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shellheadtmark2 · 5 years ago

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@auntlarb if I was to start reading comics for 616 Tony, which comic would you recommend to start with? like I have zero idea how comics work or where to even begin

honestly, and this isn’t really a good answer, but it’s the honest one, it depends on what you want to know. because otherwise the answer is everything. every single scrap you can because...well, to be absolutely real with you, shit from one panel from one comic fifty years ago will be referenced in a comic now and the only footnote you get in explanation is something like “AS SEEN IN INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #5! - EDITOR” when invincible iron man #5 was published in 1963.

i’m also going to really preface this in general for anyone reading this and also be incredibly real and say if anyone that wants to start reading iron man comics and goes in expecting anything at all like mcu tony - you’re gonna be disappointed. mcu tony is as different to 616 tony as ultimates tony is to both of them, which is to say...they’re different characters. or, rather, very different takes on the same character. the mcu is something like what if 616 and ultimates had a baby and that baby grew up to marry thanos. 616 tony is less cinnamon roll too good for this world and is literally charred cinnamon roll, crunchy, been through hell and back, throw him in the trash. i love him a lot tho.

alright, that’s my expect something completely different disclaimer.

the problem with reading guides in general is that they don’t...you don’t get the full picture. with comics you have to jump around, read an issue here and there of a title you wouldn’t normally do so with (as i wait patiently for wednesday so i can read loki #2 and find out why tony’s wearing armor on the cover he logically shouldn’t - assuming that’s even addressed). there’...honestly i’d argue there’s no perfect place to jump in, you just pick a spot and start reading, and if you get to the end of an issue and it says “contined in [some other comic title and number]” you hunt that down and read it, and then bounce back to what you were reading. so you get the full picture. you read a lot of comics - and i mean a lot - digging out every scrap of one storyline.

which is a lot of words to say pick a spot and just dive in. but it’s true. i can, however, offer suggestions for runs that i personally enjoy and think give good groundwork for how 616 tony feels different from mcu tony, and eases you into it being less jarring because of that difference.

iron man: extremis director’s cut (2005) will never not be on my recommended list. it shows you how extremis works in 616 and why tony would do that to himself. it’s also one of those comics that gives you a little bit of a sense of how 616 tony’s brain works. be warned tho, it’s...it’s dark. and gory. i can tell you right now most of the iron man comics on this list are going to be both of those things, because that’s just how iron man rolls. there’s no happy endings for tony, y’all. this is one comic i reference a lot.

invincible iron man (2008) is another favorite. it’s a little bit director of shield, a little bit of a mandarin face off story, a little bit of yanking tony out of the armor, a little bit of getting involved in asgard’s bullshit, a little bit of a detective story. this is the run with the brain thing. also gory. also, at times, dark. it does not shy from the body horror of what tony does to himself. but it’s a solid look at tony’s world, i think, from tony’s point of view. also i can verify you can read this one without having read others because @gwinnetts did it for reasons and furthermore and didn’t have any trouble.

invincible iron man (1998) is another good run, though it’s one that...goes for a long while. the mandarin shows up, you see bits and pieces of tony’s ridiculously bad love life, he’s secdef for a while, there’s all kinds of weird horror shows going on, it’s dark, it’s gritty, it’s the golden age of iron man comics, in my opinion. also a good place to start because it’s post heroes-reborn so everything’s new and shiny and you can follow along right through it.

avengers (2013) requires some prerequisite reading and some intermittent reading of other stuff (AXIS, superior iron man, new avengers, infinity) to get the full picture by the end, but good lord it’s a beautiful avengers run.

because that’s the thing. you can’t just read iron man comics, you gotta start dipping in all over the place to understand what’s going on.

new avengers & young avengers (2005) is okay in the set up to civil war. you’ll get to see characters like luke cage and spider-man, stature and patriot, as well as jessica drew and wolverine, and it starts laying that foundation.

civil war is super! super! important to tony, even if he doesn’t remember it anymore firsthand. and there are so many tie ins to civil war like...you could spend forever just here. on top of the seven issue run, i also highly recommend fallen son, the confession, and what if? civil war for maximum tony stark manpain. because civil war fucking wrecks me. it’s been fifteen goddamn years almost and it still fucking wrecks me.

demon in a bottle, because tony being a recovering alcoholic is such a huge part of his character development, and demon in a bottle is crucial to that. to add on to that, in invincible iron man runs in the early 80s help fill in the blanks from this nicely.

iron man legacy is incomplete, but it’s so so good. so good. it gives you a taste of homeless tony in a modern sense, as well as how inventive his brain is when he’s armorless. well worth the read and it won’t even take that long.

the armor wars (both of them) are another set that definitely deserve a skim through, because it shows just how out of hand shit gets sometimes, and how far tony will go to get his shit back.

iron man: viva las vegas is also incomplete, which is a goddamn shame, but it’s another quick read that gives you and idea of tony doing tony things. it was also a great little plot, killed before its time, and the art was, imo, solid, in the same style as iron man: extremis.

iron man: fatal frontier is hooo boy. it’s sure a thing that happened. think mining boomtown. on the moon. with tony as the sheriff. who’s also suffering from a metal poisoning that’s making him megalomaniacal because “tony knows best”. it’s good. if anyone doesn’t agree, we can meet in the pit, i love fatal frontier. i have lots of feelings about fatal frontier.

fantastic four/iron man: big in japan is great to lighten things up again. kinda gory but in a cutesy...way? it’s hard to explain, this comic is just wild as fuck. also hilarious.

captain america: man out of time is probably a weird choice outwardly to put here, but it’s about the avengers finding cap from cap’s perspective, and how badly tony was mancrushing on him. the start of the unnecessary touching. tony wiggling in excitement to take steve rogers out. tony’s dual identity. it’s all here, and from steve rogers’s perspective.

anyway this thing is...really long, and this is a good start. it gives (i personally think, anyone else is welcome to disagree / make suggestions) a good comparison for just how different 616 tony is. you’ll both hurt for him even more? and feel pretty unsympathetic to some of his bullshit by the end of it. but what you will see is a lot of nuance that’s missed just because the mcu couldn’t develop these kinds of layers in the time it had. tony’s complicated, and that’s putting it...extremely mildly. he’s so so good, but he’s willing to throw himself on the pyre and nail himself on the cross and it fucks him each and every time he does it.

#auntlarb #★ protocol . answered / i stole the keys from the sky #★ protocol . ooc asks / hey big spender spend a little time with me #★ array . misc / do you walk in the shadow of men who sold their lives to a dream #long post #long post for ts #// i also recommend classic invincible iron man if you can wade through it #// you can watch his character start out kind of stuttery and then...start to grow #// gain the personality tony keeps to a large degree #// and see how his early tragedies shape him later #// also kree/skrull war and the start of the illuminati #// which you should read the illuminati run too #// now that i think about it

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wolviecore · 4 years ago

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An AU where Archie's a ruthless villain who hates the Southside and FP, because FP left him, Fred, and Jug behind (let's say Fredsythe was married in this AU, but Gladys somehow convinced FP to leave his family in Riverdale for Toledo or smthg) and not only is his baby brother in love with a tall, beast of a boy southie fucker, but Moose, one of his closest friends, is also in a secret relationship with the tall fucker's best friend.

LIKE. ARCHIE IS A BOY, RIGHT? A bully, sure. It seems harmless (it's not. Reggie being forced into exile, having to give up his jacket and spot on the team, and shunned away to eat by the dumpsters, is not harmless.

Archie breaking into biology class with his posey in tow after the serpents transfer, that too wide, too friendly smile plastered on his cruelly handsome face staring at the three kids sitting tight in their chairs as dead snakes, stabbed, gutted, skinned, get thrown at their dissection trays , isn't harmless. It's a war declaration. One that no one takes seriously enough.)

Archie gains control over the school young; He's bigger than the other kids. Bigger, badder, meaner. Has a sharp mind, too cutting for someone so small, with enough knowledge to disguise it as innocence when he needs to.

"Fear and respect sleep together, you know, " he whispers to Cheryl. Bitchy, icy, insecurity filled Cheryl, on their first day of junior year, no Jason at her side. He must be hand in hand with Polly Cooper somewhere, and he's willing to bet his guitar it bothers the girl to the bone. "Stick with me. We're gonna run this nothing town."

Archie fits just right with the bulldogs; He wants to lead, not follow, thought. And Cheryl grows fangs of her own.

And they do; Unknown to Jughead, the only person besides his father Archie has love for, they do, and their rule is a glorious and brutal one.

Then Cheryl meets the tiny serpent girl with too much nerve to be considered smart. And things... Change.

"What do you mean I didn't make the team?! I was the best one there! "

She was. She was, and that's what makes Cheryl's skin crawl. "Evidently, we possess anonymous viewpoints of what 'best' means."

"... You're afraid of him, aren't you? Cheryl fucking Blossom, scared of one man."

Cheryl tenses, crimson lips tight. "Everyone is scared of Archie. But not me. This is not about fear,- I cried, and begged, and bled for this team. It happens to be the one thing in my life I have a pinch of control over. I won't endanger that just because of pretty Southside trailer trash not realizing she's aiming too her for such a laughable stature."

" ... You think I'm pretty?"

Cheryl doesn't dignify that with a response.

Unsurprisingly, Sweet Pea has a lot to say. "Northsiders are trouble. Falling for them is stupid, and we don't do stupid," the scowl on his face vanishes within minutes, as soon as he smiles and waves back to the dark haired boy following Cooper to the B&G. "What?"

Sweet Pea, who's torch of hatred he carries for Andrews burns so bright it could blind the sky, fell in love with his enemies' younger brother.

SP HAS NO IDEA WHAT TO DO, he envisioned a mini Archie; A spoiled, rotten little north side brat who acts like he owns the room. So he rehearsed, prepared himself to hear Andrews' voice from a different mouth when they first got paired up for a project.

But Jug is nothing like his big brother, from the dark of that fluffy, bouncy bed hair to his lithe stature, the elegant bed of his neck when he wanted to look Sweet Pea in the eye. He didn't have hazel eyes hiding hell in them, or a shark grin that raised hair from everywhere on the body.

No, - the boy is all small but scrappy, soft, dainty, if he dared used that word. He's got bright Bambi eyes, layered with a faint blue that steals the air from SP's lungs, and if given the opportunity, he won't ever shut up about those precious bunny teeth.

The fact that he has to keep the boy in the dark about Archie's cruelties cracks his heart. He doesn't know why. It just does. Maybe its because he understands hero worship. Maybe he's not ready for the other option.

Fangs and Moose, thought. Fangs and Moose break my heart.

They're young, and they're revounous for eachother, more than food or air. Fangs is hungry for the gentle eyed bulldog who towers over Archie but still bends down to get his hair ruffled, the only one there besides Sweet Pea's boy who doesn't sneer or looks with hatred.

Moose represses; Is what he knows. But the drumming in his chest when Fangs brushes hands with him in the crammed hallways refuses to be silenced, and the dryness in his mouth at every stolen glance and secret late night kisses won't be parched.

Its not enough. This is not the kind of love you can walk away from. So Moose doesn't.

The bulldogs have an exile ritual; Public. Ruthless. Stripping you of power, of humanity, of everything that makes you whole. It's a brutal spectacle, one that everyone must attend.

Cheryl makes sure Jughead doesn't. Sweet Pea makes sure FP does.

Moose, actual sunshine baby, with tears of heartache washing over his face, pushing his letterman jacket into Archie's chest. The redhead is stoned face, but his eyes are large, incredulous. Pleading, almost.

"You're either going to kill someone, or kill yourself, Arch. I don't want to be there to see it."

Archie's hand travels from its desperate grip on his friend's, - one of his BEST friend's,- wrist to fist Moose's hair. The strength is vulnerable. There's despair behind it.

"This is about the Southside. You're picking them over us," he whispers, pained. "You're picking that southie over me."

The taller between them gulps, teardrops slipping down his raised chin, proud, defiant. "... Yeah."

Archie framing Moose's face between his hands, steeling himself against the gentle pain in Moose's eyes, exploding at the violent tenderness in his captain's hold. "Your name will dissappear. Your worth will dissappear. And I want you to remember that I gave you a chance to walk away. You're dead at 10 pm."

Moose knows; He knows pain, and fear, and Fangs is worth all of them. That's the mantra echoing, when he arrows through the sea of students, all of them gazing downward.

GOD- ARCHIE. ARCHIE SLOWLY STAUNTERING IN MOOSE'S DIRECTION. LIKE IN THAT BULLDOGS VS SERPENTS FIGHT. "Come back," he's whispering. Hes begging, a quiet plea, a silent curse. "I'll forget about this. Come back to us. Please."

Moose's eyes find Fang's. Even drowned in sorrow, even cracked with raw pain, they're beautiful. His lips mouth 'I love you.'

"Do what you came here to do. It won't change my heart. Or my mind."

holy shit when Archie looks over at a SHATTERED Fangs, held back by Sweet Pea and Toni, his stomach coil in such a dark hatred, such a poisonous anger- he pours it all in the punch to Moose's jaw.

"You're gonna cry, hmm?" Archie growls, animalistic, more hell then boy, dishing thundering slaps to Moose in between his hisses."You gonna cry Moose, huh? Cry a bit. Cry for your fucking snake friend and his southie family."

FP BEING THERE- WATCHING HIS SON, HIS OLDSEST, THE SON HE LOVES SO MUCH, DO... THAT. AS a father, he's destroyed.

As a leader, he just. Watches Fangs, pure, good, strong, RIGHT Fangs, cling to Sweet Pea, fingers hooked so tightly into his best friends' jacket they pale. He yells ' they're killing him, sweet pea let me GO they're killing him, stop, STOP-' and FP realizes. On some degree, a bitter one, Tall Boy's words rang true.

At some point, they will have to hit back.

At the end of the ritual, Archie grips Moose's hair, fingers digging into his loose jaw. His friend is limp in his hands, probably unconscious, probably passed out.

He holds this maimed version of Moose, more corpse than boy, towards Fangs. He's so hateful. He knows, because Sweet Pea's disdain stares right back. " LOOK AT HIM! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! YOU DID THIS," he laughs, a sad, hollow sound, bordering on manic. Half madness, half sob. "YOU DID THIS. NOT ME! NOT ANY OF US. YOU."

"THIS," He whips around, Moose swining in sort, making majority of them cringe in disgust, in unsettlment. They're terrified. Good. " IS WHAT THEY DO! THIS IS WHAT YOU'LL BECOME, IF YOU MIX WITH THEM!"

At the very end, Moose drops, but he's strong. He's so strong. He stays on his knees for it, not down. His face is drenched in blood and brushes and cuts, and he won't stand down.

Someone hesitantly hands the redhead a baseball bat, which he grabs, eager to end this, eager to leave. Archie hates the whole world.

"You can live up here with us," he can't tell if the wetness sliding down his cheek is rain or tears. Can't distinguish the wail of pain from Fangr or Reggie, as the bat leaves a punishing kiss on Moose's right cheek, putting him down for good. "Or die down there, like them."

In conclusion, I'm crying.

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spidercakes · 4 years ago

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Since you like mob AUs, here’s a prompt u thought of: Peter is dating Beck or whoever, who doesn’t treat him right. What Peter doesn’t know is that his bf is a mob boss. Mob boss tony kidnaps peter out of revenge towards beck or for info or whatever. Soon he realizes peter has no idea what’s going on, and decides to keep him. Peter isn’t too upset about that.

I finagled with the prompt a little bit, Tony deliberately kidnaps Peter because he has no patience for domestic violence and is basically offended that Beck sucks. The rest is true to the prompt!

Warming: mentions of violence, mentions of domestic violence, age difference, this is more preslash than anything.

Tony feels bad that poor Peter looks so damn terrified but snatching him off the street seemed less... invasive than his other options. Plus its easier to leave less evidence that way and while he doesn’t give a shit what Beck thinks he doesn’t want to deal with him deciding to harass the hell out of him about his kidnapped boyfriend either.

He leans into the table and Peter immediately leans back. Tony sighs, “you know you deserve better than that piece of shit, right?” he asks. The kid has to know, he has to. Tony has looked into him because he had to wonder how the hell Quentin Beck, smart but ultimately an unhinged jackass with a temper, landed someone so... amazing. Peter is smart, his credentials prove it, his social media is all related to various social issues he cares about so he’s compassionate, and he’s stupid attractive. Like Beck deserved someone like that even before considering the whole ‘beats his boyfriend’ thing.

Its not that Tony has morals, he doesn’t really because they aren’t useful to him, but he’s got his limits. They’re few and far in between but domestic violence lands on his rather short list so that had made up his mind. The fact that Beck would be missing Peter is mostly an afterthought to Peter being removed from a shitty environment.

“As opposed to what, you? You literally snatched me off the street!” Peter says, voice shrill but its ballsy nonetheless. More ballsy than half the supposedly tough criminals he roughs up on a regular basis. By now most of them would be begging, but not Peter. But then surviving what he did gives a person a certain kind of strength, Tony knows.

“No, not really. I’m mostly here to mess Beck’s business up, and your lack of presence does that but I might as well kill two birds with one stone by telling you that you should get out. I mean I get it if you can’t, all things considered, but I’m well connected myself so if Beck think he can outdo-”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Peter asks, voice still several octaves higher than normal.

Tony frowns for a moment as something occurs to him. “There’s no way you don't know...”

Peter rolls his eyes looking semi hysterical, “well clearly I fucking don’t because I have no idea what this is and I’d really like to go home, please,” he says, voice cracking as he starts sniffling towards the end.

Across the room Rhodey gives him a look. “Keep it to yourself Rhodes,” Tony tells him.

“Just saying,” Rhodey murmurs.

Peter turns to face him, frowning. “Did he say something?”

“Not with words. Twenty five years of friendship has led to me being really, really good at reading his body language. As for home do you have anywhere else you could go that isn’t back to Beck? Seriously, that guy is a piece of shit. And a mob boss. That’s what this whole thing is about. He keeps messing with my business and I don’t really take kindly to that,” he says, sparing Peter the details. Mostly because he doesn’t want Peter to think he’ll become the details.

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re a real charmer in comparison,” Peter mumbles.

He doesn’t expect Rhodey to be the one to snort but he does, “yeah he’s a murderer but he’d never hit his significant other,” he says and the unshakable confidence in his voice is touching, really. Peter slumps a little in his seat and the poor thing looks desolate. He’d try and comfort him but he’s sure he wouldn’t be any good at it given that Peter is probably, and rightfully, afraid of him too.

The last thing he expects is for Peter to burst into tears though he supposes they’ve come later than normal. Usually he doesn’t do this sort of thing, target family, because he finds it distasteful but on the rare occasion he breaks that general rule they usually cry four seconds into it, not several minutes into it. He sighs, “aside from the kidnapping thing, what’s wrong?” he asks.

Rhodey’s eyebrows would have hit his hairline if he had one but instead he just looks at Tony like he’s a god damn moron. Which, in hindsight, his question does sound really stupid. “You kidnapped me,” Peter says, voice gone back to that shrill tone he’d had before. “You fucking kidnapped me and you’ve been nicer to me for the last twenty minutes than Quent has in the last five years,” he finishes right before crying even harder.

He looks at Rhodey, who squints and lifts his hands into the air in a ‘what the fuck’ motion. Great, so he can’t expect any help from him apparently. Some right hand man he is, Pepper is going to replace him soon if he keeps it up. “Look, you don’t need to go back. Its not as hard to make people disappear as cops think it is provided you know what you’re doing. Peter Parker doesn’t even need to exist and Beck isn’t competent enough to find whatever fake name you choose, trust me on that.”

Peter sniffles harshly but calms a little at least. “I’m no- not running away,” he mumbles.

“Taking necessary precautions isn’t running away, I know you know Beck better than I do and I know he doesn’t back down easy. He will try and hunt you down,” Tony says but not unkindly. He gets it, really, he does. He and his mother lived it.

Peter considers this a moment before he sits up a little straighter, still crying but the tears are silent. “You said you had connections. Do you have any way I can stay in New York and avoid Quent?”

Not exactly given that that’s a tall order. “Stay here as long as you want, we can work out the details later when you’re in a better position to land on your feet. And when I get the time to consider the logistics of that. I highly doubt Beck will bother you here though, I have a reputation and even he’s not stupid enough to test me.”

Peter knows Tony has to be dangerous, it comes with the whole mob thing and Tony isn’t shy about referencing violence at all. Peter doesn’t think he’d be shyer if he actually had to follow through on his words either, there’s just something about the easy way he talks about inflicting pain on people that Peter thinks is experienced. He has yet to see any evidence of it though and its been a month, he’s had time but Tony has been nothing but kind to him to an unusual degree if the reactions of everyone else around him is any indication.

Everyone from his business partner, Pepper, to Rhodey seem to find Tony’s fascination with him odd but Peter doesn’t so much mind if he gets to benefit from it. He’s wanted to leave Quent for a long time but he’d always suspected that he hadn’t reached his peak of violence and that’s partially why he stayed. The other part was not knowing where to go and he knew damn well that Quent wouldn’t just let him go.

So it was kind of convenient that Tony showed up when he did and he’s held up his end of the bargain. Peter hasn’t had to deal with Quent since Tony pulled him off a random street and he doesn’t mind that he has to take Natasha with him everywhere he goes. Its inconvenient but he’ll take that over having to deal with whatever Quent would try if he managed to find him again. Or gain access to him, he’s sure Quent figured out where he went by now when he hasn’t really been shy about it.

And that’s how Peter knows in his heart of hearts that Tony’s reputation isn’t just to be believed, but to be actively feared. Quent is mean and possessive and Peter never thought he could just walk out of their relationship but thanks to whatever it is that Tony does to people he managed.

“What?” Tony asks, probably sensing Peter staring at him.

“Why are people so afraid of you? I’ve never even heard you raise your voice,” he says. He’s seen Tony pissed off and he’s got a habit for mumbling in Italian but he doesn’t seem much for raising his voice even when actively livid. Peter finds it hard to be afraid of him even if he knows he should be.

Tony laughs a little, “you haven’t heard me yell because I’ve purposefully never yelled around you, not because I don’t. And people are afraid of me because I’m single minded in my goals and have a nasty habit of achieving them no matter the cost. They’ve grown wise not to get in my way.”

And there it is again, that slightly threatening nature but its hard to reconcile that with the guy who, after kidnapping him, immediately told him he deserved better than the treatment he was getting at home. Its hard to believe someone can sit on extremes that large, that someone would offer a perfect stranger a home and protection for literally no reason in one second and then do some kind of great violence the next. Rhodey said Tony was a murderer and that statement was confident, fact, but Peter just doesn’t see how Tony could do it. But then apparently he’s gone through the trouble of making sure Peter didn’t have to hear him yell.

“Why would you do that?” he asks because he knows Tony has some surprisingly kind reason for doing that.

He shrugs, “I figured after being yelled at as much as you have you probably didn’t like hearing people yell now. Probably triggers a stress response so we all freak out when you aren’t in the room.”

We all. Peter frowns because it isn’t just Tony, he’d made that order to everyone and he knows they’ll all listen, even Natasha even though she’s the most likely to tell Tony no. Partially because of sibling rivalry and also because she seems the least afraid of him next to Rhodey. “You told everyone not to yell in my presence because you didn’t want to stress me out? I can handle yelling, I’m not glass.” He doesn’t know why he’s prickling to this when its actually incredibly kind of Tony, and so unexpected the way all his kindnesses have been.

Tony doesn’t look ruffled though, instead he looks almost a little proud. “Oh I know you aren’t glass, and this isn’t a question of whether or not you can handle something. Its more making sure you don’t need to, not when you’re clearly still waiting for the shoe to drop. After that you can be fair game if you really want it,” he says, lips twitching up a little.

Peter loses that sharp edge of feeling he’d had and relaxes. “Thank you,” he says softly, “you don’t need to do any of that.”

Tony shakes his head though, “basic care, its not an issue and its always kind of a funny test of self control. You don’t understand Italian though, so I do most of my venting that way.”

So Peter has noticed. “I have a hard time reconciling this with someone who’s supposedly dangerous,” he says, blurting it out accidentally.

Tony doesn’t take offense to it, he just looks Peter up and down. “People aren’t as simple as we like to think and being capable of murder doesn’t make me incapable of not being a dick. I wouldn’t hurt you, I don’t have reason to, but I’m known as the Merchant of Death for a reason.”

Merchant of Death, he’s heard that before but he can’t remember where. Doesn’t matter know because he can figure out what that means at least in part. “Why do you keep doing that, reminding me that you’re like... dangerous or whatever?”

“Because I don’t want you to be surprised,” Tony tells him. “Its a lot easier to make sure that doesn’t happen if you know what to expect.”

“Why does that matter to you though?” It shouldn’t, Peter isn’t his responsibility and he’s surprisingly caring for someone who has no reason to be. Peter has had friends that went less out of their way to accommodate for him than Tony has with zero connection to him.

“People fear me, but that doesn’t always mean that they won’t test me. Apparently Beck didn’t even tell you how he made his money and that’s a bad idea, keeping someone in the dark like that. God knows what would have happened to you if I had more bad intentions than screwing with your ex’s life.”

Peter frowns again because its hard, figuring out what the hell is going on in Tony’s head. “So you’re being honest with me in case what, someone else kidnaps me? Because that seems unlikely.” What are the chances he’d be kidnapped by another mob? He didn’t even know he was affiliated with the first one in any way so it seems a bit much to be kidnapped by a third.

“Or worse, yes. And its not as unlikely as you think, none of us are exactly pleasant to piss off and I’ve got an impressive talent for pissing people off. Everyone who’s around me is a target but you’re the only one who refuses to carry a gun.” Right, Peter had forgot about that. He hadn’t anticipated reacting so strongly but given the circumstances he thinks his meltdown wasn’t as bad as it could have been and Tony dropped the idea of him carrying around a gun for protection real quick.

“My uncle Ben got shot and killed in a robbery gone wrong when I was a teenager,” Peter says. “And I didn’t like guns before that either. Or anything lethal.” Expect Quent, if Tony’s hinting is to be believed but then he’s always had a thing for bad boys. Women? His taste is normal and results in pretty good relationships in his experience. Men? He seemingly can’t pick them any worse than he has previously and Quent is a whole new level of garbage for him.

Tony looks him over for a moment, “you should learn some self defense though, if for no other reason than it being generally useful. Natasha would probably be happy to teach you.”

Peter wrinkles his nose, “can I get someone less terrifying?”

He doesn’t expect it when Tony cracks up laughing but it looks a lot nicer on him than the air of seriousness that usually taints his presence. “She might be the least scary we’ve got,” he tells Peter and starts laughing harder at whatever face he’s making.

“If that’s the least scary you’ve got I feel so bad for anyone who tries to fuck with you.”

Peter doesn’t take to self defense well and Natasha clearly doesn’t know what to do with that, but that makes it kind of fun to watch. “None of this is difficult, what is so confusing to you that you?” she asks Peter, who is on the floor breathing hard.

“Nothing, he just doesn’t want to hurt you,” Bucky says from the other side of the room where he’s watching. Tony raises an eyebrow but Bucky only shrugs.

Natasha rolls her eyes at Peter, “trust me, there’s no way you can do any real damage to me. First of all you’re weak, second of all you have almost no skills, and third, I have a high pain tolerance anyway. Get up and stop worrying about doing damage you can’t even do,” Natasha tells him.

Its easy to see Peter isn’t suited to this, at least not the way Natasha is teaching it. “Just give him a basic lesson in self defense moves, none lethal ways for him to buy himself enough time to get out of a given situation,” Tony tells her. “He’ll be resistant to learning much else.” Peter has made it clear he has a distaste for hurting people in any manner but especially the kind of brutal manner Natasha is used to and desensitized from.

“You can get out of a situation faster if you stab them,” Natasha tells Peter specifically and he does that thing that he does sometimes when he’s reminded that he’s in an environment that’s more violent than he agrees with.

He gives Natasha an unimpressed look with a surprising amount of steely strength in his gaze. “I’m not stabbing people because you think that’s the only way to get anything done,” he snaps. His response clearly comes as a surprise to Natasha and Bucky but not so much to Tony. He’d been that immediately brave off the bat with him and he didn’t lose his confidence when he found out who he was. Peter has a quiet kind of strength that Tony admires and Natasha doesn’t know what to do with given that people don’t often test her. She’s unnerving at the very least, its why Tony chose her specifically to be his lead enforcer. That, and people are stupid enough to underestimate her because she’s a woman.

Natasha looks him over for a long moment, “alright, then.”

For the next hour Natasha does a slightly better job teaching Peter how to break holds and other simple self defense moves that he picks up on a little faster than how to properly maim someone. Peter doesn’t like it any, that much is obvious, but he does pay attention to Natasha and does his best to pick up what she’s trying to teach at least until Natasha gets bored enough to dismiss him.

“What, don’t like that this one didn’t immediately think he could take you out?” Tony asks her as she walks over. Across the room Bucky snorts and laughs probably because he’s seen people try and fail about a million times. Hell, at this point he’s failed at it a million times too. He might have trained her but she’s better at killing people than he is, try as he might. Probably because he actually likes people and seems to feel the fallout of having killed someone in a way Natasha doesn’t. Tony isn’t sure if she’s good at compartmentalizing or if she actually doesn’t feel anything about it and he doesn’t care either, her skills suit him.

Her lips quirk up a bit at the corners and she shakes her head. “No, actually. Its refreshing to have someone in here who immediately knows I can kick his ass and have something to teach. I approve,” she tells him.

Tony frowns, “what?”

“Of Peter, I approve. We all do, but Rhodey seems to think you’ll listen to me the best for whatever reason. I think you’d listen to him but what do I know, I’m only your sister,” she mumbles, shaking her head and walking off.

“Not that you admit that out loud often,” Tony calls after her in a teasing manner.

“Like you admit you’re related to Howard often either, you should understand,” Natasha tells him, grinning at him as she leaves the room.

“God, she’s fucking unsettling when she smiles,” Bucky says, coming up beside him.

Tony looks him over and he’s got that stupid lovestruck look on his face like he always does. Tony rolls his eyes, “just ask her out, god. What the fuck are you waiting for, Judgement Day?”

“You don’t even believe in God,” Bucky points out.

“Yeah, exactly. You’re waiting for a moment that’s never going to come so make your own moment. And what’s this about approving of Peter?”

Peter doesn’t expect the clothes, or the shoes, or anything else Tony must have done research on to get right. Everything is exactly the kind of thing he would have picked up for himself if he had the chance and its sweet, if a little unnerving at the same time.

“This is cute,” Natasha says, picking up a dress as she walks in without bothering to knock. He’s learned that she’s a bit of a pest when she likes people, but it takes her a lot of time to warm up to them.

“I can’t imagine you wearing a dress,” he tells her. All he’s seen her in is all black outfits that looked a bit like she was ready to rob someone and after mentioning her style choices to her once he discovered they were purposeful, and also a bit of a joke. She’s got a weird sense of humor but Peter can deal with that.

“I wear dresses all the time, you just don’t see me in them,” she tells Peter, grinning. “You should wear this later,” she adds, handing him the dress.

He takes it, frowning. “O...kay? Am I supposed to be going somewhere?”

She nods, “yes, on a date with Tony because he’s never going to ask you and we’re all tired of waiting around.” Peter must look more confused and it makes Natasha roll her eyes. “Look, normally I stay out of anything that isn’t a stabbing but the fact that you guys are a good match is clear and I doubt another good match for Tony is going to just show up. He’s difficult to get along with.”

Peter has never found that to be true. “I don’t see how he’s even still single. I mean yeah, maybe the guy runs a mob and he’s like... a little overdramatic and whatever but he’s really generous.”

Natasha laughs, “no, he’s not. He’s mean, cruel, sometimes even delights in it, and generally speaking an arrogant asshole. Usually you have to know him to get past all that but its like you skipped that and went straight to part where you find out he has personality traits that aren’t threatening to kill someone. And he listens to you.”

She says that like its important but Tony listens to everyone. “I don’t see why you didn’t try and get him and Rhodey together if that was a concern.” Rhodey knows him better than anyone, that much is clear so it seems to Peter that he’d be a better choice.

Judging from the look on Natasha’s face its not as good an idea as he thought it was. “He’s married to Pepper. We need to work on your observation skills if you didn’t notice the ring. Its not exactly like its hard to see,” she says. Now that Peter thinks about it he had noticed a silver ring, but hadn’t clued in to the fact that it was on his ring finger. Maybe Natasha has a point about his observation skills.

“What makes you think Tony even has an interest?” He knows he’s an unusual case but he’s not a total dunce in the observation department so he knows its because he’s got this thing with domestic violence, has no patience for it. He’s not so sure his... appreciation goes beyond that.

“You tell him ‘no.’ Trust me there’s nothing Tony values more than people who aren’t afraid of him. Even if he’s acted like a total Bond villain in an attempt to seem all dangerous or whatever. You should know that I’m actually the dangerous one, Tony’s like a grumpy puppy. He seems mean but he actually just wants a treat,” Natasha says, grinning.

Bucky is right, it is unnerving when she smiles. “What makes you think I’m interested?”

“The fact that you took this long to ask that,” she points out.

Alright, he’ll give her that. So he smiles a little, sitting on the edge of his bed, dress still in hand. “He does kind of act like a Bond villain. You know people are afraid of him because no one points it out,” he says, snickering.

Natasha snorts and starts laughing and just like that its like he’s like he’s broken through some kind of barrier that makes Natasha chatter and a hell of a lot weirder, but not in a bad way. Peter finds her less intimidating when she’s not staring through him like she can see his thoughts, and he also finds he likes her sense of humor when he’s not just getting bits and pieces of it.

“You don’t think this is too soon, do you?” he asks her as she leaves.

She shrugs, “probably, but the good news is that Tony has a bad habit of being one hundred percent in or one hundred percent out, he doesn’t do middle ground well. So if you let him, he’ll be more than devoted to you and you know what that looks like,” she says.

Yeah, he does so he nods. “Okay.”

#starker #tony stark x peter parker #mob au #starker mob au

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ptrparkcrs · 4 years ago

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& you say rise above (self-para)

summary: peter meets an old friend in an unexpected place and faces dire consequences word count: 3002 trigger warnings: violence, injury, death mention, spider-man cops (completely useless, but existent)

It was ten seventeen PM. He had been at work late, probably too late, troubleshooting something small and nitpicky that even he barely understood. At least there was always food somewhere in the building, and FRIDAY liked him enough to not yell at him when he stole a second donut, or a third, or when he ordered an extra-large pizza on Tony Stark’s credit card. As long as he didn’t leave his workspace too greasy and saved some leftovers for Tony, he’d probably be fine.

Whatever it was he had been supposed to be working on, clean energy or artificial intelligence or consumer goods or fancy sunglasses, it probably wasn’t supposed to have been reconstructing the lenses of Spider-Man’s mask to better conform to his facial expressions, but Peter had had to do some repairs after Gabby had torn the thing to shreds. If Tony caught him sewing on the clock, what was he going to do? Let Spider-Man go without a mask? Put Peter’s life at risk? No, he’d be fine. He’d been too antsy to focus on real work, his ribs still healing, his face still a little tender. He’d needed a concrete physical distraction and the satisfaction of knowing he was fixing something.

(He’d be totally fine in a day or two; he was almost there, but Gabby had done a pretty solid number on him. Broken ribs, a black eye, scabs where the pavement had rubbed his chin raw, the whole shebang. He told everyone it was a bike accident, even though he didn’t own a bike, because nearly beaten to death by a chemically ramped-up teenager wasn’t something that could realistically have happened to completely normal, non-superhero guy Peter Parker. In retrospect, he should have said he’d crashed his skateboard into a taxi again, which he had done more than once in high school, but hindsight was 20/20.)

Still, the time spent on the mask during the day had meant a pile of unfinished work, which had meant staying at the tower later. Peter knew that, as best as he’d tried not to be, he was a nepotism hire. He’d waltzed into Stark industries with little training and few qualifications, and he was determined to prove that he was just as suited to be here as anyone else. Yeah, he’d had the internship, but he’d gotten that through sheer dumb luck and minor internet fame, and he and Tony both knew it had been a cover, anyway. Yeah, he had a college degree, but most of his actual work experience had been mediocre photography for a vaguely predatory, second-rate newspaper. He’d been a child prodigy, sure, but last he’d checked most child prodigies peaked sometime around high school, and building the Spider-Man suit for personal gain wasn’t about to go on his resume. He knew any interview process he’d gone through had been performative; he knew that the job had been his no matter what, so long as he hadn’t actually blown up the company. He didn’t want Tony to regret his decision, and he really did want to keep his job. That meant actually doing his work, even if he did have to stay long past dark.

So he’d finally finished—the work and the mask—and headed home to find Sandwich demanding a second dinner and a walk. Fine. Okay. He could do that.

“All you’ve got going for you is your body, bud,” he said. “Don’t know why you’re so determined to ruin that.” Sandwich was beautiful, in a scraggly rescue dog kind of way (Aunt May said he looked like the dog from Annie, which was probably a compliment), but he was also dumb as a rock. He put a few treats in the bowl anyway and went to find a leash.

As he dug through the storage cube where he was sure he’d left the good collar, Peter heard sirens. They sounded close, maybe a few blocks away, and getting closer. His police scanner was on his nightstand, but there wasn’t time to check. Sirens were as good a cue as any.

“I’ll be back soon,” he told Sandwich, as he grabbed his suit from the pile on the floor, pulled it on, and headed towards the window. “We’ll walk later. Promise. Please don’t eat the couch again while I’m gone.”

The dog grunted and went back to eating.

&&&

Web swinging was hard today. His body groaned with every movement, resisting the stress of his acrobatics. Still healing. He hadn’t realized she’d gotten him quite that badly; he’d been up against way worse than a single teenage girl, but he hadn’t had anyone try so determinedly to kill him from such close range in a long time--not since Norman, or maybe Harry, but that had felt a little more reluctant. Fine, he’d go easy on the somersaults.

So long as whatever was up there wasn’t a troupe of murderous acrobats, he’d probably be okay. At least the new mask was holding up well.

What was up ahead, three or five or seven or twenty-six blocks from his apartment, he’d lost count, was—lights. Sirens. Yelling. A strange, echoing thump-thump. Shit. He dropped himself onto a rooftop to survey the scene, his ribs only groaning a little bit as he landed in a crouch. A bank, long closed for the night, its windows smashed. A row of police cars, like a barricade. Coming in from the north, fire trucks, an ambulance. A small throng of bystanders, their phones out, edging around the scene. A trail of broken asphalt running away in the opposite direction.

And in the middle of it all, a figure.

A man, maybe. In a long jacket, something more than the night obscuring his face. He—if it was a he—didn’t seem very big, but he hovered several feet above the ground, supported by what appeared to be a pair of giant robotic arms. Another pair spread wide into the night air, lashing at anyone who tried to approach.

Peter was pretty sure he’d seen those arms before, or something very like them. Mostly in sketches, then once or twice in a lab in college, never in use, just propped up safely against the back wall. They help my dexterity, Peter. More precise.

But that had been in a secure research lab up at Columbia, where the arms had helped a man’s clumsy hands study nuclear physics at an atomic scale, not ravage a bank on the Lower East Side. Stolen tech, maybe? A copycat? Convergent evolution, two people independently building the same machine at the same time? But what were the odds of that, really? These were robotic arms, not clean energy or self-driving cars. It was too niche. Who was this man, and what could he want?

He swung down, closer, landing on the hood of a police car. The officer standing next to it looked down at Peter and sighed.

“Hey, Spider-Man,” he said. “You can go home. We’ve got this.”

Peter tethered himself to a lamppost closer to the bank and leapt off the hood, angry at his stupid fragile body keeping him from somersaulting away for maximum dramatic effect. “That’s what you always say, Bill.”

“It’s David.”

“I really don’t care.”

He landed on the lamppost, but just barely. The many-armed man had seen him coming and was getting closer, one of his robotic limbs swiping at Peter’s perch. Peter leaped off before the pole could crash down and rolled to the ground, where he finally got a good look at his assailant.

He hadn’t imagined it. He knew those arms.

“Doctor Oc—"

Doctor Octavius. His thesis advisor. A kind, absentminded, academic type, the brand who left their office littered with sticky notes to remember to buy milk, who replied to emails four days late at two in the morning. He’d called Peter a genius kid, said he’d had what it takes to save the world. Because that’s what scientists do, Peter. We change things. We fix them. We make them better. We help the people who can’t help themselves—you get that, don’t you?

Oh, he got it.

Doc was wearing glasses, and his jovial smile had twisted into a sneer, but it was unmistakably him. He lowered himself to the ground, all four metal arms swirling around him.“Oh, great,” he said. “It’s the bug boy. What, couldn’t send any of the real superheroes to stop me? Daddy too busy arresting innocent people?”

With all due respect, Peter thought, what the fuck? Sure, he wasn’t an Enforcer, but his old professor going on a crime spree with a set of weaponized robot arms, probably having some sort of episode, called for enforcement.

He lifted himself off the ground slowly. His body was already screaming for a break, and they were barely getting started. “Look, dude, I respect the whole eight-legs thing, but you don’t gotta be so literal about it. It’s kinda—what’s the word? Tacky.”

Doc lunged at him; Peter dodged. “Wait, no,” he continued. “Kitschy. Campy. Gaudy.” Another swipe, another dodge. “No, I was right the first time. Tacky, it’s tacky.”

The next swipe came from behind him, and Peter jumped out of the way just in time. “What do you even want, Doc? For a guy in tights to teach you that robbing banks and taking hostages is wrong? Congrats, you got it!” He didn’t know if there were hostages; he’d been too stunned by Otto to check, he just assumed there were. There were almost always hostages when the guys in costumes got involved.

“How do you know my name?” Octavius growled.

Yep, there were hostages.

“I dunno, it was just a vibe. You kind of look like my dentist.” And the man who shaped my college career, but same thing.

Most nights he could go on like this forever. Banter, dodge, punch, jump, repeat. Talk him into submission, until he was too worn down by Peter’s endless punchlines to punch back. Tonight, he was tired. He was injured. He had a dog at home waiting for a walk. This needed to be quick—rescue the hostages, get Otto taken in and looked after. (Kindly, he hoped; the Otto Octavius he knew was a good man, and was probably in there somewhere, scared and confused.) In the morning, maybe Peter Parker could call to innocently, coincidentally check in on his old mentor and get the full story.

“You’re a nuisance, Spider-Man. You know that, don’t you?”

“So it said on my report cards.”

Octavius stepped closer, and Peter webbed one of his metal legs to the ground, but he kept swiping. In his real arms, the human ones, Peter could see a briefcase, presumably full of the stolen money or techno-weapons for looting safety deposit boxes. So he already had what he wanted, but still the hostages, still the rampage, still the crazed look behind those horrible dark goggles. Peter could deal with him, the cops could free the hostages, they’d be fine, this was fine, everything was going to be fine.

But how had this happened—why had this happened? Did he poison everyone he touched? Ben, Gwen, Norman, even Harry, all either dead or driven mad by his proximity. Who next? Tony? May? Steph? MJ? His high school science teacher? His next-door neighbors?

You ruin everything, Peter Parker. They’re safer if you don’t love them, if they don’t love you. You’re a time bomb. A nuclear blast. Look at what you do to them. What you’ve done. You’re not worth it.

His spider sense alerting him to an incoming blow put a pause on the cycle of self-loathing. He couldn’t dodge in time, and an angry fist landed hard against his face. He groaned, and he tasted the blood from his (now probably broken) nose as it dripped into his mouth. “What do you want, Otto?” he spat.

Shit.

“Doctor” he could get away with as a joke, but how would Spider-Man know Doctor Octavius’s first name? He wouldn’t, that’s how. Not unless they knew each other in real life, civilian life, faces uncovered and feet on the ground. Peter, you idiot. His cover, which he had so carefully maintained for the past eight years, was about a minute from being blown by an academic in octopus cosplay.

This shouldn’t have been happening. He was a professional, he was good at this. He had learned from his past, he was doing better, and these were amateur mistakes. He was off his game, that’s what this was. He was exhausted, injured, overworked, stunned by the improbability of it all. His whole life was improbable; he should have known to expect this kind of thing by now, but he wasn’t convinced he wasn’t living out some middle schooler’s sadistic Mad Libs. He still had time to fix this.

Otto said nothing; he just laughed.

Peter tried to launch himself in the air for a swing and a kick, but his reflexes were slowing, his injuries worsening. Whatever healing he’d done had been set back several days, and every movement was more labored than the last. Before he could evade, the arms, all of them now free of webbing, wrapped themselves around him and pulled him in. Peter hissed in response, his exhalation short and shallow, doing his best to suppress a yelp.

“Oh, come on. Personal space, dude,” he said, and the top left arm pinched his wrists together in response. He was now being held fast in evil, sentient handcuffs, no hopes of swinging away in sight. Nothing this stupid would have happened to Tony; Tony would have had lasers and lights and taken out this guy in minutes. Hell, he could have called in the Iron Legion for backup if he’d wanted, but a single man didn’t deserve it. Peter was a disappointment, again. This should have been so easy, and yet.

And yet.

Peter wasn’t Tony Stark.

“Otto,” growled Octavius.

Peter said nothing.

“Why did you call me that?”

This time, Peter squirmed. He was being held tightly, so tightly. His wrists were raw, his chest burning, and at some point, he had started to bleed. Work was going to have to buy bike accident twice this week. ”I told you. You look like my dentist. His name’s Otto. It was a lucky guess.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe you.”

His head spun and his mouth tasted like iron and asphalt as the world tunneled in around the edges of his vision. His hands still tied, he tried to gain some leverage with a kick, but the other arms squeezed even tighter until he was sure he felt a crunch. Great. This was it, this was how he died. Sometime around midnight outside a random bank because his college thesis advisor had taken up a life of crime and he’d been too weak and injured to do anything about it. Yeah, that tracked.

“Who are you, Spider-Man?”

Peter couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could only steel himself as his spider sense turned on high alert. Imminent danger, big time. Yeah, he got it. With the human hand not holding the briefcase, Otto pulled the mask from his head.

And immediately dropped him, limp and winded and battered, to the ground.

Peter’s bare skin was so cold, the streetlights so bright, every sound and smell heightened without the mask.

Otto’s face had cleared with recognition, and his sneer fell away. “Peter?”

Peter groaned. Then he peeled himself off the ground and launched a flurry of web bombs until Otto was wrapped tightly all over. It wouldn’t hold long, but it would have to hold long enough to get him taken safely into custody. Locked up in the Raft for ten to life, a brilliant man’s work cut short by his own creation. (Was it too soon to make Frankenstein jokes?) But Peter couldn’t think about the tragedy of it yet. He had to keep moving.

He kept his head down until he found the mask by Otto’s feet. His hands were shaking, and it took impossibly long to fit it back over his head. It was twisted or too small or made for someone else entirely, bunching around his neck and pulling uncomfortably against his swollen face. And then he stood up, wobbly and wheezing, and faced the officers who were pulling the hostages from the building. Maybe they’d been inside. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. Maybe it was okay.

“You’ve got this from here, Bill,” he said, and, with every ounce of willpower he had left, he swung away on shaky arms to pick up his dog, call Aunt May, and hide in his childhood bedroom for the rest of his life.

&&&

The officers may not have seen him, but there had been bystanders. There are always bystanders, just like there are always hostages. They have cameras. They have social media. They flock to danger, to drama, to sensationalism. They post suffering for the likes and the retweets and the fleeting moments of fame. A Spider-Man sighting was pretty commonplace--novel, but not extraordinary. But this tableau, a hero in crisis, an identity revealed, that was media gold. This was a millennial icon’s Pyrrhic victory. This was a new weak spot in the Accords. And under all that bravado, he was just a scared little boy. They didn't recognize him (there was at least one audible boo when someone realized that Spider-Man was just another pasty white boy), but they’d seen him, and that was enough.

The responsible thing would have been to keep his secret, to respect the sanctity of what had happened here tonight. But the bystanders are never responsible.

While all the others had been texting and tweeting and snapping and streaming, at least one had had the wherewithal to take a picture with one of their fancy, enormous, three-lensed phone cameras and capture Spider-Man unmasked, clear as day, battered and bloody but distinctly him, and send it straight to the Daily Bugle.

(The ball’s in your court now, Jameson.)

#( self-para )#( & you say rise above )#tw: injury #tw: violence #tw: death mention #( yeah i fucked with my own canon for dramatic effect sue me )

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thebaronmunchausen · 5 years ago

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Like most of you writers, I got my start as a writer in the campus press, first in high school, then in college. And, like most of my contemporaries I dreamed of a career in journalism—writing for the national newspapers and magazines, since, in those days, there was only print journalism. Creative writing programs, and even creative writing courses didn’t exist.

UST, my alma mater, offered a degree in Journalism (with course offerings which included the new fields of Advertising and Public Relations). In the same faculty (the Faculty of Philosophy & Letters, or Philets), which taught Journalism, it also offered a Bachelor of Philosophy (with course offerings which included many Literature subjects). I chose Philosophy even if I had no idea what profession a degree in Philosophy prepared one for, mainly because I wanted to take all those Literature courses.

In high school, while writing for and eventually editing The Paulinian, I began to contribute feature articles to several national magazines (all unfortunately short-lived). As a sophomore in college, while writing for and eventually editing The Varsitarian, I wrote a weekly column in the youth section of the “Manila Chronicle”; and as a senior, I became Editor of the youth section of the “Weekly Graphic”. So, when I graduated from college, I considered myself a professional journalist.

But what I really wanted to be was a writer of short stories, and, of course, to win a Palanca. This didn’t come easily to me. It was essays that I wrote, and the Palanca Awards then did not yet include the essay category. My best friend had already won a Palanca for her poetry while still an undergraduate. But I hadn’t even published a story! And when she was invited to be part of the first Writers’ Workshop in Silliman, and I wasn’t, I was devastated.

When my first short story was published, I was 25, married and a mother. When I won my first Palanca, my husband had accepted a job with UNICEF, and we were living in Beirut. The news got to me in a letter from my mother, sent via diplomatic pouch by UNICEF in Manila. Tony was out of the country, and my oldest daughter was in school. So the only one I could share my big news with was my second daughter, Anna, who was around 4 years old. I said to her: “Anna, guess what, I won a prize for my story—I got 3rd prize.” She thought about that for a moment, and then, she said, “Gee, Ma, you have to try harder next time.”

I have another favorite Palanca memory. It happened in this very room on Palanca Night. I was here with my husband, Tony. Either he or I had served as judge for one of the categories. A young man came up to greet us—it was the late Luis Katigbak, still an undergraduate in the UP’s Creative Writing Program then. He looked rather self -conscious in his dark suit. I had only ever seen him in t-shirts and jeans, so I almost didn’t recognize him. We congratulated him for his prize, and he shook our hands, gave us a wide smile, and a little bow. After he had left us, Tony said to me, “That’s the look and the swagger of a writer who has just won his first Palanca. Recognize it?”

And every Palanca night since, I have seen that look and that swagger in some of the young writers in attendance. But now and again, I wonder: how long will this last? The question I’m asking is not long will the Palanca Awards last, but how long will writers keep on wanting and trying to produce the kind of writing that wins a Palanca award?

Why am I asking this question? We all know that in the different branches of the country’s biggest bookstore chain, what few shelves are devoted to books are not occupied by literary titles written by Filipino writers. Of course, these days, the question that follows naturally on that one is: but what do we mean by that term “literary title”?

A few months ago, at a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Book Development Association of the Philippines (BDAP), I heard another term used for the first time: “hard literature.” I learned that, in the publishing world, the term has replaced the earlier term, “serious literature.” As a writer, and a reader, my own definition of “serious literature” is literature that is carefully crafted, literature that seeks to explore ideas which the writer feels strongly about, literature that is written, not just to share experiences, but to offer insights about its subject. In other words, literature which has a chance of winning a Palanca award.

But at that meeting I am referring to, the speaker (himself a very successful local publisher, who happens to be here tonight, and who has given me permission to mention his name—Mr. Jun Matias of Precious Pages and Lampara) made a pitch for Filipino publishers to be more open—not just to “hard literature”—but to all forms writing. There is so much of it being produced now, he said, so many young people wanting to share their stories, and so many people wanting to read them, that publishers who choose to continue to ignore it, or “judge” it—by which he meant, look down on it—run the risk of being left behind. This made me sit up.

Jun then showed us a brief video of one of his authors—a Wattpad writer—arriving for a “meetup.” This writer’s fans were so numerous that they had to open another room to accommodate them. When she arrived, she was received like a rock star—with screams and shrieks and wild applause. And she looked the part too—young and slim with straight long hair, her face partly hidden by huge shades.

Another publisher later told me that her company has been in an arrangement with Wattpad since 2014, to turn selected Wattpad novels into print novels. One of these, “She’s Dating a Gangster” by Bianca Bernardino became, not just an National Bookstore bestseller, but the first Wattpad novel to be turned into a movie (by Star Cinema, with Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla in the lead roles).

This publisher also informed me that their most popular writer, Jonaxx, is so big that the company has created an imprint just for her. Her real name is Jonah Mae Panen Pacala; she’s 28 years old and a pre-school teacher from Cagayan de Oro. According to her fan page she is the first Filipina Wattpad author to gain 1 million followers. Last year, that figure went up to 2.7M+. And her fans are so fiercely devoted to her that they object to her novels’ being changed in any way, including correcting grammar and syntax. “Mapapansin Kaya?” the first of her books to be published, had a print run of 40,000. Seven of her books have been published so far. Since she joined Wattpad in 2012, she has published 32 novels. (That was a year ago. Perhaps she has since produced more.)

Actually, my initial reaction to the Wattpad phenomenon when I first heard of it was astonishment. I had no idea that so many people wanted to write fiction. But why not? Looking back on my own teen years… didn’t I, too, want to write stories?

I began writing stories because I loved reading them. I’m talking about novels like “Little Women” and “Anne of Green Gables” and “Daddy Long Legs;” and later, the Nancy Drew series and the Beverly Gray series—what today are called “YA novels.” My world was a small one. My parents were conservative and kept me at home most of the time. To use a hoary cliché, reading books opened doors for me, doors into other, larger, worlds.

When I first tried to write stories, I was a pre-teen. I simply wanted to imitate the stories I had read. The heroines in those stories had adventures; they fell in love. And they wanted to be writers! They became my role models. My writing—like my reading—was not so much for self-expression or sharing with others. It was a form of escape, an escape from a life I considered boring and humdrum.

But I outgrew those stories. There was something predictable in their plots, and in their characters, principally, the little orphan girl, neglected and deprived of love, but gifted with a vivid imagination. After various mishaps, some painful, sone hilarious, she transforms into a strong-minded, large-hearted, confident, accomplished, and lovely young woman; and of course finds a young man worthy of her.

So, I moved on to Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, to Mark Twain and Harper Lee and Charles Dickens. I discovered Nick Joaquin and Kerima Polotan and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. I realized I was no longer reading just for escape. Without fully realizing what I was looking for, I just knew I was looking for something else, for something more.

My writing began to change as well. I showed my new essays and stories to my English teachers and the school paper adviser. When they edited these, or wrote comments on the margins, I did not take this as an infringement on my freedom. Neither did any of my classmates, by the way. We took it as an effort to help us become better writers. And we were grateful. (Which is I find it difficult to understand why, today, some beginning writers are averse to being edited.)

Anyway, this whole process simply meant that I was growing up as a person. And that I was developing as a writer.

Today, I ask myself: if the Net had existed when I was a teen-ager, and had it been possible to post my scribblings on an app like Wattpad, without the benefit of comments or suggestions from teachers or more experienced writers; had I acquired a huge following, and my stories been turned into printed books, which would sell copies in the hundreds of thousands… if these things had happened to me, would I have chosen to stop writing girlish romances, and moved on to other subjects, and other ways of writing? What would have been the reason for doing so?

It has occurred to me that this may well be the situation some of the Wattpad writers find themselves in. They’re already successful. What else do they need to do? In particular, why do they need to go to college and study writing?

Actually, I know people—some of them, writers—who believe that one does not have to get a degree in creative writing to become a writer. And that is certainly true. National Artists Nick Joaquin, NVM Gonzalez, Francisco Arcellana didn’t have degrees in Creative Writing. National Artists Bienvnido Lumbera, Virgilio Almario, and Frankie Sionil Jose don’t have degrees in creative writing. And, as I said earlier, neither do I.

The establishment of Creative Writing as an academic discipline is relatively new (unlike the B.A. in Fine Arts and the B.A. in Music, which have been around for more than a century). But I’m not quite sure why anyone would discourage young writers from wanting to get degrees in creative writing.

The myth seems to be that a formal education in writing will “destroy” your natural, instinctive talent. And, perhaps, there ARE some teachers out there whose methods may, in fact, have a negative effect on their students. But doesn’t this happen in all fields, be they the arts, the natural sciences, or the social sciences? There are good teachers and bad teachers; there are teachers whom some students find inspiring while others find them boring.

I tell my students that, at some point, they should become pro-active and choose the mentor they feel is the best suited to their own temperaments, someone they admire and trust and feel they can work with. Such a mentor cannot harm them; in fact, he or she, is more likely to be a great help to them.

I’ve said this often before: writing is a profession like any other. One trains to become a professional. It is accepted as natural that people in the other arts, like painting or sculpture should wish to enroll in a College of Fine Arts, and musicians should wish to enter a Conservatory of Music. And, certainly in the visual arts and in music, the more highly skilled you are, the bigger your chances of selling your works via the great international auction houses or doing solo performances to the accompaniment of great symphony orchestras. Why should it be any different for literature?

Of course writers who don’t want to get a university education don’t have to get it. But if they’re serious about making writing their career—if they wish to be professional writers—they need some form of training, even if it be self-training. All training requires hard work, but this kind of training—self-training—even more so.

One learns any skill, first, by imitating those who know how to do it. Even child prodigies—like Tiger Woods, who was playing golf when he was two years old—took golf lessons, from his father, first of all. Even gifted musicians—like the band Queen and its brilliant front man Freddie Mercury—have acknowledged the influence on their work of other rock stars, whom they respected, and whose music they spent time studying: Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix.

When the UST Center for Creative Writing invited Ely Buendia to speak at a forum on song writing, I asked him what he thought had led to the Eraser Heads’ great success. He said he didn’t know, but he also told me that he had admired many other musicians, had studied them, and tried to incorporate those influences into his music. He mentioned, in particular, Elvis Presley (who, in turn, had been influenced by African American blues, southern country music, and gospel music). And he mentioned our own folk songs, which he said he had also studied.

To return to what I was saying earlier: what would be the incentive of the phenomenally popular and commercially successful Wattpad writer to raise the level of her writing skills, and take on concerns larger than first love or first heartbreak?

Actually, I know someone who has done just that. Perhaps some of you will recognize the name Charmaine M. Lasar. She’s a 20-year-old Wattpad writer, who won the Carlos Palanca award for the novel in Filipino in 2015. She has been quoted to the effect that she joined the Palanca literary contest because she “wanted to refute the idea that only garbage comes out of Wattpad.” But she also added that, in writing her 35,000-word novel, Toto-O, which she claims to have written in just one month, she “consciously deviated from her Wattpad writing style, which is looser and more carefree,” and opted to write something that was “medyo malalim” in terms of language.” Also, its plot has nothing to do with young love or heartbreak.

The novel was published in 2016 by JumpMedia. And last year, Maine was accepted by the UP Institute of Creative Writing as a writing fellow for its National Writers Workshop. I met her there, and she told me she was considering saving up to enroll for a Creative Writing degree. I salute her, and I salute the Palanca Awards for giving her the recognition she earned.

Her crossover is proof that the two worlds—the world of pop fiction and the world of hard literature—are not mutually exclusive.

Back in 1999, after retiring from government service, my husband (who, in one of his earlier incarnations, had also been a poet, an essayist , and a journalist), set up a small publishing company that he ran pretty much by himself. He had in mind two lines: information books, and literature. But when he found out how small the print run of most literary titles was, he was shocked. Why, he asked me, would I go to all that trouble and use up all that time to write a novel or a collection of short stories or essays, if only a thousand people were going to read me?

He was determined to publish books that would appeal to larger audiences, and he decided that the way to do that was to produce short, light, nonfiction books, targetting readers in their 20s and 30s; books which would be accessible, without losing their literary quality. Many of the writers he published were first-time authors, like Vlad Gonzalez, Carljoe Javier, Rica Bolipata Santos; but he also published writers who already had something of a name, like Marivi Soliven Blanco, and Luis Katigbak; and award-winning writers like Butch Dalisay, Vince Groyon, and Chris Martinez. The award winners were not averse to trying their hand at writing that would have a more popular appeal.

Milflores books did well in terms of sales. A few did exceptionally well. And some of the Miflores books also won awards, like Rica Bolipata Santos’ “Love, Desire, Children, Etc.,” which won the Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award.

Today, we have Visprint Publishing, which is doing something similar, but on a much larger scale. Some of the writers whom Nida Ramirez publishes are actually academics, like Chuckberry Pascual, Joselito Delos Reyes, and John Jack Wigley. All three have written “hard literature.” All have won awards for their writing. But Nida has chosen to publish their lighter work. Visprint books are small, inexpensive, light, humorous. Nida has also published the speculative fiction of Eliza Victoria and the graphic fiction of Manix Abrera. Actually, none of Visprint’s titles are sleepers. And some have won literary awards too. In fact, in 2015, Visprint received a National Book Award as Publisher of the Year, a prize which goes to the publisher with the biggest number of winning titles for that year.

So Visprint would seem to represent the happy bridge between the commercially successful book and the artistically lauded book, proving, yet again, that these are not incompatible.

In that sense, this is actually a very exciting time for writers. There have never been so many choices available, including what would have been mind-boggling for me and my contemporaries: self-publishing online.

Before making those choices, though, writers need to figure out a few things. First, what kind of books do they want to write? Second, what kind of writers do they want to be, or think they can be? Third, do they mainly want to entertain readers, or to challenge them intellectually, or to influence them politically? Do they want to make as much money as they can? Or do they want to write in the best way they know how? Or do they want to try and do both? And, finally, how do they want their books distributed—by commercial publishers? by academic publishing houses? by themselves, on line and in small expos?

These choices will be determined by what they believe the function of literature is in a country like ours, at the time in which we live, and what role they want to play in it as writers.

Because I am a writer who is also a publisher, I understand the need to be commercially viable. But, as an educator, I also believe that public service is an important responsibility of the publishing industry. And this means recognizing that expanding the market for books is important, not just for bigger profits, but because more educated citizens make more mature citizens—an indispensable element for any experiment in democracy, like ours.

In concrete terms, this means: on the one hand, accepting the level at which most of our reading public is—what it’s willing to read, what it enjoys reading—and, on the other hand, committing at least a part of the resources available to producing books which will upgrade standards and tastes.

Personally, I remain committed to writing in the best way I know how, no matter how small the audience for this kind of writing might be. Because I feel that literature of this sort—“hard literature,” if you will --serves its own purpose.

In another essay, I wrote about this, and perhaps you will allow me to quote from it: “Writers of all generations have tried to define that purpose. But there are periods in our history when it becomes startlingly clear. The period we live in today, in this country, is one of them—one of those periods when events, both natural and man-made, conspire to drain one of all hope that better times lie ahead."

I mentioned the book, "Sonoran Desert Summer," by John Alcock, professor of Zoology at Arizona State University, where he describes June in the desert as "the month of almost no hope for all living creatures, with the temperature at 102 degrees, rainfall at two-tenths of an inch, and a wind that has removed almost every hint of moisture from the desert world."

He calls it "a time for hanging on, enduring, letting the days pass."

And then, he describes how, suddenly… "from the boulders on the still shaded lower slope of Usery Mountain comes a song, the clear, descending trill of a canyon wren. Loud, defiant, and encouraging, it announces a survivor... (The bird) bounds from rock to rock, at perfect ease in its home in the desert.’’

Sometimes I think that this might be the reason we do it, the reason we keep on writing. This is our song, “defiant and encouraging.”

As writers, we all know that we must stay the course, most particularly in bleak times such as those that confront us now. We will not necessarily agree on what we are called upon to do, but we will do it according to our best lights. We will observe, we will record, we will protest. Above all, we will remember. And we will endure.

Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo

*Speech delivered during the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, November 8, 2019, at the Manila Peninsula, where the author was Guest of Honor and received the Dangal ng Lahi Award

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imyourliquor-youremypoison · 5 years ago

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A Girl’s Best Friend (Peter Parker x OC) - Part 7

Synopsis: Diamonds are man’s best friend- or dogs are girls’ best friends, wait… how does the saying go again?

Warnings: Family issues; Peter has a crush and it’s complicated; mention of assault; good dogs; College AU; aged up! characters; TONY STARK IS ALIVE AND WE ALL LIVE IN A HAPPY PLACE CALLED DENIAL

A/N: In this story, Peter has Tom’s dog, Tessa.The dogs in the story play a minor but key role.

Word count: 2.8k

Part 6 <<< >>> Part 8

MASTERLIST

“You know,” Emmeline started, spinning her phone on the table, legs crossed, sitting on her balcony while Spider-Man laid in a web-hammock that dangled from the balcony above hers. “You sound way younger than I thought you were.”

He folded his arms behind his neck and crossed his legs at the ankles.

“I’m not that young…” he argued, although not very convincingly. “I’m an adult, legally. I don’t magically turn into my civilian self on the stroke of midnight.”

“I know that, you hang out here way past midnight,” she laughed and stopped playing with her phone to better look at him. His gaze was still trained on the skyline, lost in his thoughts. They didn’t always talk much, but it was nice to just chat a little and share comfortable silence. “Still, I thought you were an actual adult, not just legal.”

“What does that even mean?” Spider-Man suddenly sat up, looking at her. “I’m an actual adult.”

“I don’t believe that! I think you’re my age, and I’m not even close to being a real adult,” Emmeline huffed, leaning back and crossing her arms on her chest.

“What’s a real adult, then?”

“Someone who has a job, is financially independent, is well established in life, has their shit together-“ she began to list off and Peter had to cut her off.

“Alright, alright, if that’s your criteria then I suppose I’m not an adult. Does friendly neighborhood Spider-Man not count as a job?” he still asked.

“Not if you’re not paid to do it, my friend.”

“Damn it,” he cursed under his breath. “But still, being an adult isn’t all about exterior things like money and status. It’s a feeling too.”

“Like it just dawns on you the first time you fill a tax form?” Emmeline suggested. “Because I don’t pay taxes, I don’t pay for anything, and that’s exactly my point. I’m not a functioning adult, I’m a kept woman at best,” she laughed bitterly and cracked open her beer. “Or is it when you don’t need to use a fake ID to buy beer anymore?”

As if on cue, Emmeline leaned down to grab a can of beer from the bucket of ice and threw it to him. He caught it without batting an eyelash.

“Good ones, but not what I meant. Like, what made you realize deep down, what changed inside of you?" Peter argued, rolling his eyes under his mask.

“Oh, you mean the newfound crippling anxiety regarding anything that is farther into the future than next week? Yeah, I have that now, fun times!”

“That's funny. You're funny,” Peter said, playing with his beer but not drinking it. He never drank the beers she offered, he suspected she was trying to force him to take his mask off, using politeness as an excuse.

“What about you?”

“For me it was...” He pursed her lips as if thinking really hard about it. “...back pain. Back pain and insomnia. One often deriving from the other.”

She threw her head back and laughed more frankly this time, filling Peter with an odd sense of accomplishment for making her laugh.

Peter had been here dozens of times and now he had to pretend really hard to never have been. Granted, he had never stepped in, but Emmeline’s large balcony offered a pretty great view on the inside what with the large window panels she had instead of walls. It wasn’t the safest kind of housing, he had to say. What was it with rich people and windows? They were obsessed with lighting. Then again, he would wager Emmeline did not pick this apartment for herself. He had known her for months now and he found she had rather modest tastes and never judged something by the price tag, so to speak.

With the notable exception of the leash she bought him the day they really met. He googled it and, boy, it was expensive. But another thing he had noticed was that nothing was too good for her dog – or his, actually. Tessa had gained a doting aunt of sorts the day Emmeline decided to become his friend.

It was the first time he came in through the front door though, it had to count for something. He wasn’t Spider-Man escorting a girl who had been assaulted – or Spider-Man being an over-zealous superhero who kept checking in on her even though he knew she was safe and sound. He was Peter Parker, and Emmeline Gerard had invited him to her penthouse so they could work together.

She closed the front door and they took off their shoes and coats. Tessa zoomed in and began to walk around, getting familiar with the place.

“It’s the first time you invite me here, and we’ve known each other for months,” he pointed out, good heartedly. It was a teasing comment, nothing else, and he was taken aback by her serious answer.

“This place hasn’t seen many visitors since I moved in five years ago.”

Not at all what had had expected to hear. On the contrary, he imagined having such a gigantic place to yourself would prompt anyone to try and fill it with people, with life. It must be quite lonely to be on your own in there.

“I’ve just never been comfortable with having people over.”

Emmeline shrugged, biting the inside of her cheek. She tried to play it off as a casual remark, but Peter was having none of it and decided to push her a little for answers, to see if she would shut him off or not. He was hoping they were past that and she trusted him a little now, especially after they heart to heart moment where they talked about their parents. It had been a one-time thing, but he sensed she was more relaxed around him from then on.

“Why not?” Peter made a 360-degree spin, taking in it all in. That was something he had never thought he would see. Being inside a penthouse wasn’t really new to him since he met Tony in high school, but being in Emmeline’s place was exhilarating.

“It always feels like they are invading my space, always… snooping.”

Yeah, Peter got that. Especially since he had so many secrets to hide from so many people.

“Your place is fancier than any place I’ve ever been to.”

“Now that’s not true, you’re working with Tony Stark,” she countered, leaning against the back of her couch and crossing her arms over her chest.

He couldn’t believe the Stark internship excuse was still a thing. It had been seven years since it started, and no one seemed to find it strange.

“Alright, you got me there.” Peter couldn’t deny the truth after all. “I still think your place looks nicer.” His shoulders rose so high his neck disappeared. “It’s cozier. And I work in the lab most of the time when I go to Stark Tower, not in his last floor billionaire penthouse.” Also known as the Avengers compound, that he wasn’t supposed to know about.

“Right, right.” She waved off his comment and looked away. “I still try to keep the visitors to a minimum. It’s just awkward. Like what you’re doing right now!”

“What?” Peter frowned, a sliver of a smile on his lips. “What am I doing?”

He wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary as far as he was concerned. He was just standing in front of her, hands in his pockets, looking around a bit – he tried to spot little details that would tell him a bit more about her. Emmeline was such a private person.

“You’re standing there, looking at everything around you like you’re in a museum, probably wondering how much some of it costs, and you don’t even know if you’re allowed to touch anything, hence the hands in the pockets,” she listed everything he did wrong unbeknownst to him.

Peter immediately took his hands out of his pockets and grabbed a little glass sphere that sat on a wooden base to prevent it from rolling away. He twirled it around in his hand, playing with it and glancing at her with a smug little smirk.

“What’s that little thingy?”

“That’s an original 1920s crystal art piece by French glassmaker Lalique, it’s worth 700,000 dollars,” she recited as though she had been an auctioneer in her past life, watching Peter nearly drop the little glass ball out of sheer shock, only shortly catching the priceless art object before it shattered on her floor, then replaced the thing on its stand with shaking hands.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, blushing like crazy.

Emmeline laughed and walked past him, sliding a hand on his upper arm to gesture him to follow her.

“I’m just kidding Peter, it’s just blown glass,” she giggled, looking at his decomposed face.

“Not funny!”

“But it proves my point.”

“Which is that your place is too fancy for your working class friends?” Peter asked, just to annoy her after the joke she just made at his expense. It was only fair.

Emmeline stopped at the kitchen island, placing her hands flat against the marble.

“No, I don’t like having people come here because it makes the gap between us bigger than it needs to be; they judge me based on all of this.” She gestured around them.

“May I advise you to not flail your 1920s French glasswork at them, then?” Peter suggested humorously.

She didn’t laugh.

“It’s a goddamn snow globe Peter, I wasn’t serious.”

“Got it.” Peter swallowed with some difficulty. Clearly, he had tackled a sensitive topic, he couldn’t back down now though, and apparently joking wasn’t the right approach.

“When people see this place, they have one of two reactions: there are those who start thinking that we live in different worlds and stop inviting me to stuff because it’s not fancy enough for me to hang out in their two hundred square feet flat and eat Domino’s Pizza. And then, there are those who think they can take advantage of me.”

“Who would do that?”

“A shockingly high number of people, Peter. People are disgusting,” she deadpanned. “Everyone in this city knows I come from money, but it’s not until they see how I live that they take the full measure of what it means. Making friends isn’t the easiest thing in the world.”

That was when Tessa decided to butt in and strut over to Emmeline, sitting right by her feet and looking up with big, sparkly eyes, as if knowing that she was the one to go to is she wanted something.

“You have Bella at least,” Peter said, thinking of her own dog.

He had never formally met Bella; only Spider-Man had. She was at the vet for a few days because she had stepped on some glass shards and had needed stitches. Maybe that was the reason why he was even allowed here. After all, Bella was trained to not let strangers near Em, and as far as she was concerned, that’s what he was to her protective dog. Bella’s absence was also why he agreed to come. He was dying to see her apartment, but he also didn’t want to give his identity away.

He wanted to echo her little explanation with his own experience and found he could not. He didn’t come from money, his father wasn’t someone important like hers, but he did have his own issues with making close friends, for different reasons than her. And he felt like a fraud suddenly, sitting here in her kitchen, in her home that she opened for him even though she despises bringing people here, forcing her to talk about things that stung, and yet not reciprocating.

“Yes, what would I do without her?”

A large, goofy smile replaced the stern expression on her face when she bent over to pet her.

“Are you hungry, Tessa? I know it’s dinner time. C’mon, I’ll fill Bella’s bowl for you.”

He didn’t add anything and just sat on the bar stool by the kitchen island while Emmeline went to get Tessa’s food and filled her bowls water, and a mix of dry dog food and meat leftovers from the fridge.

“Follow me,” she told him this time instead of touching his arm.

A flash of electricity coursed through Peter when she had placed her hand on his bicep just a few minutes ago, and he wouldn’t have minded if Emmeline had dragged him all the way to where she wanted to go by the arm this time around.

Actually, he just really would have liked to hold her hand.

She stopped outside a closed door and took a deep breath, then turned around to meet his questioning eyes.

“Just so you know, I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Huh?”

“I know you’re not like those people who just want to be friends with me for my family’s money and influence,” she explained. “At least, I hope so.” Her eyes shifted when she said the last part.

“Hey, hey,” Peter whispered, taking the step separating them to place his hands on her shoulders and make her look up. “Em, you could be living in a cardboard box and be a nobody’s daughter and you’d still be the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

That was it: the lamest, most ridiculous thing that ever crossed his lips in front of this girl – and God knows he already blurted out some dumb shit in his times of awkwardness.

She smiled softly, her eyes darting down a little while she placed a hand on Peter’s elbow to make him let go of her. It made her feel warm – whether it was his words or his touch, she couldn’t tell. But she didn’t let herself ponder the thought too long.

“Thank you for saying that. It means a lot.” And it took her a lot of effort not to start crying like a little girl, but she had pretty good control over her emotions. Living in the public eye tended to do that to someone. “You win.”

Peter’s eyebrows rose and he gave her a confused look, planting his hands on his hips and watching her step back, one hand already reaching out for the door handle.

“I win? I win what?”

Emmeline was pleased to hear the utter confusion in his voice and not an ounce of greediness.

“The right of entry.”

When she opened the door, Peter wasn’t surprised to see it was her room, but he was surprised by the room itself. It was nothing like the rest of the apartment that resembled a design magazine front cover and was so white and pristine it blinded him a little.

This bedroom was warm.

He wolf-whistled.

“Now, that’s more like it,” he said with a laugh, letting his fingers play with a leaf from a ceiling plant.

“More like what?” Emmeline walked over to her bed and hastily draped the duvet over it, smoothing it out. Someone didn’t make her bed this morning, Peter thought, amused by her need to make things look perfect, even though there was no need at all.

“You, obviously.”

It was still far fancier than anything he owned, but it was toned down. It was presented in a normal, a-twenty-something-lives-here kind of way, and not like a professional interior designer did it all. There was no ikea furniture in his room, but it had this homey feel that he thought this building lacked the first time he followed her here.

“I can’t tell if it’s a good thing, but I’m going with a ‘thank you’,” Emmeline laughed. “Don’t take this in a weird way, but you’re the first person I show my room.”

“Not even-“ Peter stopped before saying something out of line, but Emmeline just stared blankly at him, one very unimpressed eyebrow raised at him.

“C’mon,” she said. “Say it.”

“It’s none of my business,” Peter argued to get himself out of this situation. She was obviously holding back a smile, and he couldn’t help but think she was enjoying watching him fumble a little too much.

“You were going to ask anyway, and you obviously want to know,” she replied, sitting down in her desk chair, legs crossed.

If she pushed on her leg and rolled the chair a bit backwards to get in the shaded corner of the room, the resemblance with that scene in The Godfather would be uncanny.

Peter braced himself, seeing no way out of this that didn’t involve backflipping out of her window to escape.

“Not even… your boyfriends?” he eventually asked, feeling supremely embarrassed that he would even be concerned to hear the answer and blushing like nobody’s business.

“No,” she simply answered. “I use the guest bedroom when I have a boy over. This is my room, it’s private.”

“Then why-“

She sent him a sharp look and Peter swallowed down his question, mimicking to zip his mouth shut.

“Go get your laptop,” she told him, the slightest of smiles adorning her face, matching the mischievous glimmer in her dark eyes. “You wanted to partner up for this tutorial, so let’s get to work.”

He should feel lucky being here at all and stop questioning why.

Reblog to save a writer

Taglist: @justanothercynicalgenzkid @of-virtuoso

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sighingstarbeam · 6 years ago

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Spies and Gods - Chapter 8

Summary: After falling through a peculiar portal, Reader meets an old "acquaintance" of Loki's.

Word Count: 2,476

A/N: Hi guys! Sorry for the long wait. Here's a quick recap of what's been going on in my life; I just got done with classes and I'm only working a few days a week, allowing me time to work on fics. Now that Endgame is out I've been thinking about how I want to end the fic and how the story will go at this point, which is what I've been planning on doing since the beginning of the story, which is why I've also been putting off writing until the movie came out (mostly my busy life and motivation got in the way, but still). I have a few ideas in mind for the ending, which I might post two or three different endings if I can't decide which one I want to use. Thanks again for kind words! <3

Chapter 7 | Chapter 9

Your body felt as if it was floating, nothing above or below you, only the feeling of weightlessness. A profusion of emotions swept through you. You’ve only been falling for a short moment but confusion, fear, and even a glimmer of peace filled you. Reality returned when you felt hands grabbing your shoulders followed by you slamming into something, hard.

You heard two thuds, the first being something you couldn’t identify, the second was your own body crashing not too long after. You groaned as the air in your chest struggled to return after it was knocked out. Everything was disoriented at first, until your vision adjusted to the room. You were in a foyer with dark walls, a large staircase in front of you, and seats against the walls that look rarely used. You didn’t recognize this place, meaning you could only fear for the worst.

Before you could do anything else, you heard a coarse groan from beneath you. Looking down you realized you landed on top of Loki, still a bit dazed from the free-fall. Loki was on his back while you landed chest first on top of him, your faces merely inches away from each other. His head was leaned back exposing his tense neck and defined jawline, his hands holding on to your shoulders in a protective grip. He didn’t shield you from the fall, did he? “Shit, you okay?” You asked, letting your weight off of him.

Loki’s gaze met yours, “You did crash into me,” he let out a single chuckle, “however, nothing is broken as far as I am aware of.”

“Good, because I need you in one piece for you to explain yourself.” A mysterious voice emerged from the stairway. A tall man in an unusual blue outfit accompanied with a red cape was leaning against the railing, eyes staring directly at Loki. “Loki Laufeyson, brother of Thor.” He let go of the railing and floated down the stairs. Great, he’s one of those people. You and Loki stood up, watching as the man levitated down. When he reached the bottom of the stairs he didn’t bother acknowledging your presence and instead went directly to Loki, “What the hell are you doing back on Earth?”

Loki placed his hands behind his back, “With all of your mystical powers, it took you this long to realize I have returned?” He asked coyly.

“I assume your magic had something to do with it,” the man said, “perhaps some sort of cloaking spell so I couldn’t see you.”

“What a shame, it was working so well up until now.” Loki slyly grinned, almost tauntingly.

“And why is that?” The man asked, “Your spell was up for this long, what caused it to drop all of a sudden?”

Loki’s glare at the man was fierce, he was ready to attack at any moment. You should probably step in before things got out of hand. “Excuse me,” you chimed in, gaining the attention of the man and Loki, “what is it that you want with Loki? He’s under official Avengers supervision. I have to get him back before they send an army to search for him.”

The man’s look was on you, eyes squinted as he finally recognized your presence. “As a protector of this realm, it is my job to keep out anything that is a threat to this Earth. Loki is one of those threats. I have warned him and his brother before that if he were ever to return I would handle it personally.” The man looked at Loki, adjusting his yellow gloves, “It’s time to take you back to Asgard.”

Loki’s posture shifted, his eyes expressed mourning. You remembered what the team told you about what happened to Asgard, Loki and Thor’s home. Loki stood frozen, his fists clenched and slightly shaking.

You raised a pleading hand to the man, “Listen, Mister…?”

“Strange, Doctor Strange.”

You knitted your eyebrows at the sound of his name, “Okay. Doctor Strange, something happened to Asgard. That’s the reason why he’s here.” You stepped closer to Loki, almost guarding him from Strange, “He’s been here for a while and you have to trust me when I say that he has had no intentions of hurting anyone.” Loki raised a brow at your statement. Here you were, standing up for the man who terrorized New York. “The Avengers have been keeping a really close eye on him. I don’t think they’ll be really happy if you take Loki away. Especially his brother.”

Strange furrowed his eyes as he held the bridge of his nose. He thought for what seemed like forever, “Who did you say you were?”

“Y/N L/N.”

“Y/N, you need to understand that Loki isn’t a man who can simply be put under house arrest. You do know what he’s capable of, correct?”

“The question is, do you know what I am truly capable of?” Loki stepped forward, knives appearing in both hands. You sighed in annoyance. Great, everything you just said was just thrown right out of the window. He took a few steps in front of you while Strange took a defensive position.

Before he could do any more damage, you stepped directly in front of Loki, blocking his path. “Loki, don’t.” You pleaded, if he was going to get in trouble, might as well prevent Loki from killing anyone.

“Unless you wish to get yourself hurt, move aside.” Loki sneered.

“Really? You’re gonna threaten me?” At this point you were starting to get pissed. Your muscles ached from the fall, all you wanted to do was go back to HQ and take a long bath. “If you want to resort to violence, be my guest. But if this guy kicks your ass, I’m not going to be the one to drag you back. Just know that I’m the only one here that tried to sincerely defend for you.”

Loki’s eyes softened, but his lips were still pursed. His jaw visibly clenched, and in defeat, he put away his knives.

You turned to Strange, “Can we leave now? We have this taken care of.”

Strange looked at you, then to Loki, then back to you before speaking, “Fine. I’ll let you take him back, on one condition. I will have to visit in person once a week to make sure he isn’t using anymore spells to fool me.”

This didn’t please Loki at all. His mood dropped lower than before, anger rising within him. You felt a small amount of sympathy for him, having to be watched all the time now a magic man has to babysit him. Either way, there was no other answer that Strange would like, “Deal. But I have to run it by the team first.”

“Sounds fair.” Strange swept his cape behind him before he lifted his hands in front of him, “I’ll return you both to where you were-”

“No!” You and Loki yelled simultaneously, neither of you wanted to go through Strange’s weird portal again.

Strange looked at you two questionably, “Oh, it won’t be a problem-”

“Thank you, Doctor Strange,” you interjected, “but I think I’ll just call a ride. I might puke if you do that… whatever, again.”

“Fair enough. Would you like some coffee or tea, Y/N?”

“I would love some. Let me call Stark first.” Tony was the closest you could think of that wasn’t busy on a mission like the others. You could’ve called Thor, but you doubted that he knew how to drive or even had a cell phone.

“Stark? As in Tony Stark?”

You took your phone out of your pocket and dialed Tony’s number in, “Yeah. I’m his kid.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that he had children.”

You exhaled, “Neither did he.”

Some time later, Loki settled down (to some degree) while you and Strange had coffee. He showed you around and even introduced his cape to you, which was sentient and somehow not the weirdest thing you’ve encountered after your little portal trip. He explained who the Masters of the Mystic Arts are and what they do, how they protect the Earth for possibly thousands of years. It amazed you that a group of magic users hid in plain sight for this long. You knew groups like Hydra tried to hide in plain sight, but they were never known to be subtle.

You all made your way back to the foyer when you heard knocking at the door. Strange used his magic to open the doors by themselves.

Stark entered followed by Thor, but not in a cheery mood. Stark was wearing one of his finer suits that he usually wore at meetings or press conferences. Shit, you completely forgot that he was in a meeting.

“Loki.” Thor said harshly, eyebrows knit. When Loki saw his brother he immediately looked fearful. He knew the difference when Thor was annoyed or genuinely angered. This was one of those angry times. “What is the meaning of this? You told me you already spoke to Doctor Strange and had everything settled between the two of you.”

“Oh, did I?” Loki taunted, “Might have been a lie, dear brother. Do you really think I would come back to this second rate sorcerer and ask to be among Midgardians? It was much more simple to cast a spell that hid us from his forces.”

“Us? You cloaked me as well?”

“Well, not only you.” Thor raised an eyebrow in confusion, “Think about it, an entire cargo ship with hundreds of Asgardians would not go unnoticed.”

Strange turned to Loki, his temper rising, “I’m sorry, an entire cargo ship filled with what ?!”

Thor went stoic, even with one eye his stare bore deep through Loki, “Brother, what did you do?”

All eyes were on Loki now as he tried to play it cool with a coy smile. Unfortunately for him his trickster charms weren’t working. “Remember on Asgard when Heimdall couldn’t see me arrive or leave when I used the secret passages?” Thor continued his stern gaze, waiting for Loki to continue, “I figured I would do something similar with a simple spell not too long before we arrived… on nearly one hundred Asgardians.”

A sharp inhale went out of Thor’s nostrils. He rubbed his forehead in disbelief, “That’s why you have been different lately. This explains the lack of pranks and your use of magic in front of anyone.”

“You focused all of your magical energy to keep your people hidden.” Strange cut in, “Exactly how long did you expect to hold this spell? Surely not the rest of your life as it would drain you from the inside out.”

Loki rolled his eyes, “Of course I wouldn’t go on for that long. For the last month I’ve slowly been letting about a dozen people at a time go from the spell. To anyone like you who can tell the shift in your world, it would merely look like Midgard’s birthrate was slightly higher, but not abnormal.” He looked at Thor, “Did you ever wonder why nobody else has noticed a large ship coming through the atmosphere other than Stark and his little team? And they only knew because we contacted them before entrance.”

The room filled with silence as everyone was trying to process what Loki had done. It didn’t do any harm to the people of Asgard, but to be hidden away and not noticed by the entire world was too far. The Asgardians probably didn’t know Earth didn’t know about them. Here they were, trying to get by with help from only the Avengers when the world could’ve chipped in if they had any idea what was going on. The thought of innocent people under the watch of Earth’s mightiest heroes were struggling to get a hold of their new life when it could easily be fixed bothered you. There are millions of others in the world who need help as well, but this would be a quick start.

“Break the spell now.” You didn’t ask, you demanded. Loki looked at you as if you were some foreign object in the room, “Strange knows. There’s no need for this trick to go on any longer.”

Loki saw the other men silently agree. He knew he didn’t have any say in this. He wanted to say something more, but decided against it. Loki closed his eyes and with a slight clench of his fist, a tiny ripple of gold flowed around his hand. “There. It is done.” He said with a stiff tone.

“Now that that’s taken care of,” Strange pitched in, turning to Tony, “I do trust that the Avengers will keep an extremely close eye on Loki, but I will be making visits to your headquarters every once in a while to make sure he doesn’t have any more tricks up his sleeve.”

Tony was rather annoyed that Strange would show up on his own terms, but reluctantly agreed. Who else would know more about magical fiascos than an actual wizard? “Cool, now we have wizards guarding the castle with the dragon. See you around, Strange. Y/N, Wiseau, car. Now.” Tony spoke to the two of you as if you were children caught breaking a window.

He didn’t look at you as he led everyone outside, revealing a crowd of about a dozen people forming around the highly expensive car. When a few people noticed Tony and Thor, everyone turned and begged for autographs and photos. Tony smiled politely as you all trudged through the crowd, only saying hello and waving to a few people. Thor, on the other hand, took multiple selfies and hugged every other fan like a proper celebrity.

You noticed Loki visibly rolling his eyes at his brother, “Tough being the younger brother?” You asked him.

“Thor’s fame seems to follow him wherever we are.” Loki responded, “The devotees were mild compared to here, but nonetheless the spotlight is brighter in his direction.”

It took longer than intended to reach the car with all these people around. Before entering the car, you heard murmurs coming from the crowd. You made out a few words, which turned to sentences as more and more people talked.

“Who’s that girl?”

“Isn’t that Loki?”

“You don’t think Tony left his fiance for this chick, do you?”

“Maybe she’s Thor’s new girlfriend.”

“No way, Jane was far cooler.”

“Maybe she’s dating Loki.”

“That’s more believable than her and Thor.”

That was enough gossip for one day. You slipped into the back seat of the car, the door muffling the voices of the groupies. Loki sat in the seat next to you, refusing to look anywhere but out the window. Tony and Thor followed soon after, Thor taking the passenger side. Tony slammed the door harshly, then revved the car, speeding away from Bleecker street.

#spies and gods #spies and gods chapter 8 #chapter 8 #loki x reader #Loki Laufeyson #mcu #marvel #reader insert #fanfic #my fic #fanfiction #loki fanfic #loki fanfiction

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thiscrimsonsoul · 5 years ago

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“I’m sorry, Miss, do you know where this classroom is?” (Bloodwontwashout)

@bloodwontwashout

Wanda had not been adjusting to life at the Avengers’ complex. Emotionally, she was not coping well with living in a high-tech facility, with moving to America, and most pointedly, with the loss of her brother. Although she had tried to begin training with Steve and Natasha, she was distracted and overwhelmed on enough occasions for her to basically be rendered unfit for the field. That didn’t mean that she one day would not be capable of being a full-fledged Avenger, which she had expressed a deep interest in and desire for, but there was a consensus among her would-be comrades that she simply wasn’t ready right now. She needed time to grieve, to adjust, and to find herself first.

That was when Tony sprung into action. Maybe he felt sorry for the girl, maybe he harbored some guilt at the role his technology had played in both orphaning her and leading to her brother’s death, or maybe he was just weirded out by her and wanted her out of his hair, but he offered to pay Wanda’s way through college. More accurately, he offered to specifically send her to a university that would help her get her GED first and then allow her to pursue a degree of her choice. That kind of special arrangement came with a hefty price tag, and Wanda was shocked and deeply grateful that Tony would foot the bill for something like that. It didn’t come without conditions, however. She had to focus on her studies, she had to stay out of legal trouble, and she had to keep her powers on a reasonably short leash. Wanda agreed, and off to school she went.

The hope was that getting a real education, something that both she and Pietro had wanted for themselves, would not only help Wanda better herself and gain confidence, but it would be a positive distraction from her grief and feelings of dissociation. On a bustling college campus, she could be surrounded by support as she worked through her own personal issues while occupying her mind with intellectual pursuits. It saddened her to think that Pietro would never have the chance to do something like this, but that only drove Wanda harder to take advantage of this opportunity that neither of them had ever had before. He would want me to do this, she knew.

The campus was large but pretty, having the perfect combination of trees and open space alongside busier and more populated centers. She felt overwhelmed, but in a good way. Not having any classes on this particular afternoon, Wanda was out walking, trying to learn her way around campus. Upon stopping at one of the classroom buildings to use the bathroom, Wanda then found herself wandering around the building, admiring the older wooden architecture and furniture. Upon turning a corner, she was immediately rendered doe-eyed by another student who asked her for directions, indicating some sort of building code and room number on his printed-out schedule. Pushing her hair behind her ear demurely, she stepped closer to him and took a look at it.

“Um... yeah, it’s...” She turned around and looked down the hallway and then back toward a stairwell. “Um... hmm...” she looked at his schedule again. Her cheeks soon flushed pink and she looked up at him, smiling awkwardly.

“You know what, I have no clue,” she said, promptly laughing at herself. “I’m so sorry, I’m... I’m really new here, so... I’m still trying to figure everything out myself,” she explained, her accent thick as her cheeks grew even darker. Well this is thoroughly embarrassing...

#bloodwontwashout #wanda rp #{ back to the basics } ᶜᵒˡˡᵉᵍᵉ ᵃᵘ

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buckyhoneyno · 7 years ago

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Beautiful Ignorance Pt. 1

Steve Rodgers x Stark!Reader

In which Steve meets a girl that he believes could be the one, only to find out she’s Tony Starks daughter.

Warnings: none…yet

Word count – 2671

Pt.1 Pt.2 Pt.3 Pt.4 Pt.5

Masterlist

A/N Hey guys this is my first Captain America fic that I’ve ever had the heart to upload. I hope yall like it. Please give me an feedback yall have I’m really just trying to learn and grow here! I plan on making this a whole series if people are interested in reading it

Chapter 1

Central Park was quiet today, not out of the ordinary seeing that it was barely 7am. It was a sunny Tuesday morning in the middle of September. A soft breeze flowed through the city setting the scene at a nice 67 degrees. A perfect day for a stroll through the park a luxury Steve Rodgers did not get too often. Taking the chance to get out of Stark tower for a while. He loved his team, and he would undoubtedly do anything for them but he was human and needed his space.

His walk was peaceful, no one seemed to recognize him. The fight against Loki’s army had only been a few months ago. The battle still fresh in his mind. Shaking his head like he could actually shake off the dark thoughts that threaten to ruin his content mood. He closed his eyes for a moment, feet still moving forward as he rubbed his tired face. It was only a second he could have sworn but it must have been long enough because he was suddenly rocked off balance.

What felt like a small boulder rammed into his chest knocking him on his back, his breath whooshing out of him as his eyes snapped open.

A soft squeak was heard as the pair landed. Cap looked down and saw a mass of blond curls on his chest and two small hands gripping his shirt. The head of the stranger lifted, shock covering their face as blue oceans meet green seas.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” The young woman chocked out her face a bright red as she scrambled off a blushing Steve. “I was just in the zone running after my dog and didn’t even notice you were in the way, are you alright?” She took his hand and hoisted him off the ground making his eyes widen in shock at her strength. He took notice then to the large Rottweiler who sat obediently near them, head tilted to the side as it studied the humans.

“Did you hit your head, oh my god your concussed. I gave you a concussion.” Her voice was frantic as she took his frozen face in her hands examining him. Steve suddenly gained his bearings, the woman in front of him had to be some sort of goddess. He’d never seen a girl like her.

“No-No I’m alright,” Steve scolded himself for stuttering in front of the gorgeous blond. “Are you ok?”

She let out a short laugh giving him a large smile that momentarily took his breath away. “I just bulldozed you to the ground and you’re asking if I’m ok?”

“Yes?” his answer came out more like a question then an answer earning him another laugh.

“I’m perfectly fine, you broke my fall,” she reassured sounding almost like she was teasing him.

Steve raked his brain for something witty to say, god he wished he was tony right now. He’d have already secured a date with the woman. But sadly, he was Steve, a man out of his time who lacked any experience with a normal woman. He was fucked.

“Well I’m sorry about…all that,” She said waving her hand before gathering the leash that hung from the large dog.

“It alright, honestly,” Steve stated reassuringly. “Nothing I couldn’t take,”

The blonde looked him up and down with a slight smirk. “I don’t doubt that,” His eyes widened at her boldness but he covered it quickly, unable though to hide his red cheeks.

“I’m Charlie,” She stated sticking out her hand that wasn’t occupied with the leash.

“Steve,” He took her hand shaking it gently before turning to the dog. “And who might this be?”

“This is Princess,” Charlie stated proudly, giving the dog a quick scratch behind the ear. “Princess shake,” she said sweetly to the dog who held its paw out to Steve. He bent down and took the dogs paw shaking it, listening to the girl giggle softly next to him.

“Nice name, it fits,” she grinned at him in response.

“Well I’ll let you get back to your walk, it was nice meeting you Steve,” she said sweetly her voice flowing like honey to his ears. Though her words caused him a slight distress. She was leaving and he would probably never see her again. Something inside of him pushed him to be bolder.

“Do you want to go get coffee with me?” he asked quickly his words coming out so fast he thought she might not understand him. She froze for a second eyeing him till a grin broke out on her face.

“Sure,”

“I know a place a couple blocks from here if you don’t mind walking, they have a patio so princess will be able to come,” She didn’t say it but she found it endearing that he thought of her dog when making the plans. Anyone who was nice to princess couldn’t be too bad in her books.

“Sounds perfect lead the way,” He kept the urge in, to stick an elbow out for her to take. This wasn’t the 40’s.

“So, Steve, what do you do? You know other then walk through parks and get attacked by woman,” Her question made a laugh come out of him. God, he couldn’t remember the last time he laughed. Her question though did make him wonder, she obviously didn’t know who he really was so he could actually be Steve and not Captain America.

“I work for a private agency,” it wasn’t a lie, though it wasn’t the whole truth. She took his answer in stride and didn’t push the topic. “What about you?”

“At the moment, I’m taking a break from working and getting some much needed me time.” She looked so happy as she spoke about it. Obviously, she wasn’t worried about a job. “Though I have a large amount of free time and I really don’t know what hobbies to pick to fill it up,”

“Do you mind me asking what you used to do?” Steve asked curiously.

“I modeled,” She said nonchalantly peaking up at him as they walked gaging his reaction.

“That’s…nice?” Nice? Nice! Really Steve be a bit smoother. She giggled a little as she watched his face heat up.

“Eh it payed my bills and gave me something to do but it’s just so…unfulfilling,” she explained. “I want to do more with myself, or at least do something that has a little more value,”

Steve couldn’t help but smile at her words. They talked as they walked to the coffee shop. Steve couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed this hard. Her humor was refreshing, she spoke to him as if they had been friends for years rather than strangers who had only just meet. Her lack of filter reminding him of Tony making him shake his head. If he ever had the chance to introduce them he was sure they would get along, maybe too well.

“Ya and so My dad and I are in this lab trying to figure out if we can make me a science project that will win in one hour. I mean I couldn’t let that little witch Katie Gentry win,” She glared at the girl’s name continuing her story. “anyways we end up making this really cool-” she continued to explain a project that Steve couldn’t even begin to understand but he nodded along laughing at her story.

“You seem close with your Dad,” Steve stated after she finished her story. He waited for her reply hoping he hadn’t been to forward, seeing as you both were strangers and may not want to answer personal questions.

“We are,” Her smile became softer as she talked. “He raised me on his own, so it was just me and him against the world. He’s actually the reason I’m in New York,” just by looking at her, Steve could tell that she loved her father fiercely.

“Ya?” Steve said hopping the girl would keep talking. Human interaction like this came few and far between for Steve. He missed his time. Back when the only way to get to know a dame was to talk to her. Now a days there was phones and the internet that kept a buffer between people.

“He needs help with designing some stuff for his…friends. I’ve done it before for him but for some reason he’s hell bent on me actually meeting them. I swear sometimes he uses me just to show off, I mean not that I mind,” she looked like she couldn’t figure out what word to say after that. She shrugged not bothering to go any deeper on that.

“What about you though, any family your close to?” she asked curiously, it was only fair he had started it.

“Nope just me,” Steve stated trying not to make the mood dark with his lack of loved ones.

Once again, the girl surprised him by nodding understandable and then quickly changing the subject.

“Soooo…got any hidden talents,” Charlie asked grinning at her random question. Steve couldn’t help but laugh nervously before he shyly answered her.

“I can draw a bit I guess,” he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly not a huge fan of boasting about his talent.

“ooh I love drawing…I’m not very good at it though,” she said pouting a little as she thought about all of her terrible drawings her father still had hung up in his lab from when she was a child.

“What about you any hidden talents?”

“not really, I’m a bit boring,”

“I don’t believe boring is a word that anyone would ever describe you as,” Charlie couldn’t stop the smile that came to her at his words. God, he was cute, and a gentleman. Those were hard to find now a days Charlie mused to herself.

Their coffee had been finished for two hours but the conversation had never stopped. It was as if they had known each other for years.

“…so, me and Buck made it back to the apartment shoes gone, Buck lost his shirt, my pants are missing a whole leg but we managed it without being arrested,” tears were streaming down her face as Charlie laughed at one of his many stories about his childhood best friend. Charlie had found out he had passed away a few years ago when Steve first said the name and had made a point to not make a big deal about it.

“God, you two must have been a handful,”

“ya we were,” his soft smile seemed reminiscent as he thought about Bucky. It still hurt to talk or think about him but it was bearable. It felt nice though to talk about him, to say his name to someone who had no knowledge of who he was. He wanted Bucky to be remembered, he deserved it.

Princess who had been asleep most of the time let out a soft whine as she sat obediently in front of them. Charlie looked confused for a moment till she picked up her phone that she had flipped over when they had first sat down. Her eyes widened as she looked at it. 10 missed calls from her father.

“Oh my god I’m so late,” She said standing quickly but froze when she looked at Steve again who had stood when she did. “I have to go I’m sorry, my dad was expecting me an hour ago,”

“It’s alright,” Steve said reassuringly even if he was a bit disappointed that she had to leave.

“I didn’t realize we’ve been here for three hours,” she said in disbelief looking at the time again. “we should do this again though,” she said quickly as if she didn’t even think about what she said. Her cheeks became a soft pink as she looked up at him. “I mean if you want to,”

“Y-Ya,” he responded instantly excited before coughing “I mean sure that sounds great,”

“Here,” she said handing him her phone, “Put your number in,” he quickly typed the number and put his name before saving it. Proud of himself for doing it correctly the first time. It was one of the things the team had been helping him work on.

“It was really great meeting you Charlie,”

“You too Steve, see you later,” she said walking backwards for a moment giving him one last smile and a wave before her and princess were off running again.

Damn she was fast, Steve thought impressed. Turning around he had a smile on his face that wouldn’t go away and a skip in his step that stayed with him till he got back to the tower. Finding his way into the common room he crabbed some food and sat at the table.

He wasn’t alone long till Natasha and Clint rolled in coming back from training.

“Hey Cap,” Clint said nodding at him grabbing a water bottle from the fridge, handing one to Nat while he was there. “How was your morning stroll,”

“It was good,” Steve responded vaguely not wanting to give anything away. His date with Charlie…if you could even call that a date was his business and he didn’t want his nosey friends getting in the way.

The rest of his day went off without a hitch up until that night during their weekly team dinner.

“Ok everyone can I have your attention,” Tony stated standing from the couch and walking in front of the TV. Natasha paused the show she was watching with a role of her eyes before focusing on him.

“My daughter is going to be visiting the tower in a few days, I want everyone on their best behavior so that I can convince her to stay,” Tony stated before being interrupted by Thor.

“I was unaware you had a child,” The God look genuinely confused as he looked at his team mates.

“Whose drawings do you think I have in my lab?” Tony questioned with a role of his eyes.

“I assumed they were your own,”

“You know what, I’ll come back to the Point Break. Right now, I need to stay on topic,” Tony said before beginning again. “My daughter is my mini me. My pride and joy. My spawn. I want her to feel comfortable here so first thing on the agenda is for her to meet all of you. And what better way to do that then- “

“I swear if he says throw a party,” Natasha mumbled softly to Clint.

“to throw a party!” half of the team groaned as the other half sat contently.

“Are you sure a party is the best way for her to meet all of us,” Bruce questioned. “I mean maybe if she just came to one of our team dinners so it’s more personal.” Nat and Clint nodded agreeing with Bruce. Thor still sat wondering how he had not known that Stark was a father.

“well if she is anything like you Tony, I’m sure she will love it,” Steve finally said getting a smile from Tony.

“Exactly, see Cap gets it people,”

“So, what’s her name?” Steve asked, he knew of the kid just not any details.

“Charlotte,” Tony said getting a smile on his face that the team had never seen before. It reminded Steve of when Tony looks at his finished suits, but almost more loving.

“well I’m sure we all are very excited to meet her,”

With the announcement, out of the way the team settled back to watching TV and lounging around. Steve sat for one staring at the phone in his hand hoping that Charlie would call him, hell even text him for all he cared. He didn’t know what it was about this girl but he was hoping he would get to see her again.

————-

Hope yall liked it!

Part 2 will be up some time tonight

Let me know if you want to be tagged in future parts

#captain america #avengers #captain america x reader #steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #tony stark #Bucky barnes #natasha romanoff #Clint barton #thor odinson #bruce banner #steve rogers imagine #fan fiction #steve rogers series #superhero #first post

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scarpool-gmk · 3 years ago

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6 Part 1

Title: Godly Marine: Killed Author: Scarpool Fandom(s): NCIS, Percy Jackson & the Olympians Pairing(s): Gen Rating: PG/K+ Summary: Chapter 6 Part 1 (7/13) — Staff Sergeant Michael Kahale, Marine Corps Mechanic and Son of Athena, was murdered. Annabeth Chase is determined to find out who did it and why. She, along with Percy Jackson, Grover Underwood, and Clarisse La Rue, infiltrate NCIS where they team up with NCIS Agents Leroy Gibbs, Anthony DiNozzo, Timothy McGee, and Ziva David. Complete Genre: Fanfiction, Mystery, Drama, Humour, General, Action Warnings: N/A

Tony couldn't keep the yawn from stretching his mouth open.

He heard Ziva chuckle before he even saw her. "Late night, Tony?"

Tony swatted some police tape out his way. "Good morning, Miss David. And yes, I was busy going through some more episodes of my show."

"What do you call it in English? Binging?"

"Binge-watching. And no, if I were to binge-watch it, I would be done with the entire show by now." Tony looked around the building where they were all called in. Ugh. "I'm so done with this place," Tony complained. "What I'd do to be watching Monica strip down to those cute, pink bikini bottoms."

"Monica?" Ziva laughed.

"Yeah, she's a tiger," Tony explained. "Just had a fight with Kiara last episode. Punched her lights out."

"How wonderful," Ziva mused.

"Hot," Tony agreed. "Hey, where is everybody?"

"Gibbs and Abby are in Tarsibo's office, and McGee is coming in right now."

Tony turned to see McGee shuffling through the doors.

"McGee!" Tony greeted. "Look at you! Last one to arrive."

McGee gave him a cheeky grin. "Unlike you, I've never been here. Didn't exactly know my way."

Tony glared at him. Way to rub it in.

"I thought with your degree in technology," Tony said, "You would have been able to use a GPS just fine."

"I don't know," McGee said, "I kind of liked my drive."

"I rolled down my windows," Ziva shared, "The breeze felt quite nice."

Tony gave her a look that he hoped conveyed his disapproval. What a liar.

"And it appears that we are all here," Ziva said.

"This looks familiar," McGee commented.

Tony turned once more to the entrance.

"NCIS," said a blonde girl, showing her badge and I.D. to a cop.

"NCIS, huh?" Tony said, looking over the group of four.

"Looks like they had a rough night," Ziva murmured.

"Grover looks pretty down…" McGee frowned.

Tony couldn't help but agree. The nervous, nerdy, usually chatty agent seemed very despondent. A contrast to Agent La Rue, who was in a different, perhaps worse, state and spirit.

"Hey, La Rue," Tony said, "Don't go contaminating the crime scene! What did you sleep in, a sandbox?"

"Listen, punk," La Rue growled, shaking some more sand off her, "The crime scene is the office. Besides, why don't you clean yourself up? Jeez, look at you. Eye boogers and, gross, a drool line."

What?! Ziva and McGee snickered as he quickly checked his reflection. Holy-!

"Drooling in your sleep is a very natural and, in fact, a healthy occurrence," Tony defended while scrubbing at his face.

Percy enthusiastically agreed. Tony didn't know how to feel about that.

Lima gave a sigh. "It's really not. Where's Gibbs?"

Ziva answered her before Tony could argue her first statement.

"This way."

Ziva opened the door of the office to reveal… a mess. "Woah," Tony breathed.

"Good morning, everyone!" Abby greeted from her place connecting extension cords.

"Abby, I think you got a little carried away," Tony said.

"Not at all, Tony," Abby said, "I wanted to test all my new blacklights, and this is a perfect time as I can just test this whole office in one go."

"Your blacklights?" Tony asked. He spotted Gibbs standing a little ways off, watching Abby work. "Morning, Boss," Tony said.

Gibbs gave a noncommittal grunt and sipped at his steaming cup of coffee. Coffee… Not for the first time, Tony played with the idea of asking his boss to share his drink.

"Hey," McGee said, nudging one of the lights, "I recognize this one. You got it a couple years ago."

"How can you tell?" Tony asked him.

"The sharpie skulls," McGee answered.

"Are all of these blacklights yours, Abby?" Ziva asked.

"No," Abby said a bit more defensive than normal, "Three are from the lab."

"I count eleven," Lima said.

"What do you need with nine blacklights?" Tony asked.

"That would be eight, Tony," McGee corrected.

Ugh, it was too early to be doing math.

"I think the collection is wonderful, Abby," Ziva said.

"Thanks. Good thing there aren't any windows; makes the job easier. Lights!" Abby called, dramatically.

McGee shut the lights off.

And there wasn't much to look at. Almost every inch of the room, the walls, floors, and ceiling were dark. It wouldn't have made Tony nervous if it wasn't for the few patches of the wall that did glimmer.

"I'm not seeing much glow around the place," Underwood said.

"Maybe he cleaned with some bleach," Abby suggested, shaking a bottle. She went up to the walls and started to mass spray. The walls sparked very briefly with each spray. Tony didn't know what that meant, but he certainly didn't like the way Abby started to spray more frantically, running to different areas in an obvious attempt to get different results.

"Abby?" Tony asked softly. "What is it?"

Tony didn't like the way she looked at him. Now, he really wanted to sucker punch Tarsibo.

"It's…" Abby said, hollowly. "It's all blood."

There was a moment of silence as everyone in the room digested the words the scientist said.

"That's a lot of blood," La Rue commented. Tony wanted to snap at her lack of tact.

"Abby," Gibbs called.

"I'm fine, Gibbs," Abby said, answering his unspoken question, "Just surprised and…" Abby heaved a sigh, "I'm going to have a lot of work going through all of this."

"I'll call in, Ducky," Gibbs told her, "See if he can help you."

"Thanks."

Tony turned the light back on and started to look around the office.

"Did you find anything, Boss?" Tony asked, opening some empty drawers.

"Nope," Gibbs said.

Tch, which meant that everything they had was already back at the garage. There was no trace of the swords or shiny coins. Marko probably took them all with him.

"How about the dumpster?" Tony felt a bit lightheaded at how innocently Lima suggested that. "There might be some evidence that Tarsibo wanted to discard and hoped that the garbage would haul it away."

"Hm," Gibbs hummed, his lips already curled in a devious smirk, "That is true." He rapped on a door next to him that Tony had barely noticed. "I think this would lead us outside," Gibbs said, "But it's locked."

Lima frowned. "Locked from the outside?"

"That's strange," McGee said, "Maybe he just didn't use it much."

"Seeing as the video in the main entrance didn't see him leave," Ziva disputed, "this has to be the one he used."

"Alright," McGee said, fiddling with some tools, "Let me just pick the lock."

"Or we could just break it down," La Rue suggested as she marched towards the door. Gibbs moved aside as the girl kicked the door down. Literally.

Tony hoped Abby wouldn't mind the large boot print she now had to deal with.

McGee gave Agent La Rue a deadpan look. "How efficient."

"You bet on it."

Ziva took a step outside and blinked in surprise. "Not what I was expecting."

"Check. It. Out." Tony gazed at the lines of cars hidden in this back area. "Look at this. Now, this is a collection. Man! Nice Chevrolet- must be from the 60s!"

Underwood let out a huff. “They’re just a bunch of gas guzzlers.”

Ziva let out a grunt as Tony pushed her from his path. "Oh! Sweet!" He pumped. Tony slid his hand across a retro, red Plymouth. "Oh," he breathed, "What a righteous Fury. A pure classic."

"Should we leave you two alone?" Ziva teased.

"Let's not," La Rue huffed, "Don't want to scar Abby when she brings her blacklights out here. Place would light up light a Christmas tree."

Tony ignored her. Although, he sent a worried glance when Underwood choked on thin air.

"We're going to have to run plates," McGee sighed.

"It can't be that bad," Percy said as he eyed at the parked beauties with appreciative eyes. Tony knew he had promise.

"That will be something for when we get back to base," Lima said, moving them on till they got to the dumpsters.

And for a bit, they all just stopped and considered the hulking metal bin.

"So," Lima said first, looking at her team, "Any volunteers?"

La Rue crossed her arms and looked dead on at her boss in defiance. Underwood was practically begging, saying something about his nose being too sensitive. And Percy was trying to scoot his way out of Lima's eyesight.

Tony's eyes latched on the green-eyed agent. "I think this would be a great learning experience for the probie."

Tony felt a spark of accomplishment ignite in his heart as both McGee and Ziva looked up. But they were not his focus…this time. Now, he had a new friend that he made over the last day, and Tony just had to involve him in the DiNozzo welcome.

"Jackson," Tony clarified, "Come on, probie."

Percy's eyes widened as everyone turned their attention to him. "Me? Probie?" He looked at Lima in distress but slumped in obvious dismay at her lack of defense.

Tony mentally cheered as Percy clambered up and into the huge can. That is until Lima showed her true ability. Not in defense but in retribution.

"Percy may need some help," Lima said, "Why don't you join him, Agent DiNozzo? You are his senior."

"S-sure, but-"

"You've done this plenty of times, Tony," Ziva said, which McGee rapturedly agreed to.

"What was it you said?" McGee said. "You would never use your 'superiority' for personal gain?"

The snarky nerd even used his fingers to air quote. Tony mimicked him, making sure to nail his derpy face.

"Yeah," Percy said lowly, "I'm sure you've been in the garbage plenty of times."

'Excuse you?'

"Get in there, DiNozzo," said Gibbs.

Tony sighed in defeat. There was no going against the Boss. He had been sent on his fair share of dumpster diving missions, but even though he was a senior agent, Gibbs kept on pushing him back in.

"Alright," Tony grimaced, trying not to breathe too deeply. "Let's see what we have here." He ripped open a garbage bag and casually dumped its contents. Percy yelped when most of the trash landed on him. How was Tony supposed to that the wind would pick up at just that moment?

"I got a ton of shredded documents," Tony noted, picking up the slim cuts of paper, "but they just look like vehicle and business stuff. Got some water bottles. And check this out," Tony lifted a couple of bags and napkins. "Looks like a logo I recognize."

"The Drowsy Owl," Ziva read.

"There is a whole bunch of stuff from that place in here," Percy said, digging a little deeper. "Guess he really liked the place."

"Bag it," Gibbs ordered.

"Uh, which ones?" Jackson asked.

"Everything," Gibbs and Lima said in time.

Tony grimaced. Oh no, they have started to become one!

"Looks like Ducky is here, Boss," McGee said.

Gibbs nodded, "Keep going through the place."

"Keep up the good work, boys," Lima threw behind her shoulder as she left with Gibbs.

"I should grab some popcorn," La Rue considered once the two squad leaders were out of hearing distance.

"When I was younger, one of my favorite snacks was Klik," Ziva shared, "Especially the chocolate-covered pretzel ones."

"Hm," Clarisse hummed in contemplation, "those sound pretty good right about now, too."

"How about you try helping?" Percy asked sardonically.

"Nah, I'm good right here in the audience," Clarisse jeered, "And don't forget to stuff yourself in one of those trash bags once you're done."

Tony winced at how casually cruel she was to her coworker. There was no doubt going to be another argument between the two, as he saw Percy tense. Tony sighed internally. This was not going to be pretty.

Underwood seemed to be thinking along the same lines, nervously saying, "I'll go jot down those plate numbers."

Tony watched enviously as the agent practically ran away, wishing he could as well when the arguing finally started. Ziva was downright egging them on. Hopefully, he could get out of this dump.

-Ανναβετη-

'Sorry, Percy,' Annabeth thought, not sparing a glance even as the sounds of an argument brewed over. She had to get someone who could spot pieces of evidence, not that she doubted Percy's ability, but he wouldn't have even thought about the implications of shredded paper or the products from The Drowsy owl. Agent David had a sharp eye and mind, and Agent McGee would diligently stay and do whatever his boss told him to do to the best of his ability, no matter how enthusiastic he was not. DiNozzo would find what he needed to, then pull rank when Gibbs had left. Clarisse would ensure that by just being herself.

She trusted Percy to find what she had really put him there to search for.

"I'm going to speak to Kahale's C.O." Gibbs told her, "He'll be able to give us more insight on Kahale's apparent assignment, or at least have an idea on who might have sent him."

Annabeth frowned at Gibbs's obvious assumption. "What if this wasn't a mission he received?"

Gibbs gave her a look. "A mechanic would be uncovering this mess by himself in just a few days of being home?"

Annabeth sighed. Welcome to the life of a demigod. But she couldn't just tell him that. "We shouldn't cross it off," she said simply.

He scrutinized her for a moment, before nodding. "I want to speak with the owner of the bar, too," Gibbs continued. "Repeated connections to the bar aren't looking good for him."

"You think the owner is involved?" Annabeth asked. Clarisse had told her that the bartender didn't seem like the type. Maybe he had tricked her.

"We shouldn't cross it off," Gibbs repeated.

Annabeth considered her own words that he threw at her. It was a solid way of thinking, for sure. "Well, you are going to have to hold out on hitting the bar," She told him, "It has not opened yet. Might as well talk to Michael's Commanding Officer first."

She watched as the older investigator shrugged in response, then pull off the lid of his large coffee cup to frown at its contents, or more likely its lack of. Already grumpier than before, Gibbs said, "Let's see what Ducky's got."

"Good morning, Jethro, Agent Lima," Ducky greeted, clambering out of the van.

"You got here pretty quickly," Gibbs said.

"Yes, I was already on the way, having wanted to be at the site of these gruesome murders," Ducky explained

"You went through the tapes, Duck?" Gibbs asked.

"Well, not all of it, I'm afraid. Underwood has given me quite the number of video clips, I haven't had time to go through all of them."

Annabeth made sure not to show anything other than sympathy on her face. "Sorry, Ducky, there were a few years on that tape."

"Yes, full of the man's vile actions."

And that was with all the editing Grover, and she did. There were several clips that Ducky did not receive. Although giving Ducky video that showcased usage of divine weapons wasn't a problem, any obvious displays of powers or mythical creatures had been easily cut out and replaced, thanks to Daedalus' laptop. Grover had taken it pretty hard, though. There were some satyrs, nymphs, and a demigod or two that Grover recognized.

"What did you get from them?" Gibbs asked.

"There is no particular type of person that he targets. They may be young or old, a woman or a man, they could be armed or defenseless. Some he lets live, while others not. He can be rightly called a psychopath, a very murderous one. His killings are random," Ducky said.

'Not random,' Annabeth thought, 'Only when he's hungry.'

"Great," Gibbs sighed, "Did you get anything from the kids' profiles?

"Hm, they are very interesting. I wonder what deeper connection they share with our Staff Sergeant."

"You don't think they are just normal kids?"

"Honestly, Jethro! They were wielding weapons!"

"Not what I meant," Gibbs said, "Are you telling me they may be in on this whole thing?"

"Take a closer look at this image here," Ducky told him, "There is a marking on their forearm. The image is unclear, but it is obviously not a natural mark that they both just happen to share."

"Gang activity?"

"Or…"

"'Or,' Duck?"

"Or they might be part of these Mexican Cartels."

His postulation threw Annabeth off for a second. She could kind of guess how he could come to such an idea, but she really couldn't see two teenagers, far from the border and with no links to a Mexican background, would all of a sudden be part of these cartels. Even if they weren't demigods.

Gibbs also seemed to dismiss the idea. He said, "Cartels don't send kids to do business."

"No," Ducky agreed, "but they do send them to kill."

Gibbs shook his head. It seemed he had reached the same conclusion as Annabeth had.

"There is a possibility," Ducky continued. "I've been over both of their records. ADHD, Dyslexia, hardship in academic and social life, reports of violence, one or both parents dead or missing."

Typical demigods then.

"Not in Wisconsin, Ducky."

Annabeth felt a bit disappointed if that was how Gibbs was derailing this idea.

"Sergeant Kahale was from Maryland," Ducky retorted, "And he displayed all of the mentioned traits. If not hitmen, then perhaps coyotitos or reclutadores. But this man could have easily accumulated a reputation."

The doctor turned his gaze on Annabeth, who had to shake her head, admitting, "Sorry. I don't know much on Mexican Cartels. But I have to agree with Agent Gibbs, it doesn't seem likely."

"Hm, very well. It is not my job to solve the crime," Ducky sighed, before continuing with his reports. "There were a few instances of victims who shared the same circumstances of owning those unique blades that the Staff Sergeant and the children, Mr. Swaller and Miss Hibashira, possessed. What's interesting is that all, except for Sergeant Kahale, and that exception can be argued, all the victims were children."

Annabeth tried to guess what was going through Gibbs's head. After all the evidence that had been revealed to the mortal investigators, victims using celestial blades was expected.

"I fear Abigail is going to be very busy, with the added work of identifying the victims. The families will have to be notified." Ducky lifted an eyebrow at Gibbs, "Have the guardians of those children been told?"

"Not yet," Gibbs.

"Well, it'd be best to do so quickly. Don't go questioning them too hard," Ducky said, fixing Gibbs with a peculiar glare, "They have just lost their children and will all be strongly affected."

"I know, Duck."

Annabeth pondered at the shift in tone of the conversation. And she came to the realization that she really didn't know who the mortal investigators really were. She remembered last night. An empty house with hidden rooms and an obviously unused upper floor. What had Agent Gibbs gone through in his mortal life, outside of solving Navy crimes?

Maybe letting Gibbs call up the victims' families, several of which may be in the know of the divine world, was not the best idea. But if she could do it… and if she could hook up her laptop with whatever program these feds had…

"I can work with the families," She suggested, coming up with an idea. "I'll just need access to facial recognition and the database."

"I'll still have to speak with them," Gibbs said.

"Fine," Annabeth said, already anticipating that, "But this way, they could have time to process the news before you start on them."

Gibbs thought a bit before disappointing her, "I'll need you on this one, if you can get more hints at Greek cult stuff, we could maybe start putting some connecting lines. Get Underwood on it."

Annabeth held tongue before she ranted at him for calling her life a cult. She simply nodded. She could work with that; she'll show Grover how to connect with the federal programs.

"We'll leave you and Abby to take all the samples you need, Duck," Gibbs said, leading Annabeth away.

"Joy," she heard the Medical Examiner grumble.

"Head back to HQ," Gibbs told her, "We'll talk to the C.O, directly. See what he's like."

'See'? Annabeth wondered how they would do that, she doubted Gibbs or his block of a computer could handle a face-time conversation.

But before she could ask, he had moved away and was gathering up his team. She smirked as she saw DiNozzo had already left Percy alone in the dumpster can. There were showers back at NCIS, or so she heard.

She hurried to collect her own company.

"Did you find anything in there?" She asked Percy.

He glared back at her. "No. And thanks a lot, by the way."

"Hey, barnacle boy," Clarisse growled, "We couldn't just let the mortals find drachmae, and they already have a celestial bronze dagger. Let's not give them another."

"Oh. Sorry."

Annabeth sighed. Clarisse had always been quick to realize Annabeth's strategies when they worked together. Percy just relied on his instincts and improvisational skills. It's something that Annabeth had grown to admire and work into her plan making.

"What did you find, Grover?" She asked her satyr friend.

"Um, the cars don't have a smell of monster in them. But they are really old. I think they belonged to Tarsibo's past victims. He must have been here for a really long time."

"Hm, and we just drove him out of his home," Annabeth thought aloud.

"If this general was a Son of Ares like you said, then he is either cowardly or drawing up the power to beat us right back," Clarisse said.

"I said he might be a son of Ares," Annabeth corrected, "But I agree, just letting us kick him out is not something Ares would approve us. But cutting losses and waiting to bring down the hammer is."

"You think he is going to bring the Mexican Cartels into this?" Grover asked.

Annabeth thought back to Michael's notes Abby had sent her. "He confirmed that the Reynosa cartel is involved in the shipment of weapons and suspects Sinaloa's involvement. I didn't find much on them, but I really doubt Tarsibo is going to ask for Cartel help on this. However, the weapons dealing Monster Donuts chain is somewhere he might go to. We really need to find it."

"Yeah," Clarisse agreed, cracking her knuckles, this morning's pounding doesn't cover DiNozzo's insistent jabbering. Not to mention, Ziva is good and is a good match with DiNozzo."

Annabeth nodded at the information that Clarisse implied. "But they are buying our cover stories?"

"Yeah, good thing you fleshed it out, they have gone deep into it and are still searching for more."

"I can't believe they haven't found me all over the internet yet," Percy said.

Annabeth smiled, "They don't have to go onto the internet if their database has all that they need."

"When we head back, Gibbs wants to call up the C.O. with me and have a chat with him. Clarisse, I want you to listen along." It would be good to have another demigod's opinion on the Commanding Officer.

"What did Dr. Mallard have to say?" Grover inquired.

"That we did good last night," Annabeth said, "And I'm going to need your help so we can communicate to all of the victim's families. You are going to have to convince either Agent McGee or Abby, the forensic scientist, to hook up Daedalus's laptop so it can access all the programs and databases they use for facial identification."

"So, how am I going to do this?"

"I'll show you on the way there. Let's go."

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#scarpool #fanfic #fanfiction #Godly Marine: Killed #NCIS #Percy Jackson and the Olympians #PJO #Crossover #gen fic #PG/K+#Writing #Complete

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treywrites117 · 4 years ago

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Three Dimensional Characters (more detailed)

Physiology:

Sex: The gender of your character means a lot and it’s not just “male” and “female”. There are people who identify as trans, non-binary, intersex, pangender, androgynous, agender, hijra, and much more. Different cultures have different names and relationships with different genders and that can affect your character.

Age: While this may just seem like a number, people lie about their age all the time to seem more experienced when interviewing for a job or to seem younger when trying to get a date. The importance of age also varies between cultures and generations which can affect your character. Do they lie about their age? Is it important that they see themselves as five and a half instead of just five?

Height and Weight: There are Napoleon complexes and there are people who are tired of being asked if they play basketball. There are also average height people who are affected by that in ways they may not even notice. Weight can define a character more because while height is usually genetic, weight is something a character’s choices and society affect. Are they skinny because they have a great metabolism or is it because they want to look like that celebrity?

Color of Hair, Eyes, and Skin: I saw a great play called The Bluest Eye (adapted from Toni Morrison’s book) about a young black girl who wanted to be fair-skinned, fair-haired, and have blue eyes so people would like her and she could be like all the popular girls, who were all white. Her appearance was greatly affected by the lack of representation of black girls on TV and in their selections of toys. The appearance of your character and their actions can be influenced by society and the culture around them.

Posture: How your character carries themselves can represent different parts of their characters. I know a lot of friends who have been drawing a lot since they were kids and they have a slouch to their shoulders from leaning over their sketchbooks. Strict posture could mean a strict family background.

Appearance: While a lot of the categories have already gone into appearance (Eye color, hair color, skin color, height, and weight…), whether their style is tidy or simple or explicit can really help define the character. Without going into detail about their fashion style, you can easily describe a character in your screenplay with “eye-catching outfits meant to grab attention” better than specific details of their wardrobe and still do justice to their character.

Defects: Clearly having something that can set your character apart from the average person can lead to a different experience in social aspects. If they have a deformity, abnormality, birthmark, or disease, it can change how people act around them or treat your character. What they take away from those encounters can mold their characteristics and choices.

Heredity: What has your character gained from their parents? Enviable red hair? A weak constitution? These traits are more genetic than they are learned from constant parental influence.

Sociology:

Class: What class your character comes from can influence how other characters interact with them. Class played an enormous role in the plot in My Fair Lady. Professor Higgins wanted to see if changing the language of a poor cockney woman, Eliza, could affect the way upper-class socialites interacted with her. Of course, her physical appearance was changed, but she was, under the surface, still a woman from the streets who lived her life off the pittance she got from selling flowers.

Occupations: An occupation that a character has can tell us more about their monetary situations which is a good way to understand character motivations. Are they in a dead end job they hate just to put food on the table? Do they have multiple jobs? What did they want to be vs. what job they do have? Have they had many jobs due to failure or boredom? In America, careers define people more than they should.

Education: Getting an education is not always enough, it has to be a certain type. A college education is great, but society places a greater influence on an Ivy League degree. Was your character homeschooled? Did they attend college at an early age? How well did they perform in high school? What subjects did they do best in? How people interact in the influential high school years very much affects who they are. If they had to drop out of school to get a full-time job to keep their family afloat, it can affect their socialization since they don’t see their friends and “drop-out” carries a negative connotation that can keep them from getting a career they want.

Home life: Everything from parents being alive to their own marital status is under this category. The relationship the character has with those they are living with can influence many of their choices. If they live with their parents, that can mean massive social difference between a fourteen-year-old and someone who is thirty. What about childhood home life? If they were raised in a violent atmosphere, they might be a shy, tentative person or quick-tempered.

Religion: Depending on what religion your character has, they might have some strict rules or beliefs that they adhere to. Those who observe Hinduism do not eat beef, which could cause conflict if they room with someone who does not share that belief and loves making hamburgers. Pagan beliefs vary and require a lot of different rituals and is usually associated with a negative stigma. A pagan believer might seem different than a Quaker, but depending on the faction of Quaker, they may not be so different after all.

Race, Nationality: It goes without saying that in this modern day, race has a large influence on how people treat each other. A character is defined just as much by how they respond and act toward others from a different race as they are growing up as the race that they are.

Place in Community: Are they a leader? Are they involved in clubs or societies that may affect who they are to certain people? They could also be someone in the community that is shunned or perhaps they were removed from the community for some kind of unforgivable infraction.

Amusements, Hobbies: How someone spends their free time can tell you a lot about them. Do they read? What genre? Do they like to tinker or build things? Sometimes what someone’s hobby is, could be what they wanted to do with their life if they didn’t have four children they needed to feed and had to get a better paying job for the price of their soul.

Psychology:

Sex Life, Moral Standards: These could be two different things. A character could preach certain moral standards perhaps that reflect the standards of their religion, but have a contradictory sex life. Maybe they are doing it to keep their sex life secret to not be removed from the religious community or because they want to stay in their conservative family member’s will. Sometimes people will boast about sex lives they do not have to boost their self-esteem or to impress others.

Personal Premise, Ambition: What is the goal of your character’s life? This is probably where the story and the character connect. This ambition drives a character’s more “big picture” actions and could be what lands them in the conflict of the story in the first place.

Frustrations, Chief Disappointments: Frustrations can be triggers for some people that lead to problematic actions. These frustrations can be born of past mistakes and disappointments that haunt the characters.

Temperament: This could be seen as where your character falls on the Friedman and Rosenman A/B Personality spectrum. Are they a very structured and high-strung person (A) or an easy-going and relaxed person (B)? Of course, this category covers other types of temperament, like optimism, skepticism, etc.

Attitude Toward Life: Does your character feel cheated? Are they cynical or defeated? They could also live every day like their last or have a goal to help anyone they can. The way they look at life and their own outcome can affect how they approach problems like the conflict of your story.

Complexes: Characters can have obsessions, superstitions, and fears that not only color their personalities but affect their actions. If someone has an Oedipus complex and only dated people that looked like their mother, it could influence how they interact with others and how others perceive them.

Extrovert, Introvert, Ambivert: A crash course in this is: extroverts gain energy from and enjoy long social interactions while introverts spend energy and can be exhausted by social interactions. Ambiverts are usually a happy middle.

Abilities: A multilingual character could be a very openly accepting person to others from different cultures. Does your character play a musical instrument? Do they play it well? Do they use their talents or repress them? Are they proud of what they can do?

I.Q.: What is there intelligence level? Are they ashamed or proud? Do they even care? Characters with different intelligence levels may have difficulties with conversation. It also affects how characters treat each other. Sometimes intelligent characters lord their brilliance over everyone else while some lower intelligent characters might feel shame.

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mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker · 7 years ago

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One of my pet peeves is when fellow Spider-Man fans argue that Peter and Mary Jane not being together romantically will condemn them both to a lifetime of eternal misery or when people argue that their love and marriage have survived too many hardships in the past (such as the tragic loss of their baby daughter in particular) for them to ever break up.

Peter and Mary Jane are my favourite fictional couple of all time (always have been, always will be) and I want them to love each other and for them to be together until the stars turn cold and falls out of the sky but I refuse to accept the notion that they are each the other persons only sources of happiness. Also there is no such thing as a point of no return were a couple can no longer decide to end their relationship ever because of having endured too much together. That is not how relationships work, that is not how humans work!

Mary Jane could live a perfectly fulfilling life without Peter! She doesn’t need him but she chooses to be with him because she loves him and being with him makes her happy! That is a good thing dammit!

Peter once believed that Gwen was the love of his life and that he would marry her. Following her death he became depressed and sincerely questioned if it would ever be possible for him to love another person like he loved her, a most realistic concern after suffering such a devastating loss. But his life went on and we all know the answer to that question.

Later in life he even started to question if his relationship with Gwen, (the very person he once thought of as the love of his life) would have lasted even if she had lived, thinking that he and Gwen just weren’t compatible enough for their relationship to survive in the long run and that he most likely still would have ended up falling in love with Mary Jane regardless.

If he lost Mary Jane too it would probably be even more devastating than when he lost Gwen, but he survived that loss and he would ultimately survive losing Mary Jane as well.

In summary: I want to think that Peter and Mary Jane stays together because they love each other and want to spend their lives together and not because they each represent the other persons only chance of ever finding happiness.

For me a big part of the appeal of Pete/MJ is that they’re both flawed, messy, real-seeming fictional people who work hard for their relationship, which by definition means that, yes, they could split up. That’s something that can happen with real people, even ones who love each other very much.

To be fair, I think a lot of fans (including me sometimes!) use “Peter and MJ would never break up!” as hyperbolic shorthand when what they mean is, “Okay, I can see xyz scenario where Peter and MJ would split up and it would make sense, but not because Peter gaslights MJ into agreeing to a deal with the devil who then alters reality so that a brick falls onto Peter’s head the night before the wedding because Marvel thought Peter getting a divorce would age Spider-Man too much, are you f***ing kiding me–”

Yeah I think a lot of the miserable without each other stuff is an interpretation/no prize style fix fic of the terms of whatever the Mesphito deal exactly is. Supposedly they’re supposed to unfulfilled without each other per the deal, but because OMD is a piece of shit comic we never really delve into how (except for oddly a small tease in the deadpool/spider-man comic of all ducking unlikely places). Especially since if we accept current events in the comics as the canon they’re supposed to be doing fairly okay (Peter is a goddamn billionaire and MJ’s doing her own thing with Tony and pals).

My personal interpretation of that is the deal is doing more than affecting than romantic lives and is undermining them in other aspects in the long term (they’re stuck in a perpetual one step forward two step back thing-Peter’s company will be lost and he’ll be poorer than before, MJ’s acting dream keeps getting snatched from her despite the obvious successes she’s had there on top of how every time they get closer to together some outside force intervenes and pushes them apart etc.) Although full disclosure, for the time being I’ve dropped Slott’s amazing run.

But otherwise yes. The above. What makes both Peter and MJ interesting as characters is that they actually have flaws and their own characters outside of one another. And those flaws complement each other in a very real way that works for a relationship that feels organic. But MJ is such a developed character she can (and does) support stories without needing Peter’s presence to make us care about her. Or in other words, she’s the mythical strong female supporting character who’s life does not revolve solely around her love interest.

I have to disagree with the points made here. Esepcially the OP...a lot.

First of all...actually there is such a phenomenon wherein a couple will not break up. Different humans behave in different ways...but if you know enough about psychoplogy you’d know actually a lot of human behaviour can be predicted if you have a detailed enough psychological profile. And part and parcel of that is consistent behavioural patterns. The nature of comics essentially means we know EVERYTHING about a character because we live in their heads and are privy to all relevant information about them. Consequently by and large for the characters who’ve been around long enough and in enough situations we know what they are going to act most of the time. In theory if you knew as much about a human being the same would apply. In fact most of the time when we see people act in ways we didn’t expect or claim human behaviour is unpredictable or ‘people change’ the truth is that’s just us trying to explain behaviours that we didn’t know would happen due to a lack of information. We don’t know what exact variables are bouncing around and influencing someone’s thoughts and feelings which would lead to them acting a certain way, or don’t know that person’s behavioural history well enough to have seen a certain action coming. But we do with many fictional characters which means you cannot simply treat them psychologically or emotionally the same way you’d treat a real person and have them act arbitrarily differently because ‘humans don’t workt hat way’.

Which brings us to this point. When people have been in a relationship for a long enough amount of time and endured certain things that act as bonding experiences it becomes less and less likely that they would split for various reasons. One of which being that they are among the only people who understand what it was like to go through said bonding experiences which can take the form of traumatic experiences. This is why veterans or war or even of the police, specifically ones who’ve fought together are often so close and stay friends for most of their lives following a traumatic event.

So in Peter and MJ’s case your talking about people who’ve lived though shittons of tragedies and hardships indivoidually and faced obstacles to wanting to enter into a relationship together. MJ was almost pathologically opposed to any form of commitment due to a traumatic upbringing but still renegaded on that because of her feelings for Peter, an event which occurred following the knowledge that her very life would be at risk through association with him. You cannot sell short how big of a deal for someone in her position thus its a testament to the degree to which she wanted to be involved with Peter, even when she was trying to actively stop herself from being so.

Your talking about someone who for years knew fully well from first hand experience that she was going to deal with being stood up, with a lot of worrying and that she could be killed at any time and her actual biggest issue with getting together with him was worrying that she’d wind up trapped and miserable. But in reality she gained a lot of emotional fulfilment from being involved with Peter even though it actually required MORE commitment than her mother or sister or brother-in-law ever had to deal with. Those issues for her stemming all the way back to childhood (you know the shit which absolutely stays with you in life) was so deep rooted that she was still tempted to run away the night before her wedding but never did.

She had other options at her disposal. Any number of people with money, security or almost anything she wanted would’ve liked to date her or be in a long term relationship with her but she never went for them. At that point you are dealing with someone who is very, very, very seriously dead set on being attached to the person they want to be with.

And then on top of all this your dealing with people who’ve been through multiple immensely stressful and traumatic bonding experiences over the course of several years and both have a consistent track record of responding to such tragedies and traumas by growing closer together never apart. As an acquaintance of mine has said, conflict in life and in marriage either drives you apart or closer together.

Sure, enduring a miscarriage doesn’t mean 100% two people aren’t going to split up. But in Peter and MJ’s case you aren’t dealing with JUST that you are dealing with that on top of everything else in their lives and relationship and then they went ahead and had even more of that crap thrown at them after the clone saga and during the JMS run. In fact they were much closer after the miscarriage and during the JMS run than they’d been even before, highlighting what I said before about how they react to tragedies and traumas.

And here is the thing, the OP and other observers making similar points are making the error of not actually looking at the specifics of the Peter/MJ relationship but rather utilizing knowledge garnered from most people’s relationships, normal relationships. I’m not suggesting Peter and MJ have some sort of magical miracle romance or anything but it is precisely because of their lives before and during their relationships and the tragedies and traumas they faced that it is illogical to judge them the same way you judge most people’s relationships. It’s atypical even for the closest real life equivalencies such as police officers and their spouses.

So yes in fact in real life and in fiction even moreso you can definitely say past actions inform how someone is going to act now or in the future. And in this case your essentially dealing with two people who’s relationship on an emotional level doesn’t erode as crap keeps getting piled on top of it but consistently actually deepens. Could there be something hurtful enough to facilitate them ending their relationship? Maybe...but realistically its very unlikely unless they just fundamentally change as people. The notion that their relationship will end b because they get fed up with the lifestyle one another have led up until this point is ridiculous or they go through something really hurtful and traumatic is essentially ridiculous. When you’ve got people who stayed together and grew closer after multiple kidnappings, multiple near fatal attacks, stalkers, home invasions, the belief that one another were dead for 2 weeks-six months and then a miscarriage which was just the chrery on top then yes...ending it due to something like that is something that would’ve happened a long ass time ago, not at the end of over 5 years of marriage and 10 years of friendship. That is in fact extremely unbelievable and realistic.

Moving on lets talk about the nature of need here.

MJ chooses to be with Peter because he makes her happy. So...she does in fact needs him to make her happy in regards to romantic/emotional fulfilment. She doesn’t need him for financial support, security, or the kind of fulfilment she gains from acting or the dignity that comes from having a career.

But...is she deep down happy with that stuff alone sans whatever fulfilment she gets from Peter? Not exactly no. Check the JMS run. MJ had a well earning career. She could be with her friends and family from NYC if she wanted and if not plenty of people in LA to hang around. She had a certain degree of fame and she lived in luxury. And she was...totally miserable. In fact before Gwen died we know MJ loved to party but actively chose to cut back on that because of her relationship with Peter. She decided that she was going to implicate herself in his life in the 1980s stories despite having a lot of those same career options and knowing the baggage Peter came with. As frustrated and upset as she got upon losing a lot of her success she prioritized her marriage above those things and made sacrifices for it’s sake.These are not merely the actions of someone who finds someone else makes her happy but clearly finds great fulfilment from said person.

I’m not saying MJ NEEDS Peter to survive and that she’d fall apart without him. But am I saying that she would be without a certain large source of fulfilment in her life without him? Or that Peter to her is much more than someone she loves and who makes her happy but whom she doesn’t exactly need as part of her life? Or that without him there would essentially always be something missing in her life she’d want to fill? Yes to all.

Indeed the idea MJ gets this type of deepset fulfilment from her relationship with Peter goes a Hell of a long way to explaining exactly why she has a Job-like patience and tolerance of the massive stress, danger and traumas that comes from being his friend, lover and spouse and why she made an exception for him as far as her commitment issues were concerned.

That doens’ make MJ weak or dependant at all. Different strokes for different folks and some people simply need certain fulfilment in their lives through a romantic relationship.

Now moving onto Peter...this is where the OP is really getting ridiculous.

Yeah Peter Parker, aged 19-20 years old tops who’d dated exactly 3 girls in his whole life and one of those was just a handful of casual dates thought that Gwen Stacy whom he’d known for at most a year and a half (as in had known her face/name for that long, not actually befriended, dated or been in love with her for that long) thought Gwen Stacy was the love of his life and the person he would marry...without telling her his secret identity.

It’s almost as though he was a young and naive idiot who whilst genuinely in love with someone for the first time ever and built it up to unrealistic levels in his head and heart precisely because he didn’t know any better. Peter didn’t have puppy love but...he kind of had the equivalent except he genuinely was in love with Gwen.

Simply put he was a very inexperienced naive kid who didn’t really know what he was doing...also he was like super stressed most of the time trying to save the world but that isn’t the point really....

Now yes after he died he did question if he could love another person like he loved Gwen and he was depressed.

And he got through that and did eventually love somebody like he loved Gwen. As in it was Mary Jane. As in this wasn’t him merely ‘moving on’ it was him moving on with someone very specific who helped him in very specific ways. More than once the Spider-Man narrative has made the clear cut point that Peter would have REMAINED depressed, and wouldn’t have moved on and would’ve gone off the deep end if it wasn’t for Mary Jane’s presence in his life at that time. He didn’t simply work to get over it and allow time to heal all wounds. From the moment Gwen died it was Mary Jane’s support and presence as a friend in his life which enabled him to survive losing Gwen that way. Conveying it as a simple case of someone losing a loved one and moving on like many people do is belying the actual specifics and realities of the situation as it was presented.

To reiterate Peter only moved on from Gwen the then love of his life because

a) He was making a bigger deal out of their relationship than was warranted and

b) Because Mary Jane herself was the one helping him to move on and was the person he moved on to. Flash Thompson and Aunt May weren’t the ones who were going to see him through that crisis

Att he same time....where precisely did Peter ever once say even if Gwen had lived he and MJ would’ve wound up together anyway? Never in all my years have I ever encountered such a story or moment.

The closest things I can think of are Webspinners Tales of Spider-Man where Peter wonders if he and Gwen would’ve stayed together if she’d lived or Web of Romance where he compares MJ to Gwen and says Gwen would’ve needed him to protect and support her most of the time whereas MJ didn’t because she was a stronger person.

The latter doesn’t really support the OP’s statements as it has nothing to do with Peter questioning if he and Gwen would’’ve been together later in life but is simply observing how MJ and Gwen cope differently and maybe that MJ is a better match.

The former however does have Peter questioning if him and Gwen would’ve stayed together...and not coming up with an ironclad answer. But even putting that aside that was a late 20s/early 30s year old Peter Parker who’d done a Hell of a lot of growing up since the days where he was dating Gwen Stacy as a much more naive kid. Of course he’d wonder if he and Gwen would’ve gotten married if she hadn’t died. He has hindsight on his side at that point and lacks youthful naivete to cloud his judgement.

The OP’s point was Peter thoguth Gwen was the one and only person he could ever be with but she wasn’t and he even questioned it as such therefore the same logic should apply to Mary Jane or any woman he was with. But this again takes a broadbrush 1:1 approach to both relationships.

Mary Jane and Gwen and their respective relationships with Peter are immensely different. Just because Peter at one point believed Gwen was the one and only person he’d ever love and no one else could compare and was proven wrong doesn’t mean that in reality he’d be wrong for holding the same belief about Mary Jane at a much later point in life. Because again it’s coming from a completely different place in his life and from an entirely different emotional level.

So no. If Peter lost MJ he would absolutely not survive that loss the way he survived Gwen. Because again...he only survived losing Gwen because of Mary Jane. People forget this but Peter is someone who isn’t at the end of the day a great loner. He really does need people and I don’t just mean for the sake of emotional fulfilment. Peter didn’t just love MJ or feel she made him happy. He literally needed her presence in his life as proven by stories like Kraven’s Last Hunt, ASM #150, the Clone Saga, Doomed Affairs, etc. MJ was vital to keeping him afloat and he’d have gone down a long time ago without her influence.

So yeah Peter and MJ do stay together because they want to and because they love one another. But more than likely when you break down the characters and their experiences, especially in Peter’s case...yeah. Actually there probably isn’t anyone else for either of them. Not at the very least to fulfil them AS much as they would otherwise be in one another’s company.

I know we like Peter and Mj becuase they are more realistic and try to make things work but...honestly there comes a point where you really do have to look at the charaacters and what they are and have dealt with and see them for how they’ve been defined.

Sure their relationship is messy and requires them to work hard in spite of character flaws. But it honestly at this point (or rather before OMD anyway) would be immensely difficult to believably and yes realistically split them up

The only way to do it is if you have them completely change in their personalities and lose the very aspects that one of them loved about the other. And outside of very mean spirited stories where they have kids who are violently killed or where Mary jane is victimized in some way (which Marvel would never due out of fear of the PR and the desire to keep using the character for branding purposes) those changes aren’t going to happen. Marvel would of course never change Spider-Man permanently in any significant way to the point where he loses his personality because again branding.

But if we’re talking about stuff we’ve already seen before now, if we’re saying they remain essentially the same in their personalities and they go through similar tragedies and traumas as they’ve gone through up until now and those things break them up...Hell no. they aren’t going to split up over that stuff. If they were it would’ve happened decades ago. It’d have to be something really extreme or out of the ordinary like one of them being rendered disabled and blaming the other or something. But even that...I don’t buy they’d do that given the losses they’ve endured already. Losing your kid is so much worse than that.

As for the ramifications of OMD...as I’ve said before OMD is a different continuity from pre-OMD Spider-Man and furthermore is literally a consistent series of OOC BS moments stretching across years. Sure if we look at the current stories and say Peter and MJ are perfectly happy without one another...but it isn’t that that proves that actually they are fine without one another. It just proves how deeply the post-OMD comics misunderstand the characters and the series. This stuff has little to do with OMD and actually goes back way into their histories, for example in the JMS run BOTH of them were miserable and missing each other a Hell of a lot.

We never even SAW either of them post-OMD all that upset that the most significant romantic relationship in their lives which was stated in and out of universe to be tantamount to a marriage. Not once. We hit the ground and Peter is macking on some stranger and MJ is dating some loser actor. Not even a hint of them being upset over breaking up and we’ve to this day never seen anything accurately reflect the realistic sadness either would feel, even if this was like a fairly standard relationship.

To reiterate, I’m not saying Peter and MJ have some kind of miracle magic romance where everything is lovey dovey all the time. But I’m just saying because of who they are and what they’ve been through yes it is actually very difficult to dream up a realistic scenario wherein they’d believably break up like many people do. Because many people have not lived thorugh what they have and have not developed their personal relationships in the same ways.

@horselover107 I don’t disagree with your last paragraph but I think there is a difference in discussing a character’s creative standing and issues of mental/emotional satisfaction and fulfilment. Similarly someone doesn’t need their lives to REVOLVE around someone they love for that person to still be fulfilling in their lives and the most important person or aspect to it. MJ herself acknowledged this as such. She acknowledged Peter was more important to her than anyone or anything else in her life but that didn’t mean everything she did hinged upon taking him into account or that she didn’t have her own things going on. Ditto for Peter. He’s acknowledged MJ as the person he loves most and needs in his life but he has other shit to do as well. But that doesn’t mean that for MJ there would be a big hole missing in her life without Peter leaving her at least never as happy as she would be with him, or that for Peter he wouldn’t eventually fall apart without MJ supporting him.

#mjwatsonedit #mary jane watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker #Spider-Man #Peter Parker #Gwen Stacy

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mozgoderina · 7 years ago

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Some say bypassing a higher education is smarter than paying for a degree (Washington Post)

Across the region and around the country, parents are kissing their college-bound kids -- and potentially up to $200,000 in tuition, room and board -- goodbye.

Especially in the supremely well-educated Washington area, this is expected. It's a rite of passage, part of an orderly progression toward success.

Or is it . . . herd mentality?

Hear this, high achievers: If you crunch the numbers, some experts say, college is a bad investment.

"You've been fooled into thinking there's no other way for my kid to get a job . . . or learn critical thinking or make social connections," hedge fund manager James Altucher says.

Altucher, president of Formula Capital, says he sees people making bad investment decisions all the time -- and one of them is paying for college.

College is overrated, he says: In most cases, what you get out of it is not worth the money, and there are cheaper and better ways to get an education. Altucher says he's not planning to send his two daughters to college.

"My plan is to encourage them to pursue a dream, at least initially," Altucher, 42, says. "Travel or do something creative or start a business. . . . Whether they succeed or fail, it'll be an interesting life experience. They'll meet people, they'll learn the value of money."

Certainly, you'd be forgiven for thinking this argument reeks of elitism. After all, Altucher is an Ivy Leaguer. He's rolling in dough. Easy for him to pooh-pooh the status quo.

But, it turns out, his anti-college ideas stem from personal experience. After his first year at Cornell University, Altucher says his parents lost money and couldn't afford tuition. So he paid his own way, working 60 hours a week delivering pizza and tutoring, on top of his course load.

He left Cornell thousands of dollars in debt. He also left with a degree in computer science. But it took failing at several investment schemes, losing large sums of money and then studying the stock market on his own -- analyzing Warren Buffett's decisions so closely he ended up writing a book about him -- for Altucher to learn enough about the financial world to survive in it. He thinks he would have been better off getting the real-world lessons earlier, rather than thrashing himself to pay for school and shouldering so much debt.

It's cold comfort, but the loans put him in good company: Hundreds of billions of dollars of national student-loan debt has now overtaken American credit-card debt, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, using numbers compiled by FinAid.org, a Web site for college financial aid information.

"There's a billion other things you could do with your money," Altucher says. One option: Invest the money you'd spend on tuition in Treasury bills for your child's retirement. According to Altucher, $200,000 earning 5 percent a year over 50 years would amount to $2.8 million.

Few families have that kind of money lying around. But if you can give your child $10,000 or so to start his own business, Altucher says, your child will reap practical lessons never taught in a classroom. Later, when he's more mature and focused, college might be more meaningful.

* * *

The hefty price tag of a college degree has some experts worried that its benefits are fading.

"I think it makes less sense for more families than it did five years ago," says Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University who has been studying education issues. "It's become more and more problematic about whether people should be going to college."

That applies not just to astronomically priced private schools but to state schools as well, where tuitions have spiked. Student loans can postpone the pain of paying, but they come due when many young adults are at their most financially vulnerable, and default rates are high. Even community colleges, while helping some to keep costs down, prompt many to take out loans -- which can land them in severe credit trouble.

According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 percent of loans made to community college students are in default. (The same report found that 25 percent of all government student loans default.) Default on a student loan and face dire consequences, beyond a bad credit record -- which can tarnish hopes of getting a car, an apartment or even a job: Uncle Sam can claim your tax refunds and wages.

Now, take a key argument in favor of getting a four-year degree, the one that says on average, those with one earn more than those without it. Education Department numbers support this: In 2008, the median annual earnings of young adults with bachelor's degrees was $46,000; it was $30,000 for those with high school diplomas or equivalencies. This means that, for those with a bachelor's degree, the middle range of earnings was about 53 percent more than for those holding only a high school diploma.

But a lot of college graduates fall outside the middle range -- and many stand to make considerably less.

"If you major in accounting or engineering, you're pretty likely to get a return on your investment," Vedder says. "If you're majoring in anthropology or social work or education, the rate on return is going to be a good deal lower, on average.

"I've talked to some of my own students who've graduated and who are working in grocery stores or Wal-Mart," he says. "The fellow who cut my tree down had a master's degree and was an honors grad."

The unemployment rate among those with bachelor's degrees is at an all-time high. In 1970, when the overall unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, unemployment among college graduates was negligible, at 1.2 percent, Vedder says, citing figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But this year, with the national rate of unemployment at 9.6 percent, unemployment for college graduates has risen to 4.9 percent -- more than half the rate of the general population. The bonus for those with degrees is "less pronounced than it used to be," Vedder says.

"The return on investment is clearly lower today than it was five years ago," he says. "The gains for going to college have leveled off."

Before hackles are raised about boiling the salutary effects of higher education down to its cost, there are obvious disclaimers: Education is a priceless thing. Many high-school graduates are not ready for independence and adult responsibilities, and college provides a safe place for them to grow up -- for a fee.

But what about the lessons offered by the success stories that have unspooled along a different path? Dropouts are the toast of the dot-com world. To the non-degreed billionaires' club headed by Microsoft's Bill Gates (Harvard's most famous quitter) and Apple's Steve Jobs (left Oregon's Reed College after a single semester), add: Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computers, University of Texas dropout), Microsoft co-founder and Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen (quit Washington State University) and Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Systems, gave up on the University of Illinois).

Success sans sheepskin isn't only for the technology set.

David Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks, bowed out of several schools, including the University of Texas.

Redskins owner Daniel Snyder dropped out of the University of Maryland.

Barry Gossett, chief executive of Baltimore's Acton Mobile Industries, builders of temporary trailers, also left Maryland without a degree. (No hard feelings, apparently: In 2007, he donated $10 million to the school.)

Perhaps these are unique individuals in whom a driving entrepreneurial spirit outstripped the plodding pace of book learning.

Or perhaps they point to a new model.

"There's nothing you can't do on your own," Altucher says. A provocative idea -- and a liberating one. Even if it's not entirely true.

But you don't have to agree with Altucher to concede that the debt-stress many graduates or their parents -- or both -- are left with after tossing off the cap and gown works against the merits of the degree.

Even if a kid doesn't party his way through college, chances are he or his family has plowed a boatload of money into a few memorable classes and a lot of boredom.

On top of that, you don't know how big a boatload it'll be. For many college students, four years of anticipated tuition payments grows to five years or six -- or more. Government statistics show just 57 percent of full-time college students get their bachelor's degrees in six or fewer years.

And the rest . . . don't.

* * *

In her youth, Toni Reinhart, 55, owner of Comfort Keepers Reston, a licensed home-care agency in Northern Virginia, abandoned hopes of completing a business degree at George Mason University. There was that C in accounting, and then trigonometry. . . .

"My problem was not being able to put the time in to learn things I wasn't interested in," she says.

Has dropping out held her back?

"Oh sure," says Reinhart, a self-described late-bloomer. "But maybe that's good. Maybe it held me back from things I shouldn't have been doing anyway."

Now she manages 56 employees and in recent years hit the million-dollar mark in gross revenue.

"I understand the case for finishing, because you've proven you can stick with something," she says. "But wouldn't it be nice if we did have another path that didn't put people in debt for . . . $100,000? Isn't there another way to instill those kinds of lessons in people that would be cheaper?"

Nelson Cortez, 20, wishes there were. The Napa resident starts his third year this month at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He's received state grants and works 15 hours a week while school is in session, but with the loans he's taken out, he estimates he's already about $25,000 in debt. This is why, when the California Board of Regents last year announced a 32 percent increase in fees, he joined protests that galvanized students around the state -- and set off similar protests around the country.

Cortez helped shut down the Santa Cruz campus and traveled to the District to rally outside the U.S. Capitol. (On Oct. 2, students will demonstrate on the Mall for affordable education as part of the One Nation march, organized by civil rights and youth groups and unions.)

"Rent was due yesterday, and I was $20 short, and I'm running around the house looking for $20," Cortez says. His money problems have caused him to question whether he's made the right decision: "Am I going to be able to afford it, should I take a semester off? . . . I do have in the back of my mind, would it be better not to have those loans and just work?"

According to the Education Department, between 1997-98 and 2007-08, prices for undergraduate tuition, room and board at public institutions of higher education rose by 30 percent, and prices at private institutions rose by 23 percent -- after adjustments for inflation. "The reason colleges have been getting away with raising their fees so much is that loans allow parents to tough it out," Vedder says.

Federal government moves, such as tuition tax credits, allow those paying college costs to subtract a certain amount from their tax bills. But it does little to alleviate the financial burden, Vedder says, adding that it gives colleges an excuse to raise costs further.

* * *

The cost of college is putting the financial screws to an entire generation, say student activists.

"I think it's absolutely despicable that students are asked to pay that much," says Lindsay McCluskey, president of the United States Student Association. "In terms of public education, you can't even call that public when students are taking out an average of $25,000 to complete college and then are paying off student loan debt until they're 50 or 60 years old."

A recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she majored in anthropology, McCluskey is paying down a $20,000 student loan. She thinks it will probably take her a decade to dig out of that hole -- while the balance is accumulating interest -- because she can't afford to make more than the minimum monthly payments.

"For my generation," McCluskey, 23, says, "that loan debt is taking the place of the house we could be buying or a number of other investments we could be making in our lives. The loan debt just sucks a lot of that out."

Now consider Jeremiah Stone, 25. The graduate of Rockville's Thomas S. Wootton High School is living in Paris, pursuing a drool-worthy international career as a chef. After high school, he took a job as a barback in a Houston's Restaurant, worked up to kitchen assistant, took a nine-month cooking course at the French Culinary Institute in New York and finally landed in France, where he has freelanced as a chef throughout the country. Eventually he hopes to open his own restaurant in New York.

"People I meet for the first time, they're always saying, 'Oh, if I had another career, I'd be a pastry chef instead of becoming a lawyer,' " Stone says. In the eyes of some of his friends, he says, he's become emblematic of simply doing what you love. In his case, it turns out that not following the herd was the best investment of all.

Source: Washington Post / Sarah Kaufman. Link: Bypassing a higher education Illustration: Tim Lahan. Moderator: ART HuNTER.

#propaganda #contemporary world #postmodern thinking #neoliberal capitalism #economy #washington post #tim lahan #brainslide bedrock education talk #education #knowledge #article #free your mind

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael (June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture, was a Trinidadian-American that became a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement and the global Pan-African movement. He grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while he attended Howard University. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movement, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and finally as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Early life and education

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Stokely Carmichael attended Tranquility School there before moving to Harlem, New York, in 1952 at the age of 11, to rejoin his parents who had emigrated to the United States when he was age two, leaving him with his grandmother and two aunts. He had three sisters.

His mother Mabel R. Carmichael was a stewardess for a steamship line. His father Adolphus was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Van Nest in the East Bronx, at that time an aging neighborhood with residents who were primarily Jewish and Italian immigrants and descendants. According to a 1967 interview he gave to Life Magazine, Carmichael was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

He attended the elite, selective Bronx High School of Science in New York, with entrance based on academic performance.

After graduation in 1960, Carmichael enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C.. His professors included Sterling Brown, Nathan Hare, and Toni Morrison, a writer who later won the Nobel Prize. Carmichael and Tom Kahn, a Jewish-American student and civil-rights activist, helped to fund a five-day run of the Three Penny Opera, by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill:

Tom Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances. It was a classic win/win. Members of the Council got patronage packets of tickets for distribution to friends and constituents.

Carmichael's apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in philosophy. Carmichael was offered a full graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but turned it down.

While at Howard, Carmichael had joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Kahn introduced Carmichael and the other SNCC activists to Bayard Rustin, an African-American leader who became an influential adviser to SNCC. Inspired by the sit-in movement in the southern United States during college, Carmichael became more active in the Civil Rights Movement.

1961: Freedom Rides

In his first year at the university, in 1961, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to desegregate the bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. He was arrested so many times for his activism that he lost count, sometimes estimating at least 29 or 32. In 1998, he told the Washington Post that he thought the total was fewer than 36.

Along with eight other riders, on June 4, 1961, Carmichael traveled by train from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi, to integrate the formerly "white" section on the train. Before getting on the train in New Orleans, they encountered white protestors blocking the way. Carmichael says: "They were shouting. Throwing cans and lit cigarettes at us. Spitting on us." Eventually, they were able to board the train. When the group arrived in Jackson, Carmichael and the eight other riders entered a "white" cafeteria. They were charged with disturbing the peace, arrested and taken to jail.

Eventually, Carmichael was transferred to the infamous Parchman Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi, along with other Freedom Riders. He gained notoriety for being a witty and hard-nosed leader among the prisoners.

He served 49 days with other activists at the Parchman State Prison Farm. At 19 years of age, Carmichael was the youngest detainee in the summer of 1961. He spent 53 days at Parchman Farm in "a six-by-nine cell. Twice a week to shower. No books, nothing to do. They would isolate us. Maximum security." Carmichael said about the Parchman Farm sheriff:

The sheriff acted like he was scared of black folks and he came up with some beautiful things. One night he opened up all the windows, put on ten big fans and an air conditioner and dropped the temperature to 38 degrees [Fahrenheit; 3 °C]. All we had on was T-shirts and shorts.

While being hurt one time, Carmichael began singing to the guards, "I'm gonna tell God how you treat me," to which the rest of the prisoners joined in.

Carmichael kept the group's morale up while in prison, often telling jokes with Steve Green and the other Freedom Riders, and making light of their situation. He knew their situation was serious.

What with the range of ideology, religious belief, political commitment and background, age, and experience, something interesting was always going on. Because no matter our differences, this group had one thing in common, moral stubbornness. Whatever we believed, we really believed and were not at all shy about advancing. We were where we were only because of our willingness to affirm our beliefs even at the risk of physical injury. So it was never dull on death row.

In a 1964 interview with author Robert Penn Warren, Carmichael reflected on his motives for going on the rides, saying,

I thought I have to go because you've got to keep the issue alive, and you've got to show the Southerners that you're not gonna be scared off, as we've been scared off in the past. And no matter what they do, we're still gonna keep coming back.

1964–67: SNCC

Mississippi and Cambridge, Maryland

In 1964, Carmichael became a full-time field organizer for SNCC in Mississippi. He worked on the Greenwood voting rights project under Robert Parris Moses. Throughout Freedom Summer, he worked with grassroots African-American activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer, whom Carmichael named as one of his personal heroes. SNCC organizer Joann Gavin wrote that Hamer and Carmichael "understood one another as perhaps no one else could."

He also worked closely with Gloria Richardson, who led the SNCC chapter in Cambridge, Maryland. During a protest with Richardson in Maryland in June 1964, Carmichael was hit directly in a chemical gas attack by the National Guard and had to be hospitalized.

He soon became project director for Mississippi's 2nd congressional district, made up largely in the counties of the Mississippi Delta. At that time, most blacks in Mississippi were still disenfranchised. The summer project was to prepare them to register to vote and to conduct a parallel registration movement to demonstrate how much people wanted to vote. Grassroots activists organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), as the regular Democratic Party did not represent African Americans in the state. At the end of Freedom Summer, Carmichael went to the 1964 Democratic Convention in support of the MFDP, which sought to have its delegation seated. But, the MFDP delegates were refused voting rights by the Democratic National Committee, who chose to seat the regular white Jim Crow delegation. Carmichael, along with many SNCC staff members, left the convention with a profound sense of disillusionment in the American political system, and what he later called "totalitarian liberal opinion."

Selma to Montgomery Marches

Having developed aversion to working with the Democratic Party after the 1964 convention experience, Carmichael decided to leave the MFDP. Instead he began exploring SNCC projects in Alabama in 1965. During the period of the Selma to Montgomery Marches, he was recruited by James Forman to participate in a "second front" to stage protests at the Alabama State Capitol in March 1965. Carmichael became disillusioned with the growing struggles between SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who opposed Forman's strategy. He thought SCLC was working with affiliated black churches to undercut it. He was also frustrated to be drawn again into nonviolent confrontations with police, which he no longer found empowering. After seeing protesters brutally beaten again, he collapsed from stress, and his colleagues urged him to leave the city.

Within a week, Carmichael returned to protesting, this time in Selma, to participate in the final march along Route 80. He initiated a grassroots project in "Bloody Lowndes" County, along the march route. This was a county known for white violence, where SCLC and Dr. King had tried and failed to organize its black residents.

Lowndes County Freedom Organization

In 1965, working as a SNCC activist in the black-majority Lowndes County, Carmichael helped to increase the number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600—300 more than the number of registered white voters. Black voters had essentially been disfranchised by Alabama's constitution passed by white Democrats in 1901. After Congressional passage in August of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government was authorized to oversee and enforce their rights. But there was still tremendous resistance by whites in the area, endangering activists. Black residents and voters organized and widely supported the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LFCO), a party that had the black panther as its mascot, over the white-dominated local Democratic Party, whose mascot was a white rooster. Since federal protection from violent voter suppression by the Ku Klux Klan and other white opponents was sporadic, most Lowndes County activists openly carried arms.

Although black residents and voters outnumbered whites in Lowndes, their candidate lost the county-wide election of 1965. In 1966, several LFCO candidates ran for office in the general election but failed to win. In 1970, the LCFO merged with the statewide Democratic Party, and former LCFO candidates won their first offices in the county.

Chair of SNCC and Black Power

Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966, taking over from John Lewis, who later was elected to the US Congress. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper during the solitary March Against Fear. Carmichael joined Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers and others to continue Meredith's march. He was arrested during the march and, upon his release, he gave his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence:

According to historian David J. Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a few days after Carmichael used the "Black Power" slogan at the "Meredith March Against Fear," he reportedly told King: "Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum and force you to take a stand for Black Power." King responded, "I have been used before. One more time won't hurt."

While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech brought it into the spotlight. It became a rallying cry for young African Americans across the country who were frustrated about slow progress in civil rights. Everywhere that Black Power spread, if accepted, credit was given to the prominent Carmichael. If the concept was condemned, he was held responsible and blamed. According to Carmichael: "Black Power meant black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs [rather than relying on established parties]". Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book The Wretched of the Earth, along with others such as Malcolm X, Carmichael led SNCC to become more radical. The group focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology.

During the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966, SNCC, under the local leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote the candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State Legislature in an Atlanta district. Ware excluded Northern white SNCC members from this drive. Initially, Carmichael opposed him and voted against this decision, but eventually changed his mind. When, at the urging of the Atlanta Project, the issue of whites in SNCC came up for a vote, Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites. He said that whites should organize poor white southern communities, of which there were plenty, while SNCC focused on promoting African-American self-reliance through Black Power.

Carmichael considered nonviolence to be a tactic as opposed to an underlying principle, which separated him from civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Carmichael criticized civil rights leaders who called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle-class mainstream.

Under Carmichael's term, SNCC continued to maintain a coalition with several white radical organizations, most notably Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It encouraged the SDS to focus on militant anti-draft resistance. At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. For a time in 1967, Carmichael considered an alliance with Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, and generally supported IAF's work in Rochester and Buffalo's black communities.

Vietnam

SNCC conducted its first actions against the military draft and the Vietnam War under Carmichael's leadership. Carmichael popularized the oft-repeated anti-draft slogan, "Hell no-We won't go!" during this time.

Carmichael encouraged Martin Luther King Jr. to demand an unconditional withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, even as some King advisers cautioned him that such opposition might have an adverse effect on financial contributions to the SCLC. King preached one of his earliest speeches calling for unconditional withdrawal with Carmichael seated in the front row at his invitation. Carmichael privately took credit for pushing King towards anti-imperialism, and historians such as Dr. Peniel Joseph and Eric Dyson agree.

Carmichael joined King in New York on April 15, 1967, to share his views with protesters on race related to the Vietnam War:

1967–68: Transition out of SNCC

Stepping down as chair

In May 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and was replaced by H. Rap Brown. SNCC was a collective and worked by group consensus rather than hierarchically; many members had become displeased with Carmichael's celebrity status. SNCC leaders had begun to refer to him as "Stokely Starmichael" and criticize his habit of making policy announcements independently, before achieving internal agreement. According to historian Clayborne Carson, Carmichael did not protest the transfer of power and was "eager to relinquish the chair." (It is sometimes mistakenly reported that Carmichael left SNCC completely at this time and joined the Black Panther Party, but those events did not occur until 1968.)

Targeted by FBI COINTELPRO

During this period, Carmichael was targeted by a section of J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) which focused on black activists; the program promoted slander and violence against targets that Hoover considered to be enemies of the US government. Carmichael accepted the position of Honorary Prime Minister in the Black Panther Party, but also remained on the staff of SNCC, and attempted to forge a merger between the two organizations. A March 4, 1968 memo from Hoover states his fear of the rise of a black nationalist "messiah" and notes that Carmichael alone had the "necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way." In July 1968, Hoover stepped up his efforts to divide the black power movement. Declassifed documents show a plan was launched to undermine the SNCC-Panther merger, as well as to "bad-jacket" Carmichael as a CIA agent. Both efforts were largely successful: Carmichael was expelled from SNCC that year, and rival Panthers began to denounce him.

International activism

After stepping down as SNCC chair, Carmichael wrote the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967) with Charles V. Hamilton, while clarifying his thinking. He also continued as a strong critic of the Vietnam War, and imperialism in general. During this period he traveled and lectured extensively throughout the world; visiting Guinea, North Vietnam, China, and Cuba. Carmichael became more clearly identified with the Black Panther Party as its "Honorary Prime Minister." During this period, he acted more as a speaker than an organizer, traveling throughout the country and internationally advocating for his vision of Black Power.

Carmichael lamented the 1967 execution of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, saying:

The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us.

Carmichael visited the United Kingdom in July 1967 to attend the Dialectics of Liberation conference. After recordings of his speeches were released by the organizers, the Institute of Phenomenological Studies, he was banned from re-entering Britain.

1968 D.C. riots

Carmichael was present in Washington, D.C. the night after King's assassination in April 1968. He led a group through the streets, demanding that businesses close out of respect. Although he tried to prevent violence, the situation escalated beyond his control. Due to his reputation as a provocateur, the news media blamed Carmichael for the ensuing violence as mobs rioted along U Street and other areas of black commercial development.

Carmichael held a press conference the next day, at which he predicted mass racial violence in the streets. Since moving to Washington, D.C., Carmichael had been under nearly constant surveillance by the FBI. After the eruption of riots, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover instructed a team of agents to find evidence connecting Carmichael to these events. He was also subjected to COINTELPRO's bad-jacketing technique. Huey P. Newton suggested Carmichael was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, a slander that led to Carmichael's break with the Panthers, and his exile from the U.S. the following year.

1969–98: Travel to Africa

Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers. He disagreed with them about whether white activists should be allowed to participate in the movement. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael had come to agree with Malcolm X, and said that the white activists should organize their own communities first.

In 1968, he married Miriam Makeba, a noted singer from South Africa. They left the US for Guinea the next year. Carmichael became an aide to the Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré, and a student of the exiled Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the United Nations. Three months after his arrival in Guinea, in July 1969, Carmichael published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning them for not being separatist enough and for their "dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals".

Carmichael changed his name to "Kwame Ture", to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré, who had become his patrons. At the end of his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by both names, "and he doesn't seem to mind".

Carmichael's suspicions about the CIA were affirmed in 2007, when previously secret CIA documents were declassified, revealing that the agency had tracked Carmichael from 1968 as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad. The surveillance continued for years.

Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak in support of international leftist movements. In 1971 he published his collected essays in a second book, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing, "Ready for the revolution!"

In 1986, two years after Sékou Touré's death in 1984, the military regime that took his place arrested Carmichael, for his past association with Touré, and jailed him for three days on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the government. Although Touré was known for jailing and torturing his opponents, Carmichael had never publicly criticized his namesake.

All-African People's Revolutionary Party

For the final 30 years of his life, Kwame Ture was devoted to the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). His mentor Kwame Nkrumah had many ideas for unifying the African continent, and Ture used those ideas in a broader scope involving the entire African diaspora. He was a central committee member for the entire time that he participated in the A-APRP, and made many speeches in the Party's behalf.

Ture did not simply study with Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. The latter had been designated honorary co-president of Guinea after he was deposed by the US-backed coup in Ghana. Ture worked overtly and covertly to "Take Nkrumah Back to Ghana" (according to the movement's slogan). He became a member of the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG), the revolutionary ruling party of Guinea. He sought Nkrumah's permission to launch the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), which Nkrumah had called for in his book Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare. After several discussions, Nkrumah gave his blessing.

Ture was convinced that the A-APRP was needed as a permanent mass-based organization on all continents and in all countries in which people of African descent lived. For the remainder of his life, a period often ignored by popular media, Ture worked for decades on a full-time basis as an "organizer" of the Party. He spoke on its behalf on several continents at innumerable college campuses, in community centers and other venues. He was instrumental in strengthening ties between the African/Black liberation movement and several revolutionary or progressive organizations, both African and non-African. Notable among them were the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the United States, New Jewel Movement (Grenada), National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) of Trinidad and Tobago), Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Pan Africanist Congress (South Africa) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party.

Routinely, Ture was regarded as the leader of the A-APRP, but his only title was "Organizer", and he was a member of the Central Committee. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the A-APRP began each May to sponsor African Liberation Day (ALD), a continuation of African Freedom Day begun by Kwame Nkrumah in 1958 in Ghana. Although the party was involved in or was primary or co-sponsor of other ALD annual observances, marches and rallies around the world, the best-known and largest celebration of the event was held annually in Washington, DC, usually at Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park) at 16th and W Streets, NW.

While based in Guinea as home, Ture traveled a good part of the time. Britain and his birth country, Trinidad and Tobago, barred him from speaking at one time or another for fear that he would arouse African-descended people in those countries. In the last quarter of the 20th century, Ture became the world's most active and prominent exponent of pan-Africanism, defined by Nkrumah and the A-APRP as "The Liberation and Unification of Africa Under Scientific Socialism."

Ture often returned to speak to large (1,000+) audiences at his alma mater, Howard University, which generally included students and community residents and other campuses. The party worked to recruit students and other youth, and Ture hoped to attract them through his speeches. He also worked to raise the political consciousness of African/Black people. Shortly after the A-APRP was formed, he said that an initial goal was to bring "Africa" on the lips of Black people throughout the African Diaspora. He knew that many may not have consciously related to the continent in a positive way after generations away. Ture was convinced, according to those who worked closely with him, that the party played a significant role in helping to raise international black consciousness of pan-Africanism.

Under his leadership, the A-APRP organized the All African Women's Revolutionary Union and the Sammy Younge Jr. Brigade (named after the first black college student to die during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement) as component organizations.

Ture and Cuba's president Fidel Castro were mutual admirers, sharing a common opposition to imperialism. In Ture's final letter, he wrote:

It was Fidel Castro who before the OLAS (Organization of Latin American States) Conference said "if imperialism touches one grain of hair on his head, we shall not let the fact pass without retaliation." It was he, who on his own behalf, asked them all to stay in contact with me when I returned to the United States to offer me protection.

Ture was ill when he gave his final speech at Howard University. A standing room-only crowd in Rankin Chapel paid tribute to him and he spoke boldly, as usual. A small group of student leaders from Howard University and a former Party member traveled to Harlem (Sugar Hill) in New York City to bid farewell to Kwame Ture shortly before what was his final return to Guinea. Also present that evening were Kathleen Cleaver and another Black Panther, Dhoruba bin Wahad. Ture was in good spirits though in pain. The group bidding farewell to Kwame Ture included African/Black men and women born in Africa, South America, the Caribbean and the USA.

Illness and death

After his diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1996, Ture was treated for a period in Cuba, while receiving some support from the Nation of Islam. Benefit concerts for Ture were held in Denver; New York; Atlanta; and Washington, D.C., to help defray his medical expenses. The government of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose. He went to New York, where he was treated for two years at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, before returning to Guinea.

In a final interview given in April 1998 to The Washington Post, Ture had criticized the limited economic and electoral progress made by African Americans in the U.S. during the previous 30 years. He acknowledged that blacks had won election to the mayor's office in major cities, but said that, as the mayors' power had generally diminished over earlier decades, such progress was essentially meaningless.

In 1998 Ture died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea. He had said that his cancer "was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them." He claimed that the FBI had infected him with cancer in an assassination attempt.

The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spoke in celebration of Ture's life, stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down". NAACP Chair Julian Bond said that Carmichael "ought to be remembered for having spent almost every moment of his adult life trying to advance the cause of black liberation."

Personal life

Carmichael had married Miriam Makeba, the noted singer from South Africa, while in the US in 1968. They divorced in Guinea after separating in 1973.

Later he married Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor. They divorced some time after having a son, Bokar, together in 1981. By 1998, Marlyatou Barry and Bokar were living in Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, DC. Relying on a statement from the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, Carmichael's 1998 obituary in The New York Times referred to his survivors as two sons, three sisters, and his mother, without further details.

Legacy

Kwame Ture, along with Charles V. Hamilton, is credited with coining the phrase "institutional racism". This is defined as racism that occurs through institutions such as public bodies and corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s Ture defined "institutional racism" as "the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin".

In his book on Carmichael, David J. Garrow criticized Ture's handling of the Black Power movement as "more destructive than constructive." Garrow described the period in 1966 where Ture and other members of the SNCC managed to successfully register 2,600 African American voters in Lowndes County, Alabama, as the most consequential period in Ture's life "in terms of real, positive, tangible influence on people's lives." Evaluations from Ture's associates are also mixed, with most praising his efforts and others criticizing him for failing to find constructive ways to achieve his objectives. SNCC's final Chair, Phil Hutchings, who expelled Ture over a dispute concerning the Black Panther Party, wrote that, "Even though we kidded and called him 'Starmichael,' he could sublimate his ego to get done what was needed to be done....He would say what he thought, and you could disagree with it but you wouldn't cease being a human being and someone with whom he wanted to be in relationship." Washington Post staff writer Paula Span described Carmichael as someone who was rarely hesitant to push his own ideology. Tufts University historian Peniel Joseph credits Ture with expanding the parameters of the civil rights movement, asserting that his black power strategy "didn't disrupt the civil rights movement. It spoke truth to power to what so many millions of young people were feeling. It actually cast a light on people who were in prisons, people who were welfare rights activists, tenants' rights activists, and also in the international arena." Tavis Smiley calls Ture "one of the most underappreciated, misunderstood, undervalued personalities this country's ever produced."

In 2002, the American-born scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Kwame Ture as one of his 100 Greatest African Americans.

Accusations

Anti-semitism

Jews had comprised a disproportionate number of the white supporters of the southern civil rights movement. The subsequent rejection of white activists from groups like SNCC and CORE, accompanied by ideological factors such as the shift in emphasis to a revolutionary anti-colonialist struggle, and anti-Zionist sympathy for the Palestinians, led to a permanent souring of relations in America between blacks and Jews. Although he stated in his posthumously published memoirs that he had never been anti-semitic, in 1970 Carmichael proclaimed: "I have never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler."

Misogyny

In November 1964 Carmichael made a joking remark in response to a SNCC position paper written by his friends Casey Hayden and Mary E. King on the position of women in the movement. In the course of an irreverent comedy monologue he performed at a party after SNCC's Waveland conference, Carmichael said, "The position of women in the movement is prone." A number of women were offended. In a 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education article, historian Peniel E. Joseph later wrote:

While the remark was made in jest during a 1964 conference, Carmichael and black-power activists did embrace an aggressive vision of manhood — one centered on black men's ability to deploy authority, punishment, and power. In that, they generally reflected their wider society's blinders about women and politics.

When asked about the comment, former SNCC field secretary Casey Hayden stated: "Our paper on the position of women came up, and Stokely in his hipster rap comedic way joked that 'the proper position of women in SNCC is prone'. I laughed, he laughed, we all laughed. Stokely was a friend of mine." A former SNCC worker identified only as "Tyler" on the Internet claimed: "I will forever remember Stokely Carmichael as the one who said 'the position of women in the movement is prone'. This viciously anti-women outlook is another reason why all of these nationalist movements went nowhere." In her memoir, Mary E. King wrote that Carmichael was "poking fun at his own attitudes" and that "Casey and I felt, and continue to feel, that Stokely was one of the most responsive men at the time that our anonymous paper appeared in 1964."

Carmichael appointed several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chairman of SNCC; by the latter half of the 1960s (considered to be the "Black Power era"), more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the first half.

Wikipedia

#Stokely Carmichael #06-29 #11-15

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abovethesmokestacks · 8 years ago

Text

Oh, How We’ve Grown (3/4)

Title: Oh, How We’ve Grown Pairing: Bucky x Reader Rating: General Audiences Word count: 1.4k Warnings: swearing, feels? Spoilers: None

Apparently ten hours of sleep and waking up to freaking 400 notes does a lot to restore you from severe fatigue. You guys are being so kind, and I appreciate all the kind words you throw my way. So much so that and I may or may not have screenshotted some of your feedback to look at on a bad day. Only one chapter left after this one, I’m sort of nervous. As always, if you want in on the tag list, send me an ask. Do not ask in reblogs and replies because they tend to disappear in the notes, and I’d feel bad if I missed someone.

III

We found weekend jobs, when we got paid We’d buy cheap spirits and drink them straight Me and my friends have not thrown up in so long

”Domino’s, may I take your order?”

So it’s not the most glamorous job in the world. It’s the worst. It’s slaving for minimum wage in Satan’s sweaty armpit while hoards of rude customers chip away at your faith in humanity. You keep repeating that it’s only for another couple of months more, that you need the money, that it’s a good experience. You roll your eyes when the line crackles as the customer hushes violently into the receiver.

”Shh! Shut up, Steve, I'mma order!”

No. No fucking way.

”Sam?”

”Huh? Sorry, did I misdial?” He sounds drunk, and you’re more than a little jealous. Working the evening shift on a Saturday night sucks extra hard.

”Not unless you want pizza. But it’s Sam, right? Sam Wilson?”

”Yeah…”

”We grew up together, you know my brother Clint, ” you explain. It’s been a while. A year or so, maybe two, possibly three, since you last saw him.

”Wait, is this… Baby Barton?”

The nickname stuck after that night when you got drunk for the first time, and you’ve bristled enough over it that even Clint’s over the novelty.

”I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

”Hell, no! Holy fuck, haven’t seen you in ages!”

”Technically, you’re not seeing me now either,” you point out into your headset.

”Still with the claws, Bab-” He almost says it but corrects himself with a swallow that might also be a suppressed burp. ”Barton.”

”What can I getcha?”

As much as you’d love to chat with Sam, you’re on the clock. Brass don’t like it when you stretch out calls for too long, and you’re already pushing it.

”Yo, Steve! Whaddaya havin’?”

You can’t hear the answer, and part of you is wondering if the Steve in the background is your Steve, Clint’s Steve, and if so… Shaking your head, you force the thought away. Out of all your brother’s friends, Bucky’s the one that’s seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. You saw him at Christmas after the beer-incident, and the summer after, but then he never really came home. It pained you to not know where he went, however you didn’t feel like you could ask Clint. He was too invested in his studies, didn’t go to the same college, and at the time it felt too awkward to ask your brother why the friend you maybe-sorta had a crush on didn’t come home during breaks anymore. You only met up at the castle a couple more time, each time with fewer and fewer friends, until you realized it would only be you and Clint there, and no way in hell were you getting drunk with your brother.

”Barton? Barton!”

”Hmm?” Sam’s voice interrupts your little walk down memory lane.

”Did ya get that?”

”Sorry, bad line,” you lie, perking up to listen for real this time. “Could you say that again?”

”Three large pizzas, one New York, one Meat Feast and one Pepperoni Feast, two orders of cheesy bread and one order of chicken wings.”

”Got it.”

You repeat back the order, give Sam the total and take his address and credit card number, giving him an estimate of when his order will arrive.

”Hey, Barton, you should come hang out with us. ’S been a while, and… you know.”

”Sam, unless it’s slipped your attention, I’m working.”

”All night?”

Okay, so he has a point. You get off your shift in three hours. So what if you are dead on your feet now? You could just pop by, it isn’t too far from your own apartment as it turns out. No biggie. Right?

”Come on, Barton. You already have my address,” Sam teases, and you just knows he smiling that crooked smile, all white teeth and chivalrous charm that had all the neighbourhood ladies swooning over Mrs Wilson’s perfect little gentleman back in the day.

”Which I shouldn’t use for my personal gain!” you hiss at him.

”Come on…”

You sigh, looking over your shoulder. Your co-workers seem busy as ever, zipping back and forth. You shouldn’t. But what if… No. Yes. No. But-

”I get off in three hours,” you huffed. ”If I’m not dead, I might swing by.”

”You better! See you round, Baby Barton!”

You allow him that one, in part because Sam hangs up before you can chew him out. Three hours to decide. Pedaling home to conk out on the couch or pedaling off to a semi-reunion. It’s a choice that puts a pep in your step, and you breeze through the rude, drunk and semi-incoherent orders until it’s time to clock out. By the time you’re on your bike, you know you couldn’t resist temptation even if you tried.

Sam is a lot more buff than last time you saw him, but has apparently not learned how to hold his liquor. He’s a happy drunk, greeting you with a shot glass in each hand and exclaiming ”BABY BARTON!” so loudly it makes you wince quietly. It’s a bit embarrassing to have him herd you into the apartment, still in your work pants with a ratty band t-shirt and a sweater to keep you warm, declaring you to be his best friend’s baby sister to anyone still sober enough to listen and care.

”Hey, I thought I was your best friend!”

Steve is really your Steve, a mass of muscles and a backwards baseball cap that you hope is only ironic. When he envelopes you in a hug it’s something akin to hugging a mountain, but he’s as easygoing and polite as ever, running interference when Sam gets a bit too excited. You hover around them, gravitating towards Steve when Sam disappears for refills or a disastrous round of beer pong.

Of course you catch up. It’s standard, an exchange of data. Clint’s fine, he’s out trying to make good on his degree. It’s tough, market is what it is, blah blah. Really, Tony got hitched? Natasha’s a mystery as always, last Steve heard she was in Russia heading up a division for the company she worked for.

”So, what about Bucky?” you ask hesitantly.

Steve cocks his head, his eyes searching your face for something before answering.

”Military,” he then answers, taking a sip of his beer.

”What?”

”Yeah. Didn’t finish college. Dropped out and enlisted before our junior year.”

”Oh. Okay. Is he..?”

You’re not sure why you’re really asking. There was never anything there, nothing more than a silly high school crush that would never become anything. It was a kiss on the cheek, platonic in hindsight. So why is your heart thundering in your chest at the news of Bucky’s career?

”He’s fine. I think,” Steve blurts out, immediately backpedaling when he sees your shocked expression. ”No, no, he’s okay! He calls sometimes when he’s back at base, wherever the hell that ends up being. Shit, I have to tell him I met you next time he calls, he’ll be so stoked to hear about you!”

”W-why?”

It flashes across his face, so rapidly that anyone else might miss it, but time is different, you know that, and you see it clearly before it’s erased and replaced by an easy grin.

”People from the old block, you know. Where everyone ended up. So… where did you end up?”

He’s trying to avoid the subject, and you’re too tired, too overwhelmed to contest him. You offer up your own story, simple and boring as it might be while Steve nods in all the right places. Conversation dies between you after that, and you end up ducking out just as Sam pukes out the window.

You ponder the night as you bike home through deserted streets. Nothing’s like it used to be. When you finally stumble in through the door, you make a beeline for the sorry excuse of a box that constitutes your liquor cabinet, pulling out a bottle off off-brand, cheap-as-they-come vodka and taking a swig. Nostalgia and the wear of a long day thud dully behind your temples and you’re not sure if you want to remember or if this will go down as another “seemed like a good idea at the time”-deal. Try as you might, your thoughts wander, travelling unfathomable miles to a man with blue eyes and cropped hair, tucked away in some hellish corner of the world, and you weep for him when you fall into bed.

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