#Steve is too besotted to notice

[xoxoladyaz]

Deep down, Steve knows that it's only a matter of time until he gets caught.

It feels like he's gone through the five stages of grief, like, twenty times. He can't count how many hours he's spent rationalizing it: what Eddie doesn't know won't hurt him, this is normal, people do it all the time, and besides, Eddie would feel completely betrayed if he knew and their relationship is so new that it's just not worth the risk. The absolute last thing he wants is to upset Eddie and this will just make him upset so really, Steve is doing the honorable thing by just not telling him, by pretending that he's not hiding anything, that everything is fine.

But it's not Eddie that catches him; hell, it isn't even someone in the Party; it's Jeff, Eddie's friend/Hellfire Club member/Corroded Coffin bandmate who shows up too early for D&D at Steve's one day and sees something he shouldn't have.

"This isn't what it looks like."

Jeff walks into the kitchen and frowns, like he's confused by what he's seeing and why Steve is so anxious, why he's sweating like he's just run a marathon. "It looks like you're blending a bunch of veggies together in a blender."

Shit. "Okay, it's exactly what it looks like."

Jeff still looks confused. "And this is a big deal because - "

"Because I haven't told Eddie that the 'special pasta sauce' that I've been using the last three months whenever we have spaghetti and meatballs is actually entirely made of, like, ten different kinds of vegetables," Steve rushes out, and Jeff's face smoothes in understanding.

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. The dude has a weird vendetta against veggies."

Steve groans, slumping in relief. "Tell me about it. Do you know how hard it is to hide veggies in every single meal that I make for him? Because if I don't, then he's never going to eat them, and I'm worried about his health enough as it is."

Jeff nods. "It's the smoking, right?"

"The smoking, and the drinking, and I know he's sneaking out to smoke with Jon and Argyle, but he doesn't exercise and he only eats highly processed cereal with loads of sugar and I just don't want him to have a heart attack before the age of forty!"

"Hey, hey, Steve, man, your secret's safe with me." Jeff holds his hands up in supplication. "And for the record, I'm on your side. The dude is like a feral raccoon."

"I know," Steve sighs. "But he's my feral raccoon."

That makes Jeff start laughing. "If it makes you feel any better, my mom and I have been doing the same thing for years now. If you want, we could exchange recipes sometime."

"Really?" Steve perks up and now, now he's excited. "That would be great!"

"Sick. Need some help with the meatballs?"

"Please!"

And that is how Eddie and Gareth and Phil and Dustin and Mike and Lucas and Erica and Will find them later, chatting and laughing while Steve tosses his homemade noodles into his now-simmering pasta sauce, Jeff sitting on the kitchen island and drinking a beer.

This time, it's Jeff who looks like he's seen a ghost. "This isn't what it looks like."

"Oh?" Eddie asks, and his voice is totally controlled, which means that Jeff is screwed. "So you're not hanging out with my boyfriend and making him do that cute little blushy giggle that is my cute blushy giggle?"

"Eddie!" Steve scolds, but it's too late, Jeff knows his fate is sealed.

"Okay, it's exactly what it looks like."

(Jeff's rogue is caught in the blast zone when Dustin's ranger kills a large acid toad. Still, he can't feel too mad when he sees Eddie smirk and then lick the veggie sauce out of his pasta bowl.)

[ellewritesandrants]

I don’t know why but the idea of a soulmate AU between Billy, Steve and Eddie captivates me, especially with the idea that Billy unknowingly gets Steve and Eddie to find out that they’re soulmates. Either in a modern AU where Billy’s a big fan of Corroded Coffin and Steve just managed to get a free ticket or something or in a canon AU where Billy and Steve are friends who want to smoke a little something so they buy from Eddie or Steve picks up the kids from Hellfire and one of them notices the marks match, I don’t really care how but I just want to explore the hurt and comfort of that.

Can you imagine Billy pining away, forever in love with the idea of his soulmate being the one who’ll save him from his situation given that’s what happened to his mom and he finds out that his crush is his soulmate but doesn’t want to tell him yet until he’s made something out of himself, until he’s deserving of love and all of a sudden, he finds out that his soulmate found his soulmate and it wasn’t Billy?

Imagine Steve happily dragging Eddie with him who already looks besotted with Steve and they show Billy the mark that he’s memorized from seeing it in the mirror thousands of times and as soon as he sees the smiles on their faces and the look of wonder in their eyes, he knows for a fact he can’t ruin their happiness. He isn’t selfish enough to do it even others would say he was and all he could do was pretend to be happy and smile at the happy couple.

Imagine Billy pulling away, either out of fear he’d inadvertently ruin their relationship or because he couldn’t stand being surrounded by what he couldn’t have and the kids weirdly enough noticing and trying to figure out what’s wrong. It doesn’t help that Neil’s always been bitter about soulmates and he loved rubbing it in Billy’s face how worthless everything regarding soulmates and soulmarks was. Billy used to be able to ignore it in the hopes of finding his soulmate but now, he knew the truth.

The kids come to a different conclusion, not realizing it was something regarding soulmates but instead, about Neil’s treatment of Billy. If canon, it would be El spying on Billy and seeing him being beaten into a pulp by his dad but in a modern AU, it would the aftermath wherein Max would ask Steve to come visit Billy and he drags Eddie along with him.

Either way, Steve and Eddie find out about the abuse that Billy’s been suffering through and the guilt that Steve felt was immeasurable for not seeing what his best friend was going through, too busy with being in love with his soulmate. With Hopper’s help, they get Neil behind bars but Billy’s a wreck and he needs people to take care of him.

Steve refused to leave Billy alone in the trailer while Max went to school and Susan went to work so he offered to have Billy move in with him and Eddie so they could take care of him. Since Steve only worked part-time and Eddie was in the same year as Billy and could drive them to and from school, it made a lot more sense than leaving him to his own devices.

Billy thinks he’s in a new level of hell as time goes by because getting to know Eddie and seeing everything he can’t have was absolutely painful and heartbreaking on another level. Being surrounded by their care and affection when he’s barely known it his entire life hurts on another level he can’t exactly describe but it’s a pain that hurts so good that he can’t exactly say no to it. His only saving grace is that his mark was casted over due to Neil’s last temper tantrum and there was no way that the boys would get to see it.

Months pass of Billy falling more and more in love with his soulmates who are already in love with each other and it hurts so good. Steve and Eddie never make him feel like an outsider the entire time he’s there but sometimes, his touch starvation reminds him of just how much he’d love to be squeezed in between them in any way possible.

Graduation comes and goes and Billy refused to let his father take his achievements away so he graduated valedictorian, dragging Eddie kicking and screaming past the finish line to graduate. Billy gets to make his speech, loudly supported by everyone and he makes sure to thank his newfound family for all of the support they’ve given him.

Of course, graduation wouldn’t be complete without a graduation party so they all get drunk and party in Steve’s house to celebrate six graduations especially Billy and Nancy who graduated valedictorian and salutatorian respectively. Both Jonathan and Nancy planned to go to the same college in Chicago while Robin and her girlfriend, Heather were heading to California soon. Billy had also gotten into the same college but he wasn’t sure about going because he’d be leaving so much behind, including his soulmates.

By now, Billy was in love with both of his soulmates and unbeknownst to him, they were both plently enamored with him and they’d been trying to build up the courage to ask him out. The party had been slightly delayed because Billy was getting his casts off about a week after graduation and they wanted to do shots, something that really wasn’t advisable with a cast.

Billy had planned to initially conceal his mark using makeup but a large part of him knew that it didn’t matter since Steve and Eddie were happy anyway so he didn’t bother. After all, both Steve and Eddie loved to show off their marks at every opportunity and no one gave a shit about Billy. Somehow, Billy had managed to keep his mark a secret from everyone but he knew Heather had some suspicions.

After some time, the drinking games start and somehow, Billy’s mark is revealed either in a dared striptease or by accident during a dare and it quickly sobers him up. He doesn’t notice at first but then Robin drunkenly pointed out that they had matching marks and the sober gaze of Eddie was too sharp for Billy to meet, instead choosing to run away, stumble to his car and hit the gas to the quarry.

It’s only there that he allows himself to breakdown and to mourn the end of what was a good friendship he had going on with his soulmates because he was sure they would want nothing to do with him now. He’s only just begun to run out of tears when he hears the telltale sound of Eddie’s van, meant to drive Nancy, Jonathan, Heather and Robin home later but was most likely currenly holding the last people Billy wanted to see.

For a moment, he considers running again but his Mama didn’t raise no coward, so he wipes his tears and stands his ground. Steve was a lot drunker than Billy was when Billy had left but it seemed he’d sobered up during the ride because he was clear-eyed when he was grabbing Billy and making sure that the blond wouldn’t run away.

Steve and Eddie trapped Billy in between them, in what seemed like a mockery of his fantasies only to have them play out right in front of him. Never in his wildest dreams did he think that his soulmates would tell him that they wanted him, that they loved him and wanted to take care of him and love him. Sure, it was after an argument about why Billy felt the need to hide but he had expected rejection or at the very least a mutual ignorance of his mark. He’d never considered it a possibility but the two were convinced to try and convince him to give them a chance.

After more than a few tears and attempts to get them to realize they were better off without Billy and his baggage, Steve and Eddie stubbornly managed to convince Billy to try with them. A few kisses convinced Billy to leave his car behind so that they could get it in the morning but for now, Steve and Eddie wanted him in Eddie’s van so they were sure he wouldn’t run.

The entire ride, Billy’s mind was trying to convince him that Steve and Eddie were better off without him, that he didn’t deserve this and that he was a fraud ruining a perfectly happy couple but Steve instinctively knew something was up and he’d had Billy laid across his lap with his hair being stroked to keep the bad thoughts away while Steve affirmed Billy of all of their feelings towards him.

Halfway through the ride home, Billy was asleep and Steve had no problem carrying the younger boy into their bed so that they could finally hold him the way they wanted to. Billy had long since told them of how lonely he felt in his room but as much as they had wanted to invite Billy to literally sleep with them, they hadn’t wanted to cross any boundaries.

Tonight though, all Steve and Eddie wanted to do was to fall asleep holding their newly found soulmate. Billy awoke to Steve’s warmth cocooning him and Eddie coming in to wake him with breakfast in bed. After a hearty meal, Steve and Eddie asked if they could court Billy to show him how serious they were about their feelings for him and Billy found that much like before, he couldn’t say no to his soulmates.

Months passed with Steve and Eddie constantly trying to prove their love of Billy who eventually concedes and moves in with them in the master bedroom. It isn’t long until having Billy in between Steve and Eddie is a norm and no longer a fantasy for Billy and he realizes just how much he didn’t let himself have when he hated himself. With Steve and Eddie’s love, they helped Billy realize he was always worthy of love, care and devotion and that they were ready to spend the rest of their lives together reminding him of that fact.

[lunaraindrop]

I love prompt things!

How about the word...twirl? :)

Oooo! A good one! Here you go! A bit of Wayne Munson/Claudia Henderson thrown in there too!

‐----‐--------------------

In the short six months after the "earthquake" that rocked Hawkins to its core, many strange things had happened. Some bad things, yes. But some good too.

In all of the chaos with Eddie and Max in the hospital, Wayne Munson and Claudia Henderson met. To say that the two adults got along was... a huge understatement!

At first glance, Steve didn't really see much of a resemblance between nephew and uncle. Besides the obvious, Hair vs. no Hair, Wayne was shorter than his nephew. He also lacked the rich, warm brown eyes that Steve was starting to become addicted to. Wayne's were what Steve thought at a cool blue. His hands were stubby and naked, where Eddie's fingers were all long, wiggly tendons and metal rings.

All of those thoughts went out the fucking window the minute Steve witnessed Wayne meeting Claudia.

The woman went into that hospital with a mission. After hearing Dustin talk about how Wayne had barely left Eddie's side in days, Claudia Henderson bustled into the room like only a mother of Dustin Henderson could, handed a bemused Wayne a cup of coffee and a club sandwich in Reynolds Wrap, and tutted at him that he would be no help to Eddie if he didn't take care of himself. (Steve...may have got a similar speech...)

Instead of the man being offended...well, you would think Claudia handed Wayne the moon.

Once Wayne, and subsequently Eddie's jaws were picked up off the floor, Wayne opened up.

While it was quieter, more subtle, Wayne Munson flirting greatly resembled the cow-eyed, cute quipped, touchy-feely dance Eddie did around Steve. (Steve, very observant thank-you-very-much, noticed this. Feeling the flutter of something warm and cautiously hopeful, Steve asked Robin later, "Hey, do you think Eddie's been flirting with me?" Robin sputtered and fell out of her chair)

After just talking to the woman for a second time, a besotted Wayne swore to his nephew in his hospital bed, "I'm gonna marry that woman."

Well, that was only going to happen *after* Steve hints that Claudia has to ask the man out first. Apparently, Munson men fall in love hard, fall fast, and stay in love like a possessive, deranged swan. They just...have an awkward time going from love declarations to actually asking someone out.

This was confirmed by Eddie. They were once again in his hospital room. Eddie was getting close to being released, but still had to stay until his wounds healed over a little better. Steve, hating the idea of Eddie being alone while Wayne had to go to work, would hang out with him in between work shifts and volunteering at the school. This meant he was often sleeping over on the pullout cot. It was one of those mornings when he slept over in the hospital that it came up. Since it seemed like Steve and Wayne were trading Eddie shifts, Claudia was bringing them both clean clothes and something to eat. He and Eddie witnessed the exchange, where hands lingered just a bit longer than necessary on the work clothes she so nicely washed. Instead of Wayne yaki g his chances, he called her "Dollface" and "Sweetheart" before rushing to get ready to leave. Steve saw the glimmer of confused disappointment in her eyes.

Steve fully understood that feeling.

Later, Steve found himself questioning Eddie on why Wayne was like that. How the time before he gave Claudia his jacket in the chilly hospital, only to make an excuse to zip out that Eddie needed more Jello.

Eddie hates Jello. Calls it a "Gelatinous Cube" and hisses at it anytime some comes near. Steve finds it endearing funny.

"So, your uncle goes on and on about liking Dustin's mom, but flakes out when he has a chance to ask her out. What gives, man?"

Averting his eyes, Eddie shrugged from eating his chocolate pudding (that Steve smuggled in for him). "What can I say? Munson men feel deeply, but are chicken shit about rejection. We just bat our eyes and stare, hoping the one we love gets a hint and proposes first."

"You mean asks out first."

"I know what I said, Big Boy."

Steve knew he needed to leave and take Dustin (who was with Max in the other room Steve frequented) home to his mom. He *also* knew he had to have a little chat with said mom.

But Eddie had him thinking.

After their goodbyes, as Steve stood at the threshold of the door, he mustered up the courage to turn around.

"You know, Eddie. You bat your eyes at me. Like, all the time."

Eddie dropped his spoon, beautiful cow-eyes wide. "Uh..."

Steve crosses his arms, and leaned a little cockily against the door frame. "And you stare."

Eddie pulled a piece of hair in front of his face, voice going up a higher octave. "Would we reeeeally call it staring? I thought of it more practicing telepathy."

Feeling giddy and so, so in love, Steve sauntered back in.

"You're not a mind reader, and I'm not El. If you want me to ask you out, you gotta give me a better signal."

Eddie went from looking panicked to impishly intrigued. "You'd be up for that? What kind of signals are we talking about? And what outcome should I expect? You know, hypothetically."

Steve shrugged, trying for casually cool and not like his heart was going to jump out of his chest and tackle Eddie back into the bed. "I dunno, like twirl your hair? Bite you lip? Or, I don't know, say 'Hey Steve, I would really like to get to go on our first date soon' to name a few!"

Eddie's brow furrowed. "And would there be a date?"

Steve walked back in and sat on the edge of Eddie's bed, softly petting at Eddie's calf. "Oh, there would be LOTS of dates. That one would just be the one to get the ball rolling. Throw me a bone here. Hypothetically, of course. "

Tilting his head, Eddie eyed Steve and twirled a piece of his hair.

Steve held in a gasp.

"I see what you're getting at, Stevie-Boy."

Looking away, Eddie bit his lip.

"But I'm stuck in this here hospital bed. If I said, 'Date me now, you beautiful bastard!', where wouldwe go? The cafeteria?"

Steve propped himself above Eddie, hand braced against the wall behind Eddie's head.

"Hypothetically?"

"Of course."

Steve reached over to twirl a curl of Eddie’s hair. He learned closer, almost nose to nose.

"Hypothetically speaking, we could be dating for months before we even go on a single date. Busy lives, you know."

Eddie, trying and failing to look serious, canted his nose to rub against Steve's.

"That sounds an awful like proposing to be boyfriends, Sweetheart."

Switching from looking into his eyes to his lips, Steve breeched the hairsbreadth of space, kissing the supple lips he had been dreaming about, before giving Eddie's bottom lip a little nibble.

"Ha. I guess you have it right. What do you say? Want to give it a go?"

Eddie threaded his fingers into Steve hair.

"Boyfriends?"

"Yes."

"Hypothetically?"

"Hell no."

"Good."

Dustin found them ten minutes later, making out on Eddie's hospital bed.

The little shit wasn't even mad or traumatized.

He just demanded that Steve figure out how to get his mom and Wayne to figure their shit out.

Turns out all Claudia had to do was the hair twirl before Wayne caved.

[thorniest-rose]

Consider: Bisexual homewrecker Steve targeting his dad's business contacts. It's a bit risky at first because if one person tips their hand steve's screwed. but eventually if someone outs steve to his dad steve could take half the company down with him. Steve has a small but undeniable influence over their stock prices just by whispering in the ears of influential businessmen. Mr Harrington notices that there's some sort of club he isn't in, clandestine meet ups he's not invited to and he can't figure out why. Meanwhile anytime there's a conference in Indy steve just happens to be at the bar down the block from their hotel and if he goes back to the room of whoever treats him best that works out for everyone. He collects trinkets like a scrapbook from all the powerful men he's ensnared and hoards all these secrets like a dragon. Steve has a harem of wealthy powerful men tripping over themselves to get a piece of him and he revels in it.

Oh my god, I'm utterly besotted with this. Dark, sultry, manipulative minx Steve targeting all his dad's colleagues and high-profile business partners??? Using them as sugar daddies and as leverage against his own father until he gets bored of them and moves on to the next challenge? Having all these men under his influence and finding it so easy too, they're putty in his hands the moment he flashes his eyes at them. Some of them are halfway decent in bed too which makes it even more fun, though nothing can compare with how it feels to see another powerful man fall under his spell and prove his love and ardour for Steve by emptying his bank account for him or letting him use his credit card and buy anything he wants, even if it's a wardrobe of designer clothes or a yacht or a house or a vacation in Europe. Steve gets what he wants and uses all these men and never feels bad about it 💕

[iam93percentstardust]

oh, i think you're going to like this one: winterironfalcon, each one of the three think the other two are dating and therefore behave like pining idiots. it's a mess, really. :D

you're right i did like this one :)

you can find it on ao3 here

~

“Sit down,” Natasha orders, and because Sam is not an idiot and values his head, he sits.

“How did you get into my apartment?” he asks suspiciously, eyeing her from across the kitchen table. She seems oddly at home in his kitchen, too at home. There’s no reason she should find it as easy as she does to locate his cups and teabags.

“I stole your key a few years ago and had my own made,” she says breezily, pouring hot water into two mugs.

“And just how did you steal my key without my noticing?” He’s pretty sure Natasha was a spy—or maybe a thief—in a past life because this isn’t the first time she’s done something like this. Sam has mostly stopped being surprised by it, but then there are times like now, when he finds out she stole his key and duplicated it, when he thinks he should possibly be more worried than he normally is.

“How do you think?” Natasha asks, giving him a look that says she knows he’s not as stupid as he’s acting.

Sam suddenly remembers the one and only time their friend group went barhopping after Sam had just gotten fired. Considering it had ended with Clint in a dumpster in an alley and Steve being violently ill in a completely different alley, they’d all decided it would be for the best if they never did that again. He doesn’t remember much of that night—other than that awful, horrible moment when he’d realized that Tony and Bucky are seeing each other—but he supposes that considering all the random contacts Natasha has around Boston, it’s entirely possible that she could have disappeared at one night with his key—or maybe all of their keys—and had it duplicated.

“That’s very creepy of you,” he informs her. She seems supremely unconcerned by this. “Alright, so why did you break into my house—”

“It’s not breaking in if I have a key.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it works like—”

“Do you drink your orange juice straight from the carton?” Natasha asks. He isn’t sure how she figured that out just from looking in his fridge, but he nods anyway. “Sam, that’s disgusting.”

“I live alone.”

“What if you have guests who want orange juice?”

“First of all, I don’t have overnight guests.” He hasn’t since he realized his feelings for both Tony and Bucky were somewhat less than platonic. Maybe someone else would have decided to get over their two happily in love friends by getting under someone else, but to Sam, every time he’d tried to go pick someone else up, it had felt too much like a betrayal (it’s been a very sexually frustrating couple of years). “And secondly, no one drinks orange juice other than in the morning, so I don’t even have to offer it when you guys come over.”

“My sister drinks it at other times.”

“Your sister also puts hot sauce on mac and cheese. Why are you here, Natasha?”

Natasha puts one of the mugs in front of him, and he would ask how she knew how he takes his tea, but Natasha’s always been observant. “You’re in that thermal-fluids class with Tony, right?”

“Yeah,” Sam says slowly, wondering where this is going. As a mechanical engineering minor, he doesn’t share a lot of classes with Tony, who’s getting a second degree in mechanical engineering while he works on his PhD in physics, but they’d coordinated their schedules this semester.

He’d originally planned, on the first day of classes, to sit somewhere in front of Tony, so that he wouldn’t have to stare besotted at the back of his head all semester, pining hopelessly over what he can’t have, or keep inhaling the spicy shampoo Tony uses if they were sitting next to each other. But on the second day, Tony had plopped himself in the seat next to Sam, commented that there was no point to sharing a class if they weren’t going to sit beside each other so they could help when the other one got confused (as though Tony would ever get confused on a topic as simple as thermal-fluids), and given Sam the big, wide eyes that he’d never been able to resist when he tried to protest. And that was the end of that.

“Does he ever stare at anyone?” Natasha asks, shaking him out of his thoughts.

“Does he—what?”

“I want to set him up,” she pronounces. “He’s lonely, and I think it would do him some good to get out there.”

Sam blinks at her. His heart leaps in his chest—Bucky and Tony broke up? He might have a chance, then!—followed immediately by a wave of guilt—his best friends broke up, how could he be so excited?

“Uh, Bucky and Tony broke up? When?” he asks cautiously. It’s news to him (it must be really awkward in the apartment Bucky and Tony share right now), and he wonders that neither of them told him.

Natasha gives him an odd look. “Sam, they were never dating.”

Wait, what?

“Wait, what?”

Her brows crease. “You thought they were dating?”

“Well, yeah,” he says. “They’ve been going out since the night you stole my keys.”

Her frown deepens. “No, they haven’t.”

“Uh, yeah, they have. They were all over each other.”

“Because Tony’s an affectionate drunk,” Natasha says, waving her hand impatiently. “And Bucky can’t say no to him—much the same way that you can’t.”

“They live together,” he points out though he can’t stop his heart from beating faster. Has he really not lost his chance? He’s been in love with Bucky since the day they met in sixth grade, though he hadn’t realized what his feelings were until he saw him with Tony—Tony, pretty, bratty, brilliant Tony, who’d quite literally tumbled into their lives on the first day of orientation and stolen Sam’s heart just as much as Bucky had. He’d thought he’d lost both of them, but—but maybe, just maybe, he still has a chance.

Natasha snorts. “Only because Tony is codependent on Rhodes and Bucky is codependent on Steve, and with both Rhodes and Steve gone, they’re substituting each other.”

“I—huh.” Sam sits back in his chair, mind racing. They’re not dating. Sam hasn’t lost them. They’re not dating. “Go away, Natasha. I need to think.”

She harrumphs and flounces out the door, warning him, “Don’t take too long thinking. I’m not kidding about setting Tony up.”

~

Tony is no longer surprised when Natasha shows up without warning in the apartment he and Bucky share. He’s pretty sure she copied his key that night that they all went barhopping, that wonderful, horrible night after the worst exam of Tony’s life when he had finally made his move on Bucky and it had seemed like Bucky had accepted them, only to find out the next morning that apparently Bucky had just been putting up with him since he’d gone home with Sam that night where they must have gotten together because they’d shown up at brunch the next day together. Tony wishes he could forget about that night the way Sam and Bucky seem to have because it had been perfect, the feeling of Bucky’s arms around him, Sam’s hot gaze on them both (and hadn’t that been a fun realization, finding out that he wouldn’t mind being the filling in a Bucky-Samwich), but no such luck. He’s doomed to remember that for the rest of his life.

“What are you doing here, Nat?” he asks wearily, holding out an empty mug for her to fill with coffee.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, tapping one perfectly manicured nail against her chin. She picked up the gesture from Pepper, back when Pepper had been visiting for the summer, and it always throws him off when he sees it. He keeps expecting to see Pepper in her place.

“That’s dangerous,” he quips and tosses back most of the coffee in one gulp.

Natasha observes him, nose wrinkling distastefully, and says, “I don’t know how you can stand to drink that. There’s not even any sugar in it.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Tony informs her. “It’s supposed to be mainlined straight into my veins so I can have a full conversation with you at ass o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s nearly noon.”

“My point still stands. What brings you to my corner of the woods?”

“You go to Bucky’s coffee shop often, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Tony says immediately because it’s true. He’s in there almost every day, usually after his thermal-fluids class with Sam which is a torture all its own because he sits next to Sam, who always smells so good and Tony just wants to lean over and lick a stripe up his neck to find out if he tastes as good as he smells and—anyway, he goes to Bucky’s coffeeshop all the time because he’s a glutton for punishment there too. He knows Bucky’s taken (just like he knows Sam is taken), but he can’t stop himself cause every time he goes, Bucky’s eyes light up, and Tony has never been good about denying himself anything even when he knows he can’t actually have it.

“Does Bucky ever look at anyone while he’s working?”

Tony gives her a Look (it’s not as good as Pepper’s but he’s still learning, damn it!). “Nat, he looks at lots of people. He works at a coffee shop.”

Natasha’s Look is much more impressive than his, damn her. “I meant, does he look at anyone longingly?”

“Uh, no?” Why would he look at anyone longingly? He has Sam.

Her mouth twists in a small pout, and she drops down into one of the chairs at the table. “He’s pining, and I can’t figure out for who.”

“He’s… He can’t be pining, he’s already in a relationship.”

She frowns at him. “No, he isn’t.”

“Yeah, he is. He’s been dating Sam for like two years.” Which isn’t fair. Tony’s the one who lives with him (and yeah, a large part of that is because he can’t remember his social security number without Rhodey, and Bucky can’t figure out how to do laundry without Steve, but that’s beside the point); he should be the one dating Bucky. Or Sam, he’s not picky. Or both of them, ideally, but there’s never been any indication that they would be interested in a throuple, and Tony isn’t willing to put himself out there like that.

A thought occurs to him, one that makes him simultaneously uncomfortably gleeful and deeply guilty. “Did they break up?”

“Of course they didn’t,” Natasha replies dismissively. Tony tells himself that his heart does not plummet into his stomach when he hears that (he’s lying). “They were never dating in the first place.”

“Yeah, they are.” He thinks about that and amends it to, “Were?” That doesn’t sound right either. “Whatever. I know what I saw, Nat.” And what he saw was Sam and Bucky walking into brunch together, standing uncomfortably close as they laughed at something, only hours after Tony spent pretty much the entire night in Bucky’s lap. He’s not an oblivious idiot, no matter what Rhodey says. He’d clearly misread the situation, and Bucky had been too nice to shove him off (it doesn’t sound like Bucky, something traitorous whispers in his mind, but that something traitorous is wrong). And maybe when he’d seen them walking in together the next morning, something had broken inside of him—something that hadn’t even realized before then that he’d fallen in love with both of them and not just his grumpy roommate.

“Tony,” Natasha says, irritatingly gently. “They’re really not dating. Sam told me himself.”

He—he did? Then what was with all the long glances Sam and Bucky gave each other? The plethora of inside jokes that Tony always wanted to know about? The touches that always seemed too intimate to be between just friends?

“They’re not?” he asks, and he hates how squeaky and hopeful his voice has gotten.

He still has a shot. He didn’t blow it that night at the bar. He could still—he could still—he needs to get them both together, he realizes. That time at the bar, he’d only been trying to get Bucky, but he knows better now. They could be good together, all three of them. They will be good together. He just needs to talk to both of them.

The coffee shop. Bucky’s got a shift until late in the evening. And if Tony times it right—he checks the clock on the microwave—he can get there right when Sam walks in, same as he does every week so he and Bucky can talk about whatever game was on last night.

He can do this.

~

When Natasha steps through the front door of the coffee shop, Bucky wishes he could say that he’s surprised to see one of the travel mugs from his apartment in her hands, but he’s not.

“Did you at least knock before you let yourself in?” he asks amusedly, leaning against the counter. They’ve hit the mid-afternoon dead time, he can do that. He’s already swept and made sure everything is refilled and pristine for their next customer. There’s nothing wrong with talking to one of his best friends for a few minutes.

“Of course not,” Natasha says, snorting. “Tony was still asleep when I got there.”

“And you couldn’t just wait until he woke up like anyone else would’ve done,” Bucky states, jealous of the fact that Tony gets to sleep in (and maybe even more jealous, irrationally this time, of Tony’s bed, which gets to hold Tony while he sleeps).

“Exactly.” She holds out the travel mug. “As much caramel crunch frappuccino as will fit in here, please. Cream base, not coffee.”

“Sure thing, Tasha,” he says, taking the mug from her. “Sure you should be drinking that much though? I thought dancers were supposed to watch their weight.”

“They are doing Swan Lake this season,” she says dismissively like that answers anything. For most people, it wouldn’t, but Bucky isn’t most people. He knows how much she hates Swan Lake. She definitely wouldn’t be auditioning for that one, that’s for sure. Most companies wouldn’t allow her to just skip out on a ballet like this, but the new-on-the-scene Boston Harbor Ballet company, recommended to her by Tony’s cousin, Sharon, also a dancer, does things differently. “One coffee won’t kill me.”

There’s a dangerous glint in her eyes that says he better not argue with her, and, well, Bucky values his head where it is. He starts making her drink.

“What brings you in here today?” he asks, only half-paying attention to her. He’s got an assignment in his environmental chemistry class due later today, and he’s going back over it in his head to make sure he’s hit all the salient points.

“You and Sam go to the football games together, right?”

That startles him out of his thoughts. “Yeah,” he says, turning away from the blender to give her a curious look. “The home games anyway.” It’s been a tradition for as long as they’ve been in school, and if Bucky keeps going to them because it’s as close to a date as he’s ever gonna get with Sam, well, that’s his own problem.

“Does he ever seem like he’s watching anyone? Any of the cheerleaders, perhaps?”

Oh. Bucky knows what this is about. “If you’re worried about Yelena, don’t be. She’s a great cheerleader, and your mom’s way too scary for anyone to risk pissing her off by hitting on her baby.”

“No, no, I know Yelena can take care of herself,” Natasha says, frowning at him. “I mean anyone else.”

“No, why? What’s this about?”

“He is pining for someone,” she replies, tapping her fingers on the edge of the counter. “And he won’t tell me who. I thought it might be one of the cheerleaders since I don’t know why else you’d be going.”

“Gee, Tasha, it couldn’t possibly be that he wants to spend time with me,” Bucky says sarcastically. Then he frowns. “He can’t be pining for someone. He’s already with Tony, and Sam’s not the type to cheat.”

Natasha sighs, and there’s something very exasperated about the sound. “Sam and Tony aren’t dating,” she says irritably, almost like it’s a conversation she’s had before, even though he knows that’s impossible. He would remember if they’d talked about this before, mostly because it’s completely ridiculous.

Sam and Tony have been dating since that night they all went barhopping. Bucky doesn’t remember much from that night, but he remembers that part because he’d been working up the courage to ask one of them out—either of them (maybe even both of them if he’d ever gotten any inkling that they were polyamorous)—only to be absolutely devastated when Sam and Tony had arrived together, Tony’s arm linked through Sam’s, two gorgeous heads bent together in deep discussion. Tony’s hair had been tousled like someone had been running their hands through it, and Sam’s lips looked like they’d been bitten red. He still doesn’t know why Tony had spent most of the night hanging off of Bucky instead of Sam, but he’d gone home with Sam that night, intending on apologizing for letting Tony sit on his lap for most of the evening (what can he say? He’s a weak man, and when faced with that ass perching on his lap for hours on end, he hadn’t tried resisting at all). But he’d passed out on Sam’s (admittedly comfortable) couch pretty much as soon as they walked through the door, and the next morning, it was like nothing had even happened. Sam and Tony had continued to date, continued to leave Bucky out in the cold, and now they’re even one of those adorably disgusting couples who coordinate their schedules together.

“They most definitely are,” he replies, pouring her frappuccino into the mug and passing it to her. “That’ll be—” She hands him the exact change before he can finish the sentence.

“They’re really not,” she says. “Tony told me himself.”

“They broke up?” he tries weakly. But even as he says it, he knows that Natasha is completely serious. Sam and Tony aren’t dating. They never were.

He doesn’t know how he feels about that. On the one hand, he’s delighted, ecstatic even. He can still ask one of them (both of them, in his wildest dreams) out. He’s still in the running. On the other hand… they’ve wasted so much time. Years of their lives spent on this misunderstanding. He wonders how it even happened, how it never, in all their time spent together, all the hours he’s spent at football games with Sam, all the days spent relaxing on the couch with Tony…

How it never came up that all three of them are, in fact, single.

~

Natasha settles back into the poofy armchair she always sits in when she comes to the coffee shop. It’s located in a corner, dark enough despite the brightness of the coffee shop that she can easily be overlooked even when it’s as empty as it currently is. She pulls a highlighter and her textbook for her civic media course out of her backpack and flips to the chapter they’re on, highlighter at the ready.

She’s rewarded for her patience what feels like only a few minutes later, but is actually closer to thirty when she glances at her phone. She hears them first, two loud voices coming closer to the door. That’s worked out better than she could have planned then. She’d hoped that by talking to Sam, who likes to think things out by acting, first and then to Tony, who’s never been called anything other than impulsive, she would manage to time it so that they would show up at the coffee shop around the same time, but at exactly the same time? Even she couldn’t have made that work.

Bucky’s head pops up from where he’s going over his own textbook at the counter. He starts to light up when he sees Sam, only for an adorably confused expression to cross his face when he realizes Tony is with him. Natasha can almost see the thought process: Tony’s with Sam, but Natasha told him they weren’t dating, so why are they together? Are they dating? She almost wishes she could go over there to reassure him that everything’s working out just the way she planned, but that would blow her cover. She wants to actually see what happens, and she can’t do that if they realize she’s here.

“Bucky Babe, light of my life,” Tony declares as he walks through the door. “Are you on break?”

Bucky looks around the coffee shop deliberately. “No,” he says unnecessarily.

“Can you be on break?” Sam asks.

Bucky sighs. “I can if you wait ten minutes. Clint will be here then.”

Natasha deliberately doesn’t squirm in her seat. She’s—not excited, necessarily to see Clint, but she can’t think of a better term. It’s just—Clint intrigues her. He’s clumsy and a bit of an idiot and when he smiles, it makes her breath catch in her throat. She’s not interested in him—she can’t be, he’s wholly unsuitable for any daughter of Melina Vostokoff, but… Well, as she already noted, he intrigues her.

 “Tony, can I get you the usual?” Bucky asks, cheeks dimpling as he smiles at him. Tony, to Natasha’s delight, blushes as he shyly nods. She’s never seen him do that before. He must have really been convinced that there was no room for him with Sam and Bucky.

“And Sam, what about you? We got a new rooibos blend, if you’re interested.”

“Yeah, that’ll be great,” Sam replies, grinning at Bucky so brightly, he could rival the sun in its intensity.

These poor, hopeless boys. What would they do without Natasha in their lives?

The time before Clint arrives seems to go by so slowly. Natasha can’t seem to concentrate on her book when Sam and Tony and Bucky are all at different ends of the coffee shop, studiously ignoring each other. She’s grateful none of them have noticed her yet or they would have definitely figured out something’s going on… she hopes. Sometimes, they can be so oblivious that she wonders if they would notice if she set off fireworks right under their noses.

Clint’s arrival is marked with stark relief from all three boys, who relax wherever they’re sitting—or standing, in Bucky’s case. Even Natasha relaxes, though she likes to think that she’s much more subtle about it than Bucky, who’s clearly antsy as he waits for Clint to clock in.

As soon as Clint has his apron on, Bucky slams his book closed, tosses it on the back counter, and says, “I’m taking my break.”

“Wait, what?” Clint asks, watching confusedly as Bucky grabs both Sam and Tony’s wrists and drags them into the backroom with him.

“Be back in fifteen minutes!” Bucky calls, just before the door shuts.

“What’s going on with them?” Clint mutters. He brightens up when he spots Natasha. “Hey, Natasha! Can I get you a refill?”

“…This is a frappuccino,” she says slowly.

“Yeah, and?”

“And you guys don’t offer refills on frappuccinos.”

Clint droops, and Natasha immediately wants to take it back. She likes it when Clint smiles. He shouldn’t be sad; it’s like kicking a puppy dog or something. But Clint brightens again almost immediately. “What manager won’t know won’t hurt him. You want a refill or no?”

Natasha opens her mouth to say yes, but before she can, she hears yelling coming from the backroom. She and Clint both look nervously toward the closed door.

“Are they fighting?” Clint asks, sounding surprised. She doesn’t blame him. Those three bicker all the time, but they’ve never truly fought for as long as she’s known them.

“They weren’t supposed to be,” she says, suddenly worried that she’s made a mistake. This was supposed to make them happy, make them stop pining for each other. They shouldn’t be yelling at each other.

But just as quickly as it started, the yelling stops.

After a moment, when it doesn’t start up again, Natasha says, “Yes.”

“What?”

“Another frappuccino,” she clarifies.

“Oh!” Clint busies himself with making her drink and even brings it out to her personally instead of calling her to the counter even though the coffeeshop’s gotten busier and there’s a line forming. She doesn’t even realize that thirty minutes have gone by or how busy it’s gotten until Clint calls for her and says, “I know you don’t work here, but can you go check on Bucky? His break was supposed to be over a while ago.”

She eyes the crowd forming in the coffee shop and nods sharply, standing up. “Watch my stuff,” she orders the weedy boy in the armchair next to her, staring him down until he squeaks and nods.

She cautiously opens the door to the backroom, not sure what she’ll find—the three of them talking, hopefully. Worst case scenario, she’ll find Bucky sobbing because Sam and Tony left him. Best case, they’ve torn each other’s clothes off and are fucking against the nearest surface, not caring whether it was horizontal or vertical.

What she actually finds is somewhere in between best case and most likely: Sam is sitting on the small couch in the back, Tony perched on his lap, the two of them kissing as Bucky presses up against their sides, dotting kisses across the line of Sam’s jaw and over to Tony’s. They’re all clearly engrossed in what they’re doing, and she’s loathe to interrupt them, so…

Without any of them noticing, she snatches one of the aprons off the hook next to the door and ties it around her waist. She marches back to the front and sidles behind the counter, firmly telling Clint, “Bucky’s busy. I’m here to help instead.”

“Aw, Bucky,” Clint complains and then gives her a dubious look. “Have you ever made coffee from one of these before?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding, even though she hasn’t, but how hard can it be? If she can get those three pining idiots together, she can do anything. Even, hmm, even figure out how to get Sharon and Steve together, despite Steve living in New York now.

She’s shaping up to be quite the matchmaker if she says so herself.

Now, if she could only figure out how to turn the coffeepot on.

[steviespanties]

omega!steve and omega!billy have synced up heats and of course their valentine’s day date gets ruined by both of them realizing they’re due earlier than usual.

“it’s because you’ve been emanating all these stupid happy pheromones,” billy complains as he shoves a big knotted plug into steve. barely gets him to hold still when he’s already deep into a feverish fog, moaning and gushing slick onto billy’s hand. there’s already a plug firmly nestled into billy, who’s still more pissed off at the interruption of their plans than fully In The Zone.

steve, however, is fully gone already. has been in such an elated, bubbly mood all week leading up to their date, which really was just a regular date if you asked billy. and yet steve was primping and secretly decorating their bedroom with pink heart garlands and rose petals on their bed, even as he was getting flushed and wet without even noticing.

it’s ridiculously endearing. billy knows he’s whipped, filled up his empty heart with ooey gooey softness that’s turned him into an equally huge idiot for his pretty boyfriend. underneath him, steve is spread out on silky sheets, a rose petal stuck to his shoulder, eyes barely open and completely transfixed on billy. stupidly besotted expression firmly in place.

“come closer,” steve sighs and with surprising strength wraps his arms around billy, drags him down and on top of him till he lets out his breath in a surprised “oof”. steve wriggles his hips till their dicks are aligned to slide against each other perfectly, making both of them moan at the friction. billy can’t resist any longer and buries his face against steve’s throat, right where he can lick and drool all over his scent glands and get lost in his sticky-sweet smell.

“‘m sorry i ruined our date” comes from above him though. and despite the growing heaviness of his limbs, billy pushes himself onto his forearms, bracketing steve in and lifts up far enough to look him in the eyes. 

“s’okay,” he slurs. his speech is already sounding drunk from his own heat and the thick dose of steve’s smell he just inhaled. but this is important. he can’t let his mate think he somehow messed up or should feel guilty just for going in heat because he’s too much in love with billy. no such thing as too in love, really. “as long as i spend the day with you, nothing’s ruined.”

when the words register, steve lets out a long sigh and a line of tension billy hadn’t even noticed bleeds out of him. “still wanna go on a date with you,” he grumbles, even as he drags billy close again and wraps his legs around him for good measure. no way for them to untangle now, not when there’s all this skin to rub together and get even more heat-drunk on.

[newtonsheffield]

Any chance of getting some spicy royals content on this fine Sunday? After they’re married/during their engagement, I have a vision of them doing their events and then going back to palace and just like tearing each other’s clothes off and doing it on any and all available surfaces.

My friend, you understand the Royals vibe.

Their whole romance started because essentially they couldn't keep their hands off one another. That's not going to change when they're together, in fact, it makes it all a little worse. The young queen and her future husband are well known for probably being too in love.

Kate wasn't stupid, she knew what the entire country was saying about her when rumours of her relationship with Anthony started leaking from the palace as these things often did. And she supposed she was a good part to blame. People couldn't help but notice the Security that lined the corridor outside Anthony's flat, and really that meant there had to be someone of note inside, and there was, of course, the very public way Anthony had gone about things. It didn't take long for the rumours to start.

She called off the wedding for him

It was all arranged for publicity

The Queen Regent demanded she marry him if not Stirling

He's a traitor and so must she be.

It was vaguely amusing honestly, the idea that Mary of all people would be encouraging Kate to do anything to Anthony that wasn't punching him in the stomach. The palace PR team had practically begged her not to acknowledge Anthony publicly

"All due respect Your Highness, This will be a disaster." Jenkins had said, the bridge of his nose pinched in his fingers, barely 2 days into her relationship with Anthony,

Kate had bristled, "What are you suggesting, Mr Jenkins?"

"I'm suggesting, that publicly, Our new Queen has no consort, whatever you do in private is of course your own business."

Kate had frowned, "And what about when we get married." A small hiss escaped several people in the room and Kate had pretended not to see the way Mary stiffened beside her, plowing ahead. "Surely eventually I'll have to marry someone, what do you suggest then?"

And no one had really seemed to have an answer for her, which of course meant the answer was clear.

Hopefully you'll come to your senses before then!

But it hadn't been necessary in the end. Sophie had sent them to a primary school, and aided by a rather adorable Hyacinth Bridgerton, Kate and Anthony (Kathony as they'd been dubbed) had emerged as they country's new it couple. Requests poured in for comment, the were star crossed lovers people that certainly weren't supposed t fall in love but couldn't resist the pull. And allegedly, everyone could see it. Just from the way they looked at one another.

It seemed every day in those first few months blurry pictures emerged of them, Anthony's head resting on her shoulder on a street corner, Kate's legs wrapped around his waist as he carried her through the garden on his back, Anthony crowding her against a tree their lips nearly touching. It was relentless, and rather than sullying the image of the royal family, it seemed to make public opinion soar. Yes, their new queen was young, beautiful, and very much besotted with her grouchy boyfriend. It really was quite the narrative, and not very far from the truth. Before long reports of them slipping away at public events seemed to emerge, and this the palace could not abide.

"Kate, please, please do not sneak out of this event." Sophie was practically begging, looking sternly between her and Anthony. "I mean it, "I get it, you just got engaged, and it's adorable that you're so happy but Can we stay to the end of one event this month?"

"Ahh Sophie, when you look this good, lady's are bound to drag you behind a topiary animal for a quickie." Anthony had said, with that insufferable smirk on his face."

Kate had scoffed. "Won't be a problem, Sophie, Anthony won't be getting any for a while."

As it turns out, it was a problem. Before they'd even left the palace Kate was warm. Anthony had been sitting in the small living area attached to her suite by the time her styling team had finished flitting around her, and honestly, the sight of him made her mouth go dry.

He was wearing a light grey suit, the waistcoat of which had a light checked pattern through it, cut tightly across his broad shoulders, his red tie and pocket square in stark contrast. She didn't really need to look at them, she'd known before she even walked in what colour they would be, they always matched, Anthony insisted upon it. Insisted on her crest being neatly embroidered into them, and it was a little unflattering but it aways sent a little possessive thrill through her.

She'd cleared her throat and he'd looked up from his phone, smile already in place though it turned just slightly predatory at the sight of her.

"Well, well, your majesty, don't you look lovely this evening?" His fingertips had trailed over her bare back a little delightfully.

Kate had scoffed, her cheeks burning, "we promised hands to ourselves tonight."

Anthony laughed, "There's almost no way you're going to be able to manage that, Darling. I look delectable this evening."

God his arrogance was startling, even if he wasn't far off the mark. "You look average."

He wasn't deterred. "I'll make you a deal, Princess" She'd been the queen for months but he still called her by her original title, his eyes shining at her. "If we stay until 11:30, I'll give you a reward."

A shiver had run down her spine as she'd thought about last night when he'd bent her over the back of the sofa, his hands hot against her. "Won't be a problem. Prepare to get on your knees for me."

"It would be my pleasure."

By the time they'd been there an hour, Kate was struggling, Anthony's hand was hot on her back, his eyes burning into hers as he laughed and smiled, his glasses shining in the dim lighting, and it didn't help that she was sure the air conditioning was broken.

And he wouldn't leave her alone. Usually at these events after a while they were tugged in different directions, mingling with this lord and that, as directed by their teams. But tonight Anthony shrugged off all of his instructions, keeping his arm like a vice around her, the smell of his cologne a little overwhelming, his deep voice rumbling through the both of them, his finger tapping his watch every time her own hand slipped under his jacket or to the edge of his trousers, a stupid smirk on his face. God he was absolutely unbearable, and she wanted him so fucking much, but she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

Her eyes didn't leave his watch from 11:28, counting down the seconds as they slipped by, clearing her throat as soon as 11:30 ticked around.

"Can you have the car brought around Steve?"

Anthony's smirk intensified into something like a wolfish grin as they waved once more to the assembled party before they slipped out the side doors.

"Well, Your majesty, very impressive restraint shown tonight." his voice was like gravel in her ear, both hands on her waist now, one on either side, his teeth already nipping at her neck, it was all she could do not to groan loudly.

As soon as the car door was opened, Kate had tugged Anthony inside, her hand wrapped around his tie, his hips bucking against her at the sharp tug she gave it.

"What are you doing?" Her own voice was rough as Anthony attempted to settle into the seat beside her, his eyebrows raised.

"Sitting down so we can go home and fuck?" There was something so innocent about the way he said it, that made her heart flutter with love for him, his hand fiddling nervously with his glasses.

Kate clucked her tongue, tugging on his tie until his knees were resting on the floor of the limousine in front of her. "But we have such a long drive home, Lord Bridgerton, you better get to work."

Anthony's eyes darkened immediately, his hands tugging roughly at the hem of her dress, calming as he slipped underneath it, his lips trailing up her thighs, hands forcing her legs apart.

"Fucking hell I wanted to crawl under this dress the minute I saw you, wanted to do it right there in that fucking room again."

Kate tried to force her voice into something like nonchalance, failing miserably as she shifted her hips a little desperately "Well it would have certainly given the Lords something to tut about, you know how they like that."

His chuckle was slight muffled through the layers of her dress. "They're just jealous, they don't get to have you."

And then his mouth started moving over her, hard and relentless, and fuck she couldn't breathe. The privacy partition was thankfully already up as it always was on the way home from events, but still, Kate knew the driver, and Steve who always rode in the front of her car could hear her, and there was something oddly thrilling about it. Oddly thrilling about the obscene noises that were pulled from her chest, about the soft sound of Anthony's mouth on her, the soft moans falling from his lips at the taste of her, his voice coaxing against her.

"That's it, Kate, you've been such a good girl for Daddy."

Her eyes rolled back in her head, unable to help herself as her hips bucked against him helplessly, desperately seeking just a little more friction.

"Please, Anthony, Please."

He chuckled again and then he started moving impossibly faster, his fingers joining his tongue, forcing her higher and higher, she could see the reflection of them in the window as the streetlights passed, th obscene image of them branded on the back of her eyelids, And everything shattered. A soft scream tore through her chest, Anthony humming happily in response as her chest heaved, her breathing erratic.

Anthony's head popped out from under her dress, checking his watch a little dramatically.

"Well that took 5 minutes so I think I can probably do that another 3 times before we get home."

He managed another 4, one rolling against the other like an endless wave, her screams getting louder and louder, condensation covering the windows in the back of the car. And Anthony's smug smile as he tugged her boneless from the car, really was absolutely insufferable.

[emptymasks]

I get what you mean about how Kirill plays Herbert, like for me any Herbert-watching tends to involve "I Am Switching My Brain Off To Enjoy This (: (:" but some people's acting choices require more of it than others lol. On the more positive side, who does your favourite portrayal of Herbert, and what is it about their portrayal that you like?

Yeah, it's nothing against Kirill! Sometimes the more over the top performances don't vibe well with me, but I'm also aware that there's at least a few Herbert actors who are gay and I'm not saying any of the more... stereotype-y performances are the actors trying to be homophobic. But yes there's always going to sometimes be an air of that as the original film it's based on was very much trying to play into bad stereotypes but I think the musical overall has tried to stray away from them.

But aw thank you for this ask because my favourite Herbert is one who is no one else's favourite Herbert and so I love getting the chance to talk about him - Máté Kamarás!! He was an ensemble member in the original 1997 Vienna cast, and you can hear him as the first solo vampire in Carpe Noctem on the cast album, and then after the original Herbert, Nik Breidenbach, left Máté became the new main Herbert.

What I love about him is the portrayal is like no other Herbert I've seen. Most Herbert's are smirky and it's debatable whether they believe they are as smitten with Alfred as they claim and they're more... I don't know, but they're not what Máté's is. Máté's Herbert is so smiley, like pure joyous smiles, and is so openly besotted (I love that word) with Alfred. Instead of smirking he just smiles and he's just so adorable! He's just precious! He feels like a much younger, sweeter Herbert.

This performance is so funny though, this whole show was wild. So either it was Steve Barton's final show, or he'd come back for a guest performance, I forget which one (even though I have this entire production) and a bunch of silly changes were made like in Carpe Noctem Sarah and Alfred swapped choreography, and in Wenn Liebe, Máté came out with no shirt on, just his waistcoat, and flexed. But that's why the crowd in this video is so loud, everyone was just messing around and having fun. What he does when waiting behind Alfred after Alfred runs off the stage (every Herbert does something different, and sometimes does different things on different nights) fixing Alfred's bowtie and tapping his face it's aaaah! It's also Aris Sas as Alfred so this video gets double bonus points from me.

I have even more photos of him in the ensemble and as Herbert and info than I used too because a friend gifted me the pdfs of the huge blickpunkt Tanz der Vampire books!

Marc Liebisch is another Herbert I love, he's the first Herbert I ever saw and also the first clip or song from Tanz der Vampire I ever watched (which is no longer on Youtube and I wish I'd saved it, but it was him and Dennis Jankowiak as Alfred with English subtitles and was a good quality recording). I prefer him in Berlin 2011 to Vienna 2010, but that may also just be that I way prefer Herbert's costumes and make-up in the original staging than Kentaur (an unpopular opinion). I just really love the range of his hair styles in the original staging. And I think Marc's Herbert is very coy and smirky, but not over the top, and I do love the choices he makes when he's waiting for Alfred to notice he's behind him - he often acts really awkward, looking at his nails, scratching his neck, wondering when he should alert Alfred - rather than others who look more sinister and smirking or grinning behind Alfred.

Also with Marc! He's spoken about the reason Herbert is there in Carpe Noctem is because he was the power to manipulate dreams and he's the one causing Alfred's nightmare and I just love that! I love Herbert being something more and powerful.

Also sidenote: a reason why I prefer the original staging for this song over the Kentaur is because I feel like having Alfred run off stage and around the audience so he's out of breath when he gets back on stage while Herbert just casually strolls along the stage to get to the same spot highlights how Herbert as a vampire would have super-speed/stamina anyway that's just a little thing only I think about.

This video is also adorable:

There aren't that many photos and videos of Máté as Herbert and for anyone wanting to see more I'm just going to leave as many as I can under the cut alongside ones of him as an ensemble member:

Welp it's only allowing me to add 10 images because this is in the new beta post editor. If I was using the regular one it would let me paste as many as I wanted. Oh well.

[fific7]

Dangerous and Divine - Part 5

Billy Russo x Reader

Summary: Billy Russo is an itch you don’t want to scratch. But he’s all over you like a rash.

A/N: This does not follow canon except for a few random points mentioned this time. It’s mainly fluff, lemon zest 🍋 and a bit of angst. There’s also some Billy POV in there. The GIF is from Exposed, unreleased pilot show in case you’re wondering 😌... Billy vibes.

Warnings: Some drinking & swearing.

(My GIF)

A grin curved his lips upwards, “How d’you like your eggs in the mornin’, ma’am?”

“Over easy,” you grinned back. He tapped his shoulder a couple of times with the kitchen spoon, “Ummm.. how about scrambled? And then I’ll give you the “over easy” version afterwards.”

That damn smirk of his, you thought, it’s downright dangerous.

The two of you were sitting at your kitchen island, eating breakfast. The scrambled eggs were really tasty, you complimented him. He’d preened a little, “I’m quite a good cook, sweetheart,” he said, “learned how to look after myself quite early on in life.”

Suddenly he put his fork down, and looked over at you. His face was serious, and you saw some sadness in his eyes. “My mother abandoned me when I was a really young kid. She was a junkie, and couldn’t look after herself never mind me, so I suppose I should thank her. I’d probably be dead otherwise. Got put in a group home, stayed there until I aged out and went straight into the Marines. And got my degree on the government’s dime.”

Your hand moved to cover his, “Billy, you’ve done so well, and you’ve achieved it all on your own. I’m proud of you, and I hope you’re proud of yourself too.” He beamed at you, eyes crinkling at the corners, “Yeah... yeah, I am. Thanks, angel, I appreciate you sayin’ that. I wanted to tell you about it, wanted to be honest with you. In case when you saw the suits, the car, the penthouse and all, you thought I was some kind of privileged trust fund kid.”

He looked down, “There’s a stigma about growin’ up in the system, y’know? I wanted to get it out on the table so you know who I really am and where I came from.”

“I don’t care about that, Billy.” He nodded, thumb stroking your hand which was still on top of his. “I really hoped that you wouldn’t ... but I wanted to be sure, and I’m really glad you feel like that. Also I needed you to know that I’m bein’ honest with you.”

You thought you saw a closed-off look on his face for a moment, but then it was gone and he smiled over at you.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

You had spent the rest of Sunday together, lazing around, watching various shows on Netflix before venturing out for a late lunch to a local diner. Billy had eventually headed home after another steamy session in the bedroom, regretful about not spending the night, sighing that he had a really early start in the morning, a ‘job’ he couldn’t tell you anything about.

He’d explained a bit more about his work earlier in the day while you were eating in the diner. How a lot of it was classified as it was military or political in nature, so he couldn’t go into detail. You’d nodded, and said you understood. But you’d asked some questions nevertheless; how many of the assignments did he go on himself, just how dangerous they were, had he or his men ever been injured.

You got the impression that, although he couldn’t tell you much about who was involved or why they needed protection details, he was pleased you were showing an interest in his work.

The two of you agreed that you’d meet up during the week, Billy saying he’d text you to confirm when and where as he wasn’t sure how long this job would last, maybe at least a couple of days.

He’d insisted on putting his numbers into your phone himself, so you’d unlocked it and handed it to him, wandering back to your bedroom to put some more clothes on. Shortly afterwards he’d kissed you long and hard and made his way downstairs to his car, and you’d watched from your balcony as he drove away. Then you’d laughed at yourself - you were acting like some medieval damsel watching her knight disappear off to war or something.

Sliding the glass door closed, you went to the fridge to pull out a bottle of wine. The apartment suddenly felt very empty without Billy in it. How quickly you’d got used to him being there.

You wandered across to the sofa with your newly-poured glass of wine, noticing your phone on the coffee table. Oh yeah, Billy had added his numbers. A sudden twinge of insecurity hit you. What if he hadn’t actually put his direct numbers in there, and just pretended to? You sat down, looking at it lying there. I mean, it wasn’t like you couldn’t track him down at Anvil, but you would no doubt have to go through a receptionist and you could be endlessly stone-walled.

You eventually picked up the phone and unlocked it. Scrolling to your contacts, you suddenly burst out laughing. Billy had put his numbers in there and had also taken a selfie, him smouldering into the camera. He’d attached it to the contact details with a description.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

Billy drove away from her apartment, truly wishing he could’ve stayed over again.

But then he’d shaken his head slightly, laughing to himself; she’d definitely got one thing right - he was a big sap. Since when did he find himself almost playing house with a woman? Telling her she was his girlfriend - as she’d put it - after five minutes? He was a one-and-done kinda guy!

But then Billy Russo admitted to himself that something had hit him smack in the heart when he’d first seen her, sitting there looking stunning and somehow fragile with that creep trying to come onto her. Well turns out she wasn’t fragile in the least! However when those beautiful eyes had met his... well, he was a goner. Solid gone. And then he’d pursued her like a lovestruck idiot.

He hadn’t ever seriously thought about love. Or believed in it, for that matter. Certainly not when he’d been bedding all those women when he’d been on leave or since he’d left the Marines. All that shit just wasn’t for him. And now? Yeah, not so sure.

Billy almost felt like he was under some kind of spell, it had hit him so quickly. Yeah, like she’d enchanted him or something ridiculous, straight out of a Disney or Harry Potter movie. Was this love, then? His stomach clenched every time he saw her, he just couldn’t stop thinking about her, wanted to be with her all the time, hell he was even jealous of Jake though he wasn’t a threat. Was he? No, surely not. And what about Steve, the other one? Yeah, there he was doing it again - unreasonable jealousy.

And when they’d first slept together, he felt like he’d finally understood what making love meant.

Billy Russo, who until a few days ago had spent most of his leisure time in life actively fucking women - how he’d always described it to himself and others - was now a confirmed big sap. He chuckled to himself.

He suddenly remembered ripping the shit out of a young Marine in his squad who’d come back off leave totally besotted with some girl. The kid had confessed (stupid move) to all the guys that they’d made love, a distant and dreamy look in his eyes. At the time, Billy had scoffed at him and endlessly humiliated him about it. In an affectionate way of course, he told himself.

But he felt guilty about that. Who’s the one with the distant and dreamy gaze now, Russo?

In all truth, Billy felt like he was having some kind of out of body experience. As if Previous Billy Russo was looking down in horror at his new self, yelling at him to get his fucking head back on straight. But New Billy Russo wasn’t listening because, well because he realised he liked feeling this way.

And he thought that she felt the same. He knew she was fighting it and wouldn’t admit anything to him, but there were little tells that had given her away. He decided he’d stay on his best behaviour, just keep trying to win her over, and he felt in his bones that they would be together.

But he did feel a sting of guilt. He had been honest with her, but he’d also been selective with what he’d told her about Anvil, how it all started, and this ongoing shit he and Frank were still embroiled in. One day... one day, and hopefully soon, he could tell her absolutely everything.

His phone, clipped to the dash, vibrated.

He rolled his eyes when he saw the caller ID, hit the button and answered it.

“Dinah... what can I do for you?”

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

You, meanwhile, had just finished your second glass of wine and were admitting to yourself that you were really missing Billy. Oh this is bad, your brain yelled at you, very bad. You’d only known this guy for a few days and you were falling for him. Or - okay - had already fallen for him. It scared you, quite honestly.

He was charming, funny, handsome, sexy. An amazing lover. He’d been disarmingly honest with you about his past, but... but what? Why was there a ‘but’? Because there was something niggling at the back of your mind. Just a couple of expressions you’d seen on his face, quickly gone. An indication of more happening just underneath the surface than you knew about. Billy had a distinct air of danger about him, and you wondered what else was going on inside that dark head of his.

You’d fallen for him, yes... but you were also going to remain wary of him, until you were certain you knew everything you could about him.

Reaching over and pulling your laptop towards you across the coffee table, you typed Billy’s name into Google.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

The next morning, Billy parked his car and walked into Anvil. His reception staff wished him a respectful Good Morning, he nodded to them and headed upstairs to his office. Frank was already there, reading a newspaper.

“Mornin’ Bill,” he said, looking up. “Frankie,” nodded Billy, “want a coffee?” and kept on walking towards the coffee machine in the corner. “Nah, just had one, thanks.”

He poured out an Americano for himself, then chuckled loudly. Frank quirked an eyebrow at him, and Billy shrugged back. “I met someone last week. She owns two cafés, and she’s a coffee snob. Gonna refine my palate, she said.”

Frank looked back down to his paper before commenting, “I’m impressed you know that much about her, Bill. Didn’t think you bothered cos you usually cut & run.” Billy smirked, knowing he couldn’t dispute what Frank had just said, but he was going to enjoy the next slice of the conversation. Even just to see the expression on Frank’s face.

“I....like her. A lot. I want something with her.” “Something?” Frank chortled, “...you mean, like a relationship, Bill?” He looked closely at Billy, saw the shit-eating grin he had on his face and his jaw dropped. “You do, don’t you?! Fuckin’ hell! Never thought I’d see the day, Russo.” Billy burst out laughing.

“Well, that makes two of us, Frankie. But...” he spread his hands out to either side of him, “...it is what it is. And I’ll fill you in on all the details later. Now, this thing with Madani and Homeland - let’s get it nailed down.”

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

That same morning, you sat at your desk and slowly twirled from side to side in your chair. You sipped your cappuccino, and thought about Billy.

Little cousin had done you a favour this time and earlier on had delved into her company’s database, digging out some further information on Billy and Anvil which Google couldn’t provide you with. All it had given you was the bare minimum of the company’s founding date and numerous photos of Billy looking hot in his designer suits.

She told you she’d heard of him, and had also seen him at several events similar to the one you’d attended. You’d admitted you were seeing him, and she’d firstly screeched down the phone at you, nearly bursting your eardrum, before saying, “Now see, if you hadn’t gone in my place you wouldn’t have met him!” “Yeah, yeah, alright. Tell me what you’ve got for me.”

In a more serious tone, she said, “Just be careful though, his company seems a little... well, shady let’s just say. I mean, in the security business,” her voice lowered, “there’s usually some dodgy dealings or other going on. But him and his colleagues seem to have got themselves in some deep water with two federal agencies. I’ll email this stuff to you now and you’ll see what I mean.” You thanked her and hung up before she could tell you that now you owed her another favour.

You’d read through the attachments she’d sent you, and your eyes had got wide as you read that Billy and Anvil had originally been funded by a shadowy CIA guy, who’d then been killed in a gun battle between un-named protagonists. You sussed out that Anvil must’ve been one of those involved, as Billy and his friend Frank had been arrested and interrogated by Homeland Security before being released without charge. That struck you as a bit odd, but there were no more details available.

Your phone had chosen that moment to buzz with a FaceTime call from the man himself. You’d hesitated then accepted the call, and Billy’s handsome face popped up in front of you, with a wide smile plastered on it. You could see he was in his car. “Mornin’, sweetheart,” he said in a low sexy voice, and you felt your stomach tighten with excitement. This guy... the effect he had on you....!

You’d smiled and replied, “Morning, Billy.” He tilted his head towards you, dark eyes drawing you in, “Missin’ me? Because I’m missing you.” Shaking your head, smirking, you said, “We only saw each other a few hours ago so no, I’m not.” A cheeky grin from him this time, “Don’t believe you, angel, I think you can’t wait to see me again.” “You’re such a cocky bastard, Billy,” you laughed, “Why are you calling, exactly?”

His smile was a genuine one as he said, “I just wanted to see you before I head off to this job. Not sure when I’ll be able to call next. Remember - I’ll let you know as soon as I can when we can meet up this week.” You nodded, “Yeah, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten.” He blew you a kiss, saying “Bye, angel,” before he rang off.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

One of your friends had called shortly afterwards to ask if you wanted to meet up for lunch, as you hadn’t seen each other in quite a while. Deciding that you could do with some girl time, you arranged to meet her in a steak house near the Chrysler Building, and then decided you’d better get some work done before you headed out for your long lunch hour.

The two of you had met up just outside the restaurant and had gone in chatting away to each other. Being shown to your table, you sat down only to spot Billy Russo walking in behind a small dark-haired woman. Your mouth dropped open, and your eyes took in every detail of her. She was pretty, with big dark eyes, olive skin and wavy hair in a shoulder-length bob. Billy, you noted, had his hand on her lower back, guiding her to their table, just as he had with you when you went for your first drink with him.

You leant forward to your friend, “I’m so sorry about this but we’re gonna have to go somewhere else.” She looked concerned, “What’s wrong?” “Someone I need to avoid just came in,” you explained, “c’mon, I’ll tell them I’ve had an emergency at work or something.” You both stood up, and you fled from the restaurant before you repeated your actions at that house party, which had got you arrested. You didn’t want to end up in jail this time just because of that jerk and his little lady.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

Billy looked up as two women who’d been sitting near him stood up and started rushing towards the door. Weird, he thought, they hadn’t even been served judging by the menus still laying on their place settings. He looked back at them, and one of them turned back briefly to her friend behind her as they exited the premises.

His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. It was her. His angel. Oh fuck! Did she..? Yes, she must’ve seen him and... he glanced at Madani across the table from him, reading through the menu choices. She glanced up, smirking at Billy but it quickly dropped off her face, when she saw the expression on his.

“Billy?” she said, but he’d dumped his napkin onto his plate by now and was standing up.

“Sorry, Dinah... I gotta go.” An annoyed look on her face, she growled, “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. I... there’s someone I gotta catch up with, and I just saw them leaving.” He walked away from their table, and towards the door of the restaurant. As he did so he heard Madani say in a harsh voice, “Is it a woman, Russo?” but ignored her.

He made it out onto the street, looking around him in all directions, heart sinking as he couldn’t see her anywhere.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

@blackbirddaredevil23

[imagine-loki]

Blushing in His Colours, Chapter 3

TITLE: Blushing in His Colours CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 3 AUTHOR: fanficshiddles ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine Loki being a Daddy Dom, his adores and loves his little, worships the ground she walks on. She has vaginismus, but he couldn’t be more supportive with her. RATING: M

When Loki saw Mia the following day, a blush instantly graced her cheeks, making him grin. He went over to her and kissed her cheek in greeting, making the others around them all ‘oooooo.’ He glared at them in return.

‘The date went well last night then?’ Clint asked with a smirk.

They were in the kitchen having breakfast before starting their day.

‘A gentleman never tells.’ Loki said as he held his head high.

Mia went to sort out her breakfast, unable to stop blushing at being the main focus of the conversation within the team.

‘You’re far from a gentleman.’ Stark snorted.

Loki narrowed his eyes at him and folded his arms over his chest. ‘I’d beg to differ.’

Mia had her back to the group as she poured milk into her cereal. But she did speak up. ‘Loki was the perfect gentleman last night. More than rest of you are, that’s for sure.’

Loki grinned and looked rather smug. The team all laughed.

‘Oh no, his mischievousness is already rubbing off on you.’ Tony said as he put his face in his hands, then he looked at Loki. ‘Do NOT corrupt our sweet and innocent Mia!’

When Mia turned around, she met Loki’s gaze and he winked at her with a mischievous smirk. ‘I am making no promises.’

Because Mia’s job was to keep up their social media appearance, it meant she was often right in the action. Taking pictures of the team ‘behind the scenes’ providing it didn’t compromise any mission, as the fans loved to see what the superheroes got up to at times.

So she found herself in the lab with Loki, Tony, Bruce, Fury and Vision. She was typing some stuff up on her laptop in the corner, Loki kept glancing in her direction, unable to stop looking at her.

‘Oi, stop staring at your new girlfriend and concentrate!’ Tony remarked as he tossed a pen at Loki, but with his quick reflexes Loki was able to catch the pen before it hit him, glaring at Tony.

Mia had heard and she couldn’t help the big smile that spread across her face. She tried to concentrate on her work though, even if she could feel the God’s eyes on her often.

Later on, Mia disappeared to get something to eat from the kitchen. When she returned, she had food and drinks for everyone. Including Loki’s favourite flavour of muffins that she had baked a few days ago. When Loki thought about it, she often went out of her way for other people, especially him. She always seemed to get his favourite drink or food and would always beam happily when he thanked her.

The following day Mia was down on the training floor on the benches, watching Thor, Steve, Natasha and Clint training. She was taking a few pictures and posting onto their media. She was thinking about heading off, but Loki entered the hall and she decided to stick around for a bit. Smiling like mad when he waved at her.

He had his full armour on, like Thor, and jumped in to start training. Everyone knew he was deliberately showing off because Mia was watching, even she knew. But she found it flattering, and was always impressed with his skills.

But he was caught unaware.

He had just tricked the rest of them using his illusions and pinned Thor down with a dagger at his throat. When he got up off Thor, he looked over to Mia. He winked at her and grinned, but that’s when he was blindsided by Natasha getting him in a headlock with her ridiculously strong thighs and knocking him down to the ground with a loud thud.

Thor, Clint and Steve all burst out laughing. Mia laughed too and put her hands over her mouth. Loki got up, rather flustered as he flicked his hair back from his face and wiped the dust from his arms. He looked over at Mia sheepishly.

He wandered over towards her as she gathered her things up and stood to meet him.

‘Impressive.’ She smiled up at him.

Loki chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. ‘Aside from the end.’

‘Still impressive. Not many would be able to get up unscathed from being taken down by Natasha.’

‘True. And I was a little distracted by something rather beautiful.’ Loki reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, then trailed his fingers along her jawline.

‘There’s uhm… the monthly Avengers interview coming up. I was wondering if you fancy doing it?’ She asked, giving him puppy dog eyes.

It was something new she had started doing, Tony was the first one last month. A small five-minute interview that Mia posted. Just to give fans a little personal insight into the team.

‘Of course. Give the fans who they really want.’ Loki smirked.

‘You do have quite the fanbase, actually.’ Mia laughed.

‘I do?’ Loki frowned, but was intrigued.

‘Oh yeah. They call themselves Loki’s army. Quite the army too.’ She grinned.

Loki titled his head, but he did look a little smug. ‘Well, they have good taste… Are you in my army?’ He raised an eyebrow.

Mia smirked, deciding to play a bit. Feeling brave again. ‘I dunno. Maybe I’m team Hulk.’ She shrugged.

Loki’s mouth parted in mock shock. ‘Well, I will need to work harder to get you on my team.’

‘Sooo… Is that a yes for the interview?’

‘Of course. Anything for you.’

-

Mia had asked Loki to meet her before breakfast the next morning in the living room, to do the interview. It would give her time to come up with some good questions.

But Loki decided he wanted to do the interview somewhere more private. So he went along to her room an hour before he was due to meet her.

He knocked and heard Mia call out to just come in. When he entered though, Mia was surprised to see it was Loki.

‘Loki! Hi.’ She stammered quickly, surprised.

Loki was also surprised, she was in her pyjamas. Light blue, with cute baby penguins on them. But his first thought was how adorable she looked, with her messy hair too.

‘Oh gosh! I was expecting Wanda. Sorry, I uh… Let me just get changed real quick.’ She said in fluster, practically sprinting into her bathroom.

Loki smiled and waited until she was dressed. That’s when his eyes were drawn to what she was watching. He was a little confused when he noticed it was on the cartoon channel. But he didn’t think overly much of it, until he then spotted something peeking out from underneath her pillow. Curious, he went over and had a look, it was a colouring book of Disney characters.

His first thought was, did she have a secret child here? But he shook that off, knowing it was ridiculous. He was slightly confused as to why she would have a colouring book. Then he just thought perhaps it was something she enjoyed doing in her down time.

Loki stepped away from her bed, just as Mia emerged from the bathroom. She was looking embarrassed as she stuffed her pyjamas away in a drawer.

‘Sorry… I uhm, should probably check who’s there first.’ She said sheepishly.

‘Not at all. I should’ve said it was me.’ Loki smiled and walked over to her, he rubbed her arm and then leaned down to kiss her on the lips, making her squeak a little and blush so hard. ‘I was rather hoping we could do the interview somewhere private? The others will be a distraction in the living room.’ He chuckled.

‘Yeah, sure. Where would you prefer?’ Mia asked, still slightly flustered from the innocent kiss.

Loki shrugged. ‘Here, if that suits you? Or we could go to my room if you’d rather?’ He asked.

‘Here is good.’ Mia nodded and went over to her desk, clearing some space.

During the interview, Loki couldn’t help but be besotted with her. It was a good excuse for him to be able to just stare at her without being called out on it from the others. He kept his flirting to a minimum, knowing this was going online.  

Mia managed to keep her cool when she asked him questions, she had set up a camera to film him so it was more personal for the fans. They went nuts over the first one with Tony, so she hoped this one would be an even bigger hit.

Once it was uploaded, Mia showed Loki some of the comments. His fangirls were going crazy over it. Especially when Mia had asked him what he thought about having a fanbase. He’d replied in a charming way, saying he appreciated having so much support.

He read one comment: Heck, Loki can rule over me any day! I would kneel for him without being told to!

‘Quite a few say similar. Your, uh, attempt at ruling Earth is all over Tumblr and YouTube. Many have made fan videos out of them.’ Mia said with a laugh.

‘Really? I thought everyone would have been repulsed by what I did.’

‘Not everyone. I mean, I’d kneel for you.’ Mia said without thinking as she shrugged. Then she realised what it was she had just said. Her eyes widened.

‘Oh, really?’ Loki growled a little, leaning down closer to her as he was stood behind her, while she sat on the chair at her desk.

Mia cleared her throat and tried to ignore the fact she had just openly admitted somewhat a fantasy to Loki and that his breath was hot against her neck.

‘This interview is already a huge hit, more so than Tony’s.’ She said to try and change the subject. But Loki spun her chair around so she had to face him as he put his hands on the arms and trapped her in.

‘No changing the subject, pet.’ He chuckled at her doe in the headlights look.

‘I… wasn’t… really… I just don’t know what to say after that.’ She blurted out nervously, her eyes skittishly moving all over his face, unsure on where to look.

But she was saved by the knock. Wanda had arrived, which Mia was slightly relieved for. Though she had a feeling Loki would try and bring it up again later.

He left the girls to it, heading back to his room.

His mind kept wandering to what he’d found in Mia’s room. Or what he’d seen. He went to his laptop and sat down, after thinking for a moment he went to google to see if he could find some answers.

After some researching, he wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up on a kink site. But there he was, reading all about a Daddy Dom/little dynamic.

Some of the characteristics of a little suited Mia to a T. It really got him wondering if she was in fact a little. He then realised that while thinking of her in this kind of way he was slightly aroused.

He looked through a Daddy Dom’s characteristics and was surprised to find he fit a lot of them. When he thought about it, being in that kind of relationship with Mia was very appealing to him. And he thought how it kind of made sense why one girl actually called him Daddy during sex once… Perhaps he just oozed Daddy Dom appeal, he thought smugly.

But he now had to figure out for certain if Mia was into this kind of thing… or if it was just a coincidence. He could of course just ask her outright, but he didn’t want to scare her off if that wasn’t something she was into. He wasn’t going to lie, now he knew about the subject more and had thought about it, he would be a bit disappointed if she wasn’t…

‘Hmm…’ He tapped his lower lip in thought, deciding how to proceed.

After a lot of mulling it over, he decided that trying to coax it out of her naturally was going to be his best route.

[ceealaina]

Title: Man on the Run Collaborator Name: ceealaina Card: 4008 Link: AO3 Square Filled: R4 - Old Team Ship: Background Pepper/Nat, Background IronHusbands Rating: Teen Major Tags: Fluff and Humour, Team as Family, Post-Endgame, Fix-It Summary: Saving the world is important. But Tony really, really just wants to retire and spend time with his family. And if faking his death is the only way to do that, that's how it goes sometimes. Word Count: 1115

Everyone stood out on the property of the Stark Cabin, staring out at the water as they watched the wreath of flowers with the first arc reactor, the ‘proof that Tony has a heart’ disappear into the distance. Nobody spoke, hardly anyone even breathed, not wanting to address what was happening. 

And then Steve sighed. 

“This is stupid, Tony,” he announced loudly, breaking the strange hush. He looked directly at the man standing over by the tree, wearing a cowboy hat and Clark Kent glasses. His normally immaculate beard was filled in unevenly with what appeared to be magic marker, simulating thick, bushy sideburns that came to a point on his chin. “I can see you.” 

“Nope,” Tony intoned, not even looking over at him. “I’m dead.” 

In front of Steve, wearing sunglasses and holding a to-go cup of coffee, Jim Rhodes nodded. “Super dead,” he agreed.

“There, there, Colonel,” Tony called over to him. “I know Mr. Stark’s death was a particularly tragic loss for you.” 

“Love of my life. Gone too soon,” Rhodey deadpanned. “And that’s Dr. Stark, thank you.” 

Behind the ridiculous marker moustache, Steve caught Tony’s lips twitching up into a pleased grin. He sighed again, wondering if, in fact, he had died, and now he was in hell. 

Steve had tried to appeal to Pepper beforehand. He got the point Tony was making; retirement hadn’t worked, the only way he was getting out of the superhero business and spending time with his daughter was if he “died” before it actually killed him. And maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, considering Tony’s flare for the dramatic, but an entire funeral felt ridiculous to him. It wasn’t as though they didn’t all know that Tony was alive, and standing there, and that his “disguise” had been drawn on my Morgan -- the fact that she was sporting matching magic marker facial hair was a dead giveaway. 

Pepper, however, had ignored Steve’s attempts at reason. Instead she looked back at him in that way that simultaneously terrified him and turned him on a little, and said, “How dare you, Captain. I’m a widow.” 

And then, because apparently drama ran in the Iron Family, she’d shown up at Tony’s “funeral” in full black mourning wear, complete with a veil covering her face. Steve glanced over at her, standing on his far side, next to Nat. 

“I still can’t believe you’re onboard with this,” he grumbled. “I thought you were supposed to be the sensible one!” 

Pepper gave an unconcerned shrug, twining her fingers with Nat’s. “I’ve been saying being a hero would kill him for a decade. Did you expect me to pass up the opportunity to be right?” 

Tony made a show of shuddering at that, hissing through his teeth. “Good thing I’m -- he’s -- already dead, ‘cause that burn would have cremated me -- him -- alive.” 

Steve just rolled his eyes as Rhodey snickered, he and Tony sharing an air high five from three feet away. “I hate you all,” he grumbled. 

Bucky gave him a pat on the back then, something that was probably supposed to seem comforting, but felt more like he was making fun of him. “I don’t really think you’re in a place to be calling anyone out, pal,” he pointed out. “You missed Pepper and Nat’s wedding.” 

Steve groaned for what felt like the millionth time that day. “I thought that was a joke!”

He really had. The invitation had arrived only a day after he’d come back from returning the Infinity Stones with Nat in tow. He hadn’t even known they were together; how was he supposed to know they were actually getting married? It wasn’t until the next day that he’d found out that not only had it not been a joke, but that everyone had been there -- including the recently deceased Tony. Thor had married them because, as Nat had told Steve later, “Married under god, married by a god. It’s like world peace.” Steve had no idea what that meant. 

(Bucky, apparently, had taken Sam. He’d found the whole thing delightful.) 

“Rude,” Nat told him noq, standing on tiptoe to give Pepper a quick kiss. “I know it was fast, but missed opportunities and all that.” 

Pepper gave her new wife a besotted smile, sweet enough to make even Steve calm down a little. And then she ruined it with, “Besides, with Tony’s death, it was better to get remarried ASAP. Helps with the inheritance and stocks issues.” 

Steve was pretty sure that wasn’t even right, but he wasn’t going to waste time arguing.

***

Later, when the service was finished and they’d moved inside for the reception, which had rapidly devolved into a party, Steve couldn’t seem to stop himself from watching Tony. He watched as he passed Morgan off to Happy, giving her a long, long hug before she headed off for her nap. He watched the quiet moment he shared with Pepper, the less quiet kiss that he shared with Rhodey, the way he comforted Peter when he caught him crying in the corner because, “I know it’s not real, Mr. Stark, but it could be.” 

He lost him after that, drawn into a debate between Sam and Bucky over the difference between lox and smoked salmon. After that he ducked out onto the porch for a breath of fresh air, and then suddenly Tony was at his elbow, Steve’s super serum reflexes the only thing keeping him from jumping out of his skin -- not that he was going to tell him that.

“You alright, Cap?” he asked, and he was laughing but there was something softer around his eyes now. Steve noticed the way he rubbed at his right arm, full mobility not yet returned. “You’re seeming a little off, and I know this level of shenanigans isn’t your usual scene.” 

“No, I'm fine,” he insisted, trying to play it off. But maybe Peter had something, because the next moment he was grabbing Tony’s arm -- his good one -- to keep him from walking away. “I’m just really glad you’re here, Tony.” 

Tony grinned, but he settled his other hand over Steve’s, rubbing against his skin in the way Steve imagined he might soothe Morgan after a nightmare. “Me too,” he told him, honestly. “But don’t worry, Cap. Fake funeral aside, I’m not going anywhere any time soon.” He looked at him seriously for a long moment, and then broke out into a bright grin. “Besides. I know you’re not Captain America anymore, and I know I’m technically dead now, but I’m still available for consulting.” He grinned wide, offering Steve a wink. “My office hours are between eight and five every other Thursday.” 

@tonystarkbingo

[papermoonloveslucy]

LOOK! TV: TURN ON OR TURN OFF?

September 7, 1971

The September 7, 1971 issue of LOOK Magazine (volume 35, number 18) dedicated their entire issue to the medium of television. Inside, there is a feature titled “Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist on page 54. 

The photograph on the cover is slightly distorted to give it the look of an image through a TV screen.  The shot was taken by Douglas Bergquist in January 1971. 

The issue presents a variety of viewpoints about the state of television. Is it ‘tired’ or is there an infusion of new energy to take it into the new decade? John Kronenberger writes an article that asks if cable television is the future. Hindsight tells us that it was not only the future, but is now the past. 

“Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist. 

Bergquist first interviewed Lucille Ball in 1956 for the Christmas issue of Look. 

The photograph is by Douglas Kirkland, a Canadian-born photographer, who not coincidentally, also took the photograph used on the cover. This shot was taken in the garden of Ball’s home in June 1971.  At age 24, Kirkland was hired as a staff photographer for Look magazine and became famous for his 1961 photos of Marilyn Monroe taken for Look's 25th anniversary issue. He later joined the staff of Life magazine.

Bergquist launches the article talking about her friend Sally, who is besot with watching Lucille Ball reruns, preferring Lucy over the news. Under the headline, she sums up the purpose of her interview: “Sorry, Sally. But Lucy is a serious, unfunny lady. So how come she’s a top clown of the fickle tube for twenty years, seen at home 11 times weekly and in 77 countries?”  

LUCILLE BALL: THE STAR THAT NEVER SETS...

(Lucille Ball’s quotes are in BOLD. Footnote numbers are in parentheses.)

My neighbor Sally, nine, turns out to be a real Lucy freak. Though she likes vintage-house-wife I Love Lucy best, she'll watch Lucille Ball 11 times a week, if permitted. That's how often Madame Comedy Champ of the Tube, come 20 years this October, can be caught on my local box. Ten reruns, plus the current Here's Lucy on Monday night, CBS prime time. Friends, that's 330 weekly minutes of Lucy, which should be rank overexposure. Did you know that even the U.S. man-on-the-moon walkers slipped in ratings, second time around?

Quel mystery. Variety last fall announced that old-fashioned sitcoms and broad slapstick comedy are passé, given today's hip audiences. With one big exception - Lucy. When the third Lucy format went on in '68, reincarnating Miss Ball as a widowed secretary (with her real-life son, Desi Jr., now 18, and Lucie Jr., 20), Women's Wear Daily said not only were the kids no talent, but the show was "treacle." "One giant marshmallow," quoth the Hollywood Reporter, "impeccably professional, violence-free, non-controversial . . . 100% escapism." 

Miss Ball: "Listen, that's a good review. I usually get OK personal notices, but the show gets knocked regular."

So why does Sally, like all the kids on my block, love slapstick, non-relevant Lucy? "Because she's always scheming and getting into trouble like I do, and then wriggling her way out of it." A 44-year-old Long Island housewife: "Of course I watch. I should watch the news?" When the British Royal Family finally unbent for a TV documentary, what was the tribe watching come box-time? Lucy, over protests from Prince Philip. (1)

"I've been a baby-sitter for three generations," says Miss Ball briskly. "Kids watch me during the day [she outpulls most kiddy shows]. Women and older men at night. Teen-agers, no. They look at Mod Squad. Intellectuals, they read books or listen to records.... You know I even get fan mail from China?" MAINLAND CHINA? "Hong Kong, isn't that China?" No. "Where is it anyway?"

The Statistics on the Lucy Industry are numbing. In recent years, she has run in 77 countries abroad, including the rich sheikhdom of Kuwait, and Japan, where, dubbed in Japanese yet, she's been a long-distance runner for 12 years. Where are all those funny people of yesteryear - Jackie Gleason, the Smothers Brothers, Sid Caesar, the Beverly Hillbillies - old reliables like Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton? Gone, all gone, form the live tube - except for reruns dumped by sponsors, out of fashion, murdered in the ratings.

Even this interview is a rerun. Fifteen years ago, I sat in Miss Ball's old-timey movie-star mansion in Beverly Hills, wondering how much longer, oh Lord, could Lucy last? She has a different husband, a genial stand-up comic of the fast-gag Milton Berle school, Bronx-born Gary Morton, 49. He replaced Desi Arnaz, her volatile Cuban spouse (and costar and partner) of 20 years, who lives quietly in Mexico's Baja California, alongside a pool shaped like a guitar, with a second redhead wife. "Ever been here before?" asks Gary, now her executive producer, who's brightened the house decor. "Used to be funeral-parlor gray, right?"

Otherwise, the lady, like her show, seems preserved in amber. Though newly 60, she could be Sally's great-grandmother. Of a Saturday, she's unwinding from a murderous four-day workweek. Her pink-orange-fireball hair is up in rollers. Her black-and-blue Rolls-Royce, inherited from her friend, the late Hedda Hopper, is parked in the driveway. But in attitude and opinion, she comes across Madame Middle America, despite the shrewd show-biz exterior. Good egg. Believer in hard work, discipline, Norman Vincent Peale. Deadeye Dickstraight, she talks astonishingly unfunny - about Vietnam, Women's Lib, about which she feels dimly, marriage to Latins, books she toted up to her new condominium hideaway in Snowmass, Colo. "Snow" is her new-old passion, a throwback to her small-town Eastern childhood. For the first time in family memory, this lifelong workhorse actually relaxed in that 9,700-foot altitude for four months this year, learning to ski, reading Pepys, Thoreau, Shirley MacLaine's autobiography, "37 goddamned scripts, and all those Irvings" (Stone, Wallace, etc.). She had scouted for a mountain retreat far away from any gambling. Why? Is she against gambling? "No, I'm a sucker. I can't stay away from the tables."

From yellowing notes, I reel off an analysis by an early scriptwriter. Perhaps she comes by her comic genius because of some "early maladjustment in life, so you see commonplace things as unusual? To get even, to cover the hurt, you play back the unhappy as funny?"

Forget any deep-dish theorizing. "Listen, honey," says Miss B, drilling me with those big blue peepers, "you've been talking to me for four, five hours. Have you heard me say anything funny? I tell you I don't think funny. That's the difference between a wit and a comedian. My daughter Lucie thinks funny. So does Steve Allen, Buddy Hackett, Betty Grable."

BETTY GRABLE THINKS FUNNY? "Yeah. Dean Martin has a curly mind. oh, I can tell a funny story about something that happened to me. But I'm more of a hardworking hack with an instinct for timing, who knows the mechanics of comedy. I picked it up by osmosis, on radio and movie lots [she made 75 flicks] working with Bob Hope, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges - didn't learn a thing from them except when to duck. Buster Keaton taught me about props. OK, I'm waiting."

Well, I hedge, I caught Miss Ball in a few funny capers on the Universal lot this week. Like one day, in her star bungalow, she throws a quick-energy lunch in the blender - four almonds, wild honey, water, six-year-old Korean ginseng roots, plus her own medicine, liver extract. "AAAGH," she gags, then peers in the mirror at her hair, which is a normal working fright wig, "Gawd," she moans, "it looks as if I'd poked my finger into an electric-light socket!" No boffo line, but her pantomimed horror makes me laugh out loud. Working, she is fearless - dangling from high wires, coping with wild beasts. She talks of animals she's worked with, chimps, bears, lions, tigers. "I love 'em all, especially the chimps, but you can't trust their fright or panic. Like that baby elephant who gave a press job to a guest actress." (2) What's a press job? "Honey, once an elephant puts his head down, he keeps marching, right through walls." Miss Ball puts her own head down, crooks an arm for a trunk, and voila, is an elephant. Funny as hell. So off-camera she's no great wit, but then is Chaplin?

Four days a week, through the Thursday night filming before a live audience, she labors like some hungry Depression starlet. Monday a.m., she sits at the head of a conference table, lined by 12 staffers, editing the script. Madame Executive Tycoon in charge of everything, overseeing things Desi used to do. Also the haus-frau, constantly opening windows for fresh air and emptying ashtrays. She wears black horn-rims, three packs of ciggies are at the ready. "Do I have to ask for a raise again?" she impatiently drills the writers, "I've done that 400 times." "QUIET!" she yells during rehearsal, perching in a high director's chair, a la Cecil B. DeMille. "Isn't somebody around here supposed to yell quiet?" She frets about the new set. "Those aisles - they're a mile and a half wide. What for?" The audience is too far away, she won't get the feedback from their laughs are her life's blood. (Once I hear Gary Morton on the phone, in his British-antiqued executive office, saying: "We need your laugh, honey. Go down to the set and laugh; that's an order.")

That physical quality about her comedy, a la the old silent movies or vaudeville - which were the big amusements of her youth - seems to transcend any language. (A Moscow acting school, I was told, shows old Lucy clips as lessons in comic timing.) So what did she learn from that great Buster Keaton?

"At Metro, I kept being held back by show-girl-glamour typing. I always wanted to do comedy. Buster Keaton, a friend of director Eddy Sedgwick, spotted something in me when I was doing a movie called DuBarry - what the hell was the name? - and kept nagging the moguls about what I could do. Now a great forte of mine is props. He taught me all about 'em. Attention to detail, that's all it is. He was around when I went out on a vaudeville tour with Desi with a loaded prop." What's that? "Real Rube Goldberg stuff. A cello loaded with the whole act - a seat to perch on, a violin bow, a plunger, a whistle, a horn. Honey, if you noodge it, you've lost the act. Keaton taught me your prop is your jewel case. Never entrust it to a stagehand. Never let it out of your sight when you travel, rehearse with it all week." Ever noodge it? "Gawd, yes. Happened at the old Roxy in New York. I was supposed to run down that seven-mile aisle when some maniac sprang my prop by leaping out and yelling 'I'm that woman's mother! She's letting me starve.'" What did you do? "Ad-libbed it, and I am one lousy ad-libber."

After 20 years, isn't she weary of playing the Lucy character? "No, I'm a rooter, I look for ruts. My cousin Cleo [now producer of Here's Lucy] is always prodding me to move. She once said Lucy was my security blanket. Maybe. I'm not erudite in any way, like Cleo. But why should I change? Last year was big TV relevant year, and I made sure my show wasn't relevant. Lucy deals in fundamental, everyday things exaggerated, with a happy ending. She has a basic childishness that hopefully most of us never lose. That's why she cries a lot like a kid - the WAAH act - instead of getting drunk."

Aha! Is Lucy the guileful child-woman, conniving forever against male authority - whether husband or nagging boss - particularly FEMALE? ("None of us watch the show," sniffed a Women's Libber I know, "but she must be an Aunt Tom." Still, I ponder, hasn't that always been the essence of comedy, the little poor-soul man - or woman - up against the biggies?)

"I certainly hope so. You trying to con me into talking about Women's Lib? I don't know the meaning of it. I never had anything to squawk about. I don't know what they're asking for that I don't have already. Equal pay for equal work, that's OK. The suffragettes rightly pressed a hard case - and when roles like Carry Nation come along, they ask me to play them, perhaps because I have the physical vitality. But they're kind of a laughingstock, aren't they? Like that girl who gave her parents 40 whacks with an ax? Didn't Carry Nation ax things, was she a Prohibitionist or what?" (3)

She'd just said nix to playing Sabina, in the movie of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Why? "I didn't understand it." She turned down The Manchurian Candidate for the same reason. "Got that Oh Dad, Poor Dad script the same week and thought I'd gone loony." If she makes another movie, she'll play Lillian Russell in Diamond Jim with Jackie Gleason, "a nice, nostalgic courtship story that won't tax anyone's nerves." (4) 

Is Miss Ball warmed by the comeback of old stars in non-taxing Broadway nostalgia shows like No, No, Nanette? (5)

"Listen, I studied that audience. I saw people in their 60's and 70's enjoying themselves. That had to be nostalgia. The 30's and 40's smiled indulgently, that Ruby Keeler is up there on the stage alive, not dead. For the below 30's, it's pure camp. I don't put it down, but it’s not warm, working nostalgia, but the feeling 'Ye gods, anything but today'

"Maybe I'm more concerned about things that I realize. I told you politics is definitely not on my agenda - I got burned bad, back in the '40's signing a damned petition as a favor. (6) Just say the word 'politician,' and I think of chicanery. Too many subversive angles today. But I must be one of millions who are so fed up, depressed, sobbing inside, about the news...the atrocities, the dead, the running down of America. You can't obliterate the news, but the baddest dream is that you feels so helpless.

"I was sitting in this very chair one night, flipping the dial, and came to Combat! There were soldiers crouching in bushes, a helicopter hovering overhead. Nothing happening, so I make like a director, yelling, 'Move it! This take is too LONG!' It turned out to be a news show from Vietnam. That shook me. There I was criticizing the director, and real blood was dripping off my screen... That drug scene bugs me. It's ridiculous, self-indulgent. We're supposed to be grateful if the kids aren't on drugs. They're destroying us from within, getting at our youth in the colleges. OK, kids have to protest, but how can they accomplish anything if they're physically shot?

"One of the reasons I'm still working is that people seem grateful that Lucy is there, the same character and unchanging view. There's so much chaos in this world, that's important. Many people, not only shut-ins, depend on the tube, too much so - they look for favorites they can count on. Older people loved Lawrence Welk. They associated his music with their youth. Now he's gone. It's not fair. (7) They shouldn't have taken off those bucolic comedies; that left a big dent in some folks' lives. Maybe we're not getting messages anymore from the clergy, the politicians, so TV does the preaching. But as an entertainer, I don't believe in messages.

"Some Mr. Jones is always asking why am I still working - as if it were some crime or neurotic. OK, I'll say it's for my kids. But I like a routine life, I like to work. I come from an old New England family in which everyone worked. My grandparents were homesteaders in New York and Ohio. My mother worked all her life - during the Depression in a factory."

What does she think of the new "relevant" comedy like All in the Family? "I don't know... It's good to bring prejudice out in the open. People do think that way, but why glorify it? Those not necessarily young may not catch the moral. That show doesn't go full circle for me."

Full circle?

"You have to suffer a little when you do wrong. That prejudiced character doesn't pay a penance. Does he ever reverse a feeling? I'm for believability, but I'm tired of hearing 'pig,' 'wop,' 'Polack' said unkindly. Me, I have to have an on-the-nose moral. Years ago, the Romans let humans be eaten by lions, while they laughed and drank - that was entertainment. But I’m tired of the ugly. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, that's my idea of entertainment. Anything Richard Burton does is heaven. Easy Rider scared me at first because I knew how it could influence kids. But at least that movie came full circle. They led a life of nothing and they got nothing. Doris Day, I believe in her. Elaine May? A kook, but a great talent. Barbra Streisand? A brilliant technician."

On her old ten-minute daily interview radio show, (8) she once asked Barbra, like any star-struck civilian: How does it feel to be only 21, a big recording artist and star of the Broadway hit Funny Girl? "Not much," said Barbra. "That cool really flustered Lucille. It violated everything she believes in," says cousin Cleo Smith, who grew up with Miss B in small-town Celoron, N.Y. "For her, nothing ever came easy. She didn't marry until she was 30, or become a really big star until she was 40. She's still so hard on herself, sets such rigorous standards for herself as an actress and parent. She honestly believes in all the old maxims, that a stitch in time saves nine, etc. She's literal-minded, a bit like Scarlett O'Hara. Does what needs doing today, and to hell with tomorrow."

Her self-made wealth a few years ago was reckoned at $50 to $100 million. After her divorce, she reluctantly took over the presidency of the Desilu studio and sold it six years later to the conglomerate Gulf & Western for nearly $18 million. Does that make her the biggest lady tycoon in Hollywood? (The 179 original I Love Lucy reruns now belong, incidentally, to a CBS syndicate; her second Lucy Show, to Paramount. She owns only the current Here's Lucy - OK, go that straight?)

"Hah! Like Sinatra, I owe about three and a half million bucks all the time. That figure is ridiculous. All my money is working. I lost a helluva lot in the stock market last year and haven't recouped it. It's an illusion that people in show biz are really rich. The really filthy rich are the little old ladies in Boston, the old folks in Pasadena, who've had dough for years and haven't been seen since."

The divorce from Desi Arnaz can still set her brooding. "It was the worst period of my life. I really hit the bottom of despair - anything form there on had to be up. Neither Desi nor I has been the same since, physically or mentally, though we're very friendly, ridiculously so. Nobody knows how hard I tried to make that marriage work, thinking all the trouble must be my fault. I did everything I could to right that ship, trotting to psychiatrists. I hate failure, and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes... Anything in excess drives me crazy. He'd build a home anyplace he was, and then never be around to enjoy it. I was so idealistic, I thought that with two beautiful babies, and a beautiful business, what more could any man want? Freedom, he said, but he had that. People don't know what a job he did building that Desilu empire, what a great director and brilliant executive he was yet he let it all go....Maybe Latins have an instinct for self-destruction..."

Was that the conflict, a Latin temperament married to an old-fashioned American female? "It has a helluva lot to do with getting into it and getting out. The charm. But they keep up a big facade and don't follow through. No, the machismo didn't bother me, I like to play games too.

"Desi and I had made an agreement that if either of us wanted to pull out of Desilu, the other could buy. I wanted to go to Switzerland with the kids, anywhere to run away, but he wanted out. The I found out that for five years, our empire had taken a nose dive, and if I wanted to get my money back, I had to rebuild it first. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely terrified - I'd never run any show or a big studio. When I came back from doing the musical Wildcat on Broadway, I was so sick, so beat, I just sat in that backyard, numb, for a year. I'd had pneumonia, mononucleosis, staph, osteomyletis. Lost 22 pounds. Friends told me the best thing I could do physically, psychologically, was go back to work, but could I revive Lucy without Desi, my old writers, the old crew?"

You didn't like being a woman executive? "I hated it. I used to cry so much - and I'm not a crier - because I had to let someone go or make decisions I didn't understand. There were always two sides to every question, and trouble was I could see both sides. No one realizes how run-down Desilu was. The finks and sycophants making $70,000 a year, they were easy to clean out. Then during the CBS Jim Aubrey regime, I couldn't sell the new pilots we made - Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Ethel Merman. I couldn't sell anything but me." (9)

Was it tough to be a woman bossing men? "Yeah. It puts men in a bad spot. I could read their minds, unfortunately, wondering who is this female making this decision, not realizing that maybe I'd consulted six experts first. I'm all wrong as an executive, I feel out of place. I have too many antennae out, I'm too easily hurt and intimidated. But I can make quick surgical incisions. I've learned that much about authority - give people enough rope to hand themselves, stand back, let them work, but warm them first. Creative people you have to give special leeway to, and often it doesn't pay off. Me, I'm workative, not creative. I can fix - what I call 'naturalize.' I'm a good editor, I can naturalize dialogue, find an easier way to do a show mechanically.

But I didn't make the same marriage mistake twice. Gary digs what my life is, why I have to work. We have tranquility. We want the same things, take care of what we have."

She shows me Gary's dressing room, closets hung with shirts and jackets - by the dozen. "My husband is a clothes and car nut, but it's a harmless vice. Better than booze or chasing women, right?" (His cars include a 1927 Model T Ford, a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, an Astin Martin, a Rolls-Royce convertible.)

"Anyone married to me has an uphill climb. Gary and I coped by anticipating. We knew we should be separated eight, nine months a year, so he tapered off his act, found other thing to do - making investments, building things. He plays the golf circuit, Palm Springs, Pebble Beach, and tolerantly lets me stay at Snowmass for weeks. Sun just doesn't agree with me. He didn't come into the business for five years. I didn't want to put him in a position in which he would be ridiculed. I could tell that he was grasping things - casting, story line. I said, 'You've been a big help to me. You should be paid for it.' "

On a Friday night, I dine with the Mortons. Dinner is served around 6:30, just like in my Midwest hometown. Lucille is still fretting about this week's show - "over-rehearsed; because there were so many props, the fun had gone out of it." Gary, just home from unwinding his own way - golfing with Milton Berle, Joey Bishop - asks if I'd like something to drink with dinner? Coke or ginger ale? "No? I think we have wine." No high living in this house, but the spareribs are superb. "Laura asked me an interesting question," he tells his wife. "Like isn't there a conflict when a husband in the same business - comedy - marries a superstar? I told her I'd never thought of it before."

They met the summer when Lucille was rehearsing Wildcat, and he was a stand-up comic at Radio City Music Hall, seven days a week. "We both came up the hard way," he says. "I got started in World War II, clowning for USO shows. I've been in show biz for 30 years and can appreciate what she goes through. Lucy can't run company by herself. Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there. She's a thoroughbred, very honest with me, a friend to whom I can talk about anything. She never leaves me out of her life; that's important for a man. Do you know how many bets were lost about our marriage lasting? It's been nearly ten years now, and I've slept on the couch only once."

Past dinner, we adjourn promptly to the living room, and a private showing of Little Murders. It's not a pretty movie of urban American life, and Lucy talks back indignantly to the screen. (10) The flick she rally like was George Plimpton's Paper Lion, with the Detroit Lions, which she booked under the illusion it was an animal picture. "At the end, 12 of us here stood up and cheered, and I wrote every last Lion a fan note. You know that picture hardly made a dime?"

On a house tout, I'd noted the Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth albums in the living room, and a memo scotch-taped to her bathroom wall: "Get Smart with N.V.P."

N.V.P. Is that Norman Vincent Peale, her old friend and spiritual mentor? "Yes. He marred me and Gary. I still adhere to his way of thinking because he preaches a day-to-day religion that I can understand. Something workable, not allegory. Like how do you get up in the morning and just get through the day?

"Dr. Peale taught me the art of selfishness. All it means is doing what's right for you, not being a burden to others. When I was in Wildcat, he dropped around one night saying, 'I hear you're very ill, and working too hard.' 'Work never hurt anybody,' I protested. But he reminded me I had two beautiful children to bring up, and if I was in bad shape, how could I do it? I've learned you don't rake more leaves than you can get into the wheelbarrow. I've always been moderate, but I was too spread around, trying to please too many people. You don't become callous, but you conserve your energies."

What about her kids? Passing a newsstand, I'd noted a rash of fan mags blazoned with headlines about Desi Jr., something of a teen-age idol, and at 18 a spitting image of old pop. (A rock star at 12, he'd recently garnered very good notices indeed for a movie role in Red Sky at Morning.) "Why Lucille Ball's Son Is So Bitter About His Own Mother," read the El Trasho covers. "Patty Duke Begs Desi Jr. To Believe Her: 'You Made Me Pregnant.' " Does the imbroglio bother this on-the-nose moralist?

"I worked for years for a quiet personal life and to have to personally impinged on, with no recourse, is hard. I brought Patty to the house, feeling very maternal about her, saying look at this clever girl, what a big talent she is. Now, I can thank her for useless notoriety. She's living in some fantastic dreamworld, and we're the victims of it. Desi being the tender age of 17 when they met, she used him. She hasn't proved or asked for anything. I asked Desi if he wanted to marry her and he said no. My daughter helped outfit the baby, which Patty brought to the house, but did she ever say thank you?

"Desi's going to CIA this fall." Not the CIA? No, the new California Institute of the Arts, where he'll study music. "Yes, he's very much like his father, too much sometimes - I just hope he has Desi's business acumen. I'm glad he didn't choose UCLA or Berkeley or a school full of nonconformists. Lucie just now wants marriage and babies - maybe she'll go on to college later.

"I took the kids out of school deliberately. Desi was at Beverly Hills High, Lucie at Immaculate Heart."

Why? "I didn't like the scene - it was the usual - pregnant girls, drugs." That goes on at Immaculate Heart? Sure. "A lot of girls who boarded there were unhappy misfits, and Lucie was already working in the nunnery. All the friends she brought home were the rejected. I'm that way myself."

Did they mind, well, your stage-managing their lives? "No, they were as sick of that weird high school scene as I was. I made them a proposition - told them to think it over for a month, while I was in Monaco. Do you want to be on the show? I told them the salary would be scale, that most would be put in trust. They'd be tutored and not able to graduate with their classes. They both thought they were going to the coast, but working with a tutor, they really got turned on by books for the first time. They wanted to be in show business, and I wanted to keep an eye on them."

Of course her show is nepotism, she grants. "Cleo thought a long time before becoming the producer, wondering if it wasn’t overdoing family. Nobody seems to be suffering from it, I told her." Thursday night show time is like a tense Broadway opening night. Gary Morton, in stylish crested blazer, warms up the audience, heavy with out-of-town tourists. "Lucy started out with another fellow, can't remember his name.... What is home without a mother? A place to bring girls." Lucille bursts out onstage, exuding the old MGM glamour, fireball hair ablaze, eyelashes inches long, in aquamarine-cum-rhinestone kaftan. "For God's sake," she implores, "laugh it up! We want to hear from you... Gary, have you introduced my mom?" Indeed he has. Loyal, durable, 79-year-old Desiree "DeDe" Ball, her hair pink as Lucille's, has missed few of the 409 Lucy shows filmed to date, and is on hand as usual with 19 personal guests. Gary also asks for big hands for Cleo, and her husband Cecil Smith, TV critic for the LA Times, who has also appeared on the show. (11) 

One day Desi Jr. wanders on the set, just back from visiting his father in Mexico. He'd gone with Patty Duke and the baby. The young man does have Latin charm, and apparently talent. I ask him a fan-mag query: Is it rough to be the spin-off of such famous show-biz parents?

"Well, I grew up with kids like Dean Martin, Jr., and Tony Martin, Jr., and we had a lot in common." What? "We all had houses in Palm Springs." Any generational problem with Mom? "She's found the thing she's best at, and sticks to it. As long as she has Snowmass, she has an escape, some reality. I realize she lives half in a man's world, and that must be tough on a woman. My father - he worked hard for years, and then he'd had it. This is silly, weird, he felt. He aged more in ten years than he had in 40. I'm like him. I feel life is very short. He's had major operations recently, and he's changed a lot."

Patty Duke is six years older than Desi Jr., paralleling the six-year age gap that separated parents Lucy and Desi. "Patty is a lot like my mother, the same drive, and strong will, a perfectionist...But I'm never going to get married. Marriage is unrealistic, expecting you to devote a whole life unselfishly to just one person. Do you know people age unbelievably when they marry? From what I've seen, 85 percent of married couples are miserable; 14 percent, just average; one percent, happy." (12) 

His mother's own childhood, in little Celoron, an outspring of Jamestown, N.Y., was oh-so-different from her kids'. "She was always a wild, tempestuous, exciting child," say Cleo, "doing things that worried people, plotting and scheming, though she knew she'd get in trouble." Interesting, because that's one basic of the Lucy format, Miss B forever finagling second bananas like Vivian Vance into co-trouble. "One summer, she conned me into running away. It was only to nearby Fredonia, but in her sneaky way she really wanted to catch up to a groovy high school principal who was teaching there. He played it very cool, calling Mom and telling her we were staying overnight in a boarding house. On his advice, when we got home, DeDe acted as if we hadn't been away. That devastated Lucille, no reaction, nothing."

The classic Lucy story line also has her conniving against male authority, whether husband or boss, now played by Gale Gordon. "I need a strong father or husband figure as catalyst. I have to be an inadequate somebody, because I don't want the authority for Lucy. Every damned movie script sent me seems to cast me as a lady with authority, like Eve Arden or Roz Russell, but that's not me.

"No, I don't remember my own father," says Miss Ball. "He was a telephone lineman who died of typhoid at 25, when I was about three. I do remember everything that day, though. Hanging out the window, begging to play with the kids next door who had measles... The doctor coming, my mother weeping. I remember a bird that flew in the window, a picture that fell off the wall.

"My brother Fred [who was born after her father's death] was always very, very good. He never did anything wrong - he was too much to bear. I was always in trouble, a real pain in the ass. I suppose I wasn't much fun to be around." To this day, says Cleo, Lucille suspects Fred is her mother's favorite, even though DeDe has devoted her whole life to this daughter.

Family ties were always fierce-strong. After her father's death, "We lived with my mother's parents, for a while. Grandpa Hunt was a marvelous jack-of-all-trades, a woodturner, eye doctor, mailman, bon vivant, hotel owner. [And also an old-fashioned Populist-Socialist.] He met my grandmother, Flora Belle, a real pioneer woman and pillar of the family, when she was a maid in his hotel. She was a nurse and midwife, an orphan who brought up four pairs of twin sisters and brothers all by herself. He took us to vaudeville every Saturday and to the local amusement park. When Grandma died at 51, all us kids had to pitch in, making beds, cooking.

"Yeah, I guess I am real mid-America, growing up as a mix of French-Scotch-Irish-English, living on credit like everyone else, paying $1.25 a week to the insurance man, buying furniture on time. But it was a good, full life. Grandpa took us camping, fishing, picking mushrooms, made us bobsleds. We always had goodies. I had the first boyish bob in town and the first open galoshes.

"My mother then married Ed Peterson, a handsome-ugly man, very well-read. He was good to me and Freddy but he drank too much. He was the first to point out the magic of the stage. A monologist came to town on the Chautauqua circuit. He just sat onstage with a pitcher of water and light bulb and made us laugh and cry for two hours. For me, this was pure magic. When I was about seven, Ed and mother moved to Detroit, leaving me with his old-fashioned Swedish parents, who were very strict. I had to be in bed at 6:30, hearing all the other kids playing outside in the summer daylight. Maybe it wasn't that traumatic, but I realize now it was a bad time for me. I felt as if I'd been deserted. I got my imagination to working, and read trillions of books."

The adult Lucille, talking to interviewers, used to go on and on about her "unhappy" childhood, little realizing that she was reflecting on her mother, to whom she is passionately devoted. "Just how long do you think you lived with the Petersons?" asked DeDe one day in a confrontation. "Three YEARS? Well I tell you it was more like three weeks."

"I left home at 15, much too early, desperate to break into the big wide world. Looking for work in New York show biz was ugly, without any leads or friends or training other than high school operettas and plays and Sunday school pageants. I was very shy and reticent, believe it or not, and I kept running home every five minutes. I got thrown in with older Shubert and Ziegfeld dollies and, believe me, they were a mean, closed corporation. I don't understand kids today who get easily discouraged and yap about doing their own thing. Don't they know what hard work is? Where are their morals? I always knew when I did wrong, and paid penance."

Yet she was venturesome enough to sit in on some recent Synanon group-therapy sessions for drug addicts. "They wanted me to raise some money, and I wanted to find out what it was about. The games were fascinating, wonderful, until I couldn't take it any more. The other participants kept bugging me: What are you here for? Are your children drug addicts? I had to start making up problems."

For two decades, she's been risking her neck in those murderous ratings, outlasting long-ago competitors like Fulton Sheen, and now up against such pleasers as pro football and Rowan and Martin. (13) 

Suppose the ratings drop, what would she do?

No idea. "Might take a trip on the Inland Waterway form Boston to Florida. In my deal with Universal, I can make specials, other movies, TV pilots. I wouldn't have to ski 'spooked' at Snowmass." What's that? "Honey, I have to be careful. If I break a leg 500 people are out of work. (14) I'd be happy in some branch of acting with some modicum of appreciation. Listen, it never occurred to me, in life that I'd fail ever, because I always appreciated small successes. I never had a big fixed goal. When I was running Desilu, it drove me wild when people asked, 'Aren't you proud to own the old RKO studio where you once worked as a starlet?' What $50-a-week starlet ever walked around a lot saying, 'I want to own this studio'?

"I don't know what you've been driving at, what's your story line? But it's been interesting, talking."

FOOTNOTES: HINDSIGHT IS 20/20

(1) This refers to a rare 1969 BBC documentary about Britain’s royal family that gave the public an inside look at the life of the Windsors. In one scene, the family was watching television, and on the screen was “I Love Lucy”, much to the chagrin of Prince Philip. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were mentioned on the series, especially in the episode “Lucy Meets the Queen” (ILL S5;E15).  

(2) Lucy is referring to a 1967 episode of “The Lucy Show” titled “Lucy The Babysitter” (TLS S5;E16) in which Lucy Carmichael babysits three rambunctious chimps for their parents, played by Jonathan Hole and Mary Wickes. In the final moments of the show, Wickes reveals a fourth sibling - a baby elephant!  The animal went wild and pushed Wickes (what Ball described as a “press job”) into one of the prop trees. The trainer had to physically subdue the elephant to get it away from Wickes, who injured her arm. The final cut ends with the entrance of the baby elephant.

(3) Lucy is conflating (probably intentionally) the stories of real-life prohibitionist Carrie Nation (1846-1911), who famously hacked up bars and whisky barrels with an axe, and Lizzie Bordon (1860-1927), who famously hacked up her parents with an axe. (Photo from the 1962 TV special “The Good Years” starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.) 

(4) There was never a film version of Thornton Wilder’s play Skin Of Our Teeth which was on Broadway in 1942 starring Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina, the role offered to Ball.  There were several television adaptations; one in Australia in 1959; one in England the same year starring Vivian Leigh as Sabina;  one in the USA in 1955 starring Mary Martin (above) as Sabina; and a filmed version of a stage production starring Blair Brown as Sabina in 1983. Although it is possible that Lucille Ball might have been considered for the role of the sexy housemaid Sabina in 1955, the article says that the role was “just” offered to her, so it probably refers to a 1971 project that never materialized. Wilder’s story tracks a typical American family from New Jersey from the ice age through the apocalypse. 

(5) In 1971, there was a popular revival of the 1925 musical comedy No, No, Nanette on Broadway. The cast featured veteran screen star Ruby Keeler and included Helen Gallagher (playing a character named Lucille, coincidentally), Bobby Van, Jack Gilford, Patsy Kelly and Susan Watson. Busby Berkeley, nearing the end of his career, was credited as supervising the production, although his name was his primary contribution to the show. The 1971 production was well-reviewed and ran for 861 performances. It sparked interest in the revival of similar musicals from the 1920s and 1930s. The original 1925 cast featured Charles Winninger, who played Barney Kurtz, Fred’s old vaudeville partner on “I Love Lucy.” In that same episode (above), they sing a song from the musical, "Peach on the Beach” by Vincent Youmans and Otto Harbach. Like the revue in the episode, the musical is set in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  

(6) Lucy is referring to her 1936 affidavit of registration to join the Communist Party.  Lucille said she signed it to appease her elderly grandfather. The cavalier act caught up with Ball in 1953, when zealous red-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy tried to purge America of suspected Communists. Although many careers were ruined, Ball escaped virtually unscathed.  

(7) The popular big band music series “The Lawrence Welk Show” (1955) was unceremoniously canceled in 1971 by ABC, in an attempt to attract younger audiences. What Lucy doesn’t mention is that four days after this magazine was published, the show began running brand new shows in syndication, which continued until 1982. Welk, despite not being much of an actor, played himself on “Here’s Lucy” (above) in January 1970. 

(8) “Let’s Talk To Lucy” was a short daily radio program aired on CBS Radio from September 1964 to June 1964. Most interviews (including Streisand’s) were spread over multiple installments.  

(9)  To showcase possible new series (pilots) Desilu and CBS aired “Vacation Playhouse” (1963-67) during the summer when “The Lucy Show” was on hiatus.  This would often be the only airing of Lucy’s passion projects. “Papa GI” with Dan Dailey as an army sergeant in Korea who has his hands full with two orphans who want him to adopt them. The pilot was aired in June 1964 but it was not picked up for production. “Maggie Brown” had Ethel Merman playing a widow trying to raise a daughter and run a nightclub which is next to a Marine Corps base. The pilot aired in September 1963, but went unsold. “The Hoofer” starring Donald O’Connor and Soupy Sales as former vaudevillians aired its pilot in August 1966. No sale! 

(10) Little Murders (1971) was a black comedy based on the play of the same name by Jules Feiffer. The film is about a young nihilistic New Yorker (Elliott Gould) coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s. Definitely not Lucille Ball’s style of comedy!  Paper Lion (1968) was a sports comedy about George Plimpton (Alan Alda) pretending to be a member of the Detroit Lions football team for a Sports Illustrated article. 

(11) Cecil Smith appeared in “Lucy Meets the Burtons” (HL S3;E1) in 1970 playing himself, a member of the Hollywood Press with a dozen other real-life writers. The casting was a way to get better coverage of the episode (featuring power couple Dick Burton, Liz Taylor, and her remarkable diamond ring). The gambit worked and the episode was the most viewed of the entire series. 

(12) Desi Jr.’s 1971 views on marriage did not last. He married actress Linda Purl in 1980, but they divorced in 1981. In October 1987, Arnaz married dancer Amy Laura Bargiel. Ten years later they purchased the Boulder Theatre in Boulder City, Nevada and restored it. They lived in Boulder with their daughter, Haley. Amy died of cancer in 2015, at the age of 63.   

(13) From 1952 to 1957, Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen hosted the inspirational program “Life Is Worth Living”, winning an Emmy Award in 1953, alongside winners Lucille Ball and “I Love Lucy.”  “Here’s Lucy” was programmed up against “Monday Night Football” on ABC and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” on NBC.  Instead of ignoring her competition, Ball embraced them by featuring stories about football and incorporating many of the catch phrases and guest stars from “Laugh-In.” 

(14) Lucy spoke too soon!  Just a few months after this interview was published Ball did indeed have a skiing accident in Snowmass and broke her leg. With season five’s first shooting date approaching, Ball was faced with either ending the series or re-write the scripts so that Lucy Carter would be in a leg cast.  She chose the latter, even incorporating actual footage of herself on the Snowmass  slopes (above) into "Lucy’s Big Break” (HL S5;E1). 

Elsewhere in the Issue...

“This Was Our Life” by Gene Shalit includes images of Lucille Ball in the collage illustration. 

A week after this issue of Look hit the stands, the fourth season of “Here’s Lucy” kicked off with guest star Flip Wilson and a parody of Gone With the Wind.  Three days later, Ball guest-starred on his show. 

Not to be outdone, LOOK’s rival LIFE also devoted an entire issue to television, on news stands just three days later.  

Naturally, “I Love Lucy” didn’t escape mention!  I’m not sure why the show’s run is bifurcated: 1952-55, 1956-57.  Actually, the show began in 1951 and ran continually until 1957. 

Click here for more about Look, Life and Time! 

[asexual-fandom-queen]

Pre-stoncy Jonathan and Nancy going to Scoops to flirt at Steve.

“Stop that,” hisses Nancy, the back of her hand striking quick and sudden against Jonathan’s bicep. Jonathan looks up at her with wide, surprised eyes, and immediately, his fingers still against the shirt button just below his navel, where the hem tucks into his jeans.

Nancy crosses her arms over her chest and does her level best to hide her own trembling fingers in the loose fabric of her blouse as she continues, “you look nice. Don’t be so nervous.”

Jonathan scoffs and rolls his eyes, nearly tripping over his own feet as he follows along at the breakneck pace Nancy’s set. The mall is crawling with people, school just having let out for the summer. Mothers congregate in groups in the food court, or bounce around like pinballs in an arcade from outlet store to outlet store, their children reeling in the sweet taste of unstructured time and lack of supervision.

“Easy for you to say,” Jonathan says, quiet as he can while still making himself heard over all the raucous activity. A kid no older than seven zooms across the mall aisle and nearly bodychecks him in the gut, and Jonathan does his best approximation of a pirouette to dodge the collision in time.

“Hey, watch where you’re going, seriously!” Nancy yells after the kid, one arm thrown out in exasperation, while Jonathan stumbles in place, taking a moment to find his footing again. The kid doesn’t so much as look back, and Nancy huffs loudly, shaking her head.

Jonathan leaves her a moment to stew in her annoyance before leaning in close to her ear and picking the conversation back up where they were cut off. “Steve already likes you,” he says.

Read the Rest Below the Cut, or Here on AO3. 

“Liked me,” Nancy amends, her lips pulling down into a dissatisfied frown. “You’re not the one who called your relationship bullshit and then stomped all over his heart.”

When Jonathan doesn’t answer right away, Nancy glances over at him, and the soft, besotted smile she’s met with goes far toward melting the anxiety weighing down her chest. “It would take a lot more than that for me to fall out of love with you, Nancy Wheeler,” he tells her.

She shoves gently at his shoulder, face hot and flushed, with her gaze glued to her feet. “Shut up, Jonathan.”

When she looks up at him through her lashes a few seconds later, he’s still smiling at her, but he’s more sombre now, and Nancy’s mood shifts to match his.

“I know,” Nancy whispers, even though Jonathan hasn’t said anything. He doesn’t have to. The more time they spend together, the more in tune they become, reading the other’s every thought plain as day on their faces. “It’s not like anything’s gonna happen anyway. But even just to be his friend. I’ve missed him.”

And even though Steve never meant to Jonathan half of what he meant to Nancy, he still remembers the night they fought the demogorgon under the flickering lights in his childhood home every time he closes his eyes. He remembers Steve’s face. Remembers what if felt like to have him come back for them.

He wraps his arm comfortingly around Nancy’s shoulder, lets her lean into his side, press her nose into his collar and breathe deep.

“Me, too.”  

~~~~~

“Welcome to Scoops Ahoy. Do you know what you want?”

Nancy fidgets nervously from foot to foot as subtly as she can, staring across the counter at the employee in her garish, blue sailor’s uniform, complete with the little hat. Her face is as bland and impassive as her voice, but her eyes are gorgeous and unmistakable. Nancy’s sure she remembers her from school, despite the fact that the name Robin engraved on her nametag does little to jog Nancy’s memory of specifically which classes.

“Um, is Steve around?” Nancy asks tentatively, trying for a smile, but only managing to twitch the corners of her lips spasmodically. Beside her, Jonathan waves once, short and curt, with the tips of his fingers, his other arm pressed closely to his chest. His smile is just as tight-lipped, but at least it stays in place.

Robin blinks, long and slow, then raises her eyebrows and shakes her head. “Why do I even work here?” she mutters. Then, just as Nancy’s about to try asking again, Robin turns on her heels and makes for the frosted glass window behind her.

“Hey, dingus,” she yells, smacking the glass with the flat of her palm until it rattles in the frame. Nancy flinches, and beside her, she feels Jonathan do the same. “It’s for you again.”

“Oh, no, no, no.”

Nancy hears the familiar voice before she even sees the first sign of movement from behind the frosted glass.

“I told those little shitheads not to get caught” – a shadow, then a monochromatic streak of blue in the shape of a man – “and then what do I hear from Dave from Panda Express?”

Finally, forcefully, the panes slide open, and whatever rant is poised on the tip of Steve’s tongue abruptly dies in his throat. He stares at them both, blinking owlishly, for a moment.

“Hey, Nance,” Steve says finally. He looks to her right, spies her company, then adds, hesitantly, “Jonathan.”

Jonathan nods to him, and Nancy waves, and Steve stares at them both, mouth working, until Robin hops up on the counter and pulls herself through the open frame.

“Well, this is lots of fun for me, but I’m going on my break now,” she provides, patting Steve on the shoulder on her way past, like she’s tagging him in. It takes Steve a second to get with the program, but when he does, he’s scuttling through the window himself and closing it shut behind.

“Hey,” Steve says again, like it’s as far as he’s been able to ride his train of thought since opening a window and finding his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend on the other side. Nancy can hardly blame him. She’s not doing much better.

“Hey,” she says back, but she takes it as a win, as Jonathan has yet to say anything.  

“I, uh,” Steve tries, brows knitting under his mop of thick, touchable, brown hair. It looks a little ridiculous with the sailor’s hat perched on top, but Nancy almost forgot – ridiculous is a good look on him. “I wasn’t expecting to see you two here. Least of all looking for me.”

Conspiratorially, Steve looks around the ice cream parlour, then leans over the counter, palms braced on the cold vinyl surface, so he can whisper to them. “Is there something… upside-downy going on that I should know about?”

Nancy and Jonathan, who leaned in close to hear him, reel back at once. “No, no,” Jonathan assures him at the same time as Nancy firmly asserts, “absolutely not.”  

“Okay,” Steve says, long and slow, nodding gently to himself as the crease in his brow only gets deeper. “I mean, did you want specifically my opinion on the ice cream flavours? Because Robin could have just given you some samples. We have, like, millions of these little plastic shovels, and it’s not like we really care how many of them you–”

“Steve,” Nancy says, cutting Steve off mid-ramble.

Steve stops dead, mouth open in a loose O shape. Nancy chuckles softly, then reaches across the counter to place a reassuring hand over Steve’s knuckles. She regrets it the second she does it. Steve draws his hand back like she’s burned him and casts furtive glances back and forth between Jonathan and the counter.

“Ah,” Nancy tries again with a short, awkward chuckle that drops some of the tension from Steve’s shoulders. Jonathan is stiff as a board beside her, but she can feel, every so often, his muscles trying to unclench before tensing up again.

“Do you guys wanna split a sundae?” Steve asks suddenly, sudden enough that Nancy and Jonathan both jump. “That’s a big hit with, uh– with couples when they come in.”

Nancy opens her mouth to reply, but doesn’t get a polite refusal out before Steve soldiers on. “On the house,” he offers. “Who’s gonna notice a few missing bananas, right?”

“You don’t have to give us free food, Steve,” Nancy protests.

“Okay, right, yeah,” Steve says, but he sounds less and less like he’s agreeing by the second. “No, sorry, I’m just not exactly following, I guess. If you’re not looking for the Monster Hunter Union Rate, what exactly am I doing for you?”

“Cocoon.”

“Huh?” Steve asks, his face a mask of confusion, and honestly, looking at him over her shoulder, Nancy thinks Jonathan looks just as surprised by his own outburst.

“Have you…” Jonathan trails off, his words escaping him for a moment until he’s able to wrangle them back into place. “Have you seen it, yet? It’s still playing here.”

“The one with the old people and the swimming pool?” Steve asks.

Jonathan nods. “You’ve seen it, then?”

Nancy can hear the disappointment in his tone.

Steve, though, shakes his head. “Nah, man,” he replies. “But we get enough people who come in after the movies let out that I’ve gotten the cliffs notes version of every freaking thing that’s been playing since I started.”

“Would you still wanna see it?” Nancy asks, trying to keep her tone casual.

Steve cocks his head sideways and screws up his face. “What’s the question, here?” he wonders. “Like, after hearing about the basics of the plot, do I still think it’s a worthwhile movie to watch, or–”

“Or would you like to watch it with us?”

Jonathan surprises Nancy, being the one to actually ask. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye and sees he’s white as a sheet. Not that she blames him. Butterflies turn to knots in her stomach that pull and twist uncomfortably every time she breathes.

“Oh,” Steve says, and it’s quiet and weighty and makes Nancy squirm all the more.

“Listen,” he resumes. “You guys. It’s really nice of you to go out of your way to offer up an olive branch, and I appreciate it, I do. But you don’t have to let me crash your date because you feel weird about how everything went down between us.”

Just to hear Steve say the words between us sets a fire in Nancy’s belly, even though she knows, in the logical part of her brain, that he doesn’t mean between us the way she and Jonathan wish he did.

“I’m a big boy,” Steve continues. “And anyway, I’m over it.”

The assurance doesn’t reach his eyes, or at least, Nancy doesn’t think it does. Her own wishful thinking makes Steve harder to read, but she doesn’t think, at least, that he really wants to let things go so soon.

“You wouldn’t be crashing,” Nancy promises. “Plus, it’s not St. Elmo’s Fire. It’s a comedy. Harmless, right?”

To posit it as harmless means, to a certain degree, acknowledging they’re playing with matches, but Nancy hopes Steve won’t examine it that deep. Or at the very least, not have the courage to question her.

She should know him better.

“And what kind of harm exactly are you imagining, Nancy?” Steve asks.

They’re quiet for a moment, Steve staring the couple down, and them examining him in turn, each trying to complete the puzzle laid out before them without all the pieces.

“Come to the dumb movie with us, Steve,” Nancy says finally, unwilling to let the staring match continue any longer. “We have survived far worse things than trying to get along with each other.”

Steve scrunches his nose. “I’m not worried about getting along with you,” he admits, and it feels precarious, so when he says nothing more, Nancy doesn’t push.

“Well, good,” Nancy huffs, puffing out her chest and doing her best approximation of a person who knows what they’re getting themselves into. “Because we aren’t worried about that, either.”

“Byers?” Steve questions.

Jonathan’s been quiet, but his eyes flick quickly to meet Steve’s when he’s called upon, and, with steel in his spine, he holds that gaze as he replies, “what Nancy said.”

“So,” Nancy says firmly, crossing her arms over her chest and holding her head high to get as close to looking at Steve straight on as she can manage. “When are you done your shift so we know how much time to kill at JCPenney?”

Steve smirks in a way that feels so familiar, all of Nancy’s knots uncurl into butterflies again. “Give me an hour and I’ll meet you at the concession stand.”

“You’re buying the popcorn,” Jonathan says, matter-of-factly, and Steve balks.

“I make three dollars an hour!”

“We’re interns,” Jonathan and Nancy reply in tandem, and  Steve scoffs and shakes his head.

“New plan,” he says. “We meet back here in forty-five. Then at least the ice cream’s free.”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “How chivalrous of you.”    

“Look,” Steve sighs. “Any chivalry I had, if that was even any at all, I already gave to you. Now all that’s left is just Steve, alright?”

Jonathan smiles. “I guess Just Steve is okay.”

Steve smiles right back. “Oh, well, as long as guess so.”

[starkerforlife6969]

Alpha Steve x Omega Peter - college au fluff overload

Part one of gift to @everyflowerneedspruning 

Steve ducks into the classroom, eyeing flickering over the already seated students. He keeps his head down, shuffling towards the back when he hears an incredulous:

“Steve?” from the front.

He turns to see Bruce, his roommate, staring at him with a bewildered expression. Steve hurries over to him and collapses into the seat, tugging his stuff out of his bag. “Hey, Bruce,” he greets distractedly, turning to glance at the door as more students shuffle in.

“Uh…hey?” He frowns, “are you…are you in this class?”

“Yeah, I just transferred.” He watches as another group of students filter in, chattering animatedly.

“You transferred to…to History of Math…”

Steve shoots his beta friend a mildly irritated glare. “Yes, Bruce. I did. Is that a problem?”

Bruce continues in the same bemused voice. “It’s just….History of Math. You’re a political science major...Here on a sports scholarship. And I’m pretty sure you once said that math was the most boring thing in the wor-“

“You know, maybe I just wanted to broaden my interests.” Steve grumbles in a clipped voice. “We’re seniors in college, Bruce. It’s the perfect time to try and widen your horizons and discover new opportunities.”

“…did you buy any of what you just said? Because I sure didn’t.” Bruce laughs.

Steve doesn’t reply.

His eyes are stuck on Peter.

The gorgeous omega who’s just in. He’s beautiful, oh god, he’s so beautiful. Steve watches as he makes his way to a seat at the back. He’s so dainty, with perfect cream skin and eyes that Steve could write sonnets about. Brown, but not just brown. The colour of Steve’s favourite chocolate, the colour of the mossy bark behind his house back home that trails into the forest. With specks of honeyed amber and glints of whiskey like fractures of sunlight. Those eyes are endlessly deep and a man could drown in the depths of them and die happy.

And his hair- his hair, always a little mussed and out of place; always wind swept with some lock falling, curled, into his face and a little tuft defying gravity. He’s wearing an oversized pink pastel sweater that drops down his shoulders, baring slivers of that lovely cream skin, and some denim shorts that should be illegal. Steve watches as he gracefully scoots into one of the seats and sets his leather satchel on the desk- looking for his laptop.

God, he’s the most gorgeous thing in the whole world and-

“Oh my god. You swapped for some omega?”

Steve whips around immediately and glares at Bruce who looks world-weary and judgemental at his discovery. “No! N-no! And he is not just some omega, he’s-“

“I know who he is,” Bruce sighs, pulling off his glasses and wiping them like he can’t bare looking at Steve. “He’s Peter Stark. As in, son of Tony Stark. Do you know who Tony Stark is, Steve? He’s the reason that Peter doesn’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. He’s the Tony Stark. That’s why I’m beginning to question your sanity.”

Steve pouts at that, and sets his head in his hands miserably as the class starts. He spends most of it completely confused as to anything that the professor is saying, and the other part gazing at Peter as discreetly as he can manage. The boy is so beautiful, he aches. And he’s typing into an expensive laptop quickly, looking like he understands everything.

He probably does. He’s a genius, after all. He’s a Stark. He finds jokes about physics equations funny just by looking at them and Steve has to google them just to get the gist. He knows this because he- not stalks, but follows Peter on instagram- why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he want to see candid selfies of the boy bashfully half hidden behind his hands? Of him lying in bed half asleep and hugging his kitten Ojai? The tiny little thing almost as cute as Peter that the boy had rescued from an animal shelter? Of sunsets and views and shots of him and his omega friends? Peter comments laughing emojis on science puns and math symbols and Steve is in love, double tapping every photo.

But Peter has millions of instagram followers. Steve’s just a nameless face.

It’s a disheartening thought. But probably a necessary one- Peter is a freshman, a tiny, doe-eyed freshman who looks much younger. Who even let him into a place as brutal as college? He’s so small. He’s so soft and amazing and-

Steve falls into a daydream where maybe one day he and Peter post a picture of the two of them on his instagram account and-

When he comes to, Bruce is standing in front of him, looking remarkably unimpressed. Everyone else is gone, the classroom is empty and Steve smiles sheepishly. “You are going to fail this module.” Bruce declares unsympathetically. “And I am not going to tutor you.”

So much for friendship.

He tries to push thoughts of Peter out of his head and he even manages a little. He manages not to think of those chestnut curls or that milky skin or his perfect smile and tight, plump ass. He tries not to think about that when the headline broke that Tony Stark’s only son would be going to the same college as Steve- he nearly lost his mind. 

 It’s two days later, in the middle of the afternoon after a gruelling practise in the summer heat, that he’s scanning the squad for some refreshments when, of course, of course, he sees Peter with a lemonade stand. Like something out of a wet dream.

He’s awed at the sight of him. White tennis shoes, his long legs bare, and white shorts that are so flowy and flimsy it almost looks like a skirt- with a cream crop top that is tantalisingly tempting as it flutters around the lean, taught stomach. God, Steve wants. Peter’s all flushed and red from the heat. He wants to cover that delicate skin in suncream and kiss him and adore him. He’s so distracted by the sight of Peter, that he jumps a foot in the air when the sound of a megaphone goes off in his ear.

“Football should not just be for Alphas!” A dark skinned omega yells at him, and shoves a flyer into his chest. He grunts a little at the force of it and stares at her in shock, as Peter heads over with a glass of lemonade.

“MJ,” he calls disapprovingly, “we’re not going to sell much lemonade if you keep yelling that at people.”

“And we’re not going to fight injustice by you handing out lemonade.” She grumbles, but heads off dutifully back to the stand. Steve watches her go warily, a little afraid. But now he’s left with Peter, Peter who’s so close and a little shiny with sweat so that Steve can smell him. God, he smells good. He smells like lavender and his favourite chocolate chip cookies and the barest hint of strawberries and-

“Sorry about MJ. She seems a little grumpy, but she’s just passionate. Would you like to buy some lemonade?” Peter asks adorably, rocking on his heels and beaming up at Steve and practically radiating sunshine and rainbows. “We’re collecting for the local animal shelter!”

Steve is already reaching for his bag to get his wallet, and doesn’t see the way Peter’s eyes linger on the places his shirt has stuck to his abs with sweat. He’s trying not to stumble in the face of the effortless beauty and the smell of sure a pure, sweet omega. He wants to think of something cool to say. Something suave and interesting. What comes out is: “Sure, I love animals.”

Fucking idiot. Who doesn’t love animals?

“Same!” Peter exclaims excitedly, “I have a kitten that I rescued from a shelter!”

“Really?” Steve asks, playing dumb, “what type is he?” He hands over the money- actually, he hands over all the money in his wallet, and Peter hands over the lemonade with eager hands. Like he just can’t wait for Steve to try it. He’s never ben this physically close to Peter before and the size difference is amazing. Peter is tiny- obviously, all omegas are, but Peter truly is the smallest thing ever. Steve thinks that at the smallest point of Peter’s waist, he could wrap his hands right around it. He’s like a little fairy, a dainty elfin omega.

“He’s the most adorable little cream and ivory tabby! Oh, and he has the most stunning bright blue eyes, look, I have a picture!” He reaches for his phone, and Steve is so completely fucking endeared, when Peter seems to notice the money in his hand.

He stares at it in confusion for a second, before looking up at Steve (and he really does have to look up), then back down to the money, then back at Steve. “You’re…you’re donating thirty dollars?” He whispers, eyes wide and he looks like he might cry with joy.

There goes dinner for tonight. And breakfast tomorrow. Steve nods, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s for a good cause,” he murmurs. Peter really is an angel, and he looks like one too, all decked out in white. Because Steve knows. Steve’s seen the pictures. He’s seen the photos of Peter’s home growing up- Stark Mansion, the stunning, enormous house in acres of green that Peter will go home to every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Summer for the rest of his degree. But he’s still acting like this is a lot of money, and god, he’s precious-

“MJ!” Peter calls, gesturing his scary friend over from the stand. “Come look! He’s-“ he cuts himself off, staring at Steve with his bambi eyes as MJ reluctantly comes over. “I’m so sorry! I don’t even know your name!”

“Steve Rogers,” he greets, trying to keep his voice level, and Peter smiles at him with his fucking dimples and rosy pink lips. Steve holds out his hand without trembling by some miracle.

Peter takes it in his tiny, dainty ones. It’s completely engulfed in Steve’s. “Peter,” he murmurs, like everyone on campus doesn’t know who he is. How could they not? Tony is famous, and everyone is utterly besotted by his gorgeous, perfect omega. MJ arrives, and Steve is momentarily distracted by her.

She’s a pretty omega, slim and delicate, and although a little taller than Peter, she has something unique about her. She has dark eyes and dark hair and she looks at him with narrowed eyes.

“Steve just donated thirty dollars!” Peter exclaims, waving the money at her. “Isn’t that amazing? Mrs Denver is going to be so happy! We’re so close to our goal! Do you think she’ll let us help repaint the sign?”

MJ’s cool veneer seems to waver a little, and she looks reluctantly amused by Peter’s bright eyed enthusiasm. “Maybe.” She answers noncommittally, “So, Steve. You like helping out?”

Steve swallows hard, and nods. “Yeah, uh- it’s a good cause.” She stares at him like she can see through to his soul. “And uh- I- I mean, I’m all for omega rights and omegas in sports, but- mixed Alpha and Omega football might be- dangerous. The size difference alone, there’s a lot of risk.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him at all about the lemonade, but she does look a little impressed by his views. He feels good about the interaction, overall. “Cool.” She says eventually, before towing Peter away.

He lets out a little yelp, but turns to wave gleefully at Steve.

The blond smiles, taking a sip of the lemonade and groaning. Fuck. It’s fantastic. It’s almost worth all the money he’s given away. It’s cool and refreshing and obviously homemade and it’s sweet- just like Peter.

That night, Peter posts a picture of him and MJ. He’s kissing her cheek and she’s smiling and relaxed in a way Steve didn’t know she was capable of. It’s cute. He double taps it and scrolls through the comments. Most of them are sweet and complimentary, but there are a few more lewd suggestions. Steve scowls but he’s not surprised. Though omega-omega relationships are taboo, the porn is hot.

He goes to sleep with the smell of lavender and cookies in his head, and the lingering taste of lemonade on his lips.

A week goes by without contact, with devastates Steve but it’s for the best. He’s a senior, and Peter is a wide-eyed, innocent first year, and he deserves someone as clever as he is. Steve should- he should focus on the pretty omegas in his own year. He should try to get thoughts of those lovely brown eyes out of his head.

And he does have things to be worried about.

As it stands, he is failing History of Math. He looks down at his most recent assignment grade and shudders. He’s going to have to beg Bruce to tutor him.

He steps into the classroom and looks for his friend for some humble grovelling when he hears-

“Steve?”

He turns slowly, but of course, it’s Peter. The only person with a voice as sweet and melodic and attached to Steve’s heart. He’s sitting in the front row, wearing a large purple sweater that swamps him deliciously, and a black ribbon choker that draws all the attention right to his delicious neck. Steve’s mouth waters with the need to claim. He’s already got his stuff set out and he beams, waving at Steve in amazement and gesturing to the empty seat beside him.

Steve takes a step forward instinctively, before he hears someone else call his name.

He turns to the hiss to see Bruce, nearer the back, a warning look on his face.

Fuck. Bruce is right. Peter is- Peter is too young, way too out of his league, he deserves someone better than Steve. He takes a step back from Peter towards Bruce and he sees it.

Hurt.

Hurt flashes across Peter’s face. It’s quick, almost impossible to catch, but his eyes widen and his lips part with impossible sadness, before that supportive smile and friendly beam comes back.

Steve feels like he’s been punched right in the gut .

He can’t bear the thought, not even for a second, that he’s hurt Peter’s feelings. Not the sweetest omega in the world, so he heads over and takes the seat almost viciously. Peter twists towards him, radiating happiness. “Steve!” He exclaims joyously, “I didn’t know you took this class.”

God, he smells amazing. He looks amazing. He’s so tiny and brilliant and- “Yeah, I uh- swapped in late. It was a mistake to be honest, I completely failed the last assignment. I was actually just gonna ask one of my friends for help.” He turns to point at Bruce, and Peter turns too.

Bruce waves at Peter and glares daggers at Steve.

“Oh!” Peter beams, “I know Bruce! We’re in science club together. He’s a senior isn’t he-“ Peter stops short, his eyes go wide and he seems to realise something. Suddenly, he’s scanning the classroom, eyes flickering from person to person and Steve frowns. “Everyone in here is a senior.” He whispers.

Steve looks around, and sure enough, Peter is right. He hums in surprise.

“Oh my god,” Peter closes his eyes (and oh god, his lovely eyelashes are so long and they curl against the cusp of his cheek) and he looks sad. Steve sits up in concern. “Dad,” Peter whispers to himself angrily.

Dad- oh. Oh.

“I can’t believe this,” the omega whispers, shaking his head in anguish. “He always does this! I can never just achieve something for myself! And-and I actually thought that I was meant to be in this class-“ he laughs humourlessly, sounding on the brink of tears, and Steve shakes his head.

“Hey,” he murmurs, collecting Peter’s tiny hands in his own. God, his skin is so soft. Softer than Steve ever imagined. “Don’t- don’t do that. C’mon. Your dad…he was only trying to help, you know?” He croons in a soft, soothing voice because omegas are so delicate and sensitive. “And you do. You do deserve to be here, you’re so smart. You’re brilliant-I mean, what did you get on that assignment? I just bet it was an A.”

Peter looks up at him shyly, his eyes wide and glittering like diamonds. Red crawls across his cheeks in affirmation.

“I knew it,” he squeezes his hands gently, “your dad just…he wants people to see how brilliant you are. Maybe he opened the door, but you deserve to be in this room. Sometimes professors need to…need to be shown how amazing students can be. I mean, god, Peter, you’re…” he trails off, because he wants to bury his head in Peter’s neck and declare his love for him and Peter is staring up at him in awe. Like he’s taken aback by the adoration in his voice. He clears his throat and shakes his head. “I mean- I had to flirt with the admissions woman to let me swap.”

Peter giggles, sniffling. “I bet that went down well. A tall handsome alpha flirting with her, she must’ve been a mess.”

Steve’s inner Alpha preens, and the rest of the lesson flies by in a flash.

They don’t become friends exactly, because alphas and omegas aren’t usually friends, but they form something of a kinship. They become partners whenever they’re in class together, and they kid and joke around. Peter follows him back on instagram and for the first time- Steve comments on a photo.

It’s a picture of Peter and one of his friends at ballet practise and Steve writes one word. Beautiful.

They don’t text or message, but it feels like something…tentative and precious. Steve wants to hold it close and treasure it even though he knows it’s wrong. They see each other a few times, not often, but a few times outside of class. Always quite by accident, and they talk and gaze at each other. Once, outside of the science building, they’d bumped into each other and eaten lunch together on a bench in the sunlight, and Peter had said he’d quite like to come and see Steve play one day.

Steve had said he’d like that quite a bit.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he’d actually thought it would happen.

But then one night, as the cold air whips at them as they stand at the edge of the pitch, Steve looks up to see Peter in the stands. It takes his breath away. Surely not. It must be a mirage. He’s there with MJ, wrapped up in a fluffy coat and cheering, with the college’s colours painted onto his cheeks. It’s the most beautiful, wholesome thing Steve has ever seen. He thinks he could do absolutely anything if Peter was cheering him on.

“Fuck, who’s that next to your omega?” Bucky asks eagerly, looking up at the stands.

Steve gapes. “What? MJ? And- he’s not - not my omega.”

“Is she attached?” Bucky asks, lacing up his boots.

“Is she- no, I don’t think so, but she’s- they’re freshman.”

Bucky laughs, shoving Steve a little. “They’re eighteen, Steve. I mean- Tony Stark would probably hunt you down and kill you, but they’re not children.”

It stays with Steve. There’s still stigma though, especially around older alphas and younger omegas. Omegas are naive and innocent and soft, they’re easily led astray and Alphas shouldn’t manipulate them and-and Steve just wants Peter to be happy. If Peter got an eighteen year old Alpha boyfriend Steve would kill him be happy for him.

Or he’d try.

Probably.

At the end of the game, he wants to run to the stands and scoop Peter into his arms and kiss him- but he doesn’t. He restrains himself, and sips at his water, trying to catch his breath as sweat pours down him. They’ve won. They’ve won and his inner-alpha feels so good at knowing they’ve impressed and proved triumph in front of their omega.

Shit- not his, not-

“Steve! You were amazing!” Peter gushes, and Steve whips around to see Peter right in front of him, tiny and adorable and flushed with exhilaration, nose red from the cold. “You were so fast!!!” He jumps into Steve’s arms and Steve holds him tight. It feels right to have him in his arms. Peter squeals, and nuzzles into his neck and holy shit he smells so good-

“Yeah, alright, I don’t wanna puke.” MJ rolls her eyes, though there’s a teasing lilt to her voice. Steve reluctantly sets Peter down and feels colour rush to his cheeks. He sighs at the sight of Bucky, having appeared out of nowhere and eager to be introduced.

“Dangerous, dangerous game,” Bruce mutters, brushing his hair as they get ready for Peter’s arrival. They’re all heading to some campus club, and Bucky and MJ are meeting them there. “I swear to god, if Tony Stark finds out I know you and ruins my chances of getting a job-“

“We’re not dating,” Steve insists.

Though he wishes they were. They’re so close now. He knows Peter’s scent by heart, his little smile, and sometimes before Peter posts a selfie, he sends it to Steve first. It’s always gorgeous: a pastel sweater and a glittery necklace and sometimes even ones with his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

One second it’s a photo of Peter with Ojai on his head smiling like the most adorable thing on the planet, the next it’s Peter with his hand balled in his sweater and pulling it down over his bare thighs in a gif that shows his chest and Steve watches it on repeat. Peter had confided in him that the day after he’d turned eighteen, modelling agencies and fashion designers had contacted him, eager for their chance to be features on his instagram, eager for some image or sensation to be promoted, and Peter had shied away from the attention- feeling no prettier than any other omega. 

“It’s so fucking great being a beta,” Bruce says to himself, neatening his collar one last time. “I can be above to all this bullshit.”

Steve scoffs. “You don’t think he’s gorgeous?”

“I said above, not blind.”

And then there’s a knock at the door.

They look at each other nervously, before Steve wipes his sweaty palms on his jean-clad thighs and opens it.

Peter is a vision of pink. His lips are dusky rose and he has fuschia eyeshadow and his pink meshtop is as snug as a second skin as it dips into his highwaisted pale pink denim shorts. It’s the sexiest thing on the face of the planet. 

Steve gapes; at a loss for words.

Luckily, Bruce isn’t.

“Holy shit.” 

Read part two here (contains links to ao3 options). 

[cuthian]

Dancing in the Rain Chapter Two

Hi guys!

For this chapter, I'd like to warn you to please read the tags carefully. There is a potentially triggering scene involving gaslighting and violence at the end of the chapter -- if you think that's something that might trigger you or that you'd prefer not to read, please stop reading when Brock Rumlow's scene starts and skip to the end notes, where I'll summarise the scene for you.

Thank you again to my lovely beta and to my roommate, who have dragged me through writing this entire piece.

And thank you for still reading! I love you all.

See you in the comments, and then next week!

Love, Annaelle

Chapter Two

MUST-SEE: PEPPER POTTS SHARES ADORABLE AND HILARIOUS ULTRASOUND PICTURE OF HER BABY ON TWITTER!

Pepper Potts revealed she was expecting her first child with partners James Rhodes and Tony Stark a few months ago. Yesterday, the C.E.O. of Stark Industries shared an ultrasound picture on Twitter, where we can clearly see the baby takes after one of its fathers!

Potts, 43, announced her first pregnancy in December of last year through a truly adorable video starring her partners and Captain Steve Rogers, who is a close friend of Potts and her partners. Since the announcement, Potts has been sharing biweekly updates in the form of pictures, anecdotes and short videos featuring most of the Avengers.

[…] Besides Potts herself, the most frequent guest on Potts’ Twitter page is Rebecca Barnes, who announced that she and Thor Odinson are expecting their first child only a few weeks after Potts’ announcement. […] Potts has shared quite a few ultrasound pictures of the baby already, but her last update promises to be the most popular so far. The post boasts another ultrasound picture, this one showing that the baby might take after daddy Tony Stark! “[…]baby swallowed amniotic fluid, and then they opened their little mouth SO wide and stuck their little tongue out so far the gynaecologist nearly fell of her stool laughing,” Potts wrote. “It was wonderful to see, because it looked like our baby had the biggest, cheekiest smile on their face—just like Tony.”

Many of the other Avengers and various other celebrities saw the resemblance too.

“Takes after Tony, that one,” Steve Rogers, Captain America and close personal friend of Stark, Rhodes, and Potts, replied. “We’re gonna have our hands full.”

“Lord have mercy,” James Rhodes, daddy number two, replied. “The world’s not ready for a second Tony Stark.”

—Clarke Blake, Flair Magazine, “Pepper Potts Tweets Adorable Ultrasound Picture”, April 2016

——————

6th avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States of America

23 April 2016

Peggy Carter

Peggy Carter had lived through quite a few life-altering events during her ninety-five years, but she dared say that sitting through a—albeit lovely—dinner with her goddaughter and her darling boyfriend, her niece and her prickly fiancé, her wonderfully dumb Steven, and Becky was a trial unlike any other she had faced so far.

Conversation was perfectly civil, of course, because Rebecca Barnes—senior, that is—did not tolerate acrimony of any sort at her dinner table, but there was a certain… tension between them that had not abated throughout the entire meal.

She had an inkling as to its origin, of course.

Sharon and her Brock had been together for quite some time, and while Peggy certainly had her reservations about the man, none of her background checks or even the private investigators had raised any red flags beyond a mild propensity for running his mouth when he had had a few drinks.

She never quite warmed up to the man though, finding herself a little put off by his brash attitude and his overall personality.

Sharon, however, had been quite besotted with the man since the day they’d met, and Peggy was not in the habit of trying to dictate her children’s—for that was what Sharon and Becca were, to her—love life. She had discretely done said background check on him, of course, because one could never be too careful, but nothing had come out of it, and so she held her tongue.

Whatever her own reservations towards him, Sharon loved him and he made her happy.

That was, in the end, all that Peggy wanted for her.

Her distaste of Brock, though, had been more apparent this night than she had intended for it to be.

Honestly, she blamed Thor a little bit, because Becca’s young man was so absurdly charming and lovely that Peggy couldn’t be fully blamed for showing something that might, in the right circumstances, be construed as… preference.

And honestly, whoever decided she was not allowed such preference?

People didn’t work that way.

Sometimes, one clicked with people, and sometimes, one didn’t.  

It was just that…

Well, she always strived to be fair to her family, even when her personality didn’t quite match with everyone, and Brock—as became increasingly clear as time passed and his relationship with her niece became more serious—was part of that family.

So was Thor, but the scales skewed much more in his favor because he reminded her so very much of her Daniel that sometimes it ached to look at him.

He was courteous and kind, and he revelled in her stories of her days as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. He referred to each little scuffle as a mighty battle, won by glorious victory, and had sworn to her that her days as a warrior for Earth had certainly earned her spot at his father’s table in Valhalla on the very first day they’d met.

She may—or may not—have shed a tear or two.

It should have occurred to her then, when Becca invited her over for dinner with Sharon, Brock, Thor, and Becky, that Brock would sense the difference in their interactions.

He was, after all, a fully trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and a good one too.

He’d noticed.

And the atmosphere during dinner had suffered for it.

It seemed to have eased off some now, while Thor bustled about in the kitchen to do the dishes, chattering happily with Becca, who sat perched on the counter beside him, cradling her swollen belly. Sharon leaned on the doorpost beside Becca, dangling an empty glass of wine from her fingertips as she occasionally threw a comment into the conversation.

They’d been whispering and giggling to each other the entire evening, and Peggy had to admit she was curious what those two were up to.

Steve had taken Brock to the living room, distracting the man from glowering at Peggy and Thor.

Honestly, Peggy huffed to herself, the entire thing was a tad tedious.

So she had a bit of a preference when it came to Sharon and Becca’s partners—sue her.

There was no need to be so petty about it.

“Well,” Becky said, raising an eyebrow at her, leaning back in her chair. “That could’ve gone better.”

Peggy snorted lightly and shook her head, setting down the glass of red wine she’d been sipping from all night on the table. “I suppose I could’ve comported myself better towards Brock,” Peggy admitted, glancing towards the living room, where she assumed Steve was entertaining the man in question.

Becky bit her lip and nodded lightly. “I mean… You hardly said two words to him and spent the rest of the night talking to Thor. It was rather obvious, Peg.”

Peggy pouted. “I suppose I should make an effort then, shouldn’t I?”

Becky wrinkled her nose at her and nodded. “I think you should.”

Peggy heaved a very put-upon sigh and hoisted herself out of her chair, smiling when Becky followed her example. They made their way into the living room, supporting each other as they walked, and settled comfortably on the love seat directly across from the fireplace.

Steve was kneeling in front of said fireplace, stacking several more blocks of chopped wood onto the dwindling flames. Peggy sighed wistfully, trailing her eyes appreciatively over Steve’s impressive biceps and exquisite form. It really was such a shame he had always been so hung up on Barnes—Peggy had had a great appreciation for him before the serum too, but…

There was something to be said for the way he had stepped out of the machine too.

She was sure they’d have had a lot of fun together if he hadn’t been so arse over teakettle in love with Bucky Barnes. Of course, she supposed if she and Steve had given each other a chance, she would never have married Daniel, and she would never have eventually fallen in love with her Angie too…

She would not have given them up for the world.

“Steve, darling,” she called out when he got back to his feet. “Come sit with us. What were you two talking about?”

Steve sat down on the sofa beside her and Becky’s love seat and smiled tightly. “We were discussing work, actually.” He shot a quick grin towards Rumlow when the man dragged a chair over so he could sit across from them, leaving the rest of the sofa open for the others.

“We were talking about the time he botched my mission,” Brock said, just the hint of a sneer detectable in his tone but voice otherwise just friendly enough to not be called out. “Put two of my guys in the hospital and had the Widow tase the shit out of another one. Still jumps at shadows, that one. Can’t use him for ops anymore, so thanks.”

He shook his head and took a chug of his beer. “Scared away our target too.”

Peggy raised an eyebrow. “Is this true?” she asked, turning to Steve.

She was aware Steve ran mostly Avengers-related missions nowadays, and that those missions were usually meticulously planned by Becca, Maria Hill, and Pepper Potts. She couldn’t quite imagine such a large mistake escaping their notice.

Steve’s cheeks colored, and he shrugged. “Yeah. We got the same anonymous tip about a terrorist group we’d been monitoring, and we responded without a lot of delay—we informed Fury, and he gave us the go-ahead, but apparently Maria had also sent out a STRIKE team.” He sighed and hung his head. “We collided mid-mission.”

Rumlow snorted. “I gotta hand it to ya, you had us down quick. Team’s good.”

Steve smiled, and Peggy eyed him carefully. It wasn’t a real smile, because Steve’s real smiles still made her heart flutter a little, but there was enough sincerity in it to fool the people that didn’t quite know him as well as she did—or, she supposed, as well as Becca did.

Her goddaughter walked into the room and plopped down on the couch beside Steve, poking him in the arm immediately and drawing his attention away from the conversation.

Sharon and Thor filed into the room as well, and Peggy watched her niece as she sidled up beside her fiancé, leaning her hip against his shoulder until he slipped his arm around her waist and leaned in to press a light kiss to her cloth-covered hip.

Thor, on the other hand, fit himself into the narrow available space between Becca and Steve, jostling them both playfully as he settled, allowing Becca to lean up against him comfortably, slipping one hand to the curve of her stomach, gently rubbing his thumb back and forth.

Peggy smiled despite herself.

He did remind her so very much of Daniel, even in this.

Daniel had been sweet and nervous and in awe of her pregnancy too, and he had tried to wait on her hand and foot, even when it had made her want to shoot him more than it had helped.

She’d seen enough interaction between Thor and Becca to know their dynamic was similar, but also wildly different. Where Peggy had grated beneath Daniel’s care and constant attention, too independent and too unwilling to let loose her grasp on control, Becca seemed to find Thor’s constant gaze reassuring, and his touch calming.

“So,” Brock said, eyeing Sharon and Becca contemplatively. “You two gonna tell us what it is you’ve been whispering about all night?”

Peggy looked between the two as well. She had to admit she was rather curious too, because Becky had already informed her that it was actually Becca who had asked if she would host a dinner for all of them so she could give them some important news.

“Yes,” Becca said slowly, glancing towards Sharon and then Thor. “Yes, I think…” She exhaled shakily and set one hand on her stomach. “Well, I think you’ve all noticed I’m pregnant.”

Peggy snorted a laugh, and Steve rolled his eyes.

“Thor’s dad…” Becca continued slowly, “he… Well, he’s not been the most supportive about it.”

Thor leaned forward then, a determined, yet grave expression on his face. “My father is a most traditional man, when it suits him to be one. He has ratified laws that state that if I wish to be able to claim our child as mine—my heir—it must be born on Asgard.”

Peggy blinked.

“Oh,” she said.

Becca smiled tightly. “Because travel through the Bifrost is extremely taxing for humans as it is, I need to travel there before I hit twenty-eight weeks. Just to be safe. It’s like flying in the third trimester.”

A heavy silence followed her words, and Peggy tried to wrap her head around what that meant.

“You’re—you’re twenty-six weeks along, though,” Peggy asserted. “You would have to go within…”

“Within two weeks, yes,” Becca nodded, leaning back into Thor’s embrace. “And I would be gone for… for a while, probably. If Eir and Thor are right, I wouldn’t be up for any sort of Bifrost travel for quite some time after the baby’s born either. So I…” She looked at Sharon, who smiled encouragingly, and Peggy found she had an inkling of where this was going.

“I need a replacement for my position as official S.H.I.E.L.D. liaison to the Avengers,” Becca continued. “Someone the Avengers as a whole trust, so I…” She finally returned Sharon’s smile. “I thought of Sharon. I know you’ve… you’ve had a hard time at S.H.I.E.L.D. since… everything,” Becca’s voice lowered, and rage pulsed deep within Peggy’s veins at the mere mention of the absurd charges they’d tried to lay against her niece. “I hoped you might like a change of scenery,” Becca continued. “Some new colleagues.”

She chuckled and elbowed Steve in the side as she added, “Mind you, they’re a mad bunch, and you should never listen to Steve, even though he’s team leader, because he’s full of shit, but—”

“I am not,” Steve said, affronted.

“Oh darling,” Peggy sighed. “You always were a dramatic shit. It stands to reason that didn’t change.”

Brock guffawed and the others snickered at Steve’s expense, and Peggy smiled broadly at him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve huffed indignantly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Come on, Becs, you were telling us something big, remember?”

Becca smiled beatifically at him, and Peggy shook her head to clear it—it was difficult, in moments like these, to remember that she wasn’t back in the war, and that Becca wasn’t Bucky Barnes, ribbing Steve about something or the other while the rest of the Howlies laughed at them.  

Becky, God bless her, noticed her slip in attention, and patted her hand lightly on top of Peggy’s.

Peggy shot her a grateful smile before she focused her attention back on Becca.

“That’s mostly it,” Becca shrugged. “If Sharon agrees—”

“Oh, Sharon agrees,” the woman in question piped up from where she had settled on a second dining chair next to Brock, reaching out to take her fiancé’s hand. “It’ll be good to get away from S.H.I.E.L.D. for a bit,” she added sadly, and Peggy frowned.

It hurt, to think that the organisation she had built from the ground up was such a stifling place for her own niece now. It was so upsetting, in fact, that she nearly missed the scowl that marred Brock’s face before he schooled his face into a pretty convincing smile.

Nearly.

She eyed him shrewdly.

Did his jealousy of their acceptance of Thor run so deep that anything connected to him was automatically met with anger and resentment?

“—well,” Becca continued, grinning at Sharon, “then all that’s really left is me teaching you the ropes, and us coordinating moving to Asgard for the foreseeable future.” She looked back at Thor, who smiled tenderly at her before he leaned in to press a kiss to her temple.

“I’ll miss you, sweetheart,” Becky said quietly, and Peggy’s heart broke a little for her friend. Becky had raised Becca, thought of her as her daughter more than she did her actual daughter. It wasn’t easy for Peggy to know she’d miss the birth of Becca’s first—of their first great-grandchild—so it had to be agonising for Becky.

“About that,” Thor began. “If I may… I want to suggest that perhaps, you could accompany us. I’m sure it would mean a great deal to Rebecca to have you there,” he continued, and Peggy surmised from the stunned expression on Becca’s face that Thor’s suggestions was news to her too.

Becky blinked.

“Wouldn’t I be imposing?” she asked in a small, soft voice. “Your father hasn’t exactly been accepting of Becca—would he accept another human on Asgard?”

Thor shrugged. “That is really no concern of mine. He has made too many demands that we have been forced to concede to already. I will not stand for him removing Becca from her family when she needs them most.” His eyes softened, and Peggy was harshly reminded of Daniel, of the way he’d looked at her when she was being unreasonable, of the way he’d gone to bat for her when no one would even give her the time of day.

“Steve’s coming too,” Becca said, although she didn’t take her eyes off Thor. “For a bit.”

Peggy’s gaze swivelled to Steve, who nodded. “I haven’t put down the shield in almost a decade,” he said, and Peggy was fairly certain she wasn’t imagining the way his voice wavered a little. “What better time to take a break than now?” He shrugged and said, “Well, in a few weeks. I’ll have a few things to take care of before I can go too.”

“Just let me know when,” Becky said, startling Peggy a little. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

In a flash, Becca was up and flung her arms around her grandmother, and Peggy smiled lightly. She’d never gotten to have these kinds of moments with her own son—he’d passed away before he’d been able to marry, to have children, and Peggy had been left with no one until Tony was born, and then later Sharon and Becca.

She was glad that she would get to have these moments now, at least.

Becca’s children, Tony’s children, Sharon’s children—if she ever chose to have any—would be her great-grandchildren, and she would love them like they’d been Michael’s.

She leaned her shoulder into Steve’s when he sat beside her, taking her small, wrinkled hand in his.

“Almost feels perfect,” he said quietly, watching Becca and Becky with a very familiar gleam in his eye. “Doesn’t it?” He looked at her and squeezed her hand carefully—so very carefully.

Peggy knew everything he wasn’t saying.

They’d lost Timothy only a few months ago, and Gabe a year before that. Dernier, Morita, Falsworth and Barnes had been gone for so long they felt like distant memories to her, and the others were only a little fresher in her mind than that—although she supposed they were much fresher in Steve’s mind. They were the only ones left of their merry little band, and… she understood what he meant.

They still had family, and it felt almost like home—but nothing ever would without the others.

“Yes,” she agreed, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, taking comfort in his presence. “Almost.”

——————

THE EFFECT OF POPULAR CULTURE ON WARTIME PROPAGANDA: CAPTAIN AMERICA

The character of Captain America was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon at the instruction of Senator Brandt after Captain Steve Rogers—a soldier without a military rank at that time—received the super serum and successfully survived the procedure. The character that was based on Steve Rogers’ life and journey to become the first and only American super soldier first saw the light on March 10th, 1942 in what would become a monthly collection that ended in July 1949, for after the war people lost interest in these kinds of stories.

[…] Thus we can see the importance that offers this comic as a primary source, as well as being interesting to study the covert propaganda mechanisms. It also shows how people reacted to the horrors of war, especially those who felt that it was something that could happen to themselves, like the creators of Captain America. […] All the same, the collection of Captain America is most suitable for this type of study because we do not just see an imaginary superhero fighting Nazis and preventing them from seizing global control, but we see an American soldier and patriot fighting for his rights and his ideals.

This is something to keep in mind when analysing these comics because, after all, Steve Rogers is a soldier and a real man, rather than another superhero. There is no official report on how Captain Rogers felt about his life being used to create propaganda, although there are several interviews available with members of the Howling Commandos, who all imply with varying degrees of subtlety that the Captain was not a fan of being followed around by cameras during missions.

[…] Captain America has become a classical icon in the American culture over time, paraded about in comic books and films to promote what one can generally classify as “traditional Christian values”. An interesting, if not important, question one must ask themselves here is whether Captain Rogers supported those values himself. What little sources remain documenting the Captain’s life before he received the serum paint a picture that does not always fit with the image propaganda painted.

Rogers was, for example, the only child of a widowed, Irish immigrant mother, sickly and small in stature, and a card-carrying socialist whose arrest record was more impressive than several of today’s most well-known activists’. The only thing from his propaganda Captain Rogers ever openly agreed with was that he valued his new powers because he hadn’t always been this healthy—he used them to fight adversaries, Nazis and villainous HYDRA, to defend his homeland and principles because it was the right thing to do, not because he sought to fight anyone.

[…] also in one of the first issues of the Captain America comics after Captain Rogers’ rescue of the 107th Regiment from Azzano, we are introduced to his inseparable partner, Bucky, who is the mascot of the 107th regiment in the comic books. This character soon became almost as popular as Captain America, because children didn’t have to dream about superheroes anymore—they could be one even when they were as young as Bucky Barnes.

Of course, James Buchanan Barnes, the inspiration for the character, was no child, nor a simple mascot for the 107th Regiment. The decision to make a grown man, who was an accomplished soldier that made the rank of Sergeant before he finished boot camp and was handpicked for extended training as an expert marksman, was almost definitely a carefully considered one.

He was Captain Rogers’ childhood best friend and rumoured to be the reason Captain Rogers’ decided to save the imprisoned soldiers at Azzano. His influence on Captain Rogers, both as a comic book character and as his real-life right-hand man, is undeniable and must be considered in the context of this study. […] little is known how Sergeant Barnes felt about his comic book character, although several of the surviving members of the Howling Commandos have implied that neither Barnes nor Rogers were particularly pleased with their fictive counterparts.

[…] on the pages of this comic, the fears and concerns of the American society at the time, regarding their ideas about the war and the Germans, are reflected.

[…] nevertheless, it should be noted that Captain America was meant to be a figure that brings hope to the society, to bring it together to overcome the crisis. Not only this, with his ideals based on the reform of the New Deal, they could recover it to set a perfect example to try to carry out a new economic change. […] even after Sergeant’s Barnes’ and Captain Rogers’ untimely and tragic demises, the figures of Captain America and Bucky Barnes continued growing, expanding and reaching mythical proportions.

With Captain Rogers’ miraculous recovery and revival, and his subsequent breakdown of everything the public has been fed by propaganda during the last sixty years, the question has arisen of how much of written wartime history is correct, and how much of it is the result of propaganda made real by fictional characters.

[…] perhaps we live in a historic moment in time in which we need to appeal to the fictional characters to find heroes and role models that everyone should and could follow.

—Marina Chorro Giner, “Political Propaganda during WWII: Captain America”, unpublished article on academia.edu about the influence of popular culture as political propaganda during WWII, March 2013

———————

Tony Stark’s Personal Lab, Avengers Tower, Manhattan, New York, United States of America

12:23 A.M., 28 April 2016

Tony

Tony was a few hours into his favorite, semi-hazy mindset, tinkering with one of his newer prototypes—a modified version of the Mark IV suit, possibly designed with specs of every individual Avenger in mind, just in case—grease smeared across his cheek and all over his shirt when the elevator dinged pleasantly, and a heavily pregnant Pepper waddled into his workshop, one hand supporting her belly and the other pressed to her lower back.

Tony dropped his screwdriver and shot to his feet, rushing towards his girlfriend. “Hey Pep,” he said gently, because last week he’d greeted her too loudly and she’d cried for an hour and then yelled at Rhodey for not getting her French fries.

Tony was a genius. He occasionally learned from his mistakes—and the first thing he’d learned during Pepper’s pregnancy was to not aggravate or question the expectant mommy.

“What’re you doing down here?” he added, subtly walking her to the ultra-comfortable couch he’d put in his lab because Pepper—and occasionally Becca, when she got bored and needed to rib someone other than Cap—wandered down here to find him regularly.

“It’s late,” she told him reproachfully. “Rhodey’s not here to cuddle me, so you have to.” She tugged on his hand and frowned at him. “Come to bed with me.”

Usually, Pepper telling him to come to bed did the trick fine—Tony really did have a hard time saying no to her in general, and it was twice as bad now that she was pregnant and he owed her because “she was letting his spawn dance on her bladder for nine months”, and really, he couldn’t argue with that.

Of course, Pepper used that argument on him and Rhodey for everything—ranging from letting her have the last slice of bacon to driving to the grocery store in the middle of the night to get her the good kind of chocolate, because it “just wasn’t the same” if they got it delivered—but that didn’t make it any less effective.

Tony looked longingly over his shoulder at the suit he’d been working on.

Pepper sighed. “Alright. Compromise. Show me what you’re working on first, then bed.”

Tony beamed and led her back to the workbench, plopping down on his seat and gesturing to the suit—that would fit Cap’s dorito-esque proportions perfectly once it was finished—excitedly while he explained the features he’d built into it. Pepper smiled indulgently at him, rubbing her fingers through his loose, curly hair—he hadn’t put any product in it today, and he knew she liked it best that way.

“Steve’ll definitely appreciate it,” she told him when he fell silent.

Tony sighed and leaned forward, resting his forehead against the swell of her stomach, letting his eyes drift shut for a moment. He hadn’t slept in a while, because… because he needed to be sure that everything was ready, was safe by the time the baby—babies—would arrive, and he didn’t have a lot of time left.

Pep was due in five weeks—Becca in thirteen.

Sure, Becca wouldn’t be in the Tower for a while after the baby was born, and she was probably going to be safer on Asgard than anywhere else, but… just in case.

Just in case any of his nightmares turned out to be true.

He was pulled from his thoughts by a dull thump against his forehead. He looked up and blinked at Pepper, who was clearly fighting a smile.

“Was that—” he said, astonished, “Did my own kid just kick me in the head?”

Pepper snorted a laugh and Tony gaped at her. “My kid kicked me,” he repeated, slightly hysterically.

“Kid’s got good sense already,” someone said from behind him, and Tony whirled around on his wheelie chair to find the fucking Widow and her younger, redder shadow crowded in his doorway.

“Well, fuck you too,” Tony blurted, although he winced as Pepper smacked the back of his head for cursing in front of the—unborn—baby.

“We have to talk to you,” Wanda said slowly, accent lightly coloring her words. “We have…” she frowned and looked to Nat with a light frown, “…discovered something. Possibly.”

Pepper huffed a sigh. “You can have him for thirty minutes. No longer,” she said sternly, wagging her finger at the two other women. “It’s late and I need sleep, and I need my favorite teddy bear in my bed—preferably after he’s showered the grease off.”

Widow smirked. “Yes, ma’am.”

With that, Pepper waddled out of the lab, leaving Tony alone with their resident lethally reds. “Okay,” he said. “Well. Whaddya got?”

----------------------------

Poetic Edda – Hovamol – stanza 81 to 89

“Give praise to the day at evening, to a woman on her pyre, to a weapon which is tried, to a maid at wedlock, to ice when it is crossed, to ale that is drunk.

When the gale blows hew wood, in fair winds seek the water, sport with maidens at dusk, for day’s eyes are many; from the ship seek swiftness, from the shield protection, from the sword cuts and from the maiden kisses.

By the fire drink ale, over ice go on skates; buy a steed that is lean and a sword when tarnished.

A man shall trust not the oath of a maid, nor the word a woman speaks, for their hearts on a whirling wheel were fashioned, and fickle their breasts were formed.

In a breaking bow or a burning flame, a ravening wold or a croaking raven, in a grunting boar, a tree with roots broken, in billowy seas or a bubbling kettle, in a flying arrow or falling waters.

In ice new formed or the serpents folds, in a bride’s bed-speech or a broken sword; in the sport of bears or in sons of kings. In a calf that is sick, or a stubborn thrall, a flattering witch or a foe new slain.

In a light, clear sky or a laughing throng, in the bowl of a dog or a harlot’s grief!

In a brother’s slayer, if thou meet him abroad, in a half-burned house, in a horse full swift; one leg hurt and the horse is useless… None had ever such faith as to trust in them all.”

—Predictions of Odin One-Eyed, King of Asgard and the Nine, as quoted by Snorri

--------------------------------

Tony Stark’s Personal Lab, Avengers Tower, Manhattan, New York, United States of America

2 A.M., 28 April 2016

Steve

Steve yawned and rubbed his hand through his undoubtedly messy hair.

He had rolled straight out of bed when J.A.R.V.I.S. had called for him, and the only reason he hadn’t rolled right into the suit was because the A.I. had assured him it wasn’t an Assemble-call. He had, thus, not made a lot of effort, and wandered down to Tony’s lab in his pyjama’s.

His only concession to social convention had been to pull on an incredibly soft t-shirt, and thick, woollen socks that Thor had once gifted him.

“Tony,” he complained as soon as the elevator doors opened, “why am I here? I could be sleeping.”

He stopped short when he caught sight of Natasha and Wanda, both gaping at him with parted lips, Tony standing a little behind them, his hair wild and curly and his expression sheepish.

“You woke him up for this?” Natasha demanded, rounding on Tony with a mighty frown. “I thought we agreed to wait until tomorrow, at least—J.A.R.V.I.S. hasn’t even finished processing all the information!” She gestured towards the large holographic screen angrily, and Steve looked too, unsure of what he was looking at.

“I didn’t agree to anything,” Tony protested. “You said—”

“We don’t know anything!” Natasha bit out harshly, uncharacteristically emotional and expressive.

“He should know!” Tony argued.

Nat opened her mouth to argue back, but Steve had had enough. “Guys!” he yelled, startling them all. “What do I need to know?”

Tony blinked wide-eyed at him. “Uh,” he said. “See. The thing is…” He stopped and looked helplessly at Natasha, who had her arms crossed over her chest and was glaring at him.

“Steve,” Wanda said timidly from where she stood, slightly behind Natasha, her eyes wide and imploring. “I didn’t want to tell you unless I was sure.” She had pulled the sleeves of her long t-shirt down over her hands and was fiddling with the edges nervously. Steve hadn’t seen her look this withdrawn and nervous in… God, he didn’t even know how long, and he didn’t like it.

“Tell me what, kid?” he asked, careful to keep his tone calmer than before.

“We think Hydra might be back,” Tony blurted, before his eyes went wide again and he clapped his own hands over his mouth.

Steve stared at him.

“That’s not funny,” he croaked, his hands curling into fists at the mere idea. “That’s not fucking funny.”

Natasha looked at him, for the first time since she’d turned from him to yell at Tony, and her eyes were so sad, so horribly sad, that it made his skin crawl. He stood stock still as she approached, didn’t move when she laid a hand on his arm, didn’t breathe as she said, softly, “No one’s laughing, Steve.”

“I destroyed them,” he said, a little desperate. “I burned them to the ground, and I salted the earth, I made sure nothing was left.” He didn’t realize how loud he was speaking until the ringing silence that followed the last, shouted word. “I died destroying them,” he whispered. “They’re gone. Tony, you’re—you’re wrong.”

“It wasn’t Tony,” Wanda said quietly, and Steve startled at the sound of her voice.

“What?”

“It wasn’t Tony,” she repeated. “I found them. And we’re not sure, but… we’re as sure as we can be.”

Steve noted, right then, that his breathing was more unsteady than it had been since he’d received the serum. He felt like he was having an asthma attack for the first time in eighty years.

He couldn’t say he’d missed it.

He sat, heavily, in the nearest wheelie chair and stared at his hands—he’d killed, pretty indiscriminately, with these hands, had tried to raze everything even remotely related to Hydra to the ground with these hands—and wondered if everything he’d done, if everything he’d died for…

If it had all been for nothing.

“Tell me,” he finally whispered hoarsely, lifting his gaze from his hands to look at his teammates—his friends. “Tell me everything.”

—————————

E 206th Street, The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States of America

28 April 2016

Brock Rumlow

“Look,” Brock said patiently, slowly, because he knew he was pushing the line here, and that this whole thing could backfire on him very easily. “I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s a good idea, or that I don’t think you could and should do it.” He pushed up from the bed he shared with Sharon and walked over to where she stood, arms crossed over her chest and frowning.

“Shar,” he cajoled, trailing his hands down her upper arms. “I’m so proud of you. And of course, you should absolutely take this amazingopportunity, I’m just…” he shrugged and schooled his face into something semi-hurt. “I just wish I’d been part of the conversation, you know? We’re… I mean,” he sighed. “We’re supposed to be doing all of this together, right? And making huge, career-defining decisions are a part of that, aren’t they?”

He could see Sharon’s anger melting away, replaced by something sheepish—something he had been hoping to incite in her. He was desperately trying to salvage whatever he could from the flaming wreckage that had been his plan to turn Sharon.

In his defence, it had been working—Sharon had been relying on him, mostly, had been talking much more warmly about his fellow S.T.R.I.K.E. agents, who had been vocal about their support of her, while still feeding into the rumours about her supposed misconduct, and Brock had been so close to gently suggesting that maybe they should spend more time with those kinds of people…

With the people that believed her, that didn’t perpetuate a false, twisted version of her, with people like her and Brock—

And then it all got fucked up.

He’d been planning on how to turn Sharon for years, had set everything into motion years ago, had been working it—on her—for the longest time before fucking Rebecca Barnes and her meddlesome band of Avengers had ruined everything.

Fuck those fucking bastards.

And fuck fucking Rebecca Barnes for giving Sharon options.

For getting her away from S.H.I.E.L.D. and from Brock’s direct influence and fuck her for doing it so smoothly and sneakily and fucking publicly that he hadn’t been able to do anything but nod along.

All he could do now was try to pick up whatever pieces were left and try to formulate something new, something equally good or better, something that would get Pierce to listen to him, to acknowledge him and to recognise the work he did for the betterment of Hydra.

“You’re right,” Sharon sighed, arms falling to her side as she leaned back against their dresser. “You’re right, I’m sorry, I should’ve talked about it with you. I just…” she threw her hands up in exasperation and shook her head. “I was so excited, so thrilled by the idea of getting away from it all that I just…” she hesitated. “I just didn’t think about it and said yes.”

Brock lifted a hand to stroke his fingers through her thick, blonde hair as he must’ve done hundreds, if not thousands of times before in the past five years, and heaved a sigh.

Really, he might have grown to like Sharon more, over time, if she’d let him turn her.

She was fucking smart, and if he hadn’t been quite so good an actor, she’d have seen through him years ago, and it didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eyes either.

Not to mention that the sex was fantastic.

It really was too bad she was so independent and opinionated.

So mouthy.

He could’ve put up with her overbearing aunt and Rogers and Barnes if she’d just been a little more… a little more docile, a little more receptive to his needs.

If she would’ve let him turn her to Hydra, rather than take the first opportunity that led away from him with both hands, not even bothering to look back.

Some fiancée she was.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, before she leaned in and kissed him.

He kissed back automatically, without thinking much about it—it’d become a reflex, after all this time—trying to consider what he was going to do now. What use did he have for Sharon now that it had become glaringly obvious that he was never going to be able to turn her unless he would entirely rewrite her memory, like they’d done to the Soldier.

Unlike the Soldier though, Sharon would likely not survive the procedure.

Barnes, however… much as she aggravated him just by existing, Barnes had the exact potential that Sharon now lacked.

He needed access to Barnes, to the Avengers and their plans—

Brock broke the kiss abruptly, leaning back far enough to see Sharon’s quizzical expression.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, forehead creasing into a frown.

“Nothing,” he shrugged, eyeing her carefully, fingers tightening in her hair. “Sorry babe. This ain’t personal.” He abruptly tightened his hand into a fist and yanked, smashing Sharon’s head against the dresser as hard as he could. She gave a yelp that abruptly cut off when she hit the hardwood surface, and dropped like a sack of bricks when he let go off her, falling to the floor of their bedroom in an inelegant heap.

Brock eyed her prone body.

Well. That was step one.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and shot a quick text to Jack Rollins.

Time to implement step two and work out the rest of the plan.

HYDRA had sat back and watched Barnes and the Avengers mess up their plans for too long. It was high time to remind Barnes of her place in the world—not a future princess of fucking Asgard, but a future Soldier of Hydra.

—————————

Start from the beginning:

In Hell We Stand By You:

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Never Feel Alone:

(1) (2)

Decisions: (1)

Dancing with a Limp:

(1) (2)

Chances:

(1)

Starting Over:

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Dancing in the Rain: 

(1)

Or read it HERE on AO3 :D Find the next chapter HERE on Tumblr :)

[volklana]

I Was Getting Kinda Used To Being Someone You Loved

*Not proof read and I didn’t get to tag anyone cos ya girl is sleep deprived. All mistakes will be fixed asap!

Title, as usual comes from this song: 

Request:  Friend, would you mind writing a fic where you were madly in love with a guy prior to Bucky being your fiancee and the guys comes to visit during a party and you two reconnect making Bucky scared

Warnings: Angst...lots of angst!

Words: 1,168

“You know I hate parties doll,” Bucky whined, while you pulled at the lapels of his blazer.

“For me?” you pleaded, in a half smirk, knowing full well Bucky would never deny you anything you asked him for.

He threw his head back in defeat “But no dancing,”

“Oh I think there will definitely be dancing,” you continued to tease before pulling him closer and placing a kiss on his lips.

“Just don’t leave me on my own y/n,” he asked in a small voice.

“Never Buck,” you promised.

 As soon as Bucky found Steve the tension in his shoulders immediately eased and you fell into an easy chatter with Bruce, pulled ever so slightly from it every time you heard Bucky’s big beautiful laugh.

“Did Thor bring any of that good stuff?” Bruce wondered out loud.

“I sincerely hope not,” you threw a glance Bucky’s way and he looked sheepishly back as he took a sip from his cup. Both remembering well the last time he had drank too much and you and Steve had to drag the Giggle Soldier upstairs and Steve had to sit on him until he hiccupped himself to sleep. The ghost of a smile tugged on your lips from the memory and Bucky smiled back.

“Would you excuse me for a moment y/n?” Bruce pulled your attention back, and headed in the direction of a certain red headed agent.

 Deciding your cup was too empty for your liking you made your way to get a refill.

“Y/n? Is that really you?” a voice you hadn’t heard in two years caused you to spin around.

“Thomas?” you asked voice rising three octaves.

“It is you,” he smiled in disbelief pulling you to him in a bone crushing hug, “how the hell have you been angel?”

“I’m fine!” you chuckled, “I’m fine, how are you? Are you still based in Alaska?”

“I’m on leave, I’m heading back in a few weeks. You have no idea how good it is to see you!”

“And you,” you countered “let’s get a drink.”

You grabbed a table and Thomas began filling you in on his life is Alaska, you laughed along light heartedly as he showed you pictures of his beautiful Siberian Husky Thor, you thought the real life Thor would really appreciate the fact that a loveable mutt had been named after him.

Bucky was boring holes into the back of your head with his eyes and Steve followed his gaze, but said nothing.

“I was always so surprised when they broke up, I for sure thought they would be together until they died,” Sam mused as your laugh floated across the room, “y/n was besotted with him and they were always laughing.”

“Guess you never really know,” Steve added “I guess you could really love someone, but that’s not always enough.”

“I guess,” Sam countered, “It’s good to see her really laughing though isn’t it?”

Steve’s response of agreement wasn’t lost on his best friend, who downed the rest of his drink.

Bucky felt like he was swallowing a red hot iron, he was being blinded by white light, there was a ringing in his ears as he watched you toss your head back, soft hair falling around your face and you moved your hand to swipe it away, Thomas’ hand on your arm.

Bucky couldn’t recall a time he had ever made you laugh like that, and he wracked his brain silently praying for a memory to present itself but despite how hard he tried, he had to concede that he never had.

His feet were moving of their own accord, as he pushed his way through the crowd and through the doors, Steve calling after him but falling on deaf ears.

 When you finally found him, your face was still light and you smiled up at him.

“Here you are, I’ve been searching everywhere for you!”

Bucky huffed, “Surprised you even noticed I was gone. So much for not leaving me on my own huh?”

“Buck,” you reached out to him but he buffed your hand away, “I’m sorry I got caught up in the moment, I haven’t seen him in two years.”

“Just talked?” he quirked an eyebrow at you.

That hurt more than a slap in the face, “Yes James, just talked, that’s all. Do you honestly think so little of me?”

“You love him,” Bucky countered dryly “and don’t even try to deny it because you know I can always sniff you out when you lie.”

He didn’t even give you a chance to answer, before launching into another rant “You never laugh like that with me. Your face never lights up like that when we talk. And I get it I’m a heavy weight to carry around but I thought I made you happy. I can see now that I don’t, not really. I’m too heavy for you.”

“Bucky it’s different with you, I’m different with you.”

Bucky took a step away from you, and you winced it was the equivalent of watching every single wall you had spent months knocking down, spring back up and you couldn’t get through. You and Bucky never fought, you talked of course, but never fought.

“I don’t blame you y/n, of course I don’t. It’s just….”

“Just?” you tried softly.

“Just… I let my guard down, and then you pulled the rug. I was getting kind of used to being someone you loved.”

“James,” you cried out forcing your way into his arms, gratefully feeling them lock around you, and your tears stained his shirt, “Please don’t talk like you’ve given up on me or us. I couldn’t take it.”

It took him a while to spring into action but soon he was rubbing soothing patterns into your back.

“You’re the only one for me,” you mumbled into his chest, “the only person I’m in love with. I’m sorry if I made you feel any less than that. But I don’t want you to ever think that I am not head over heels for you. If I’m carefree with him, it’s because it doesn’t matter to me the way this does, the way you do.

“I was so scared of losing you, I overreacted. Completely.”

“As if you could lose me,” you laughed through your tears and pulled your ring for him to inspect, “there’s a ring on this now Buck.”

He dipped his head to kiss your hand before placing a kiss on your face just beside your lips.

“Buck, I know it’s hard for you, believe me I do, but I need to know that you know if I talk to another guy that doesn’t mean I’m ever gonna leave you. You have to know that!”

He nodded, “I just can’t believe you choose me doll, you could have someone good, someone sane.”

“I guess I’m getting kinda used to being someone you love too Buck,” you teased and he huffed a laugh inspite of himself, “and I’ll always choose you.”