn’t ask, so he closed the cuffs. Bucky gasped, just a little, then stiffened even more than the constant state of tension he always seemed to be under. Steve forced himself to ignore it. He didn’t check the fit. He didn’t want to know how tight the metal was, if it cut into Bucky’s skin. He wouldn’t be able to unlock them without arousing suspicion.

It was time. He couldn’t hesitate more than he already had. Just this could be interpreted as him just enjoying the view of a perfect soldier before defiling him. Any more, and—

Even if they didn’t get suspicious enough to ruin the mission, Steve would probably ruin it himself by killing them all too soon if he had to be in this room for any longer than he absolutely had to.

They didn’t provide them with lube, of fucking course, but Steve wasn’t just going to force his way in without any sort of preparation, regardless of his desperation to get the fuck out of there. He spit on his hand and gently pushed one finger into Bucky’s rectum until the walls felt a little less like a visegrip. Then another.

He was quicker than he wanted to be about it, and far quicker than he would be if Bucky was safe in his bed and wanted it and—

Well. He was quick, and he got it done, going up to three fingers and methodically scissoring them apart over and over to get Bucky’s body to relax and accept the intrusion, even if his mind wouldn’t.

When he pushed at one particular spot, Bucky made another of those small, gasping sounds. Steve wanted to throw up, even as his own body throbbed with sick desire. He was such a fucking pervert, getting off on Bucky chained up and helpless and hurting—

He pulled down his pants a little to release his hard cock, and set it against Bucky’s hole. He pushed in.

And Bucky fucking whined.

God take him now. Throw him in the deepest, darkest pit of hell and let him suffer for eternity. He’d deserve it, and then some.

He kept going. In. Out. In. Out. A steady, horrible rhythm. His skin slapped against Bucky’s, making a truly awful wet noise that Steve would never be able to escape for the rest of his life.

The bridge of his nose began to burn.

He blinked, a lot. He could’ve looked like he was fluttering his eyelashes, even, like he had when he was making fun of how Bucky had once so effortlessly charmed girls. He was jealous, really, but his feelings didn’t matter then and they didn’t now. What mattered was keeping Bucky as comfortable as possible. Right now, that meant keeping the tears away from his face so none of the HYDRA bastards could see them and take him away from Bucky and hurt both of them. To save Bucky. That’s all he needed to focus on. This was about more than the world. It was about Bucky, now. And maybe—maybe it always had been.

He kept going.

They were watching.

[amicablug]

A proposal

Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we don’t want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.

It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the “HYDRA Trash Party” tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground I’m thinking of here, though; I propose “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.”

For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.” He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:

[gif of a white man saying “I don’t know what I expected” in a deadpan manner]

The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”

(more at KnowYourMeme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-dont-know-what-i-expected)

[amicablug]

I really love Penelope's portrayal in Epic: The Musical because even though she only has two songs she's such a strong character and parrallels her husband in so many ways. She also suffered for twenty years. She also never gave up on her partner. She's also cunning and a liar. The fact that the Siren's impression of Penelope is cheerful and non-confrontational and teasing but without any genuine love and when he actually meets the real one she lies to test whether it's really him and when it is immediately goes "Shut the fuck up, of course I still love you". I just think she's such a strong character and the musical does a good job making a relatively passive role more active. "I never thought that this would be the lengths we'd go for love, but I wouldn't have it any other way."

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The tragedy of my life is that I keep acquiring and displaying fetish art and having to be corrected by my friends.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

"Urban, this is fetish art." and she takes me to the artist's twitter and god dammit it's fetish art, not a bold statement on cultural perceptions of women and violence throughout history. I have been tricked again.

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Imagine you're Odysseus. You've spent a decade, or two, or practically your whole life (depending on when you start counting) being tossed around between the gods, treated like a toy soldier, a chew toy, a doll. You've been played with for so long that you're ragged, dirty, smell like filth and blood. You don't know what you might've become without their hands on you: guiding your sword and your arrows, striking you, running over your body and groping you. It doesn't matter. You've fought back; you're free. You're safe now.

And then you see your son and feel your war goddess's influence, her sharp eyes and cruel hands. And you know then that you will never be truly free. She broke you. And now she's made your son her shiny new plaything.

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Hngrhrhrrhrhrhhrhrgfgrhdh

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it's meant to look like a mouth :3

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Only resolution for 2025 is MAXIMUM COMMITMENT TO MAXIMUM PLEASURE

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you're a fox caught in a trap and you know how this story ends. still, you cry and scratch at the steel; it doesn't flinch. you give up. you give up. you give up. you start biting, gnawing off your own leg with the desperate need to escape, knowing you have to sacrifice what once made you whole to get any part of you out. you taste blood. but there's no other way out.

home isn't that far away. you start walking. you move slowly. agonizingly. you leave a trail of red everywhere you go. you start limping faster, crying out in pain; you know they're coming for you: there are dangerous things in this woods, more dangerous that you were and far more than you are now, and they're going to hunt you down. you're alone. you're helpless.

suddenly, your legs give out. or you give out. you consider for a moment how nice it is here, with the sun on your face and leaves under your aching hip. you could stay. maybe you should stay. wait for something to find you. it would be quicker than continuing to struggle onward. you think about your leg, still stuck in that trap you led it into. you could join it, recombine yourself again. you could be whole again.

you get up.

you didn't think you were that far from home, but at the pace you're moving, it might take you until nightfall. if you make it back at all. you hit obstacle after obstacle: sharp, unsteady rocks that don't seem like they are in the same spots they were before, roots hidden under dense leaves, even the stream that had once been so manageable with a little cunning. you keep moving. you drag yourself through what you once danced around. it still hurts, but your phantom pains are fading. it feels like learning a new language. it feels like you might finally be okay, like maybe you're not even missing all that much.

you're home, and your son is holding a saw between his small paws. he puts it to his own leg and smiles at you.

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“Would fall in love with me again if you knew all I’ve done?”

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something that makes me soooo insane about telemachus in i can't help but wonder (and also in the wider context of epic the musical) is that telemachus says in i can't help but wonder,

"i can't help but wonder what your world must be / if we're like each other, if i have your strength in me / all this time i've wondered if you'd embrace me as your own"

because — for so much of his life, telemachus has probably been told stories about king odysseus, his father, cunning strategist, favored of athena, etc etc, and wanting to live up to that ("i know life and fate are scary, but i wanna be legendary!", "and i would fight them if i was half as strong as you" from legendary)

he has also spent so much of his life being terrorized, and watching his mother being terrorized, by suitors for her hand — and he probably thought "well, FATHER would be able to drive them off!"

and then odysseus does come. and he kills them all.

and. yes. father has finally returned. finally driven them off. but his father also had to save telemachus from melanthius, the one suitor who threatened to "break the kid's hands" to cow odysseus.

there must have been something in telemachus that thought, "ah. so you are exactly as legendary as everything i've ever heard about you, father. and i am...not."

reminder that, in we'll be fine, telemachus says that his time with athena has been the best day of his life "'cause [he] got in a fight and [he] didn't die" — that was probably his first ever fight.

plus, with the way the suitors mock him and speak about him, he's probably VERY AWARE that he is constantly compared to his father, and found lacking.

so of course he's thinking about how his legendary, cunning, kingly father might ALSO compare them, and might come to the same conclusions as everyone else. he might well decide that telemachus would not be WORTHY of being, to borrow telemachus' own words here, "embrace[d] as [odysseus'] own".

of course, odysseus has never once thought about his son as anything other than HIS — "my boy", "my son", "sweetest joy i've known", a driving force to getting him home in the horse and the infant ("penelope, telemachus, i'm on my way") and in keep your friends close where you can hear telemachus as one of the voices urging odysseus to keep his eyes open — but i wonder how long it would take telemachus to really believe that his father isn't disappointed in him, because he has spent TWENTY YEARS being put and putting himself in the shadow of this man — and it might even make him self conscious, that odysseus spent all that effort coming home to his Ideal Family™ only to be met with the reality of what they really are.

i firmly believe that to ody, the reality of his family will always be better than the "ideals" — and that probably ody's "idealized family" is literally just. whatever penelope and telemachus are like now.

but idk. it's just something i feel like they'd have to work through, now that odysseus IS home, and it is just such a consistent part of telemachus' character that i haven't really seen anyone discuss.

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cannot describe how excited i got when i read that you were doing wyfilwma i am so excited to see your personal interpretations of the characters again i am so excited to see ody look like a fucking ancient scraggly piece of driftwood that washed up on shore AUGHHH

I have simplified him,,, he cannot have too many lines of his face with be cluttered 😔 so now he looks like a kicked puppy it's a little funny