#Clutch|Baz Fucker Barton

[tarnishedhalo]

💿

So I made You This CD || Accepting

The Raft Prison Blues

1. White and Nerdy || Weird Al

2. Friendship || Tenacious D

3. That’s How We Roll || Georgia Florida Line

4. Find Out Who Your Friends Are || Tim McGraw ft. Tracy Lawrence

5. Painted Yellow Lines || Dispatch

6. The Stable Song || Gregory Allan Isakov

7. Angela || The Lumineers

8. Lonely Boy || Matt Corby

9. River || Leon Bridges

10. Soul of a Man || David Lindley

11. The Darker Side of Me || Brother Dege

12. Life is a Highway || Tom Cochrane

[tarnishedhalo]

@lilxlionxman {continued from xx}

lilxlionxman  answered:

[ Text : Duck ] didnt hve 2 cum asshole [ Text : Duck ] its jst a re-knew drivers test [ Text : Duck ] not fuckin directors review.

{Text: Mouse} I think that was the exact point I was trying to make. {Text: Mouse} But you made it sound like life and death. {Text: Mouse} I mean we *could* arrange that. Hey. Do you think if we pissed Hill off enough, we could make off with Phil’s arm before they caught us at the front desk?

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@lilxlionxman {continued from XX} [ Text : Duck ] Me [ Text : Duck ] When u show up on my doorstep at 3am [ Text : Duck ] Trippin on air & callin me something I cant say let alone spell.

{Text: Mouse} It’s called Gaelic, B. The tongue of my ancestors. {Text: Mouse} And I brought you donuts! It wasn’t like I showed up empty handed. {Text: Mouse} And I wouldn’t have had to wake you if you’d not moved the spare key. That’s just rude. {Text: Mouse} IS that what you are now, Rudeness?

[tarnishedhalo]

lilxlionxman answered your ask: “This is without a doubt the stupidest plan you’ve...

“So....how was that plan supposed to go again, fucker?”

[tarnishedhalo]

12) things you said when you thought I was asleep

Nothing like being pinned in a fox-hole you’ve dug out with your own hands until your fingers bleed and your knuckles ache and all around you it’s all shallow breaths and random intervals of silence punctuated by fully-auto machine gun bursts. But that’s where they are, taking turns resting as they go. Baz’s head is on his shoulder, eyes closed. Ragged breath. They’re covered in dried sweat and drier blood and for a second Riley allows his eyes to shut. His body aches and he can’t imagine how Baz is feeling. He counts heartbeats. Counts minutes as they slide through his fingers. Not long now and they’ll be moving again.An eternity later, he sighs, wraps a hand against the younger’s cheek. “Not lettin’ ya prove how much your father’s son you are. C’mon B. We gotta move.”

~*~

Six months. Six months the kid’s in that hospital bed. There’s talk about using the cradle and Riley threatens to burn their kingdom down. Might have worked for Clint, but he’s got his sister and he’ll trust her a thousand times over Progenitor machines. Wants Bastian to be just that, Bastian and not some kind of weird plastic replica. And there he stays, round the clock at the asshole’s bedside. Hands holding the younger’s in between, as if by will alone he can make B better. 

“You better come back to us. To me. Or I swear I will go in there and find you, fucker.”Her fingers are cool on the back of his neck, and he looks up at Beth, not used to being the one afraid. 

“He needs time, Andy.” 

“I know. But what if-”

“Then like you said. We go and find him in there.”He nods and goes back to his vigil while she does what she can.

This time, they don’t fight each other over the man in the bed.

~*~It’d been one of those nights and every nerve in his body is on fire and it’s consuming him alive. He paces the floor and is ready to climb the walls when he finally calls. Not her. She’s not talking to him right now and he doesn’t blame her. He’d never laid a hand on his sister before and he shouldn’t, in hindsight, have done it this time. Can’t explain what possessed him, can’t apologise enough. Can’t make her believe that he means he’s sorry.

So he calls Bastian. Waits til the voicemail picks up. The message is long and rambling and cuts across three different calls. Confession was good for the soul but none of it seems to matter. Baz doesn’t pick up. Doesn’t grant Riley absolution.

“…so I guess that’s it. But anyway it’s oh my gawd in the morning. Thanks for listening. I love ya, man.”

[tarnishedhalo]

@lilxlionxman

[tarnishedhalo]

☪

Five Times Our Muses Almost Hold Hands, and the One Time They Do:

{{Spectrum}}

I.  HollowHe’s sitting there, head down, ends of his hair spilling over his hands, and for the first time Riley notices they are darker than the rest of him. Years of oil and grease and wrenches have built up callouses but it’s built something else. Shadows of all the things those hands are capable of that no matter how much pumice-soap he scrubs with it doesn’t wash away. Only closer inspection shows that there’s more. Hints of rust under his nails…no. Rust is a different shadow of red. Rust doesn’t leave someone scourged and empty. Rust doesn’t cause shoulders to shake. Hesitantly, Riley reaches out and Baz pushes him away, shakes his head. Saying with actions he doesn’t need this.

Riley nods and grabs whiskey instead.

II.  Two Man TeamThe rain was coming fast, hard and heavy. A storm brewed in the background, lighting striking haphazardly in the distance. But the thunder isn’t from crashing clouds. Riley holds up a fist. Holds up a finger. Then two. Makes a fist, and he’s moving. Low crouch, rifle braced shoulder high. Kevlar soundless. They move and breath as one.  Riley doesn’t have the luxury of wondering how exactly he’d gotten here, on this Strike Team. It’s a by product of too many late nights spent worrying. It’s because Baz is transparent as glass. When the younger walks into a room and looks around before his blue eyes finally fall on him, Riley knows it’s gonna be an issue some day. Riley’s not stupid. He knows that look well. And he loves the guy, really he does. It’s just…just…. So this is the best he can do.

Rounding the corner, he scans through the scope. He reaches behind his back. Hand glances off the fucker’s wrist, just shy of his intended target. There’s no sound over the comms, but he feels his head duck forward as the fucker tags his helmet.“Got this. Laying down cover fire. Go.”

III. Paradox

It was the turkey sandwich that woke him up.

He stares at the unholy alliance of bread, turkey, lettuce and cheese, thinking I’m stuck. Stuck in this perpetually shifting span of time, in which the same day is repeated over and over again. Like Groundhog Day which was a stupid movie. Only worse because time was actually continuing to move forward. Mondays became Tuesdays which turned into Wednesdays. Months still passed by synonymously with the changing of seasons. Children grew into adults. Adults still sank in their depression.Yet the events that occurred in each individual day were exactly the same. Every day Riley would wake up and go to work. He’d be stuck with the same case as the day before and the day before that. Then he’d eat lunch with people who talked in a language he did not understand.  Then he goes home to a world that chooses not to understand. Sleep.

Rinse and repeat.But that turkey sandwich. Something inside of him had gone missing. The anger rises in response. He was sick of the sandwich. Sick of the watery-crunch sound the lettuce made when he chewed it. Sick of the cheese. Sick of soggy bread that almost dissolves in his mouth. The same thing he’s eaten for years now.

He averted his gaze and looked around. He saw fellow cops sitting at the same tables, wearing the same clothes, conversing with the same people about the same things. Amidst the sea of voices he could make out snippets of conversations he’d heard countless times before. All the meaningless gossip and small talk wrapped around his brain.His head begins to throb furiously, a circuit board overloading with too much data. Squeezes his eyes shut only to see the sickening mirrors reflecting infinity on the back of his eyelids. It was like someone had put the feeling of deja vu in liquid form and shot it through his veins. He gets up and sprints.

In the men’s room, there’s silence. He looks at himself in the mirror and his reflection stares back, seemingly surprised by direct-eye contact.“Are you done yet?"What?”“Are. You. Done. Yet?”“I don’t know what you’re talking-”

The mirror splinters in cobweb fragments.

He only just manages to throw his arm up to shield his face.

“"Fa'fuc'sake s'only a'sandwich, asshole. Don'want it? Don'eat it.”

If Baz only knew. His first instinct to grab the kid’s hand, make sure he’s real. But that’s a whole lot of crazy he doesn’t want to get into, because how do you explain Quiet, a mage’s version of metaphysical time-out for bad behaviour?

He eats the sandwich.

IV.  Six

“Be there n'six”The last thing B says to him. He wonders, after six minutes has passed, if the shithead meant six hours, but somehow that couldn’t be right.  He doesn’t remember there being a job out of town.

An hour later and he’s worried. Calls his cell, sends texts, wonders what else he could do.  The worst part about it, Riley broke his word. Long distance knocking around the castle walls, even though he promised he wouldn’t. But the gates are all shut up, the windows bricked up and despite the power he commands, he can’t find a way inside.

And that sparks a wildfire of well…not jealousy exactly. Nor anger.

Hurt, asshole, the word your looking for is…hurt.Normally sleepers have little resistance to his magick, though Baz isn’t technically a sleeper. Nor is he awakened. The best way he could put it was the kid’s a kind of sorcerer, and that’s not right either. It is what it is, but the point was…to get around Riley like he’s doing… SOMEONE has to have shown him how. And that someone isn’t Beth because she couldn’t will her way out of a wet paper bag without him knowing about it.

So that means Baz has been hanging out with someone else.

Someone who’s deliberately shutting Riley out.He paces his way through a half bottle of Glen Livet before he switches to Vodka.Two hours.Three.At this point Riley’s grabbing his keys and his jacket, mentally composing a missing persons report for his missing person, because the inner cop won’t let this shit go.Throws the door open and there’s a strange collision of puffed up chests. There’s a spectacular display of juggling as the plastic sack hits the floor, ass over tea-kettle, though Baz manages to retain his grasp on the bottle, because of course he has priorities.

“‘Y'fuckin’ kiddin’ me? S'fuckin’ dinner, jackass.”The words don’t matter. Riley grabs his hands, and then takes it a step further by dragging the fucker into a hug, arms like vices around his neck and shoulders. 

“Next time, fucking call.”

This is how Baz discovered Riley doesn’t do surprises well.

V.  HettiquetteRiley’d heard, knew Beth and Jay went to these kinds of things in support of their friends, but it’s goddamn fascinating. Like if someone took Carnival and mated it with Mardi-Gras and somehow incubated the result inside of a Vegas Strip floor show. It was absolutely mesmerizing.  And there’s a lot he didn’t inspect. There’s a man and his wife not far away, a group of teenagers. A couple wearing 'Theirs’ and 'Theirs’ tee-shirts that he makes a mental note to ask about later.

And Riley has to wonder if he’s even got a right to be here, that maybe his attempt to offer B moral support isn’t actually having the opposite effect, even if he laughed in his very Baz way over the 'Not Gay but my Boyfriend is’ shirt. Beth had given him one piece of advice before they separated for the day. 

“No dare aks wen Straight Pride is. Jus’…no. If ya do… no gonna be let out of da hale wi'out woke adult supervision, yeah? An’ wha'evah ya do…no embarrass. If I hear ya make him uncomfortable….I will make YOU uncomfortable.”Then she vanished into sequins and feathers and flower crowns.She hadn’t needed to warn him.

Despite everything that marks him as out of place, the people are welcoming. They’re warm and beautiful and the beer flows. Sees a couple people he would never have thought ought to be here. The only awkwardness is when he comes across Wojakovitz. Riley’s not usually intimidated but the rookie is six foot seven and about as wide across. Apparently, his partner…boyfriend… is a school teacher at PS 182. Good on them.At some point, in the bar later, Riley’s managed to hit his limit, and teeters his way over to Baz whose been strangely quiet most of the night, more so than usual. Arm around the younger’s shoulder, Riley leans down and lays his cheek atop Baz’s head.“C'mon asshole. Dance with me. This is a good song.”The look he gets  from both of them would have curdled paint.

He asks twice more in variations.

Twice more he’s rebuked.So he sits down next to B and his hand falls to the other’s side. Trying not to make an issue of it, one pinkie curls around Baz’s and then Baz is up and muttering something about hitting the head.“Did I…say something wrong?”No one answers him. Not even his sister.

VI. The Hang of Thursdays

         “Pick sum’m else dickhead.  Shit’s kill yer dog depressin’.”

There’s a point where his face is pale and haggard, where lack of sleep has left him looking five days dead on a three day weekend,  and the next line of the song stutters into a choking breath. He doesn’t imagine it, Baz’s mouth had moved, had formed the words and it’s stolen all of the oxygen from Riley’s brain. He doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry or …there was a phrase for this, they used to call it 'don’t know if he should shit or go blind’. 

His hands tighten around the fucker’s, careful not to dislodge the IV shunt.It’s a process. Rough palms sliding against each other. Long, blunt fingers seeking the crevices between the other’s hand. The grasp is as tight as he can make it, a warning that if Baz slips out of consciousness, he’s dragging Riley’s two hundred and five pounds with him.Baz’s scarred and battered knuckles are brought up, pressed against Riley’s lips. They’re dry and chapped but gentle as Riley bows his head over their joined hands. It takes him long minutes to compose himself enough to actually speak.

“You EVER scare me like that again, fucker, and I will beat your ass into the fuckin’ ground. You hear me?”He doesn’t mean a word of it.His eyes squeeze shut, lines spiraling around the corners and for the first time since they’d gone and recovered Baz Barton, he can breathe.What he can’t do is let go.

[tarnishedhalo]

5) things you didn’t say at all

Like Normal People

Riley doesn’t say ‘thank you’, like normal people would. He says it by making sure that Baz has at least three square meals a week. He says it with a cold six pack and a bottle of that cinnamon whiskey they both know he thinks is shit.

Riley doesn’t say he’s ‘worried’, like normal people would. He shows up at random intervals. Calls and makes sure the maintained radio silence is because the younger fuck is actually working and not...working. And he always has an excuse to be hanging out in the hanger when the wheels touch down.

Riley doesn’t say ‘I miss you’ like normal people do. He’s more likely to throw a punch, or bulldog him from behind. Or mess with the way Baz keeps his tools laid out in a perfect and very specific order. Because he knows it messes with the kid who relies more on feel than sight.

Riley doesn’t say ‘fuck you’ like normal people do. It’s always been a borderline nuclear arms-race between them and Riley has perfected the art of turning that shit into a Cold War. They don’t trade spies, they don’t make backroom deals. Riley just goes silent. Doesn’t call. Doesn’t hang out. Shuts Baz out into the world as if they don’t mean a goddamn thing to each other. And it would be quicker, cleaner if he just fucking shot Baz because he’d eventually die or the wound would scar over. Never lasts long though, and then he’s back, like nothing ever happened at all. Maybe because he knows it gets under Baz’s skin.Riley never says ‘I love you’ like normal people do. He says it with the random texts, the arms slung around Baz’s shoulder as they’re trying to make it up the front steps grass blade by grass blade, so drunk their hang-over will last the rest of the century. He says it with inappropriate jokes and every stupid invitation to every stupid family thing he can think of. He says it with cds he leaves laying around, and with books written by people Baz has never heard of. He says it with the constant stream of bullshit that is forever coming out of his mouth all the fucking time and can you not just shut up for five seconds Jesus Fucking Christ I’m tryin’ ta think here. And maybe...

Maybe...he doesn’t have to...Because Baz isn’t normal people, is he?

[tarnishedhalo]

👕

Soon as he hits the door, all fucks he might have previously pretended to give evaporate. It is clear where his sister picks up her bad habits, as the jacket and the tie are the first thing to go, dropped heedlessly on the table in the entry hall. The shirt is next on the floor followed by the tee-shirt he wears under it, leaving him without a stitch on from the waist of his slacks, hanging dangerously low on his hips, to the top of his head.

“BETH. GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE.”His voice resonates through the apartment, like thunder shakes the roots of mountains, and his face is carved from the left over stone.He gets no answer and after a second his expression darkness even further when he realises she’s not there.It’s only then that he notices Baz sitting on the couch, flipping through one of the Craftsman catalogs that had come in the day’s mail. A eyebrow cocked on his face that’s caught between appreciation and the seeds of anger at the tone, they’d talked about this, and Baz had made himself perfectly clear about Riley’s wreck of a relationship with his sister.

“T’fuck crawled up y’r’ass?” There’s challenge in his tone, one that’s a little too deep, a little too husky for his own comfort.Riley slants him a look, and shakes his head. “Oh. Hey, B. Make yourself useful an’ grab me a highball full to the top, would ya?”

“‘Scuse t’shit outta you.” But then the reason for the demand comes to light as soon as Riley turns from him unscathed by the two things he’s said. There’s a lot of exposed Riley, and from just below his arm pit and cascading down his ribs toward his hip ~the bad one~ is an angry storm of violent colour. Reds and purples and blacks vie for the muscled space. It spans from his chest to half way across his back. Somewhere in the mess….what look like teeth-marks. 

Human teeth.

“Shit.”

“Tell me about it,” Riley sighs, gingerly sitting on one of his bar stools, and leaning his elbows on the marble counter top, the same pose and position they’d been in that first morning of their relationship. Before Baz can say anything else, Riley’s talking because that’s what he does.

“Some fucktard decides to be a real cleverdick and puts two of the biggest motherfuckin’ AB dudes in a  holding cell with half a dozen of the 9 Trays to wait for fuckin’ transport. As you can imagine, shit broke out, and the only two people they seemed to have on hand to break up the dance was me and Ramos. And she’s about three inches and twenty pounds on Beth. So that left me.”

He doesn’t say if it was the Aryans or the Bloods who bit him.

Baz doesn’t ask. 

Each of them stare in different directions as silence falls between them.After a few moments there’s a humoured chuckle that ends in a breathy wince. “Hey B?”

“Yeah?”

“Gonna get me that drink…or…?”

[tarnishedhalo]

Sing for me

Enough.

Beth had done all she could, and fuck her, it wasn’t good enough, was it? He’d have, if he could, bled her dry himself and he still didn’t know if it would be enough. She was sleeping in a bed in a room down the hall, but he couldn’t be bothered to check in on her, not when each blip on the monitor was the thing that made his heart beat the next second. Her work had taken hours as she knit bone and flesh. As she reconstructed his body piece by piece. Phil had taken up a vigil with him for a while, trying to get Riley to engage, trying to take his mind off what he was watching, but it had done little good. Phil had offered the use of the regeneration cradle and Dr. Cho and Riley’d nearly punched him in the face.That wouldn’t have been Baz, and Riley knew the machine couldn’t rebuild a human body. That’s why S.H.I.E.L.D. needed people like his sister, people like him.He heard whispers of Tahiti and he wondered what the fuck that had to do with anything. Was this some kind of joke to them? His best friend…possibly one of the only two he really had, was still hooked up to machines, struggling to hold onto this piece of shit life of theirs and it was time for some asshole behind him to plot a vacation?

No.He wasn’t having any of it, and the lines on his face, the bags under his eyes threatened anyone to try and stop him. He gowned up in gloves, in sterile plastic that felt like steel on his skin. Put the mask in place. Stepped into the sterile environment. He never realised how young Baz looked until now. How young the kid actually was. How afraid he must have been, seconds before it happened. Riley wondered though, when exactly Bastian had figured out the mission had gone south. How many lives exactly he’d saved by sacrificing himself. What his last thought, his last words might have been.If he’d wanted to be saved, after all.But his mind was untethered. It was drifting in a place even Riley couldn’t really get to. He can’t feel warmth beneath the vinyl glove, can’t feel the callouses or the whorls of the other man’s fingertips. He can’t feel anything but the reediest pulse thickly, sluggishly pulsing at Baz’s wrist. He doesn’t let go of that hand though, but he can’t tell if its for B, or himself.Riley doesn’t trust himself to speak, to even whisper. It’s cracked and broken and rusted out. So he does the next best thing. He closes his eyes against the bruises and the swelling, shuts out the tubes and the tape.He lets himself in and braces for the sting of knowing the house he’s never forgotten is a little emptier still, and because he knows it so well now, he makes his way to the heart of the house…the mind…that he’s breaking into. In the world outside, he would justify himself by saying he keeps a spare key, that Baz had given him a while back, just so he’d stop knocking at three AM when he needed somewhere to crash, or was bringing a fresh bottle because he can’t sleep, and Baz was tired of finding him curled up in Angie’s bed.In his mind, the garage is warm, and littered with all the little things that made Baz who he was; the engine parts, the mechanical things even he doesn’t know the names of. Pulled up a chair inside, picked up his guitar. Baz had never been comfortable with this song. Something about it got his back up, and they’d make an agreement that Riley wouldn’t play it. If anything, it was the first one that came to mind, see if somehow the notes could somehow reach him in the thick fog of the younger man’s coma.“Please come now I think I’m fallingI’m holding on to all I think is safeIt seems I found the road to nowhereAnd I’m trying to escapeI yelled back when I heard thunderBut I’m down to one last breathAnd with it let me say, let me say….Hold me nowI’m six feet from the edge and I’m thinkingMaybe six feet ain’t so far down…”Riley prays it’s enough.

[tarnishedhalo]

♱

What do they think awaits them after death?For all that Riley says he doesn’t believe, he absolutely does. He believes in the God he thinks failed him, and he believes in the certainty of heaven and hell, though he knows you don’t always have to die to find either one of those two things on Earth, if you know where and how to look.He would love to be able to say he’d be at those pearly gates, his wings unbroken. He’d even be okay with a lake of fire where he’d spend eternity repenting for the sins that he wears in every scar, every memory of his body.But he knows better. He knows that the Riley he is now, will be back. Different name, different face. An entirely different life. And he’ll see her there too, maybe. Maybe he won’t and the cycle will start over.Again.And again.And again.And the idea just makes him fucking tired. “I dunno. Become fertilizer, I guess?”

[tarnishedhalo]

♛

Any enemies or rivals to speak of?He’s got a list.There’s S.H.I.E.L.D. There’s H.Y.D.R.A. There’s people he’s wronged (his sister, Jay, probably the entire Giambelli family), there’s people on there that he doesn’t even know the names of. (Those fuckers in Guatamala, The Dick at the gas station who insists on taking the labels off the fucking urns).There’s Captain Goddamn America somewhere on there, too. But the top and the bottom of it, in various colours of ink that have been crossed out and re-written a dozen times, is one name.That List begins and ends with Baz.They are so much alike, and complete polar opposites. They are best friends and worst nightmares. And while they’d kill for the other, they’re always looking to tear a piece off, too.“Me? I’m the soul of charm and wit, fucker. Everyone loves me.”

[tarnishedhalo]

Three beers

[tarnishedhalo]

extra-dramatic otp Riley & Bastian : 6,7,13,15

6. Who would run into a burning building to save a stranger while the other calls 911?

See this is some tricky shit. It’s part of my training. I’d do it without even thinking about it. But then that means I’d get about a half a meter toward the building when the fucker comes up behind me, tackles my ass to the ground, and launches himself with one big ass size 11 boot between my shoulder blades....

because he worries about me. Then I’d have to get up, and punch him in the face and the moral of the goddamn story is the civvie dies and the building collapses while we’re fist-fighting in the street.Naw, we’d be there, side by side.7. Who would haunt the other after death and chase away other suitors?Depends on who died first. And there wouldn’t be much of a ‘chase the suitor away’ deal because I guarantee you, we would probably again be side by fucking side and what kills one of us is probably gonna kill the other, ya know?

I think that’s why they keep assigning us to different strike teams.

13. Who would go berserk at harm or death befalling the other?Both. Of course you know B’s gonna fucking die with my hands wrapped around his goddamn neck so. I guess me?

15. Who would fight an impossible battle to give the other time to escape?

Flip a mother-fuckin’ coin. Here’s the problem. Fucker thinks he’s indestructable, and in some cases, yeah, he’s damn hard to kill. But not everything is gunfire and chemical burns and shit. Some day, someone’s gonna figure him out and they’re gonna destroy him from the inside out. Heaven help the motherfucker that tries. I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m still fuckin’ amazing and I’ve always got an eye on him.