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sorcerersofnyc · 4 years ago

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The Last Thing Left (Zemo x F!Reader) 6/9

If it wasn’t so painfully ironic (and hilarious to watch,) Helmut would find the relationship between Sam and James a little sad.

Ghosts weren’t enough to hold two people together.

While they wait for Torres to locate Donya Madani, Zemo brings Sam and Bucky to the home he once shared with you.

You reunite and he reflects upon his relationship with you (his wife’s friend and his friend’s wife) and your journey from being people with mutual friends to partners.

Chapter 6: When he wakes up beside you, Zemo remembers the day everything changed.

Angst, various mentions of death & mourning, Zemo’s wife’s name is Heike because of comics. Implied alcoholism by Zemo as a means to deal with his guilt. I use Serbian Cyrillic as a stand-in for Sokovian. The reader likes waffles (this is a non-negotiable fact).

Note: Main Character is neutral in most regards, but the story was written with my own cultural background in mind. (In other words, I won’t say what she looks like but I envision her as being black.)

First Chapter | Previous

***

Grief softens, but it never truly leaves.

So when Helmut wakes beside you, he isn’t surprised to find grief there as well. Pain has been a constant companion over the years but today’s grief is nothing but a dull throb in his chest.

He had a dream about his wife again. It wasn’t a sad dream, it didn’t hurt to look upon her face, but his heart ached for her regardless.

In his dream, she was happy, happy to sit and chat in a home that wasn’t quite in Sokovia or Spain, but rather a mix of them both. You were there, too, laughing and smiling alongside her.

She was taking the time to explain something to him, something you already seemed to understand. You both laughed when he failed to get the joke.

With a sigh, Helmut sits up in his bed and turns toward the window.

It’s dawn. The rising sun baths the room in an orangy-pink glow and you sleep soundly beside him. He traces little circles unto your shoulder as he thinks about breakfast, what might he make for you. The answer is obvious, really.

He then turns his thoughts toward his mission, whether or not Sam’s associate would locate Madani soon.

He also thinks about what you may do if he kissed you awake.

He thinks about many things as you sleep beside him.

And as he listens to the steady rhythm of your breath, he thinks that he’s truly happy.

***

You never asked what happened to Vasily Zaev and Helmut didn’t offer.

News of his death never reached any headlines in Spain or any other International News Broadcast for that matter.

There were the occasional rumors of a scandal, many of which were exacerbated by social media, but nothing outside the ordinary.

His demise was attributed to liver failure and he’d given his entire inheritance to a young woman about a quarter of his age. Tragic indeed.

In the weeks that followed that night at the Opera, you took an interest in his work. There would be no more missions like the one with Vasily (none would ever be that easy and he didn’t like to see you so scared,) but there were plenty of opportunities to conduct research.

And on some nights, you’d talk about more than just mission, nights when you shared your hopes and dreams for the future, your past sorrows, and secret anxieties.

He’d sit with you while you worked on your art, bought you flowers when you completed a commissioned project, and asked plenty of questions about some of your more unorthodox means.

Sometimes you’d take breaks together and watch television or read.

It was strange, just like the day you first hugged him, Helmut felt as though the two of you had breached something.

He now knew where you were born, how you became involved in the arts, how you felt the night you met Dominik at Heike’s dinner party, (“I always thought she set us up on purpose, but she always denied that she did.”)

It was those stories, those small, stolen moments that made him see you differently.

So by the time autumn settled and painted the leaves orange, red and brown, you were no longer just a friend his wife had—you weren’t even the wife of a friend that he had.

You were a friend to him as well.

“Have you seen this?” You asked one day, sitting right beside him on the couch. You were so close, Helmut could feel the heat of your body pressed up against him.

“See what?” He asked, though he knew what you would say.

“This article.” You slid your phone closer to him, leaned forward so close that the curve of your bosom pressed against his arm for just a moment before you leaned away. For the sake of your pride, he pretended not to notice.

The articles mattered more than creating an awkward situation.

He learned that you found articles about the Avengers to be the most interesting. Each headline would often read something like: ‘Accountability: Who Pays for the Avengers’ Mistakes?’ or ‘Sokovia Six Months Later’ and ‘‘Banning Ironman? One Minister Holds Firm.’

They were engrossing.

“They say the U.N. may get involved.” You said one day. “What do you think would happen if they did?”

“Something I’d like to see.” Was his thoughtful reply. And it was true; because even with your help, even as you grew closer together, the weight of his promise still bore down upon him.

The weight of his failure still haunted his sleep.

So for every moment he spent with you, he worked ten times harder. He worked late into the night to complete his research, learned everything he could about the Avengers and the Winter Soldier to complete his plans.

He had to work; he had no choice. Because every laugh, every smile, every lingering glance, every reprieve from his grief was a betrayal to that promise he made to his family—because happiness, even for a moment, meant that he had forgotten them.

There was no other way to justify his actions. In what other way could he be happy in a world where his family was dead?

He hoped to find the answers at the bottom of a bottle, but scotch, whiskey, brandy, and vodka, couldn’t provide a balm for his soul. Not the way your smile did.

So clearly drinking was his only option, the safest option, because he couldn’t let his thoughts linger on you.

He couldn’t compromise his mission.

But then one day, in mid-November, something changed.

Helmut read the headline for an article he knew would suit your fancy, but you didn’t come down for breakfast to discuss it with him, nor did you open when he knocked on your door.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” you told him—but you never came.

You left your room around noon but you barely spoke a word.

Helmut should have been happy for the opportunity to work, the chance to focus without you stealing his gaze, but he couldn’t ignore the lump that formed in the back of his throat when his thoughts drifted to you.

Over the past 7 months, you encouraged him to talk about his feeling, to open up more—but it seemed you weren’t interested in doing the same.

You left the house a word to him.

So Helmut waited for you to return:

He conducted his research and decrypted more files.

He brewed a pot of coffee.

He prepared lunch.

Had a glass of whiskey.

He checked his phone for messages but found nothing from you.

He reorganized your spice cabinets, bringing the most used containers to the front.

He checked his phone again.

Had a glass of whiskey.

And finally, when evening arrived and you still hadn’t come home to him, Helmut went into your room without permission.

He was careful not to disturb your things, (even if he wanted nothing more than to pick your stray socks off the floor,) and looked around the space.

There were books and magazines neatly stacked across every surface, their genres ranged from art and fashion to relationships and grief.

He lingered on that last title before turning his attention to a paper on your nightstand. The page was wrinkled, spotted, and ripped in many places, but he knew what it was before he even held it in his hands.

It was the letter Dominik kept in his pocket, the one he held on to so tightly, the one he had with him when he died.

He frowned, and his eyebrows knit together in concern for you.

You were grieving, and your grief had taken you backward, back to the promise of a simpler time. The letter was filled with the musings of budding love, a love that had grown and flourished before the cruelties of life intervened.

Helmut understood the unpredictable nature of grief, how it came and went without reason or regard, how days or even months could go by before it returned in full force.

So he set the letter down with a sigh and left your room as quickly as he came. You arrived home 20 minutes later.

“Hello,” He greeted you by the door.

“Oh—hi.” You paused by the door, a bag of groceries in hand. He followed you into the kitchen.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” He asked.

“No, I’m… I got it.” You placed the bag on the counter, unloading a bag of flour, eggs, and a box of powdered cocoa.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” You said, but then pause when you opened the spice cabinet. Your movements slowed before you stilled completely.

“Helmut? Did you…”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no, it’s just… I…”

Helmut didn’t know it at the time, but Dominik would organize your cabinets when he returned from duty. It was his way of telling you he was home if you weren’t there to greet him.

It was that gesture that broke you.

You placed both your hands over your mouth but even that couldn’t force back your cry. “I’m sorry,” you apologized, “I’m sorry—I’m ok,” you lied, but it only seemed to make you cry harder.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Helmut spoke softly. With a hand on your shoulder, he turned you around to face him but you only shook your head. "Let me help you.”

It took a few more moments of coaxing, but once you calmed, you told him everything.

“His… his birthday is next week.” You said, and it didn’t take a genius to know who you were speaking of. “He wanted me to bake a cake.”

You set a yearly reminder to try new recipes a week in advance, a reminder you’d gotten that morning. “Sometimes I look down at my ring and I still can’t believe it. That’s I’m a...that I’m a widow.” Your voice shook around the word and you sniffled again.

Helmut walked you over to the table, helped you sit on a chair, and poured you a glass of Chardonnay.

“… I never wanted to move to Sokovia—did he tell you that?” He did, but Helmut thought it best not to interrupt you. “I wanted to be with him but I never would have considered it before I met Heike… but I loved him, Helmut, I loved him so much and he promised I’d be happy. There are days when I wake up and-” You didn’t finish that sentence, but he thought he knew what you’d say. There were days when you’d wake up and wonder why you were saved, why your loved ones died and you survived. He didn’t know if you remembered, but you told him this before, on the day he first brought you to Spain.

“… He used to wonder if he made a mistake,” Helmut started, “If he’d done you a disservice by asking you to move when his duties kept him away.” He released a bitter laugh at the memory. “He asked me once if he were selfish.”

“What did you say?”

“That he was.” Helmut shrugged, remembering the look of resignation that crossed his friend’s face, a look you then mirrored exactly.

Helmut put his hand on your shoulder.

“He was selfish, but he didn’t make a mistake… your happiness wasn’t wasted and he’d want you to be happy again.” After all, you didn’t fail Dominik. You hadn’t given him a false sense of security, a promise of safety away from the fighting—Not like he had with his own family.

At first, you looked as though he said something outrageous, something you couldn’t quite believe. But then you nodded, releasing your emotions with a shuddering sigh.

“You’re right… he would want me to, want us both to…”

He sat beside you for the rest of the night. He’d listened to you talk and then when there was nothing left to say, he sat with you in peaceful silence, your head against his shoulder.

And on his birthday, Helmut helped you bake a cake.

You stood in the kitchen together, mixing batter and flouring pans. The sweet scent of your creation spread and the home you shared was filled with joy and warm memories.

By the time you finished, you were exhausted, so he offered to take you to the best restaurant in the city.

It was the least he could do for you.

When you arrived, Helmut told the hostess of your reservation—Zemo, a party of two—and she checked his name off a long list that he somehow managed to get ahead of. The hostess noticed your wedding bands, and as she stepped away from the podium, she said,

‘De esta manera, el señor y la señora Zemo.’ Right this way, Mister and Misses Zemo.

Your eyes growing to the size of dinner plates as you turned to him, but he kept his gaze settled on the hostess, his jaw set closed.

It was an honest mistake, one he’s sure others made before, but to hear it said aloud was baffling. He intended to correct the young lady, but she gestured for you to follow before he thought of what to say.

If he said you were friends, others would presume you were having an affair. Normally, the opinions of others wouldn’t concern him, but he didn’t want anyone to think badly of you.

“That was weird,” you said. “I forgot people must think we’re…”

“Should I have corrected her?”

“It was an honest mistake, nothing worth embarrassing her over.”

And that was that.

You both agreed to treat it as a joke, to have fun with the idea because the alternative, explaining how you came to be together, was much worse.

And besides, Helmut thought while taking in his second cocktail, it wasn’t exactly hard to feign some level of attraction to you; you looked beautiful that night. He liked the way your formal clothing fit around your curves, and the way your heels gave shape to your legs.

He felt immediately guilty for that, however, and followed that guilt with another sip of his drink.

But that night wasn’t the only time someone mistook the two of you for a couple. Like meeting someone whose face one begins to see everywhere they go, he began to notice it more and more.

When he signed for your packages the delivery person would look at his ring and never bother to ask for familial confirmation. The old woman at the bakery would smile a secret, knowing, smile when he asked for two pastries to take home with him. The list of culprits went on and on. Everywhere he went people saw his ring and they’d assume he had a wife at home—that you were his wife at home.

On a gloomy day in January, you convinced him to visit an art gala with you. You made a group of friends around the area but one fell violently ill after a trip to New Jersey. You didn’t want to go alone so he agreed to put his work on hold for the evening.

You lead him to a room of abstract paintings and his attention was torn between the open bar and dizzying array of dark shapes pressed across the underside of a canvas. He couldn’t appreciate the work the same way you did, but he tried.

As he looked for what you described as ‘the emotional turmoil conveyed by the paint strokes,’ you drifted to the next piece and a gentleman approached you.

He was tall, with neatly trimmed hair and a clean-shaven face. The man seemed to recognize you from somewhere and offered his deepest condolences for Sokovia.

“Thank you,” you nodded.

“It was a genuine tragedy, a modern-day Pompeii.” His words gave you a reason to pause, which he seemed to take as permission to wax poetic about Sokovia’s demise in some futile attempt to prove his intellectual prowess.

“Yes, well, thanks for that.” You continued on politely. He didn’t seem to notice the exasperated edge. He opened his mouth to say something else, to perhaps touch you on the shoulder, and Helmut made the immediate decision to ensure that didn’t happen.

“Драга,” Dear, he called as he approached you, placing his hand on your lower back. “I’ve brought you a drink.” Helmut offered you the cocktail from the table, one he was about to drink himself before the man made you uncomfortable. You smiled, a look of relief on your face.

The man was no genuine threat, probably just a lover of art, but something in the way he looked at you, the way his gaze drifted from your face to your wedding band and the instant look of shame that overtook his (admittedly handsome) features, gave his intentions away—and Helmut didn’t like his intentions at all.

“Хвала ти љубави,” Thank you, my love, you replied with the mischievous smile you adopted whenever someone mistook you for being his wife. It was a playful flirtation, one that meant nothing.

Helmut greeted the man with a simple nod, pretending to have been oblivious to his blatant flirting, before guiding you away.

“I never would have thought to compare the destruction of Sokovia at the hands of an Artificial Intelligence to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Pompeii. How truly genius.” He said in a mocking tone.

“Stop that,” you nudged him, hushed laughter in your voice.

“I hope that isn’t what passes as flirting these days.”

“Flirting? He wasn’t flirting.”

Helmut struck you with a judgemental look. You tilted your head in contemplation.

“He wasn’t flirting,” you repeat. “It was just weird, that’s not really a topic most people bring up at parties.” You finally slowed your steps and you looked at a statue in the center of the room. It was clearly meant to represent a couple, but their abstract forms created a tangle of limbs that hurt his eyes to look at.

It was then he decided he hated contemporary art.

You took a sip of your drink—his drink—and turned to him. Your eyes met briefly, and you smiled, your eyes sparkling with mischievous glee.

“Let’s see what’s in the next room, душо,” Honey. You exaggerate.

“Of course, драга, lead the way.” You hooked your arm around his and you explored the rest of the gallery.

Eventually, you reached the main lobby where you set your empty glass on a table with dozens of others. An orchestra played a mix of soft melodies and something he thought to be tunes from an action movie. The music found it’s underscore in the murmurs of the guests who indulged themselves in cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

He watched them for a moment and a dark feeling filled his belly.

This was the life he should have been living—perhaps not at a gaudy contemporary art gallery but something just as fabulous and amazing. This was the life you deserved to live.

Had it not been for Ultron, for the Avengers and others like them, he’d be enjoying this life between missions and military tours.

He might have even retired early, lived his life in bliss.

He felt angry, distraught, and disappointed all at once. So many dangerous thoughts spun around in his head and without even thinking, he looked at you. In his moment of grief and self-pity, he looked toward you to anchor him.

Your eyes landed on the couples swaying back and forth on the polished floor of the gallery. He noticed how close you stood to him, how your arm wrapped around his, the way your hand rested on his forearm.

He took a breath and he made himself smile.

“Would you like to dance, драга?”

“I’ve seen you dance, Helmut. I don’t.”

“You wound me.” He said, pulling you toward the others anyway. “You’ve yet to see me waltz.” (Or perhaps you did, at his wedding or your own, but it wasn’t the time to bring that up.)

He unraveled his arm from your and slid into position, pulling you close.

“You remember the steps, don’t you?” He asked because you had far less practice waltzing than he did. You nodded, but your eyes proved less certain than the gesture implied. “Don’t worry, I’ll lead.”

And he did.

Helmut led you through the steps of the dance, a simple box step he mastered many years ago.

“I think people are looking at us,” you whispered.

“They can take notes,” he replied. You were the only person in his gaze.

You anchored him; your kindness, your friendship, your playful banter, and your outlandish sense of design. With you he felt like less of a failure, his grief softened and he could see a clear path forward in your eyes—an alternate path if he was strong enough to take it.

But the U.N. taking actions against the Avengers seemed all but inevitable then. Helmut knew he could use their plans to his advantage, but it also meant he was running out of time.

Still, part of him wanted to surrender to your gaze, but the other part, the part that won, held firm. He tried to look away but then somehow ended up noticing the soft curve of your mouth and the fullness of your lips.

When the orchestra stopped playing, your dance slowed to a stop. But you couldn’t stop staring at each other, both cursed with the knowledge that something between you had changed.

***

Thanks for reading! Next time we'll get to see what happens when your flirtation with Helmut is no longer a game.

Feedback is very much appreciated. Please tell me what you think! This was a fun chapter to write.

Tag list:

@actuallyanita @fillechatoyante @viviace @buckyandlokicanhaveme @sapphiredreamer26 @robur-bellicum

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#zemo #baron zemo #helmut zemo #zemo x reader #mcu zemo #this was the longest chapter yet #my goodness

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midnight-inthe-kitchen · 4 years ago

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“Hotel Potter” (Part 3)

Paring: Remus x Reader (Marauders Era)

Warnings: Fluff, James is bad at fixing things, More awkwardness haha, and mentions of eating issues?

Word Count: 1775

A/n: I didn’t proof read this, so enjoy/I’m sorry... (Also, we’re getting close to the part I had in my DrEaM✨)

You watched as Sirius dropped his bag on the floor before immediately breaking into a sprint to fling himself onto the bed. The bed...

You didn’t know exactly why you were expecting there to be two... I mean that would be a bit excessive for a regular house... but not until this very moment did you realize the consequences of your poor decisions.

“Hey, Y/N,” Marlene called out from the hallway after hearing Sirius’ loud running start. “Good luck!” Her laugh echoed throughout the hall.

Lily came from around the corner to let you know you were always welcome in her room if Sirius turned out to be an actual dog. You simply accepted and just smiled while shedding a singular, figurative tear. “Nah, I’ll be fine... Probably ;)”

It didn’t take you very long to choose a side of the room and stick to it. You were just going to leave most of your stuff in your suitcase to avoid any huge messes. This obviously left you with some time to kill so you wandered back into the hallway.

When you got there, however, all you saw was Remus sitting on the floor in front of the first door James had tried so hard to open. When he saw you step into the hallway, he stood up.

“Where’s James?” you asked confused since they were supposed to be ‘bunking’ together.

Remus shifted his weight, “Oh um, he went to get a hammer, I think.” He shoved his hands in his pockets in hopes of looking less awkward.

“Oh,” you laugh. “Wh- why on Earth does James need a hammer?” You laugh at he thought of James actually fixing anything successfully.

He turned and jabbed his finger behind him to the door. “It, uh... locked us out.” He laughed under his breath as he rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment.

You laughed as well. “...Did you try Alohamora?” you offered to your ‘genius’ friend.

He straightened up a little, almost offended. “We did, actually,” he smiled, “...Except James kept saying ‘Hola-ha-mora’, so it shouldn’t have worked the first three times anyways.”

You, having the heart of a Hufflepuff but intuition of a Ravenclaw, made your way over to him to see the doorknob yourself. Remus shuffled out of the way after first being stunned by your unexpected approach.

“So what’s actually wrong with it, then?” you question, getting on one knee to peer though the keyhole.

Remus awkwardly leaned over your head to look down on the situation but quickly realized how weird it looked from everyone else’s perspective and simply took a step back. “Um... You know I was actually thinking there might be internal rusting somewhere?”

You tutted your tongue on the top of your mouth, still very concentrated. “I mean sure, but that seems very unlikely due to the appearance of the rest of the house. You would think if someone could take the time to polish the toilet-paper holders, the inside of the room locks should be in perfect condition...” Remus nodded in agreement. “... And James doesn’t have the key?” you asked, confused by the concept of poor safety measures.

Remus just shrugged, “He said the house is so old that with unlocking charms, you know, because they are so common in wizarding communities, his parents figured ‘what would be the point’ of keeping any of the keys I suppose? I don’t know... Anyways, I told him that was dumb and then he went to go get a hammer.”

You stood up, having to steady yourself first from the fast rush of blood to your head. “What does he exspect to do?” you wonder out loud, “It’s not like he can just smash the handle off— though that would solve the problem,” you mutter that last part. “...But come on... I mean Mr and Mrs Potter would kill him and let Sirius bury his bones...”

“What?”

“...Nothing,” you continued. “But by the looks of it, all the handles look like an original artist’s craftsmanship which means not only are they more valuable and rare as a completed set, but they’re also way more expensive.”

Remus marveled silently at your quirky fountain of knowledge. For such a quiet and peaceful-minded soul, he often forgot that in the moments you weren’t tarnished by the boisterous personality of everyone else, you were more than bright enough to light up his world for a moment.

Just then, you and Remus turned to where you could both hear quickened footsteps making they’re way up the staircase. “Not to fear, Moony!... You’ll be reunited with your precious books in no ti-” James stopped mid-sentence before he nearly ran into the two of you.

“Back from your quest, oh key-less one?” You watch as James furrowed his brow before glancing at Remus then back to you.

”Ah, yes, I almost—”

“Is that a screwdriver?” you bite your lip to prevent yourself from laughing right in his face. James lifted up the “hammer” he got from heaven knows where with pride.

“No. It’s a hammer, Y/n, jeeze, I would have though you’d know, coming from a nice muggle community.... Now will you please move out of the way so I can fix this thing?” He readjusted his glasses sassily.

By this point in the conversation, Remus and you were nearly having a seizure trying not to burst out in laughter at your friend who really was trying his hardest. You eventually caved and shrunk up against the wall in a ball. “You ca- You can’t fix a door know with-”

“James,” Remus chuckled as he tried to pry the screwdriver from his hands. “That’s not going to-”

You both burst into another fit of laughter as James broke free and started whacking the lock with the butt-end of the device.

When the knob finally came loose, the three of you let out a little cheer. It was you, of course, who realized that the door needed to be lifted up a little while opening or closing becuse the real probably was with the hinges, not the lock.

About fifteen minutes later, when everyone had finally “set up camp”... James gave everyone a grand tour of the house. Your favorite bits were probably the drawing room because of the gorgeous window view and the library/study for obvious reasons. The part that you couldn’t quite get over, though, was the fact that there was a fireplace in practically every room. YAAAS WARMTH✨

When dinner finally hit though, you were definitely hungry. (You weren’t exactly starving because, well, eating had always seemed like a chore to you... Just thanks to the many perks of living in a 26% functioning body... But of course, you would push it aside unless you were on mental overload and therefore stress-ate an entire box of Cheerios plus a whole bag of goldfish and chocolate all night during that one OWLS season). But right now, in the midst of friends and good food, you were excited to spend the first evening of the weekend with them :)

The table (the smaller one meant for family not business guests in the main dining hall, was seated with James and Mary on both ends. Lily had somehow slithered her way to James’ left putting her, Marlene, and Sirius between the two. Peter sat on the left of James, smushing you between Remus on your left and Mary on your right.

You watched as the conversation switched from quidditch fowls, to hot quidditch team players, to James, Sirius, Mary and Marlene competing on who had gone out with the hottest Gryffindor member.

You obviously stayed out of this one as the three of you, Remus, and Peter all watched... Lily would throw in some deviously timed mention about her short flings with Slytherin team boys just to throw James off his lead.

“Sorry about not answering earlier...” Remus stated out of nowhere.

“What?” you muffled, trying not to choke on the soup you were currently obsessing over.

Remus was hoping he would t have to repeat himself, but just when he was about to, your brain registered his words.

“Oh! Oh, no no, that’s totally fine. I actually had just told Sirius that I didn’t care where I was- Wha- I’m sorry,” you laugh nervously, stuttering on every new sentence. WhY wAs iT sO HaRd To TaLk RiGhT NoW? “I just didn’t want to put you in that position, you know having to choose who to sleep with- I MEAN not sleep-sleep with just you know...” You could practically feel your face cooking.

“...Sirius(?).” You both finish as you gesture to the boy across the table from you, trying to stick his spoon to his nose using only his breath.

You both sat there, distracted and watching him until he actually succeeded. “Mary, look!” Right as he turned to show her however, it slid off and splashed soup up in his face.

You propped your head off your hand after a long moment of thought.... “Bet I could do it longer...” you start, turning back to Remus.

A confused smile stretched across his face. “...What?” he questioned again as if he hadn’t hear you properly the first time.

Without answering, you picked up the second spoon placed at your table spot (for whatever reason) and you watched as your reflection became more and more cloudy.

“Are you—”

You turned calmly to meet his face with a spoon now hanging from atop your nose.

After a good couple seconds of Remus staring at you, it finally clicked in his head what you were doing. A rare grin stretched up his face as he grabbed his own spoon and tried it himself.

It took a couple of tries for the spoon to really stick, but as soon as it did, Sirius saw from across the room and automatically turned it into a table-wide competition.

By the time pudding came around, you were holding the record of four minutes and twelve seconds versus Peter somehow who was thirteen seconds shy.

When the competition had ended though, Lily finally asked what the heck the plan was for the rest of the weekend...

In the morning, James said, everyone could go up to an abandoned village area where a muggle summer camp once stood and they could spend the night there. He promised the plumbing still worked for whatever reason, so it could be totally doable.

Every fiber of your being was telling you that was a dumb idea, especially a bunch of teenagers in the woods alone, but whatever right? Majority votes are always won by the delinquents.

#remus lupin x reader #remus lupin #books and libraries #marauders era fanfiction #fanfiction #sirius black #james potter #lily evans #marlene mckinnon #mary macdonald #hogwarts #harry potter #wizarding society #winter break #godrics hollow #moony wormtail padfoot and prongs #marauders

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thevengeanceuniverse · 4 years ago

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Music is Worthless [COMPLETED]

A twist on the soulmate theme where Tony hears the music of other people’s souls. Warning, ready yourself for angst and pining (but there’s a happy end).

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Tony learned from very young that others didn’t hear the music. The music that underlaid a person, their own symphony that exposed the truth of what they were behind the fake smiles and the pleasant expressions.

It was constantly there, sometimes soft, sometimes loud, sometimes heartbreakingly sorrowful. He loved the times it was bright and joyful, inviting you to rock your knees to the melody. And when he was young and innocent, Tony danced to the music playing in his mind with uninhibited freedom, letting his childish laughter intertwine with it and create new harmony.

That didn’t last long. Howard lost the charm in Tony’s tales of the music quickly, shouting to grow the hell up and stop telling lies. Tony didn’t understand how his father could say he was lying when the music was so obvious. It was there all the time when there were people around. Tony only heard silence when he was with himself, so surely his father would hear the music he himself was producing.

It was Jarvis who told him the truth. His father wasn’t the one who was deaf to his music. Tony was the one with the problem.

He was the one hearing music no one else could hear.

The sent him to doctors to “fix” him. ENT specialists, neurologists, psychologists, anyone who might be able to figure where the delusions of sound were coming from. Test after test after inconclusive test, being poked and prodded and questioned and given that same pitying look. That’s the boy who was born Stark mad. His poor parents, they have so much to deal with. Insert sad head shake here. But I guess genius comes with a price.

Maria became more and more distant as time passed. Being married to Howard was its own difficulty, but having a son who could hear things that no one else could? No. It wasn’t getting any better and eventually, she just stopped wanting to know anything at all.

By the time Tony was six, he informed everyone that things had changed. One day he woke up and the music was just gone, he told his doctors, his parents. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. He was better.

He lied. It was hard in the beginning, to stop reacting to the music outwardly. But he knew that it wasn’t safe anymore for him to mention it, that being broken had punishments attached to it. Only Jarvis knew.

Even with everything, he was sometimes grateful for the music, for the warning it granted him. He knew his mother was broken and melancholy inside before she even started taking her sleeping pills during the day. Knew from the sound of the banging drums that his father was in a vindictive mood before he even heard the footsteps. The music warned him, and he always ran to Jarvis in that time because Jarvis was calm classical music that played over his frayed nerves like a rock skipping gently over a placid lake. Soothing him while he rocked in place, hands clamped to his ears and tears streaming down his face, everything around him loud and disjointed and breaking over him like waves trying to drown. In those ways, Jarvis saved him.

The silence after his parents died was worse than any of the music he had heard over the years. It ate at him incessantly like rats nibbling at his toes, sharp reminders that he was alone, that they were dead and never coming back. In those moments, he prayed for loud banging drums to force his eardrums to bleed, melancholy music to pull at his bones and make tears fall from his eyes. But there was nothing. Only emptiness.

He broke into Howard’s drinking cabinets on one of those nights, laughing hysterically at the realization that this was now his study. Howard was never coming back. Everything was his now, but he didn’t want it.

The alcohol blurred his awareness enough that he could fool himself that the sounds of the record player were people. That he wasn’t alone. He fell asleep there, sprawled on the couch and liquor bottle in his hand, clutched like the only lifeline he had.

Jarvis found him the next morning, the disapproving look on his face a clear enough message. Tony may be a prodigy and wealthy beyond imagination, but he was still underage and drinking alcohol was illegal.

Tony became very good at hiding it.

MIT Tony didn’t waste time hiding his drinking or trying to make friends. He could walk into a party and have 10 people hanging off his arm in 2 minutes or less. Sycophants who wanted to be friends with the Stark heir to millions, trying to use sex or charm or alcohol to win over him.

It became a game to him, to see who he could mess with by using their music against them. He sunk his teeth into the secret inner parts of people they didn’t know were exposed to him, prying open their carefully crafted shells to the soft white underbelly of their insecurities.

He turned the game around, mastered it, playing with the hearts and minds of the people who offered their bodies to him, expecting that he would fall into the honeyed trap and get stuck. He had no compunctions, his own heart locked away with the dead. Even Jarvis was gone now.

But then came Rhodey and his jazz music, a beat so tantalizing that for the first time in ages, Tony was tempted to dance again. And when Rhodey was happy, oh that was when the trumpets came out and everything was just 1000 times better. Tony fell for Rhodey’s music before he even spoke to him. And when he told Rhodey he heard things that no one else did—openers like that were sure to push sane people like James Rhodes away—Rhodey just shrugged and said: “Well, if that means you won’t complain about my snoring then that’s great.”

Tony did complain about his snoring because Rhodey was worse than the heaviest train car, but it all faded into the music of who Rhodey was. And once Tony tasted that unequivocal acceptance, he attached himself like a limpet and never let go.

Even crazier, Rhodey never asked him to, always holding on just as hard.

Yinsen had gentle music that reminded Tony of Jarvis, the same kind of person to be a shelter in a storm. His music was lullabies, nursery rhymes that were dark and cheerful all at once, an incongruous soundtrack to the sound of his hammering his desperate attempt at salvation together.

Listening to the bare moments when he would talk about his family, Tony saw how Yinsen’s music fit him. He was a father, through and through. The kind of father unfamiliar to Tony, the one that loved his kids with all his heart and all he wanted was to get back to them, reunited again.

He wove hope to the sounds of Yinsen’s soft music, praying to some entity he didn’t know if he truly even believed in for a chance. Just one chance.

Hovering over Yinsen’s broken body riddled with bullet holes, he listened to the music grow softer and softer until it disappeared altogether. Hating himself that he had been selfish enough only to pray for the one chance.

Merchant of Death.

Returning from Afghanistan confronted him with the reality of his moniker, the tens of thousands of souls that rested on his conscience because of the weapons that were his legacy and the gift he had given the world.

No wonder he had no music. With a death toll like that under his feet, Tony doubted he had a soul at all for music to stem from.

He should have known about Obie. The man’s organ music had always been unnecessarily dramatic, but Obie’s music hadn’t changed in all the years Tony had known him—even before Howard had kicked the bucket. Tony had assumed that all the political and economic manoeuvring the man did on a regular basis that affected his personal music, that the fact that he was prepared all the time to deal with damage control became who he was.

Turns out that Tony still had the capacity to be naïve to the worst extent because Stane wasn’t prepared so he could save the company, he was just prepared to be an outright backstabbing son of a bitch.

Lying there in that dreaded silence only interrupted by his own gasping breath, Tony wondered if this was how he was going to die. Surviving loss and torture only to be betrayed by the music he had come to rely on. Given hope and then having it seized away.

Tony didn’t know if he felt relieved to hear the violins that preceded Pepper’s rescue. He didn’t want to hear the music anymore.

Don’t waste it…Don’t waste your life…St…ark….

Yinsen saved him again.

“I am Iron Man.”

Steve Rogers was silent. In a world populated with people who had their own music, Tony had never met anyone alive who was silent the way Steve Rogers was. It wasn’t soft music, it wasn’t something with long pauses interspersed, it wasn’t anything at all. His very existence should be impossible. And yet.

Tony went on the defensive immediately, reminded of all the instances of loss that preceded quiet. Maria, Howard, Jarvis, Yinsen, even Stane.

He no longer wanted to hear the music if he could help it, not after Obadiah. These days he was good about separating himself and blasting music that didn’t have feelings or secrets intertwined with them, the living people that entered his life for more than a few hours’ time few and far between.

He was fine with silence when it meant there was no one there, but no music with a living human being disconcerted him. As far as he had known, he was the only one in the world who had no music, but Tony had developed hypotheses to explain that, all of which based on the fact that he was broken in some way.

But Steve Rogers wasn’t broken, he was the perfect specimen of a man and a hero. Steve Rogers was honourable and good-hearted and had a beautiful smile and Tony knew all of that without needing to be able to hear his music.

But no music meant he couldn’t read Steve, couldn’t protect himself against the mystery of his thoughts and emotions, couldn’t prepare himself for the inevitable fallout.

He was Tony Stark, there was always going to be an inevitable fallout.

With Steve Rogers, Tony was what he always wanted to be, like everyone else but he hated it. Being like everyone else meant doubt and insecurity and never truly knowing the right thing to say. It meant vulnerability. He wanted nothing to do with Steve Rogers and his impossible silence.

Thankfully, Steve didn’t want anything to do with him either.

The fought the Chitauri. They won.

Tony was plagued for endless nights about the complete, soul-sucking silence of space. In his dreams, he never returned. He continued to float unto eternity, the silence unbreakable by any kind of life. Tony was alone. Always alone.

He woke up gasping those nights, leaping from the bed and the room and going into the common areas of the Tower where his new occupants were taking up space with their stuff strewn all over. It took time to adjust to their presence in the Tower, but after the emptiness of space, he wrapped their music around him like a security blanket and tried to find peace.

Sighing when he heard no one around, Tony made his way to the coffee machine, already planning to head to his lab and blast music there until the chill in his bones was forgotten. Tonight was a bad night and his hands were still trembling slightly, cold and anxiety twisted in his gut in a toxic mixture.

Hearing a shuffling behind him, Tony whirled around and came face to face with Steve who was coming in from one of the side balconies. God, he did not want to be near Steve now, couldn’t stand to try and wrap his mind around the mental gymnastics that came with their every interaction.

“Hey Tony,” Steve greeted softly, his body swathed in a giant fluffy blanket.

“Cap,” Tony returned, nodding before turning back to grab his coffee. He didn’t know if he should linger and make awkward midnight small talk or if he should just make a break for it.

They had reached a place of congeniality, but Tony didn’t know if that was just because Steve didn’t really care one way or another or if he actually hated Tony’s guts and just wanted to keep things professional for the sake of the team. That was the problem with Steve, Tony just never knew and he was still struggling to figure out how to deal with that.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Steve asked, pulling out a chair at the table and settling in. Apparently, they were doing small talk.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Tony quipped, grabbing another mug. If Steve didn’t drink the coffee, it would just mean more for Tony and even at two in the morning there was no such thing as too much coffee for Tony.

“The serum means I don’t need as much sleep. More often than not, I’m just lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and talking to JARVIS.” He accepted the coffee, wrapping his large hands around the cup.

Tony snorted. “You talk to JARVIS? About what?”

Steve was silent for a moment, his finger idly tapping his cup and his eyes focused on the ripples the movement made. “There’s a lot that I don’t know about the future. It’s like being transported to a whole other world, something familiar and alien all at once. I’ve been doing research, trying to catch up with the last 70 years, but there’s a lot to cover.”

His voice was matter of fact, but Tony knew how difficult it was to feel like you didn’t belong in the space you were in, like you could no longer find solid footing in a world that had been your own.

In the months after his kidnapping, he walked around feeling as if he was looking at a distorted reality of what he knew. Everything was the same except for little things here and there, but it no longer felt like home, like a reality he could trust.

Instead of saying any of that, he remained silent and the two of them sat lost in their own thoughts, the quiet surprisingly not at all awkward like Tony had suspected it would be.

“What’s your excuse?” Steve eventually said.

“For?” Tony finished his cup and got up to get a fresh batch, lifting the carafe in wordless offering.

Steve shook his head and Tony returned to his place across from him. “Not sleeping.”

“Genius burns at all hours of the day, gumdrop,” Tony said, winking cheekily, “and sleep can’t hold a candle to the miracles that go on in my lab.” He grinned at the tiny quirk of Steve’s lips, feeling like he had won something by making Steve smile even that little bit.

“What do you do down there anyway? I know you work on projects, but you’re in there so much we never see you.”

“I’m a busy man.” Tony shifted uncomfortably, knowing that Steve is hinting at the fact that Tony had kept himself at a distance from the rest of the team. They’ve made moves to include him, inviting him out for drinks or for team movie nights but Tony always declined. With his gift, he knew more about the various members of the team more than they would ever want him to know—then he wanted to know.

Steve hums noncommittally and Tony’s guard immediately goes up, wondering what Steve’s thinking, if he’s silently judging Tony for not having time to spend with the team. It’s not like he could explain what he’s really thinking. If he did, at best they’d think it was another practical joke or one of those billionaire eccentricities that Tony does because “he wants attention.” At worst, they’d force him to get a psych consult and bench him from the team. No, it wasn’t worth it.

Knowing it was time to end whatever this little moment was, Tony rose and got another cup for the road. “Well, this was fun, Cap but speaking of my lab, I probably should head there now.”

“Wait.” Steve rose too. “Can I come with you?”

“You want to see my lab?” Steve nodded and Tony thought about having the other man in what was probably his most sacred space. But this interaction was the most civil they had been, and Tony liked the glimpse of Steve he had seen and though he didn’t want to admit it, he wanted to see more.

It was almost like a challenge: How to Decipher the Enigma that is Steve Rogers. And Tony could never resist a challenge, or a mystery.

“Okay, follow closely, young padawan. I’m going to blow your fucking mind.”

Tony gets used to the presence of Steve in his life, his silence that had been so initially unnerving becoming an unexpected gift to him. Steve just plants himself in the couch in the corner in his lab, leaving and coming as if he owned the place and as antisocial Tony could get sometimes, he never felt the need to push him out.

It was nice, having company. It spoiled him. He wasn’t used to having anyone (except JARVIS) listen to him when he spoke, let alone listened enough to ask pertinent questions.

But though Steve wasn’t an engineer, he was an artist and a strategist. He had a keen ability to extrapolate how multiple moving pieces could come together as a cohesive unit and his insights were—surprisingly enough for Tony who rarely had someone who could make him fall into spirals of thought and genius that weren’t his own—inspiring.

They got closer and the team got better with their friendship. Tony allowed Steve to convince him to bond with the team, agreeing to a couple movie nights at first and then team bonding outings to play laser tag of all things.

Even after all this, Tony still hadn’t figured out why Steve was silent, but he did discover three things almost as alarming.

1. He had fallen in love with Steve Rogers.

2. Steve Rogers had not fallen in love with him.

3. When Steve Rogers touched him, he could hear the music too.

It started small.

They’d been working together on one of Tony’s vintage cars, Tony on his back with his hands buried in the elegant machine and Steve passing him the tools he needed. They’d been talking through what they were going to do so the background music had been low, when Natasha had walked in to ask them what they were feeling to eat.

A brush of hands when Steve passed Tony a tool he’d been looking for, and the blond paused what he was saying and tilted his head.

“Did you hear that?”

Natasha rose a brow in question. “What?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like something guttural…?” Tony froze from his position, ignoring the drip of oil down his arms. Natasha’s music today was low, guttural voices, like the meditative chanting music she used to calm her down when she was having a bad day. That it was playing with her emotions instead of her having to listen to it revealed that it was a good day for her, but no one but Tony knew that because he was supposed to be the only one to hear it.

“I guess I just imagined it,” Steve continued, shrugging unconcernedly. They spoke a little longer and Tony let her know what he wanted automatically, wondering if it was just a one-off.

The next time was one morning in the kitchen with Clint. He looked to be half-asleep and utterly unconcerned with Steve behind him who was humming while making pancakes, but he had the soundtrack of The Lion King playing in his head.

Lion King always meant that Clint was thinking of his brother and that was never a good day.

Grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl, Tony whipped up a banana and peanut butter sandwich and put it in front of Clint. He huffed out a surprised laugh when arms wrapped around his waist in a fond embrace.

Rolling his eyes, he patted Clint on the back while reaching out with the other to grab the cup Steve was handing over to him. Their hands brushed again and this time Steve jerked in surprise, letting go too soon. The hot cup jostled in their hold and tumbled to the floor, shattering and sending ceramic shards and hot liquid careening every which direction.

“Damn,” Steve swore. “Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

Tony shot a quick mournful look at the coffee before he called out to Steve to don’t worry about it. “It’s fine, really. The cleaning bots will take care of it. Actually,” Tony looked around, “they should have been deployed already. JARVIS?”

“I’m afraid Captain Rogers has disabled the cleaner bots for the common areas, Sir.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I found Clint feeding them food like they were pets,” Steve replied, returning and aiming a sardonic look at Clint.

“They looked hungry!” Clint protested. “It was a humanitarian service really—”

“They’re robots—”

“—but they also have a grand purpose that needs to be fulfilled! And they get sad and listless if they can’t fulfill their duty. How would you feel if you couldn’t be Captain America anymore? Wouldn’t you want to fulfill your life’s purpose securing justice and freedom and whatever and whatever?”

“I want you to shut up now about the pet robots and help me clean.”

“It’s your fault!” Clint paused, brows scrunching together in confusion. “What happened anyway?”

Tony looked at Steve intently, not sure what answer he was hoping for.

“I thought—” Steve smiled sheepishly. “I thought I heard someone singing Hakuna Matata.”

Clint burst out laughing.

“Wow, Cap, must be your old age getting to you. Maybe you should go get your hearing checked out.”

Steve ended up giving as good as he got and they ended up bickering in the kitchen good-naturedly as they cleaned up. Through it all, Tony wondered if he should just grab Steve’s hand, press skin to skin and see if he could hear everything Tony heard. Every beat of a person’s true heart, every note of their inner emotions.

Did he truly want to test if he was no longer the only Listener in the world? Tony imagined what it would be like to no longer be the only one as Can You Feel the Love Tonight? played softly in the background.

Tony never has a chance to test his theory.

The next week, Steve found out that Bucky Barnes was alive.

Barnes took a hell of a long time to find, leading Steve in a merry chase around the world as he thoroughly waged war on any Hydra bases he had ever been housed in or heard whispers of.

Steve was gone more often than not, coming back for a few days every few months when he lost the trail, back to Tony so he could aim him in the right direction.

Tony didn’t blink at Steve’s increasing favours. He provided all the funds, created new algorithms for the search, researched the background of Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier program, kept the team together and safe during battle. He did not think about the fact that Steve had dropped everything at the mere mention of Bucky Barnes, that there were no more moments between the two of them.

He did not feel abandoned or used or any of those ridiculous dramatic emotions that would indicate that he was stupid enough to have expectations of a man he never truly had anything with. Even if he did, he was smart enough not to say anything that might reveal him. Horribly cheesy things like I need you or Don’t go.

Please don’t leave me.

Sifting through 70 years of torture and brainwashing protocol brought back his own nightmares. They blended together, making him remember the waterboarding, the yelling in his ears, the shock that lit him with painful intensity as car battery met with water and became electrocution.

Electrocution would turn into Barnes’ electroshock therapy and the hands holding down his arms would be bound to a chair. He would scream and scream, but there would be no sound. Gagged with the mouth guard, there would only be heartacheing, back-breaking, soul-shattering pain and that black hole of silence.

Once again, sleeping wasn’t the most successful experiment so far, but at least when he pushed himself far enough his body took over and knocked him out. He would catch a precious few hours before the nightmares came to say hi and then he would wake up with the trapped screams in his throat and get back to work.

It was like an alarm clock.

Even as he adjusted to his new normal, life decided to be the everlasting gift that it was and exposed a buried video from December 16th, 1991.

He threw up the first time he saw it, the image of Bucky Barnes killing Howard playing in his head over and over against the soundtrack of his mother having the life choked out of her.

Then he watched it obsessively, disturbed by finally seeing his parents after so many years with none of the accompanying music that made it feel like them. If he didn’t recognize their faces and voices, he could almost fool himself that it was strangers, people he didn’t know that wouldn’t make him feel grief and anger and sadness and every other negative emotion under the sun.

The one bare comfort he got out of it was that the main thing that Howard thought of as he was dying was helping Maria. Maybe he wasn’t such a heartless bastard after all.

He was still dead though.

He decided he wasn’t going to tell Steve, continuing to update him on the Winter Soldier’s movements and seeing him off to places unknown as scheduled.

He was so wrapped in the process of finding the man that he forgot what actually was supposed to happen when they found him. Until Steve landed the Quinjet on the Tower’s pad and out walked him and James Buchanan Barnes following like a dark, solemn shadow.

Tony locked down the lab immediately, bending over his knees as he struggled to breathe and remember what he’d been trying to convince himself of: Barnes was separate from the person responsible for the murder of his parents, that that sin lay at the Winter Soldier’s feet and the man had been tortured and had his memory and his very self wiped away like condensation on glass.

He didn’t come out of the lab for three days.

Tony was being an absolute creep and watching James Barnes through the safety of JARVIS’ many, many eyes in the sky. Barnes was subdued most of the time, always scanning the room as if he expected to be attacked at any moment and stiffening any time anyone touched him, even Steve.

But even as Steve’s face fell every time Barnes pulled away, Barnes’ face was impassive, set in a blank mask that said nothing of how he was feeling. It was as if he had no emotion at all. He watched everyone, and from where he was sequestered away, Tony watched him.

He decided to attempt his escape in the middle of the night when no one would see him. His stomach had started to cannibalize itself and all he had left was a moldy piece of bread. Tony wasn’t desperate enough to sink to that yet.

Peeking down from the elevator and seeing the lights off in the kitchen, he crept forward as carefully as he could while listening for any sounds of music or movement. When he heard nothing, he gave up on his Mission Impossible moment and strode into the kitchen, heading straight for the coffee pot.

The magic mix successfully brewing, he opened the fridge and started rummaging through the leftovers. Clint would be pissed that he’s taking the last of the Thai food, but Tony wasn’t worried. Thor was the only one you looked out for when stealing food, Tony didn’t even dare look in the direction of his PopTarts.

Popping the food in the microwave to reheat, he took the time when he was waiting to scrub some of the grease caked on his hands. He didn’t even remember how those got there.

“So you’re Tony Stark.”

Yelping, Tony whipped around to be confronted with one James Buchanan Barnes, shock and disbelief radiating through his core.

Holy shit, this motherfucker is Silent too.

Tony and Barnes stared at each other a long moment. Tony because he was trying to wrap his mind around two impossibly Silent people and Barnes because he just didn’t care to end it.

Packaging up his shock to deal with later, Tony plastered a welcoming grin on his face. “Sergeant Barnes, well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

Barnes forehead creased at Tony’s flirtatious tone, not responding even as he watched him. Tony was unnerved by the intensity of his attention, but he covered that with babble.

“I hope you’ve been having a wonderful stay here at Chez Stark, has Steve given you the grand tour yet?”

“I didn’t think you wanted me here, seeing as you’ve been avoiding me.” Barnes folded his arms across his chest, gaze still pinned on Tony.

“No, you misunderstand,” Tony waved off the accusations. “I’ve just been busy with a few very important projects—of which I would tell you about but then I’d have to kill you.”

Barnes gave him a once over sceptically. “I am absolutely sure I can take you.”

“Is that a diss?” Tony responded, astonished. “Do you actually have a sense of humour buried under all those scowly eyebrows, Robocop?”

Barnes shrugged succinctly.

“Ah, I see, a man of few words. Okay, Snowflake I’ll have you know that if I had the suit on, your ass would be kicked three ways to Sunday.”

“Maybe I’m too old for generation, but when people said that when I came from, you actually needed the ability to back up those words, Shortstuff.”

Tony let out an insulted squawk. “I am not short.”

Barnes raised a brow and Tony could almost hear the “Really?” Reaching behind him for Tony’s coffee cup, he offered it for Tony to take, only to pull it back and hoist it above his head the moment Tony reached out. Lunging for it, Tony came up short and ended up banging his knee on the bottom counter door on the way down.

“What are you, five?” Tony retorted scathingly, glaring when he caught the sound of Barnes’ snort. In response, the man just handed Tony his coffee without fuss, before pushing him into a chair at the table. Grabbing the food from the microwave, he put it on a plate in front of Tony with a quiet order, “Eat.”

Suddenly remembering that he was ravenous, Tony arrowed in on his (stolen) food, groaning happily when spices exploded on his tongue. Yea, free food really was the best.

“You know, you aren’t half bad Barnes,” Tony complimented as he finished up, wiping his face and putting his dishes in the sink.

“Is that something you decided right now?” Barnes paused and Tony felt the air on the back of his neck prickle. “Or is that what you decided after watching me on your cameras for three days?”

Tony debated whether to deny it or not, raising an innocently curious eyebrow when he decided that a silent response was the best response.

“I could hear the whir of the cameras adjusting on me when I came into the room.”

“How the hell did you hear something as soft as that?”

Barnes just tapped his ear casually, as if being able to hear near soundless noises even in a room full of people was an everyday occurrence.

“I wondered why you would want to keep an eye on me even when going to such lengths to avoid me. The only reason I can come up with is that you know I killed Howard and Maria Stark.” At this confession, emotion flashed across Barnes’ face too fast for Tony to read, like the bare glimpse of silvery fish in water

Tony flinched at the confirmation, at the reminder of what he had spent the last three days struggling to reconcile with. Taking a breath, he reminded himself of the other videos he had seen in his search for Barnes, the ones that revealed the extent that James Buchanan Barnes’ personality had been wiped away to become the Winter Soldier. He had felt connected to this man, and Tony pulled on those memories of connection, trying to let those emotions guide him.

“It wasn’t you, it was the Winter Soldier. You had no choice.” It sounded rehearsed, like Tony was just trying to convince himself of his own words and it wasn’t working, not on him and not on Barnes.

“Mr. Stark—”

“—was my father. And your friend.” Tony let out a sigh, giving up on trying to say the right thing and just going for the truth. “He was your friend, someone you knew and someone who knew you. I watched the video, listened to the way he greeted you a million times. He was happy to see you Sergeant Barnes, recognizing you even after all those years and relieved to see you alive and well. And that more than anything says that the man you were that day was not the man that my father had known, was not a man you chose to be. You were robbed of your choice that day, and many more days before and after that and I can’t blame you for things that were beyond your ability to control.”

Tony extended his hand. “But we both are in control of this situation right now, Sergeant Barnes and I choose to forgive you. But you also have to make the choice to forgive yourself.”

Barnes shook his head in a negative immediately and made no move to take Tony’s hand.

“It won’t be easy—trust me, you’re talking to the Merchant of Death here and I committed my sins fully in control of my decisions, but you have to at least be willing.”

Barnes scrutinized him for a long minute before slowly, hesitantly grasping Tony’s hand with his own and shaking firmly.

“Sergeant Barnes, it’s good to finally meet you. Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Tony. Call me Bucky.”

Bucky told Steve about Howard and Maria and about the fact that Tony had continued to search for him and welcomed him into his home even after discovering the fact that he murdered his parents.

Tony found out when Steve barged into his lab (which was no longer blacked-out thank you very much) and pulled him into a hug. Bewildered, Tony returned the embrace thoroughly confused as to what could cause this influx of emotion until he caught the soft thank yous pressed against his hair.

Uncomfortable, Tony wiggled in Steve’s grasp, managing to get his hands between them and pushing away slightly. After a second of resistance, Steve pulled away, hands still securely holding on to Tony’s elbows as he gazed down at him avidly.

“So he told you.”

“He did.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. It means everything.”

“Steve—”

“No, Tony. Please, accept my thanks and my apology. We got off on the wrong foot and I never truly apologized for the things I said on the helicarrier. You’re a better man than I gave you credit for and you’ve proved that every step of the way.” He pulled Tony back into his arms. “Thank you.”

Dazed, Tony nodded when Steve waved goodbye and went back upstairs. Against his will, he felt a warm glow in his chest, as if Steve had planted some of his own happiness there to grow.

With the dreaded confrontation out of the way, Bucky became a regular visitor to the lab, sometimes with Steve and sometimes not but when they did come together, they didn’t interact that much, all of their focus on being with Tony.

If Tony had been spoiled before with Steve’s attention, now he was downright rotten. He got used to Steve reclaiming his spot on the couch to draw or call out questions as Bucky and Tony ran around conducting fun (explosive and dangerous) experiments with the arm.

Sometimes Bucky came alone when Steve was out or when things turned bad. He never begrudged Tony for not always noticing him at first, playing with the robots until Tony was ready. Then they would sit next to each other and they would drink the expensive Turkish coffee Bucky would bring in a thermos and he would talk about all the things he didn’t feel ready to talk about with Steve.

Bucky would bring out the broken parts of him he only felt safe enough to entrust to Tony and Tony was listen and sometimes entrust his nightmares to Bucky.

Sitting with the shattered pieces of their selves around them, Tony realized that he had also fallen in love with Bucky Barnes.

Tony was looking forward to team bonding night. He had JARVIS set an alarm so he wouldn’t be late, thinking that maybe he would help Bucky and Steve cook the dinner this week (okay, supervise).

Miraculously, he was early so he strode confidently into the kitchen where he heard voices. A grin already painting his lips and a quip ready for Bucky, he stumbled to a halt when he caught sight of what was happening inside the room.

Bucky had Steve pressed up against the sink, flesh and metal hands buried in blond strands. One of Steve’s hands was holding a strainer full of rice over the sink while the other clutched at Bucky’s side.

There was a clatter as Steve dropped the rice, turning slightly to fit himself more fully against Bucky and deepen the kiss. As Tony watched, Steve’s hand crept up to cup Bucky’s face, cradle it as if it was something precious and Tony could swear he heard the sounds of a rising crescendo.

Wait, no, there was music playing. Separate, Steve and Bucky had been as Silent as the dead, but together they made the most beautiful music that Tony had ever heard, sounds that were a tangled mix of loss and anguish and hope and redemption. It was as if they had no music without each other, as if they didn’t even fully exist when the other wasn’t present, but together they were whole, they were complete.

And they had no place for Tony.

Backing away carefully, Tony left the room and ignored the way his heart wrenched in his chest as if it wanted to stay behind with them.

Tony did what he did best. He avoided the problem and he called Rhodey.

Rhodey called back with an offer to get away and a few days later Tony went on a several month long tour of army and naval bases. He wasn’t in the weapon manufacturing business any more, but he did invest time and energy in creating protective gear for the troops. This way, he got direct feedback right from the source, instead of trailing through a line of intake forms and interview surveys that eventually made its way to him.

Having a worthy cause to keep him busy was doubly blessing. Not only did he truly feel useful, but he was successfully distracted from thoughts of Silent supersoldiers. Inevitably, he was able to convince himself that he hadn’t actually lost anything. There had been nothing between him, Steve and Bucky but friendship and one-sided feelings. And even if he was no longer under the illusion that that friendship could turn into something more, he still had his friends. Even when he was gone, they called to check in on him at least once a week and tried to convince him to let them tour with him on more than one occasion.

He always said no.

He flew back in time for the wedding, congratulating the two long lost lovers for finally taking the next step with a wide smile. He did not let his hand shake when he handed over the wedding rings and did not let his voice break as he gave a rousing, hilarious speech at the wedding reception. He watched them look at each other as if no one else existed in the world and ignored the part of him that crumbled at the sight of it.

And if he shed a few tears as the sounds of their symphony rubbed over his raw nerves as if it was trying to sooth him? Well, everyone cried at weddings.

Natasha was the one who found him after. Steve and Bucky were long gone, shipped off on the Quinjet to one of Tony’s private islands somewhere in the middle of the Pacific where they would have an uninterrupted honeymoon.

Tony was sitting in the common room contemplating if he wanted a drink, thinking about the instances over the last few years where he almost crossed the point of no return. Natasha made the decision for him, taking the bottle and gifting it away to a young couple who were getting ready to leave. Tony believed they were some of Bucky’s sisters’ grandchildren.

“That was a $500 bottle of scotch Natasha.”

“You’ve had enough for a lifetime.”

“You don’t get to make that decision.”

“And you don’t get to fall off the wagon right in front of us.” She sat down next to him, pushing her feet into his lap and wiggling her toes. He sighed, but he obliged her unspoken request and dug his thumbs into her heels, making her groan out loud.

They were quiet for a while, Tony focusing his energy on Natasha’s pressure points and Natasha lost in her own thoughts.

“You always know,” she eventually says.

“What do you mean?” he didn’t pause in his moments, dragging his fingers along the veins on the top of her foot and massaging the sides.

“You always know if I’m near you, no matter which direction I’m coming from or how quiet I am.”

“Oh.” He forced a careless smile. “That’s just because I’m a Secret Agent: Legacy Edition.”

“That’s not a thing,” she murmurs.

“It is so a thing!”

“Howard wasn’t an agent.”

“Pssh,” he flapped his hand dismissively. “I don’t mean Howard, I mean Peggy. She was like my other parent when I was younger and I would swear on my mother’s grave that Jarvis was under her command, not Howard’s.”

She shrugged. “You may be right about that part.” She pulled her feet off his lap, folding them beneath her as she turned to face him. Seeing her this way, Tony was reminded that Natasha wasn’t actually that big, she just had a large presence that made her seem tall.

“Clint has been my partner for years and even I get the jump on him sometimes. But you, not only do I never surprise you but you also always know what kind of mood I’m in and what I need to feel better even before I do. How?”

“Have you ever thought that maybe I just see more than you give me credit for?”

“I think you see more and feel more than you let people know.”

Tony knew he should feel probably feel alarmed, defensive even. But he just didn’t have the energy to be. He was lonely. There was an overload of emotion that sat heavy in his chest that he didn’t what to with, something he suspected had been building up for years. So he told Natasha, from the beginning, everything that had to do with the mysterious music only he could hear.

Along the way it shifted to Steve and Bucky, how they were unique, how he was fascinated by the complete enigma they were and how their love story was written out in their song.

“But that’s not just scientific curiosity, is it Tony?”

“No,” he whispered, finally daring to put words to his feelings, share their existence with someone else.

Natasha didn’t say anything to his confession, did not rebuke him for his truth.

But also did not urge him to share it with the Brooklyn Boys. They had just finished celebrating the wedding of Steve Rogers to James Buchanan Barnes in front of everyone who cared for them. If that wasn’t a clear indication of where things stood, nothing would be. All she did was pull him in close, pressing his head against her neck and holding him to her.

Gradually, Tony relaxed into her frame, allowing himself to let go and hurt while her music washed over him without any expectations. He was never going to be able to tell anyone else, but at least he had this one moment of acceptance.

Steve and Bucky didn’t stay gone for long, coming back a week later tanned and golden from the sun, rings shining on their fingers. Natasha did the only thing she knew to keep Tony busy and his mind off of their return. She posed an experiment.

All the things he wanted to learn about the music but couldn’t research before without other’s knowing was now possible for him to measure. What was the farthest distance that he could hear someone? Did proximity increase volume? How did emotion affect sound intensity? Could someone consciously change their music like a radio channel? Could they send out distress signals?

Tony threw himself into the work, hooked himself to a machine that scanned his brain waves as he listened to Natasha move in and out of the room, try to change her music or increase its volume. They discovered that Tony had a range of 15 feet at rest, but if he focused he could extend his range to 30. Natasha couldn’t change her music like flipping a radio dial so she wasn’t going to be blasting ��Pon de Replay” anytime soon, but she could make her music turn sour and clamouring for attention if she focused on some bad memories from her past.

It wasn’t quite the distress signal they were thinking about, the noise sounding like an off-tune, off-sync marching band, but it would do in a pinch.

Steve and Bucky didn’t understand why they weren’t welcome in the lab, but Natasha was the one to put down the order and even if Bucky was tempted to outright ignore it, Steve wasn’t.

Tony told himself it wouldn’t be forever, he just needed time to figure out how to turn his love for the two supersoldiers into just friendship again, that was all.

The Avengers Alarm went off in the Tower and Tony jumped up from where he had passed out the night before to suit up. Soon enough he was soaring off, coding into the comms to the team on the Quinjet.

Tony arrived first, taking in the gelatinous giant that was releasing some kind of slime. Swearing when he realized that the slime was corrosive, he quickly ordered JARVIS to analyse its properties. While the team’s uniforms should hold up to the acidic compound, it was only be for a finite period before it would start eating away at their skin.

Tony fired repulsor blasts at the jelly-like creature, but it evaded his attacks, simply creating holes that made his blows go straight through and out the other side. Noticing one of the arms aiming a hit to Clint, he dove to catch the archer as he overbalanced when evading the blow and fell off the side of the high-rise.

“You’re supposed to be light on your feet, twinkletoes.”

“I was an acrobat in my past life, Stark, not an Avatar. If I was an airbender, I would have a fluffy flying bison to catch me when I fell, not a tin can,” the archer mocked back.

“Chatter,” Steve snapped out. “My blows are just rebounding and not causing any harm. What do we see from up top?”

“There’s a slight rough patch on its side,” Bucky broke in. “High up on its left.”

“I see it. Anyone have a good angle?”

“I can get it,” Natasha replied. “I just need a ride.”

“Your chariot is on its way, madam.”

Tony grabbed Natasha and flew her high up the side of the blob, letting her launch herself off of him once they got into position. She slipped at first but she caught herself and started prying away at the giant scab. The skin underneath was more solid than the rest of the thing’s body but still vulnerable and Natasha shoved some of her Widow Bites directly against its flesh.

“Ready when you are, Thor.”

Thor brought down lightning directly onto the monster the moment that Natasha activated her Widow Bites. The creature started to writhe wildly, it’s insides highlighted by the energy before collapsing in on itself and releasing cloudy gas that mixed noxiously with the scent of ozone.

Temporarily blinded, Tony checked in with everyone through the comms, scanning through the rubble when Natasha didn’t answer.

Finding no sign of her, he retracting his helmet in order to listen better, searching for the sound of her music. After a few minutes of flying over various ruined areas from corrosive slime, he tracked her down to one of the ruined buildings.

She was out cold, looking as if she’d been thrown from the monster when it had bucked. Reaching out, Tony had JARVIS check her vitals, sighing in relief when it showed that she had no major internal injuries, just a broken ankle.

“Sir, it looks like the structural soundness of this building has been deeply compromised. I advise you to leave now.”

“On it, J.” Picking up Natasha carefully, he followed JARVIS’ directions and was almost clear when he heard a little wind chime tinkle. Stopping, he listened again, realizing that it was someone else’s music, someone else who was in danger.

Flying out as fast as he could, he arrowed in towards Bucky, dropping Natasha in his hands before doubling back, ignoring the shouts in his wake and focusing on getting back in the building and tracking down the person before it collapsed. Because this music was soft, indistinct in a way that was only common in children.

“J, I need you to scan for any signs of life.”

Tony wove around abandoned corridors, the countdown in his data giving him a bare 3 minutes to track down the source of his wind chime. Luckily, after a few winding turns, Tony flew into a decrepit room to find a small infant wrapped in a tight bundle.

Tony picked her up oh so gently, careful of her head and uncomfortably aware of how kid friendly the armour was not. Opening the chest plate, he tucked her into his shirt before directing JARVIS to make sure she was getting enough air supply and wasn’t squished, but he was out of time to do more.

Hearing the crash of an area caving in close by, Tony blasted through walls to make his own door out of there, getting hit by a stray sheet of concrete that sent him spinning. Curving to protect his middle and his precious burden, Tony grit his teeth and forced himself to stop spiralling enough to collapse on his back a safe distance away.

Voices and music surrounded him before he saw them and suddenly arms were pulling him up into a sitting position and knocking at his helmet. Retracting it, he came face to face with a pair of worried blue eyes.

“Stop staring like you’ve seen a ghost, Rogers, I’m not dead yet,” Tony coughed out.

“God, you’re an asshole just like him,” Steve said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Bucky who was holding up an awake Natasha. “I don’t know why I put up with you two.”

“Nice to see you awake, Sleeping Beauty,” Tony called out to Natasha.

“No one could sleep through the racket these two made when they saw you fly back into a collapsing building,” Natasha retorted.

“Oh god, J, is she okay?” Retracting the top half of the suit, Tony moved frantic hands to his chest to check on the infant resting there. She seemed no worse for wear, but she had woken up over the course of their bumpy ride and blinked chocolatey brown eyes curiously up at Tony. When JARVIS declared that she was okay, Tony sighed in relief though he knew he was going to get her fully checked out when they went back to the Tower.

“You gave me a hell of a scare, you know that?” he whispered to her, listening to the cheerful sounds of her wind chimes. She blew a spit bubble at him. “Yea, I know you weren’t worried, fearless heroine you are, yes you are,” he cooed, completely oblivious to his surroundings until a snicker broke through his haze.

Looking up, he saw Clint stifling a laugh as Natasha reached up to whack him on the back of the head but his eyes were caught by the soft expression on Steve’s face as he gazed down on them.

It’s the baby, idiot. He just thinks the baby is cute, don’t get caught up in this again, he reprimanded himself. Looking down at the child, he couldn’t help but smile, helplessly charmed.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

“Yea,” Steve reached out to touch where she had a hand firmly gripping Tony’s finger, “Beautiful.” His fingers pressed against Tony’s and Tony looked up at the sound of Steve’s choked breath.

He had swung his head around, staring at the others uncomprehendingly. Lifting his hand away from Tony, he looked back and forth between them.

“Stevie?” Bucky asked worriedly, stepping forth to cup his face with his metal hand. “You okay?”

Steve nodded at Bucky’s question, taking his hand in his own, but reaching out another to Tony where he was touching him before.

They both gasped at the contact, Steve’s eyes widening with wonder as he heard the music of the others around him, swirling around in an orchestra of triumph and victorious weariness. He was looking at Tony as if he had never seen him before, as if he was the answer to a question he had given up hope in solving.

Tony on the other hand was trembling because Steve’s touch made a current run under his skin in a low vibration. Bucky quickly reached out a hand to steady him as he swayed under the feeling, grabbing him by the flesh of his arm exposed by his light t-shirt.

The feeling multiplied tenfold, as if instead of just hearing Bucky and Steve’s symphony, he was feeling it played underneath his skin. It coursed through him in brilliant waves, an intense combination of pleasure/pain that lit a fire through his veins like he was the burning, collapsing heart of a star.

He heard Steve and Bucky cry out but he couldn’t summon the strength to even open his eyes—when had he closed them?—and see what was happening.

Overwhelmed, he gave in to the feeling and everything went black.

Things came to him slowly, as if he was floating in a pleasurable haze that made everything warm and happy.

Drugs? He wondered idly, gradually becoming aware of the fact that he was in a hospital bed and that someone—no, someones—were holding his hands.

“Steve, he’s awake.”

Two heads appeared above him, faces painted in relief.

“Tony,” Steve breathed out. “Welcome back.”

“You had us worried there, dollface.” Bucky brushed over the arch of his cheekbone tenderly and instinctively Tony leaned into the light contact, nuzzling into the warm palm.

He’s not yours to have, a voice reminded him and Tony abruptly became aware of what he was doing, pulling away from the both of them quickly and sitting up.

“What happened?” he asked, to busy wrenching his emotions under control to notice the way hurt flashed across their faces.

“Well, after Bucky touched you, you passed out. Luckily, he caught you before you or the baby could get hurt and then we brought you both back here to Medical to get you checked out.”

“How is the little butternut squash? Have we found her parents yet?”

“No sign of them,” Bucky reported. “So far, it looks like she might have been abandoned.”

“Poor kid,” Tony sighed. “Where’s she now?”

“Thor’s walking around with her. She started crying when we took her away from you so we’ve all been taking turns.” Steve smiled. “I think she’s rubbing off on all of us already. Do you want to see her?”

“Please,” Tony nodded.

Steve stepped out, leaving Tony alone with Bucky.

“You knew, didn’t you? That Stevie had been hearing sounds when he touched you?” Bucky turned his intense attention to Tony, which probably should have made him feel uncomfortable but instead had the opposite effect.

“I did,” Tony shrugged. “But it only happened a couple times so I didn’t think he even really noticed it.”

Bucky scoffed. “It’s been driving him crazy for months. He once told me that it felt like he couldn’t ignore it, like every time he wanted to dismiss it, it would pull at him like an achey tooth.”

“Sounds about right, it’s impossible to completely ignore.”

“That’s not really what I meant.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Then what?”

“It’s more like, he couldn’t ignore it. It became an obsession for him that I didn’t understand until now, like something was calling to him that he just didn’t understand. We’ve been doing research on sound theory for months now, even delving into Greek myths and sirens.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why didn’t you?” Bucky challenged.

They stared down at each other before breaking into laughter.

“So, essentially, we’re all crazy,” Tony concluded.

“Yea, sounds about right. How do you deal with it?” Bucky gestured to his ear. “Constantly hearing sounds that others can’t?”

“You learn to tune it out to a certain extent, like the noises of the city. Like the sounds of the trains going by or the blaring of a police siren, you’ll notice them but it doesn’t overwhelm you. That’s why I like living in the city. If I was living somewhere isolated, I would get used to the quiet and the sounds would overwhelm me the moment I get back to anywhere that’s populated.”

“Sounds tough.”

“It is what it is.” Tony turned slightly to adjust his pillows so he was a little more supported, Bucky reaching out to help him.

“I heard it too,” Bucky admitted.

“When?”

“When I touched you after the battle. There were sounds that were coming in from all around and from within us as well.”

Tony shook his head. “Yea, that’s not how it always is. Usually you two are Silent.”

“What does that mean?”

“Here,” Tony reached out and grabbed Bucky’s hand.

Bucky tilted his head to the side. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly, unlike the rest of the planet, you and Steve are the only ones I can’t hear all the time.”

“Why? Is it because of the serum?”

“I don’t know really.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say you don’t know something.”

Tony scoffed. ��Yea, well, it’s not as of it’s an exact science.” He moved to pull away, but Bucky just held on tighter.

“Is it weird for you?” he asked softly, eyes searching Tony’s.

To his horror, Tony felt heat wash across his cheekbones and he resisted the urge to press his hands against his face to hide the blush.

“Huh?” he asked eloquently.

“Not hearing anything when you touch me?”

God, what a way to phrase it.

“Ah, well,” Tony stumbled over his tongue before managing to pull himself together. “No, actually.”

Bucky’s brows furrowed. “You said we were the only ones in the world though. Wasn’t that even a little alarming?”

Tony chewed on his lip, thinking back. “Initially, yes but then I got used to it. Or maybe I should say, I came to rely on it.” Tony squeezed Bucky’s hand in his. “It’s peaceful, as if the way I share the music with you, you’re sharing your silence with me. It’s like the reprieve I need sometimes, surrounded as I am constantly.” He smiled

Bucky grinned back. “I’m glad we can actually provide something for you for once.”

“Do you feel anything?” Tony asked, curious. “I don’t remember feeling anything specific when Steve heard the music through me.”

“Oh, I definitely feel things holding onto you, doll,” Bucky replied promptly.

Tony laughed, but before he could ask for clarification, but Bucky shushed him, tilting his head to listen.

“Wait, I think I hear something.” At that moment, Steve walked through the door, baby Jane Doe in his hands and the air was filled with the sounds of her happy gurgling mixed with the dainty tinkles of glass chimes.

“That’s amazing.” A grin broke out on Bucky’s face as he watched the baby ensconced in Steve’s large arms and he let out a low laugh as he heard the music through his connection with Tony.

Tony smiled back at him, “Yea, sometimes it really is.”

Tony picked up the baby from the crib, rocking her in his arms. After months of not being able to locate tiny Jane Doe’s parents, Tony had decided to adopt her and give her a home with him. He knew that he didn’t live the most safe or stable life, but he couldn’t turn his back on the tiny infant, her wind chimes having set up a place in his heart.

He named her Aria, in honour of his mother who had loved him to the best of her ability as well as the music that has always been a part of his life, whether he wanted it or no.

The team knew about his grand secret now, the whole revealing process disappointingly anticlimactic.

It turned out that Steve and Bucky were the only ones who could hear when they touched him, and location or pressure did not affect the ability. They could hear just as clearly if they touched him just the slightest bit as they would when they held him in a full-bodied hug.

He no longer avoided them, at first because he was unable to with the way they and everyone else had become immediately attached to Aria, but then because he found he was more at ease when he was in their presence than he was when they were apart. Even with his hidden feelings.

“Is she ready?”

He turned to face Pepper and Natasha who had claimed Aria for a girls’ day out. He knew his daughter would be safe with the CEO and the secret agent, but a part of him panicked at the idea of letting her out of his sight. She was still so delicate, with tiny little fingers and toes and the willingness to pick up and put in her mouth the exact thing that could choke her.

God, raising a child was terrifying.

“Are you sure she’s ready for this?”

Pepper rolled her eyes. “She’ll be fine, Tony. We’re just taking her out for a walk.”

“Yes, but what if she’s allergic to pollen? Spring is prime time for allergies.”

“You had her tested and the only thing she’s allergic to is pineapples.”

“Which just means she won’t be ruining pizza with fruit.” Natasha beckoned. “Now, hand her over.”

Tony cuddled Aria to his chest for another moment before reluctantly handing her over to Natasha, following them out with the baby bag as they headed for the elevator.

Before they reached it, Bucky stepped out, face lighting up when he caught sight of Aria decked out in her yellow ducky dress.

“Hello, darling,” he cooed, stealing her away from Natasha to press kisses on her breathy wisps that passed for hair. “Where are you going?”

Aria giggled happily in Bucky’s arms, kicking her legs and blowing enthusiastic spit bubbles. She had inherited her father’s taste in men.

“They’re kidnapping my baby,” Tony complained, pouting in the face of a possible ally.

“No, we’re just making sure that Tony doesn’t become a dictator daddy,” Pepper retorted, giving Bucky a few more minutes with Aria before snatching her away decisively.

“We’ll be back in a few hours and we will call if there are any issues at all, okay?”

With that, all three of the women in his life disappeared and Tony sighed mournfully.

“Hey, doll,” Bucky greeted him, wrapping him up in a comforting hug. “Are you free now?”

“Seeing as I’m without my child, the light of my life, yea I guess so.”

“Will you come with me then? There’s something I wanna show you.”

Curiosity piqued, Tony nodded. “Lead the way, Terminator.”

Bucky led him up to the roof where a picnic had been laid out on the grass Tony had installed there. There was champagne and Tony could spot mini quiches and stuffed panini sandwiches amongst the variety of other dishes.

“Wow, this looks great, what’s the special occasion?”

Hearing the sound of the elevator, Tony turned around to see Steve approaching them with a heavy bouquet in his hands, and extravagant mixture of purples and blues and reds and bright oranges.

“Okay, flowers, champagne, picnic on the roof…this is giving me date vibes you guys. Am I actually interrupting an anniversary or something because I can go…?” he trailed off when Steve handed him the bouquet, confused but unable to help burying his face in the blossoms, inhaling their fresh sweet scent.

“This way.” Tony let Bucky pull him forward by the hand, toeing off his shoes and sitting on the blanket obediently with each other the supersoldiers creating the other parts of their little triangle.

“Tony, we have something to ask you,” Steve began.

“Sounds ominous.”

Steve smiled, but his eyes were serious. “The truth is, I’ve been in love with you for years now.”

“You’re lying,” Tony denied. “Look, if this is some pity thing, you really don’t need—”

“Tony, no, I would never lie to you about this,” Steve interrupted. “Please understand, it was difficult coming to terms with my feelingsnot because of anything you did but because I felt too guilty about loving someone other than Bucky. Like I was betraying his memory when I was the one who failed him all those years ago.”

“Steve,” unable to ignore the pain he heard in Steve’s voice, Tony grabbed his hand in comfort. Steve squeezed back tight.

“And then, when he came back…well, I was so happy that I was given a second chance with him, I was scared what would happen if I told him about my feelings for you.”

“The punk felt he was being unfaithful to me for loving you even when he was with me and didn’t want to tell me,” Bucky broke in before Tony could even fully process what Steve had said. “Only to realize when he finally did tell me that I feel the same way.”

It probably said a lot about Tony that the first reaction to hearing two confessions of love was doubt. “Why tell me now? If you’ve loved me for months, why not tell me earlier?”

“Because even though we love you, but we didn’t know if you wanted us.”

“We were worried that it would be too much to ask of you,” Bucky elaborated to get involved with us when we were married already. We didn’t want you to feel like you were less a part of us just because you weren’t part of the legal ceremony because we love you just as much as we love each other.”

“And then there’s this.” Steve reached out to grasp Bucky’s with his free hand and Bucky reached out to Tony to complete the circuit. Like it had every time before, the symphony rose up between them, passing in waves of sound and feeling.

“When you explained it to us, you said that the song was proof of our love for each other, that we didn’t have a song if we weren’t together. But Tony, if you listen, there are three parts to this melody.”

Tony listened to the song, familiar to him as his own heartbeat at this point and realized that Steve was right. If you separated out the notes, there were three threads of music being wound together so tightly it was difficult to distinguish who was who.

“I’ve never had my own song,” Tony whispered, disbelieving. “Never. I’ve only ever heard Silence when I’m alone.”

“Maybe doll, it’s because the same way Stevie and I belong to each other, you belong with us. You just had to hear our song together to guide you to us.”

Tony wanted to deny such wishful thinking, but he remembered every time he had sat apart from Steve and Bucky, heart aching with the desire to be with them. The way their music would seem to call out to him in those moments, the way that it would surround him and wrap him in comfort and warmth as if welcoming him.

“Tony?”

He looked up at them both, the earnest hope shining in Steve’s eyes, the soft love in Bucky’s and let himself be brave and trust that this time if he leapt, the music would catch him.

“I love you too.”

Steve broke into delighted laughter and Bucky pulled him so his back pressed against his chest, wrapping flesh and metal arms around him tight. He buried his head in Tony’s neck and let out a deep sigh against the sensitive hairs there, causing Tony to shiver in response.

“I hope you know that this is forever, Tony Stark, because we are never letting you or the little munchkin go.”

“Watch out. That sounds like a marriage proposal, Snowflake.”

“It is,” Steve affirmed. “You don’t have to answer right now, but the offer’s there. If you want it.”

In response, Tony just let himself melt back into Bucky’s arms, pulling Steve to press against his front and kissing him as he had wanted to do from the first moment he saw him. Lost in the taste and sensation of Steve, he chased the sparks that flew between them in bright spirals, only pulling away when his body remembered that it needed to breathe.

Steve’s eyes were hot as he tilted Tony’s head helpfully to face Bucky, who didn’t waste a moment is stealing his own kisses. It was wet and dirty and glorious and Tony wanted to stay between their arms forever.

Eventually they got to enjoy the food and Natasha and Pepper brought Aria back to join them. Turns out, they had been in on the whole thing, the clever minxes. The rest of the team gradually wandered up and by evening, Tony was firmly ensconced between Bucky’s thick thighs as they watched Steve and Thor be utterly charmed at the way that Aria beat at a toy drum noisily.

“That’s not coming home with us,” Tony informed him.

“Definitely not.”

“You get to tell Steve.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I’ll trade you kisses.”

“Deal.”

Watching Steve walk back over to him, he accepted his child in his arms again and revelled in the way that Bucky and Steve trailed teasing hands over his skin, playing with their melody as if it was their own personal concert. He listened to the way their song wove together, all three of them melding together in a beautiful cacophony that told him that finally, he had found home.

If you made it this far and liked it, let me know here or on AO3! https://archiveofourown.org/works/24563422

#winterironshield #stony #stucky #winteriron #marriage #marvel #avengers #pining #soulmates #kid fic #parent tony stark #angst #vengeanceworks #fanfic #fanfiction

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alcalavicci · 5 years ago

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(Disclaimer: if you wrote this and don’t want it up, send me an ask and I’ll take it down)

Snippets of Geordie James’ letters to Claire, May-August 1974

Letter 1:

As you've probably noticed, there aren't enough of us Stockwell fans around. Before my first letter about Dean and Guy was published in the January issue of RBH [Rona Barrett's Hollywood], I felt a bit paranoid in my affection for them. I knew they must have fans somewhere, although maybe few and far-between. Now that I'm corresponding with several other fans of theirs, I can't believe it! I really enjoy exchanging praises about Dean and Guy. They are two subjects I never tire of reading or writing about. I hope you feel the same.

I know that when you wrote your letter, you didn't know how much I adore Dean -- as you've probably guessed by now, I've done as much research as possible on him. The one thing I didn't know about Dean was that he's living with Russ Tamblyn. I had heard from this fellow who wrote a book about former child stars that Dean "lives in Topanga Canyon with a very beautiful roommate." Now Russ Tamblyn is attractive, but I must admit I had something else in mind!

************

Your letter is very interesting and intelligent. This has been the case with all the Dean fans who have written me. If it's true that certain artists attract certain types of fans, I'd say that Dean definitely attracts mature and intelligent people.

Dean fans are generally older than are the fans of others, which prompts me to ask your age, if you don't mind telling me?

About myself -- I'm 27, a Pisces like Dean. In fact, his birthday is the day before mine.

*********

The most up-to-date information I've heard about Dean is that he was in Albuquerque in March of this year, on stage in a comedy called "Relatively Speaking." In an interview from the Albuquerque newspaper, Dean said that he would "prefer to exclude neurotics" in his roles in the future. He complained of being typecast, probably as a result of "Compulsion," his success at playing a poetic, deranged genius, his common character up til now. He said that he would like to do comedy and work with Mel Brooks. Reviews from the play raved that Dean was brilliant in comedy.

How does this news impress you? I ask because I'm wondering if you share my views, which are in complete sympathy with Dean. From that old "Bonanza" segment Dean did, I knew he had comedic sense that was very appealing. If you'll recall, that show opened with Dean playing a drunk, begging for whiskey in the saloon. When taken out of context from the story, that swaying, groping drunkeness showed a great scope for comedy. He is fantastic, able to play it up or down. It is Dean's subtleness, somehow, that makes him so great -- he could never be described as a ham, don't you agree? His acting style is convincing and he makes it look so easy! Just a look, the tiniest gesture, and he says everything. Dean definitely has a charisma, some sort of magic that only a few actors have shared. I often compare Montgomery Clift to Dean, which must be very terrible to do, but I consider Monty to have been the similar type of acting genius Dean is. I'd call it "realism," I guess. When an actor is charged with so much emotion in his work and is able to convey it without over-acting, that's something to praise.

**********

I'm sure I know that look you describe on Dean's face, that disgusted look. When reading this part of your letter, I could see him doing it, so you must have described it well. When I watch the adult Dean acting, I always wait for that subtle, quick scratch. Do you know what I mean? Usually it's his eyebrow that itches him, sometimes his nose. Somehow when I see his scratch, I know everything is all right. I realize I sound a bit like a nut here, but I'm so fond of Dean that I love his little quirks. I think if I ever saw him act when he didn't scratch something, I'd probably think something was wrong. Perhaps I'd better change the subject before I sound like a genuine nut!

*****************

Have you by any chance ever heard from Dean? I ask because no one who's written me has. Personally, I have written Dean half a dozen times at various addresses without any luck. For some time now I have been trying to get in touch with him and ask his permission about starting a fan club for him. All we Dean fans have agreed that we need some means by which we can keep abreast of his career, but the main snag is finding Dean. I'm continuing to try. Right now I have several lines out – if only I can get a bite.

Letter 2:

I agree with you completely in regard to Dean's scope for other characters beyond the neurotic ones. I've read several places about actors and actresses who really suffer prolonged, damaging traumas related to typecasting in neurotic and mercenary roles. Mercedes McCambridge blamed her alcoholism on just such typecasting, as one example. I heard from someone that Bette Davis said that celluloid villains were always the nicest people in Hollywood and now that I consider it, it seems to be so. I think Dean is very together, but all the same it must be very frustrating to see that producers invariably think of him as "the perfect nut" for the part. It is frustrating for any creative person to be confined to one outlet of expression.

"The Happy Years" is one Dean movie I haven't seen, but I'd really love to, especially now after you've described the scene in the classroom. I agree about his flair for comedy, though, in what I have seen of him. What bothers me most about Dean's dissatisfaction is that he just might give up acting, if only temporarily, if producers continue to see him as the perfect nut. This is a secret opinion, never before revealed to another soul, Claire, but have you noticed Dean's lack of enthusiasm for his most recent roles? In particular, that "Police Surgeon" segment, you'll recall, wherein Dean played a prosecuting attorney who was kidnapped in exchange for the mobster he was trying to convict. Dean's fire just wasn't burning very much in that part, unless it was my imagination. Was it? I thought it very refreshing that he played a Good Guy for a change, but something seemed wrong somehow. I don't know if you get "Orson Welles Great Mysteries" there, since we get it here through Canada and it is a British-made series, but Dean was fantastic in that. He had another Good Guy part, as an innocent fellow accused of murdering his girlfriend's husband. What, by the way, do you think of Dean's "ponytail?" I think that I'd love to see his hair let down long -- I'm very curious how he'd look if he "let his hair down." I like long hair on men, anyway, so long as it's not ridiculously long, but in a broader sense Dean's endears me to him more because of its obvious symbolism. Dean is unique, an odd mixture of flashiness and seclusion, a mystery. Someone called him a "male Greta Garbo" and in a way it befits him. I see him as very real, don't you? As a person one could talk to, though I'd probably be terrified to speak to him, I must admit. However, I'd love the chance to be terrified.

"Compulsion," which you mention for its fainting and rape scenes, is one of my favorite Dean films, although I feel like a traitor for saying that, since this movie was the most responsible for his typecasting, it seems. So much was left out of "Compulsion," probably because of the time it was made, but the homosexual relationship, the sado-masochism between Artie and Judd, the helplessness under Judd's superior attitudes. . . so much was trimmed and altered or left out entirely from the book, but Dean put back every word with his eyes, with his gestures, with those melting looks, the never-quite-smiles. For that reason "Compulsion" is one of my favorite films, because never did Dean say so much by saying nothing.

I think my favorite movie from Dean's childhood is "Home Sweet Homicide," so far, but I haven't had the opportunity to see them all. Dean was precious in HSH, don't you think?

Did I tell you last letter about reading how Dean worked as a field laborer in Mexico when he quit acting in his middle teens? I meant to if I didn't. Had you ever read about that?

Letter 3:

Protocol would have me first apologize for the small delay in replying this time and secondly thank you kindly for the adorable pix you copied of Dean for me -- but I know you will forgive me for being rude this time, since I have some fantastic news that just came today. First, I heard from Dean!!! Second, he wrote personally! And thirdly but not leastly, he actually authorized ME to start a FAN CLUB for HIM. Can you believe it? I am so excited that I have scarcely touched the ground all day, as you can imagine. I am absolutely thrilled! He wrote that he has never even felt inclined to endorse a fan club before this, "in all my years," as he phrased it, but recently he has had a change of heart and feels he should "involve" himself in the "give and take" between himself "and those who admire and enjoy my work." He writes a very intelligent letter, needless to say -- and he has told me to go ahead and conduct the club any way I choose and that he will cooperate as much as possible. I repeat, can you believe it? He said I should notify him of receiving this letter and he will write more and contribute information, which of course I did immediately.

***********

As for the fan club we'll be putting together, we will have to start out on a small scale and build through publicity. Of course, you and the other Dean fans who write to me are automatically members, which goes without saying, but we really do need the publicity to reach the masses of Stockwell fans. Have you any suggestions? Any help you can offer would be very much appreciated. I plan to order some printed ads to send here and there and of course I will try Rona -- I have the National Fan Club organization address somewhere -- they print ads, too. Right now I'm so excited that I feel like going door-to-door!

***************

No, I didn't get the Albuquerque interview from Richard. I received it from a very nice woman by the name of Olive White who lives in Albuquerque. She just happened upon my letter in Rona's mag and sent me the available material from the newspaper. We now correspond – she's very nice. Yes, I thought too that it sounded just like Dean to say "a bit of fluff." He has a really unique way of writing and speaking as himself, in my opinion, because he sounds very intelligent and yet very -- "free." If you know what I mean. That's a combination one doesn't find every day.

************

Dean mentioned in his letter that he has just returned from eight weeks location filming in the Phillipine Islands, but he didn't go into detail about it. I asked, of course, and I'll pass that information along to you as soon as he responds again.

I agree with you about that "Police Surgeon" episode Dean guested on. Like you, I feel he just didn't try to get into the part. I'm not sure I understand why an actor would accept a part that he wouldn't really give his best to, expecially when the actor is as gifted as Dean. (Only Dean is as gifted as Dean, come to think of it.) Perhaps it was a question of timing or maybe he was sick or something like that. I know

Dean is a veteran, though, and a trooper, and I'm convinced he could sing and dance with a 104 degree temperature if he wanted to -- I guess, in conclusion, the only thing that makes sense is that Dean didn't want to do the show and yet for some reason or another was obligated to. Perhaps he and the director were at each other's throats two minutes after they were introduced. Any speculations from you? I think I've run out of possibilities.

****************

On the question of Dean's ponytail, all I know is that he apparently had it still in March, during his Albuquerque run. The profile long-shot I received shows it clearly, but the photo was definitely inferior for copying material. I would assume he still wears it, probably lets his hair down at home. I think it's very becoming, don't you?

*****************

About your questions on Dean's marriage [to Millie Perkins], I have no facts, only gossip I've been collecting. I don't know how they met but the implication seems to be that it was through Fox, where both were under contract. They supposedly secretly married on a hiatus together and didn't reveal it til they had to -- they opened a bowling alley together -- how's that for a weird fact? Millie retired from her acting career and refused to fulfill her contract to Fox, which caused her several hassles. The general gossip is that Dean said one actor in the family was enough, what with the nomad's life actors lead and all the separations they might face, so Millie gladly retired, wanting only to be his wife. She followed him everywhere and they faithfully shunned photographers and refused to grant interviews. Naturally, Dean was blamed for making Millie "aloof" since he always had that "aloof" reputation. She married him in her heyday, career-wise, I would assume. In any case, I have a small clipping about Millie's reaction to the divorce which heavily insinuates Dean divorced her, and that she was heartbroken about it for awhile. She pulled herself together, one reporter observed, and was determined to "make a comeback" in films. A footnote to this, though, was that she was blackballed for her behavior during her marriage to Dean.

Letter 4:

As far as Dean's side of the club goes, he's still in there supporting and contributing his best. He said that he has no intention of withdrawing his support (I had feared that he might, since it took him so many years to agree to a fan club). He's sent me quite a bit of information, but more on that in a moment.

***********

The fact of the matter is, Dean has established personal communication with me and I am the only one he has entrusted with his home address and telephone number. In a way I am naturally very honored and in another way, I feel very MEAN indeed having this privilege when you and others love Dean as much as I do. But I'm sure you understand that I can't break Dean's trust because he has really given of himself a great deal to go this far. He told me that he intends to get a post office box number in his home (the city in which he lives, I mean -- Topanga) for the fan club members to use, if they'd care to write.

***************

Dean sent me a monstrous, fat collection of papers -- his biography, a copy of which should be sent to each member. It's several pages long and would cost a fortune for me to copy, just for a few members. Now I'm holding off having it copied myself, as I'd like to know if you could have it copied free of charge?

***************

I have constructed a newsletter about Dean's doings which I am getting copied immediately to be sent to the members of the club.

************

I have spoken to Dean twice and he is really wonderful, Claire! He is very kind and very natural. Naturally he is very intelligent and has an amazing kaleidoscope of interests. What impressed me singularly about Dean from the phone conversations is that he is very real, very easy. He gives one a very calm, happy feeling about things. My biggest thrill happened when Dean went off in a verbal fantasy, when talking about his hottest new interest, a martial arts form called arnis. He started to act, heatedly talking about this martial art. A performance for me alone. I smiled for days afterward!

*****************

I agree with you, I would like the club to be unique and mature, a true reflection of Dean's greatness. I certainly would not want the club to be teenybopperish, as you say, or in any way an embarrassment to Dean.

#stockwell sassies

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writings-of-dumpy · 6 years ago

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The Princess and the Pirate - Chapter 5

A/N: Wow, I’m pulling out all the tropes!!!

I woke up to being thrown over someone’s shoulder. I thought it was Harry at first, but the shoulders and arms weren’t the same as the ones I had felt earlier today.

“Hey, let me go!” I said to whoever was carrying me out of the cabin.

“Shut up if you know what’s good for you,” a deep voice growled.

I started to wiggle and kick and managed to clock my kidnapper in the face with my heel.

“Shit! She made my nose bleed!” the man yelled and dropped me. I attempted to catch myself but ended up falling and heard a loud snap followed by excruciating pain stemming from my knee.

“Harr—” I attempted to scream for Harry’s help, but my mouth was covered by a heavily tattooed hand and a knife was held to my throat.

“Say another word and you and your friend are dead,” said a slimy voice in my ear. My head was forced to look over at another group of men who had Evie completely knocked out and over one’s shoulder. “Now be a good princess and do as your told.”

I felt a gag being placed over my mouth and my hands cuffed in front of me. They tried to make me walk, but my left knee wouldn’t work properly, and I suspected it was either fractured or dislocated.

“Pick her up! You broke her, Noodler!” the tattooed man spat at his cohort. I was then thrown over a shoulder again and flung onto what appeared to be a boat. Evie was placed next to me and bound in the same way. As soon as the men left us to sail the ship, I managed to spit out the gag and start nudging Evie.

“Evie, come one girl, wake up!” I called to her.

“Hey! Quiet down!” the tatted man spat at me from the helm. I glared at him and looked at my knee. I attempted to bend it, but I couldn’t seem to make it bend. A deep purple bruise had started to bloom all around my knee and I noticed that my shin and thigh were no longer aligned, which told me that my leg was broken. I used my thigh to flip my leg so that I could get a better look at my kneecap to assess it, which sent a sharp pain through me, and I yelped.

Evie woke with a start and looked at me completely panicked. I noticed that there weren’t enough hands to keep Evie and I quiet while sailing the ship, so I took advantage of it and leaned over to her.

“Hang on, I’ll get the gag off of you…” I said and pulled the cloth down past her chin with my teeth because our hands were bound to be immobile.

“What the hell happened?” Evie whispered.

“We’ve been kidnapped. Looks like they only were after us, though..” I told her.

“Why us?” Evie asked and I shrugged.

“Because the two of you are very important to the King and his knights. We would have taken Uma, but Ursula told us not to lay a hand on her,” the man who was called Noodler said as he tied ropes to the ship next to us.

I shot him a look. “So Ursula is behind this.”

“Not really! She just knew of our plan and sent us a message. No, the one behind this is the Captain himself…” the tattooed man said.

“Jukes! Neverland on the horizon!” a man shouted from the crow’s nest.

“Aye, we’ll be there soon, men! Our captain awaits!” Jukes said and the crew cheered.

“Sorry, I hate to break this to you, but Captain Hook has been dead for a very long time…” Evie spoke up.

Jukes formed a twisted and terrifying grin on his lips. “Dead isn’t really dead, though is it? You should know that, being the daughter of an evil queen who used magic to bring you and your friends to life.”

“What are you talking about?” Evie demanded darkly.

“Oh, you don’t know? You never had a father; you and your pesky little gang were all brought about by magic. Souls of the innocent were used to bring the next generation of evil, so they said...” Jukes told us.

Evie looked broken. “You’re a pirate, I can’t trust a word you say.”

“And yet you believe it, don’t you? Because a pirate is many things, but liar he ain’t,” Jukes concluded. “Sometimes the truth is worse than any lie a scallywag can conjure.”

“Hey, Evie, it’s alright. It doesn’t matter how you got here, okay?” I told her. “What matters now is how we’re going to get out of here.”

“Oh, you two will only be going to The Black Castle in Skull Rock, see?” a man with dark eyes said to us.

“Care to explain why?” I challenged, which earned me a smirk.

“Aye, the princess wants to know our plans…” he remarked.

“Might as well since she’s dyin’ anyway, Cookson,” Noodler responded.

I looked at Evie, who was staying strong despite the obvious fear in her eyes. “It’s alright,” I mouthed to her.

“When your pretentious king and the captain’s son bring us the dust and the book, we’re going to bring our captain back with the blood of three royals and the sacrifice of the son,” Cookson sneered.

“Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but you’re down a royal. And Harry would never sacrifice himself to bring back his dreadful father,” I spat at him.

“Oh, I think he will… and with you, the Queen and King, that’s three royals,” Jukes said and he turned the ship into what appeared to be Pirate’s Cove.

I raised a brow. “You’re mistaken, I’m no royal. Harry’s not too keen on his father either.”

Cookson laughed. “You are the daughter of Tarzan, aren’t you? That means you’re royalty. Tarzan’s the rightful king of Arendelle, as Elsa and Ana have found out.”

“I’m a princess..” I breathed out to myself. The ship stopped and I looked at Evie with wide eyes. Cookson and Noodler hoisted us over their shoulders and I saw a gathering of more pirates on the edges of the Black Castle’s interior. Suddenly I was dropped onto a hard and damp rock and groaned in the pain in my knee. Evie was then placed beside me and we were hooked up to the rock and shoved into the water that was beneath the rock. At this point, the tide was only up to our knees.

“This is an idiotic plan you’ve concocted. There are mermaids in Neverland who know who to save and who to let drown,” I told Jukes bluntly.

“Mermaids don’t come here anymore,” he said and gestured towards the archway at the entrance. I looked up and saw the severed body of a mermaid with the initials ‘JH’ and ‘WJ’ carved into her cheeks, which I assumed were for James Hook and William Jukes.

I swallowed hard and looked at him with distain. “You’re disgusting.”

“Sticks and stones,” Jukes retorted.

“You better hope your love comes for you, Queen Evie. Otherwise the two of you are croc food once you’ve drowned,” Noodler taunted as the pirates left us to die.

I looked over at Evie, whose head was hung downwards.

“Evie, it’s going to be okay. I can’t walk, my tibia is probably broken and my knee is dislocated, but you can get out of here, okay? As long as one of us makes it out, they can’t bring Hook back. Harry’s not going to let them either,” I told her and looked for anything Evie could use to free herself.

“Shut up, I’m not leaving you here,” Evie said and sounded like she had something in her mouth. Her head shot up and in her teeth was a bobby pin. “Take it, I’ve got another one for me!”

I grinned. “Evie, you’re a genius!”

Once I had the bobby pin in my mouth, Evie and I worked together to pull ourselves up on the rock so that we were once again on top of it and got to work unlocking ourselves from the chains the pirates had placed.

“Ben’s probably on his way now with the book,” Evie said and shook her head after a failed attempt at the chains.

“Yeah, and Harry’s got the Pixie dust,” I added. After a few moments of fenagling, I heard a click and my cuffs opened. Once my hands were free, I helped Evie get out of hers.

“Now what? We can’t just march out there, they’ll put us back or worse,” Evie asked.

“You need to get out of here. I can’t move, so I’ll take whatever they’ve got, but you need to GO,” I told her urgently.

“Forget it, I’m not leaving you here!”

We heard cheers and jeers from outside of the castle and heard Jukes welcome Ben and Harry to Neverland. Evie and I looked at each other and I went to work on a splint for my leg using the chains and part of my dress to stabilize it.

~Harry~

Adrenaline rushed through Harry’s system as their boat approached Skull Rock. As expected, he saw all his father’s crew, lead by none other than Bill Jukes. The pirates let out a sound of excitement and anger as Ben and Harry docked their boat. It had been at least a few hours since Rayla and Evie were kidnapped, though it had felt like mere minutes. Harry had a feeling that he knew why they wanted the book and Pixie dust, but he would keep it to himself until he was sure. Ben’s main objective was to rescue Evie and Rayla, then return to Auradon as quickly as possible. Before Harry and Ben set off for Neverland, Jay and Uma gathered the troops from the kingdom and were instructed to invade Skull Rock to imprison the pirates. Harry knew a fight was coming, but he wasn’t sure exactly when, but he didn’t want Rayla to be any part of it.

“So… did you bring what we asked of you?” Bill asked Ben.

“I’ve met your criteria, but first let me see them,” Ben said very diplomatically.

“Oh, they’re safe on the rock in the castle. Princess has a bit of a broken leg, though.. Won’t be swimming anytime soon,” Bill taunted.

Harry’s blood boiled. He knew exactly the rock they spoke of and the thought of Rayla chained up to it and left to drown made his body react to attack Bill, but Ben’s arm held him back.

“Ooh-hoo-hoo! Harry’s gone soft for the girl. This makes things much more interesting…” Bill taunted with his signature smirk.

“Release them to us and you’ll get your wretched book and Pixie dust,” Ben said.

“Problem is, your majesty…” Bill began. Without a warning, Harry recognized Noodler, Cookson and Starkey as the pirates that jumped and bound both he and Ben. “We need the two of you to finish what we want.”

Starkey snatched the book from Ben’s hand. Harry was rolled onto his back and searched until the jar of Pixie dust was found and taken by Cookson.

“Aw, Harry… You were such a promising captain. But then you just had to go and defile everything our captain taught you,” Bill said, and then spat on Harry’s chest. “Should have been you that was croc food. But now I’ve got a special plan for you now that I know you’re sweet on the princess… Lock him in the brig.”

“Don’t you dare touch her! I swear I’ll kill you, Bill!” Harry screamed at his former crewmate before being thrown onto the ship and into the hold.

#Descendants fanfic #harry hook x oc

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70slovergirl · 6 years ago

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Jimmy Page Fanfic

Hello! I’m so sorry for the delay. I hope you enjoy the new chapter.

Also, does anybody else laughs at how much time I dedicate to describe outfits? I mean, it was the 70s after all!

Chapter 6, Part 1

By the time I got to my room, I noticed a square note had been posted on my door.

Gone to sound check. Will send a car for you at seven sharp. Dress Nicely.

Despite the lack of signature, the author of the message was quite obvious. I rolled my eyes at the underlined last sentence, crumbling the paper in my hand and heading inside. It wasn’t to please Mr. Grant, but I decided dedicating an effort to my look tonight was the least I could do, considering it was not only my first real assignment, but also my first Zeppelin concert. I reached for my favorite double single vinyl-Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, to set the mood for getting ready.

There was a special jumpsuit I had been meaning to wear: a double denim dream, with tight high waisted bell bottoms and a matching asymmetric top. It was edgy but also cool, just the image I wanted to portray as my role as journalist. Pairing it up with scarlet platforms, I looked around my luggage for a long, slim psychedelic fabric that I used as hippie headband. I tied it around my head, letting the knot’s remaining chords tangle in between my locks of hair.

The choice regarding the make-up was just a bit harder, as I struggled deciding between something formal and my natural juvenile taste for things like glitter. I finally decided on fluttery eyelashes, rosy cheeks and yes, a glittery gloss that belonged more to the disco that in a rock concert. Finally, I blew dried my hair into curls that framed my face and concluded I definitely looked nice enough for a night of eternal music.

It was well past six forty when I filled my arms with multicolor bracelets baring messages of peace and love, and I eventually left for the reception, a hand-painted bag slung on my shoulder and my favorite notebook of notes kept under the other one. From afar, I noticed there was a single, silver Cadillac parked in the entrance, and for half a slow-motioned second, I felt like a movie star. That is of course, until one of the back doors opened and a certain difficult musician emerged.

I truly wished I could turn back on my heels and run towards the opposite direction, but I couldn’t let Jimmy Page know I had become agitated by his sudden appearance. It was a matter that was becoming more and more problematic, having mainly to do with the fact he was wearing his stage attire and oh my god how can he look that sensual. It was an embraided masterpiece, an ink-colored fabric that exhibited mystical dragons crawling down the length of his legs. His chest was uncovered. I forgot how to breathe.

Ever the gentlemen, he kept the door open for me, a sly invitation without the necessity of communication. Of course, it was only the illusion of a choice, but I couldn’t be bothered with considerations that didn’t involve getting inside that car. It was dangerous, whatever this was, and the air was thick with tension as soon as he took a seat next to me.

“I have tried, Miss Venus, but I cannot seem to shake off those sharp eyes of yours.” His entire body was poised towards me, but I barely moved my head to acknowledge him, meeting his gaze from under my lashes.

“Its not me nor my eyes, I assure you. We all want the things we can’t have.” It was a cold answer that couldn’t hide the obvious warmth I felt at his compliment.

“And what is it that you want?”

You. I surprised myself at the sudden thought, without warning or logical reasoning, like an automatic answer. I chastised my subconscious and tried to gather any coherent idea left in my brain.

“Publishing this article is my biggest wish.” He rolled those teasing eyes at the mere mention of business, and I couldn’t help melting over the expression. It made the guitarist look years younger, a more playful side to contrast his gloomy exterior.

“You are determined to make me suffer.” It was a light sarcastic tone, and I couldn’t keep the corners of my lips from twitching upwards.

“I understand your disregard towards the media, but let me prove to you what I’m capable of.” I finally turned towards him, my eyes wide open and pleading. His demeanor changed slightly, as though I had somehow managed to cut through his characteristically frosty persona.

Jimmy raised his hand, very slowly, as though he expected me to bat it away. Gently, he took ahold of my neck and painfully dragged his fingers down and down towards my shoulder, where he halted. There was a smirk painted on his ever so handsome face when he noticed the goosebumps his trail had left behind.

“I could say the same to you.” It was such a seductive thing to say, the promise of what could yet happen, that I totally forgot what we were talking about for a second.

“James Page.” I warned, and he slumped back to his seat, defeated.

“Fine. Just answer me this then.” The guitarist searched his pockets for a pack of cigarettes and offered me one, which I shakily took. “What is it exactly that makes a musician great?”

I felt my eyebrows rise at the question since it wasn’t what I was expecting. It was a serious, thoughtful inquiry, and I knew in that moment that the future status of my article depended on the answer I gave. He offered to light my smoke, an entertained look on his face, and I took advantage of the brief time to get my thoughts together.

“It has to do mainly with their personal style.” He looked puzzled at what I had said, and I realized it had come out all wrong. Damn, I’m so much better at writing! “Take for example The Beatles. I mean, they were definitely talented from the start. They knew how to work a crowd and they wrote exactly what teens and lovers wanted to hear. But their sound wasn’t any different from several other pop groups reigning on the radio.

The greatness was truly bestowed upon them when they found the sound that distinguished them, and that only came when they started looking for inspiration within themselves. Suddenly it wasn’t repeated riffs or silly lyrics, but true music that resounded deep in all of our souls. Think of Sgt. Pepper, that album became iconic the minute it was released because it was like nothing out there.”

We shared a look in the silence that proceeded, and I knew this captivating genius and I had finally found common ground. It was more than that, but I just couldn’t point it out.

“You had that since the beginning. That first LP literally knock it out of the park. I remember all the critics were so angry. As a band, you were supposed to grow into greatness, but Zeppelin was born being exceptional.” It was not an attempt to suck up or to try and look full of knowledge, what I had said was my truth regarding them.

This time Jimmy Page’s gaze was not seeking to undress me but was rather calculating. There was something else in there too, but I didn’t know him well enough to understand what it meant.

The car halted, and my body unintentionally got pressed against the musician’s chest. Neither of us moved, somehow frozen, our faces so so close that I could kiss him if I wanted it. I had started to entertain the idea when the door of the automobile flew open. We had arrived at the arena.

#jimmy page #jimmy page fanfic #jimmy page fanfiction #led zeppelin #led zeppelin fanfic #70s fanfiction #70s #rock

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crimes-and-gelato · 6 years ago

Text

Half a Blue Sky (Chapter 2)

Rating: M Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes Chapter Title: Send My Love to Your Old Lover A/N: And thank you if you're still here and reading this.This chapter introduces Bucky, thus, it's going to include mentions of his murder of the Starks, his trauma, and his brainwashing. None are detailed. Just mentioned. I don't think this needed saying since we all know he went through all that but in case someone needed a heads up.That's it. Hope you like this chapter! :)

****

“You remind me of the stars in the sky because I don’t ever want to stop looking at the sky. I don’t ever want to stop looking at the sky. And I don’t ever want to stop looking at you. You’ve captivated my mind, my heart, and my soul. The flower from previous woes have now grown into beautiful roses. As beautiful as it seems I’m finding it hard to breathe because reality has hit me and I know I can never call you one word: mine.” -biancandbeanstalk

****

Steve comes back to the tower with Barnes in tow. And stupidly, that’s not the knife that metaphorically kills Tony. No, it’s Captain America’s grave news about learning of his parents’ murderer: James Barnes AKA The Winter Soldier.

‘It’s not his fault, Tony,’ Steve reasons out. Tony knows Steve will always take Barnes’ side no matter what. ‘HYDRA made him do it.’ There’s guilt and hatred in his voice that’s simply heartbreaking to hear. ‘Please help him.’

Tony knows he shouldn’t, that he can say ‘no’ and ‘fuck you’, and he won’t be the bad guy because Steve just opened an old wound that had never truly healed - it just scabbed over his heart and disfigured his insides. He’s mourning for his mother once again. He’s allowed to be angry.

But it’s Steve. Tony loves Steve, and he knows his mother would want him to heal and forgive. And there’s also that grieving look in Bucky’s eyes that Tony finds familiar.

So, who is Tony to deny Steve of anything? The super soldier’s happiness is important to Tony. Achingly so.

It also helps their case that Tony had been sent files about the torture that Barnes had undergone in the hands of HYDRA. It’s a miracle the ex-assassin managed to survive after those constant tormenting: the memory wiping, the unwanted operation, the inhumane training, and other more disgusting activity HYDRA planned.

Masochistic must be Tony’s middle name. Should have been because he does help Steve and Barnes.

Helping the two soul bonded doesn’t mean he fully forgive Barnes. No, that will take time. Lots of time because it’s about his mother. Maria Carbonell Stark whom Tony loves dearly. The woman who understood that Tony needed to be human before he could don the mask of a Stark man even when Howard was such a horrible husband.

His parents weren’t soulmates. Their union was nothing but a business deal.

Some people, like his parents do marry someone even when they are not soul bond. There is a statistics that say it works. But only a small percentage. Mostly, like Maria and Howard’s, fails. It’s like the universe cursing the union for trying to defy the odds.

Those who do defy the odds are small and brave and strong. Tony is none of those, so despite his old age — Rhodey says that thirty-six is the new twenty-three, or something — he tried not to settle down with anybody else except his soulmate. Only now, even his soul bond is a condemnation from the universe.

So much for waiting. He should have gone with Pepper, or Rhodey.

‘Don’t worry I’ll marry you when you reach forty, Antoshka, if you couldn’t find your soulmate,’ Natasha tells him one time he vents to her about his single-ness predicament.

Tony only cuddles further into her warm embrace. ‘But then you’ll be stuck with me.’ He throws his head back a bit to look up to her. ‘What about your soulmate?’

It’s mild but the Black Widow’s eyes flinch with pain. Just for a second. Tony could have missed it but he knows Natasha by now. They’re best friends after that green pistachio ice cream incident in which they have slowly learned to trust each other and now here they are, cuddling to make Clint gag.

‘They’re probably dead.’ She’s not meeting Tony’s eyes as she looks ahead on the TV. There’s enough nonchalance in her voice that sounded fake.

Tony doesn’t ask how she knows. He only wraps himself into her tighter and wishes that she didn’t have to suffer under the Red Room. But he can’t change their pasts. He can only wish for a better path for here on out.

Same goes for Barnes. And just like for Natasha, Tony can pave a great present and future for Bucky. Isn’t that what he’s been trying to do after Afghanistan to redeem himself from all the wrongs of his past?

He understands them both better because he took the same path and carry around a guilt that no amount of self-redemption could lessen the weight of. A road littered with blood and corpses. A road that he doesn’t want to take anymore because this is not the legacy he wants to leave behind.

Sometimes he wonders if this is why he’s close friends with Natasha — that could almost compete with his two decades friendship with Rhodey — is because she understands what it’s like to be broken. It might be the whole birds with the same feather adage. Or maybe it’s because he’s wise enough to make friends with broken people because they know how to survive.

Yes, he’s one, but there are times when he feels like he can’t do it anymore. Then he thinks back of the hell he went through and at the same time the hell he have brought, of all the amending he has to make for his mistakes. The latter alone keeps him moving forward, just like Natasha and Barnes, because he’s alive for a reason. And he won’t waste this second chance he got to turn his bloody legacy into something close to a shining beacon of hope for the future.

And isn’t that what he is? A futurist.

A man with an ambition to make the world safe for the future generation. Cliche as it may sound. But it’s the truth.

So, he needs to start working on the places he can fix. On the people he can help. People he believes have potential to makes the world safe.

Maybe he helps Barnes for Steve, but at the same time he helps the POW because he refuses to be a monster. He refuses to carry around a hate that his mother would never want for him.

****

‘Tony, it’s time for bed,’ Natasha informs as she walks into the workshop. She’s been very strict with his sleeping and eating schedule all thanks to Peppers request to Natasha to keep an eye on him. And when did the two scary redhead team up? Become friends?

‘No.’ He side-eyes her and reasons out that he’s not sleepy yet, but a yawn escapes his mouth. Great, even his own body betrays him.

‘It’s past midnight, Antoshka.’ She raises an eyebrow at him like a mother silently reprimanding her child. ‘You have an early board meeting tomorrow.’

Tony did glare at her. ‘You and Pepper becoming friends is one of the worst things that happened in my life,’ he whines but closes his holograms with a wave of his hand. He’s not stupid enough to try and disobey Natasha. He still wants to continue breathing, thank you very much.

They leave the workshop together and got on the lift.

‘Steve’s been looking for you since the day before yesterday ,’ she tells him blankly. But knowing her, Tony’s sure she’s trying to watch him for reactions.

Except Tony doesn’t have much to say. Only, ‘Really?’ And he even sounds believable as if he didn’t spend the entire week — since Steve’s return — avoiding the Wonder Twins. As if it’s all coincidence that he had lots of things to do in SI, the R&D needed him for some testing, and he had to fly to Wakanda for three days to meet with the genius princess, Shuri, to help with Barnes’ deprogramming.

He’s been busy. Not evasive. And if Pepper found him that one time in his office doing soduko at 1am when he should be home she got him some coffee and closed the door, bless her. Because he couldn’t imagine haunting his workshop as usual, it was team movie night and both Steve and Natasha have override codes.

So, not avoiding. Definitely not.

‘It’s about Bucky’s arm.’ And Natasha really does knows how to pique Tony’s interest because it’s obvious he had been lusting over the metal arm. It’s the engineer in him, really. ‘Steve wants to ask if you can take a look at it because it seems like it’s causing Bucky pain.’

Tony frowns at that. ‘Since when?’

The spy only shrugs. ‘You should ask Steve. Or better... Bucky.’

‘Sure,’ he tells her. Not knowing if he was bluffing or not. Maybe he should ask Natasha and save himself from stressing out over whether he should pull the band-aid in one go or peel it slow. She always seems to have the answer.

There’s that nagging thought at the back of his head as well that the spy had noticed his forced habit of calling Steve by any and all names but his first name, throwing the most ridiculous nicknames he can find at the man while keeping him at arm's length. But it’s not as if it’s suspicious that Tony’s using nicknames instead of names because he’s quite well-known for it. The only question is that if Natasha had been keen enough to figure out his deepest and darkest secret.

What will Natasha tell him if she knows that he’s Captain America’s soulmate? Maybe request him not to get between Steve and Barnes. That’s what people would say because that’s the right thing.

The elevator arrives on Tony’s floor, the penthouse suite. JARVIS opens the door.

‘Tony,’ she calls at him as he steps out.

He turns to look at her.

‘It’s okay,’ she says solemnly. ‘You don’t have to forgive him if you don’t want to.’ She stares into him, eyes colouring with genuine sincerity, just a dab of softness to the sides of her mouth. How he’d come to be so close to her to be able to read these things, he wouldn’t remember. Maybe it was all the time they’d been forced to work together, rub shoulders while sharing traumatic experiences.

After the fall of SHIELD, Tony thought she would set up camp by Steve’s side. But she still guards his corner. If he allowed himself, he’d probably hug her and weep. He’s allergic to any show of emotion though, and so was Natasha. Although they have been subtly disgustingly sweet and caring with each other. Ask Clint.

He only nods because what can you say to that exactly?

Natasha gives back a small nod in return and clicks the lift’s close button.

The spy is gone but Tony continues to stare at the elevator door and contemplates on what Natasha had just told him. It’s quite perplexing to believe that his pain is valid, that it doesn’t make him a bad person to not forgive Barnes. But then again, he had already decided to.

****

It takes him another day to finally face the music. He hasn’t seen Barnes ever since Steve had brought his soulmate to the tower. Not that Tony’s excited on meeting his competition. Also, there was no competition.

He invited the two super soldiers to his workshop, where he feels safer. The suits will be around him in case he needed a quick escape when it all gets too much for his poor heart. JARVIS will keep an eye out of him, and so will his bots.

‘Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes are on their way, sir,’ JARVIS announces.

‘Thanks, J,’ he tells his AI, closing the hologram for the new suit. ‘Let them in.’

‘Duly noted, sir.’

And under three minutes the doors of the shop open, and in stroll the super soldiers. He turns his swivel chair to have a look at the both of them. Maybe he can desensitise himself by looking at them, just so it won’t hurt anymore. Maybe.

The pair of them look weary. The darker-haired one looks on guard but his eyes are wide in marvel.

‘Tony.’ There’s a small relieved smile on the blond’s lips. He’s taking the lead while Barnes’ two steps behind. The sound of his own name on the Captain’s lips make his insides ache but Tony tries to pretend it’s hunger pangs from his recent eighteen hour shift he pulled with the new suit designs.

‘Cap,’ he greets back not bothering to stand up. He then eyes the ex-assassin. ‘And you must be the infamous Winter Soldier.’ He refuses to call him Bucky. They’re not friends. They don’t have to be and that’s fantastic.

‘Tony.’ It sounds like a warning, but it’s usual for Steve.

‘It’s okay, Stevie,’ the Winter Soldier placates. He moves around so he’s next to Steve.

And if Tony’s heart isn’t breaking he’d say that they both make such a beautiful picture and pair. Instead he ignores them both and ignores his pain as he mutely orders the soldier to the medical chair. He keeps it for when he’s injured in battles and refuses to go to the medical bay. Bruce reprimands him for it and keeps saying how he’s not that kind doctor, but nonetheless he still fixes Tony’s injuries.

Barnes stares at the chair like a deer in headlights. The picture of fear is clear in his blue grey eyes.

‘Okay.’ Tony silently makes a mental note. He casually pats the metal table on the other side of him. ‘Sit here, soldier boy.’

There is instant relief in the ex-assassin’s feature. Although it is mild, because he still looks like he is ready to flee at the drop of a hat.

‘Where does it hurt?’ he asks and pulls up his hologram set up to do a full body scan of the man in front of him. Hoping that having something to do with his hands will keep him from getting excited and grabby with the shiny metal arm in his proximity. He has a feeling Barnes doesn’t want it to be touched without consent. His time in Afghanistan had told him that much about having an unwanted upgrade. ‘Can I touch it? Is it okay?’

The former POW looks at his soulmate as if he’s trying to find some strength from Steve’s silent assurance. Tony tries not to notice the amount of trust between the soulmates. Tries to ignore the knife digging deep in his chest at witnessing the very thing he can never have.

Barnes nods.

The man looks like an ex-convict no matter which direction you approach him from, Tony finds it a shame, he grew up watching the old reels of the Howling Commandos. He had always looked up to both Barnes and Cap. Mostly to the former because Steve’s shoes are impossible to fill. Even at the young age of five, Tony knows that truth.

So, he’s spent his younger years and teenage years on trying to follow Barnes’ footsteps, the amazing sidekick who quietly helps save the world even when no one acknowledges how much he had done and sacrificed.

He can’t imagine coming out and saying it so bluntly. He'd sound like a fool or a teenager with a silly crush. So, he’ll have to make do with what he can get away with: be his usual, flirty, sauve self. Steve would not get the wrong impression because he’s been a victim — countless of times — of Tony’s debauch personality.

‘JARVIS, what’s the scan say?’ He turns to the screen where several files are opening up thanks to JARVIS. At the same time he tries very hard not to ogle the man before him.

‘There appears to be an overlapping framework, sir,’ JARVIS replies as Tony’s screen fills with the arm’s 3D structure.

He turns to Barnes again, gently lifting the wrist to see the movement and the arm made clinky noises as it moved. The movement seemed natural and that was more than enough to peak his interest. ‘I’m going to open your arm panels and see what’s wrong, okay?’

‘I’m not going to break, you know,’ Barnes deadpans with mild irritation.

He might have used kid’s glove on dealing with Barnes. Really, he should know better than tip-toeing around the man like he’s a walking time bomb. Didn’t he hate it when his friends did that with him before?

‘Is that a challenge?’ he retorts, raising his eyebrows at Barnes. A wicked smile playing on his lips.

Steve says his name again with perfect measurement of Captain-America-is-upset-with-you.

And before he can roll his eyes on Steve, Barnes grins widely at him like the brainwashed assassin can’t believe how lucky he's got to be to have discovered Tony’s brand of humour. It’s very special and rare, and it offends lots of people most of the time.

‘Let’s see what you got, Stark,’ Barnes throws back, amusedly.

****

Despite trying to avoid The Wonder Twins, Tony finds himself alone with Barnes more often in his workshop than the times he sees or talks to Steve. Not that Steve doesn’t try to have a conversation with him. He just refuses to speak with his teammate.

They both walk on eggshell. And it’s not like Tony wants to close the gap between them, because he doesn’t want to. Well, logically he shouldn’t because he needs to move on. But at the same time he painfully craves to have Steve back in his life like before.

Can’t always get what you want.. This is it for Tony. He should start to accept that. He should. Even if it’s hard.

Barnes goes down to Tony’s shop all by himself now, refusing to have Steve around to metaphorically hold his hand. The other super soldier believes it’s better for his healing, to get slow independence on his own.

Princess Shuri’s device must be working, and so is the therapy because Barnes looks better than when Tony had first seen him. And it’s been only a month.

He wants to be happy with Barnes since they’ve somehow became kindred-spirits with how they both undergone body changes they never wanted. And he knows that the PTSD isn’t a walk in the park either.

But they’re not friends. They’re acquaintances, doctor-patient, housemates. Nothing more. And it shouldn’t be more. He should be afraid if he starts to crave for more.

‘Tony, Tasha told me to come and get you for din—,’ Bruce cuts off.

‘Hey, Bruciebear,’ Tony flashes his friend a smile and closes the metal panels in Barnes’ arm. ‘Dinner time?’

Bruce nods. ‘Tasha’s finishing with the cooking so she asked me to come and get you,’ he explains, studying Barnes’ arm thoughtfully. ‘And this thing is connected to his brain?’

‘Yes.’ He stands up from his chair and pops his back into place. ‘I’ve had JARVIS scan it. It’s quite revolutionary. But at the same time it needs great improvements because it’s sloppy work, very inefficient.’

‘Hmmm...’ Bruce continues to stare at the arm. ‘Maybe Dr. Cho can help you improve the motor neuron function commands from his primary motor cortex.’

‘I’ve thought of that.’ He puts his hands on his hips. ‘Helen said she’ll try to drop in two weeks from now, since she’s busy with the Regeneration Cradle at the moment.’

‘The Regeneration Cradle?’ Bruce’s eyes grow wide with amazement. ‘You’ve finished it?’ He puts a supportive hand on Tony’s shoulder, a grin creeping on his face. ‘Congratulations!’

Tony nods, refusing to blush. ‘Thanks.’

Bruce squeezes his shoulder softly. ‘I’m really happy for you, Tony. It’s going to help a lot of people.’

‘Well, that’s the plan.’ He shrugs, feeling embarrassed by the praise coming from another brilliant mind. Maybe an even better genius than he ever will be. ‘And I was hoping it’ll help Winter Wonderland here as well.’

And they both turn to Barnes, who looks annoyed at being ignored and talked about like he’s not in the same room as the two scientist.

‘I don’t think I have been introduced yet,’ Bruce mentions.

Tony jumps off at the chance for a change of topic. He doesn’t like being the centre of attention. No matter what the media says. Well, he actually does like being the star of the show, but only if he has control on what’s about to happen. Praise makes him uncomfortable, maybe it's because the concept had been unfamiliar for so long.

‘That is so rude of me,’ he jokes. ‘Brucie-bear meet the Winter Soldier a.k.a., Captain America’s best friend and soulmate, a.k.a. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.’ He gestures to the super soldier sitting on the metal table. ‘Barnes,’ he begins as he turns to the said man who appears to be quite tense now, ‘meet the incredible, brilliant , Dr. Bruce Banner. He has like seven Ph.Ds. it's frankly amazing.’

Barnes isn’t even looking at the man he’s being introduced to. No, his blue grey eyes are wide with shock as they dig into Tony’s face. His whole body is rigid with tension that wasn’t there like six seconds ago.

‘And he also turns into a sublime green being that can get you and Cap a run for your money on being The Strongest Avenger.’ He tries very hard to ignore the sudden changes in Barnes, knowing it won’t do good if he hovers over him now like a mother hen. That’s Steve’s job. Not that he’s not concerned with Barnes’ well-being, too. It’s only that he understands that sometimes your nightmares haunt you with no warning or whatsoever.

No time or place is safe for the traumas to make their appearance. Tony knows that. In a snap of a finger a moment can suddenly feel like your skin doesn’t fit anymore, or the room becomes too small or too loud or too quiet. It doesn’t make sense.

‘Nice to finally meet you, Sergeant Barnes.’ Bruce reaches his right hand forward with a smile.

But Barnes’ eyes are glued on Tony’s face like he’s disbelieving the genius’ existence.

It’s not yet a panic attack, but Tony fears it will become one. He wants to reach out to Barnes and tell the man to breathe in and out, only he doesn’t. How could he? The incredulity slowly morphs into terror behind Barnes’ eyes. The same grey blue ones that are turned to Tony.

There’s no denying the presented facts. Barnes’ is triggered by Tony. He’s currently Barnes’ Boogeyman.

Tony expects the pain, the ones that always comes when they see him as he sees himself: a monster. Hate will follow fear in the process. And he’s not ready to see those emotions on Barnes’ eyes pointed at him. He couldn't stand to disappoint another one of his heroes.

And before either of the scientists can ask what’s wrong, since Bruce has noticed as well, Barnes mutters a, ‘I have to go,’ before he leaves abruptly like he can’t stand to be in the same room as Tony.

To say that it hurts Tony would be an understatement. Rejection has never been gentle with him, and to think after all these years he should be used to it by now. The years doesn’t numb the pain so that one can get use to it.

He tries to look at the positive side: he’s not going to be bothered very long by Barnes’ rejection because they’re not friends. It’s a good thing they’re not. Even when Tony wanted to be at some point despite telling himself that he doesn’t.

This is exactly for the best. Cutting lose people before he gets too attached.

Not everyone can stomach him as a person, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Barnes had wanted out before whatever they had could have progressed. Hell, Tony’s sure most of his friends are ticking time bombs and would one by one leave him in the future.

He hopes that those days don’t come. But it sure will. He knows it, because Howard had reminded him way too many times that he’s destined to be alone and unloved. It comes along with his legacy as one of the problematic Stark.

#stuckony soulmate au #stuckony fanfic #steve x tony #tony x bucky #bucky x steve #stucky #stony fic #winteriron #fanfic #angst #fluff #half a blue sky #steve rogers #tony stark #bucky barnes

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years ago

Video

youtube

NONAME FT. SMINO & SABA - ACE

[6.70]

A Chicago rapper who needs nointroduction...

Julian Axelrod: Three of the best rappers in Chicago the world go in over a bed of whispers, warm breezes and fluttering coos with some of the most conflicted flexes in recent memory. Smino's sidewinder croon hops on and off beat like a kid touching a hot stove before easing into a hook so smooth it practically floats off into the atmosphere. Noname's quietly virtuosic bars gleam with the joy of discovery, a young genius reveling in her new love of weed and sex and the life-affirming act of declaring these other rappers ain't shit. And just when you think it can't get better, Saba comes through with perhaps the crowning achievement of his already incredible year. His motormouth musings elicit some holy mix of pride, elation and astonishment from the depths of my soul, and yet his boasts are so nonchalant it feels like you stumbled into a conversation with the smartest guy at the party."GOAT TRIO TYPE SHIT" is right. [8]

Matias Taylor: There's a conversational quality to the lyrics, the delivery, and the ebb and flow of the track itself (amplified by the mood-setting acapella sample in the beat). Everything is in sync here; it sounds like the best kind of jam session, or like a late night conversation with good friends -- warm, funny, honest, and never trying too hard to show it. [8]

Nicholas Donohoue: Luscious, silly, precious, and good-natured. The audio of an early fall drive with your friends commenting on everything out the window, enjoying the laughs and the silence, and holding that feeling that everything will be alright eventually. [8]

Lilly Gray: Woof, this is smooth. Sometimes minimal, chill work like this ends up sounding empty or missing an element to me, but the pillowy woo background, seeming clipped from a music box or Fantasia, provides soft closeness that keeps it all together. That and the obvious enjoyment of the vocalists (the smile at the end of "wait and just hear me out"), whose complementary textures and flows wind through the scenery without causing more than a ripple. I also have the attention span of a goldfish, so smooth rapping in the same cadence over any length of time can lull me into a state perfect for astral projection or a nap. This isn't ideal for parties or getting work done, but is pretty ideal for laying around daydreaming, floating from voice to voice and thought to thought. [6]

William John: I went to Noname's Melbourne show about ten days ago. It was a short set -- perhaps 50 minutes in total, including an encore -- and she played only three songs from the newly released Room 25, one of which was added to the setlist spontaneously and put the audience momentarily into the position of a voyeur in the rehearsal room. Despite my caveats, it was an enjoyable show, not least because Noname is one of rap's most charismatic newcomers, and because Telefone, most of which was performed that night, has since its release been one of my favourite gloaming records -- music to play on still, warm nights when dusk stretches long, while downing Negronis as the delights of the dark night grow near. "Ace," too, is attuned to these same circumstances -- a spirited, gorgeous posse cut that belies its drowsy tempo. [8]

Anna Suiter: Noname's verse cuts off like she's being interrupted. It's clever, but the problem is that Noname barely feels like she's present in the song at all. Even if her verse should be the highlight, it doesn't feel like she's highlighted at all. The general mood of the track doesn't make it easy to pull much out of it either. [5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: One's appreciation for Room 25 will directly correspond to their opinion of Noname's spoken word tendencies. As she adopts a more poetic lyricism and delivery, Phoelix's production lays out an open canvas with which she can roam free. One shouldn't confuse the album's neo-soul leanings for objective maturation (lest they be victim to a gullible and untenable rockism), but it does alter the way one interacts with and responds to Noname herself. Such is the stark contrast between Telefone and Room 25 -- both personal, both intimate, but different avenues through which we peer into the Chicago rapper's psyche. "Ace" is the album's most digestible track: standard single length, familiar features, recognizable hook. Frankly, it stands out for being one of her least personal tracks, hindered by a constricting structure that limits her voice's capabilities. Her verse features a competent flow, but it tricks the listener into thinking she's said something particularly noteworthy. Specifically, she relies on a spattering of words that act as signifiers for a vague cool, all of which tumbles into an accidental Chance impersonation in "Room 25 the best album that's coming out." Saba's verse is similarly stiff, bringing the song to a complete halt when he delivers the only line that falls completely flat: "Since I left the road, I got more hits than a deer." Smino's "fuck is you saying?" is incredibly magnetic, but hearing it repeated four times within a single minute only drains it of its energy. All three rappers here have done better, and will continue to do better elsewhere; sometimes, a posse cut isn't conducive to everyone's strengths. [4]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Dreary faux-gospel/R&B blends as repackaged by James Blake done by people who should know better, and rappers who meander into obnoxious precociousness to the point they sound less like they care about beats and more about backing for a poetry slam. Smino's pinched delivery sounds utterly contrived, Noname's murmury cast-asides act are the work of an ever more sophomoric pseud who can be mercifully less infantile and shrieky than collaborator Chance but likewise is a behemoth of agonizing pretense. Even Saba, usually colorful and capable, sounds fully committed to the youth pastor pap of this record, making it a slog if you happen to be the person for whom self-righteousness, even draped up in faux-humility, is an obnoxious cudgel of tedium. [2]

Juan F. Carruyo: The main musical leitmotiv -- a multitracked choir singing a jazzy chord progression -- is enough to make me hear this 10 times in a row, but the young guns dropping words on top about what it takes to make it on your own in the music industry these days and how better off they are without any record label providing support is just the D.I.Y. dream come true. [9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A few miraculous things about "Ace": (1) the Noname/Smino/Saba/Phoelix (here relegated to just production duty) quartet, two years on from "Shadow Man," still holds together, with an easy and lived-in camaderie. (2) Said quartet, despite the massively increased fame and attention the mid-west psuedo-spoken word rap scene has received since Chance the Rapper's 2016, have not hardened or fallen into the vain self-seriousness that rappers frequently become mired in following breakthroughs. (3) In fact, they're maybe even more fun than before, looser and freer after various sojourns to the West Coast. (4) Even given her guests' best efforts, from Smino's elastic-voiced hook to Saba's double-timed come-up tales, Noname shines as the brightest light in "Ace"'s constellation, weaving together a stream-of-consciousness flow that strings together globalization, weed, vegan food, and Chicago without ever feeling forced. [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Noname #Smino #Saba #rap #hip hop #music #music review #writing

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jechristine · 3 years ago

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Compelling points about the cast’s feelings about NWH!

I did love the movie and I liked Tobey and Andrew in it, and I think the hubbub around them, which is at the moment overshining Tom, is less about their presence in the film and more about how press was handled. The fact that they were reserved for the big cinematic reveal seemed like they were the most important part of NWH, when in fact they really weren’t. Tom’s Peter was. I think that’ll become more obvious to people in general as we get some distance from the “surprise” and the press tour choices. (Those choices were very successful in creating enough exigency and urgency around seeing the movie right away, i.e. the leaks always being right there, almost threatening our experience of the movie, added to the urgency, I’d say. Didn’t we all get the feeling that we had to see the movie the moment it opened or it would be spoiled for us? The secrets and leaks together, I think, shook even lukewarm fans out of their streaming inertia and incited them to buy opening-week theater tickets. It was marketing genius but it did a disservice to the heart & soul of the film, which was Spiderman 1’s coming-of-age.)

If I was disappointed in anything, it was the underwhelming treatment of MJ and Ned, yet again. I do think Zendaya’s MJ had the greatest potential of the three cinematic Spidey love interests, and I think Zendaya did a great job with what she had. I also think that girl deserves an Oscar for talking throughout the press tour about the character’s development and the love story’s arc, neither of which were ever more that two-dimensional. Comparing MJ and Ned to Raimi’s and Webb’s characters—Kirsten Dunst’s MJ, James Franco’s Harry, Emma Stone’s Gwen, and even Dane DeHaan’s Harry—throws in relief just how sparse the characterizations and relationships are in Watts’s films. Why does Tom’s Peter love MJ? I feel like the Liz Allen decoy in Homecoming was a huge waste of time. The beginning of FFH made it seem like, well, Liz is gone and MJ is the only girl around so why not crush on her?

My solace/hope, given that Kevin Feige just acknowledged that fans love Zendaya and want to see more of her, is that a Spiderman 4 or even another movie/show (a Marvel Black Dahlias???) gives MJ a chance to become something other than Peter Parker’s girlfriend. I would love her to re-meet Peter as a full character and for the two to re-fall in love with each in a multidimensional and believable way. Maybe this is the kind of thing Tom is pushing for?

Overall I feel like if fans want to see Zendaya, and you know it because you trot her out for press, then just give her the roles she deserves!

Also, I 100% agree with this point about the need for diversity and representation. Tom’s been saying it constantly, too.

Spider-Man NWH Spoiler Warning!!!

Ya'll asked for my thoughts on why I think the cast wasn't happy with the movie so here it is.

Seriously I'm going to spoil the movie in

Ok So I don't think TH and company were actually all that thrilled to have T and A in the movie. I think it does kind of overshadow Tom's last(?) movie. Don't get me wrong I fully believe he shined bright in NWH and was the true star but even now a lot of people are just talking about T and A's appearance. I think they're annoyed with how Sony handled the leaks, both that they were allowed in the first place and then after they happened they still made them play along like they were fake, like we don't all have eyes. I think they hated the blatant lying.

Going back to the I don't think they wanted them in the movie, I think the Jake interview from 2019 when they're asked about the possibility of a collab with other SM and JB is like "but would we want that" and Z's lackluster "that would be dope" were very telling.

I also think they're also pissed with how the ending of the movie plays out, essentially removing MJ and Ned from the MCU. I think they legit want to continue all together if there is a 4th spiderman, and honestly I think Tom's reluctance to commit to another also has something to do with that. He keeps talking about a diverse SM world after knowing Sony essentially removed his two closest people who are black and asian. None of them seem as excited as they were even for FFH.

I have very little faith that Sony will do the right thing so I legit think this may be the last SM movie Tom does, just cause I think he's sick of their shit. Even the trying to trap him by confirming him for other movies during a press tour and catching him off guard to try to pressure him is messed up. I absolutely adore TH's Peter and would love to see more of him but I wouldn't blame him if he was just over it.

#spoilers #nwh spoilers #spiderman nwh spoilers #don't read if you haven't watched nwh

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seven-oomen · 7 years ago

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Till the end of the line - Chapter eleven

Tony

Pain. Throbbing, pulsing pain all over his body. He tried opening his eyes but they seemed to be glued shut. At least he was laying on a comfortable surface. Probably a hospital bed. He groaned softly and moved his head to rest on the warmth on his right.

“How is he?” He knew that voice from somewhere… Was that cap?

“I think he’s waking up, he’s been stable for the last few hours. That serum they gave him is like a miracle juice.” He knew that voice too, but it wasn’t as easy to identify. Could it be Barnes? Not likely, Barnes wouldn’t dare come that close to him. Would he?

“EXTREMIS. Yeah it is. From what I’ve heard it used to be quite explosive and dangerous. Until Tony improved the formula.”

“Excuse me, what?”

Yeah he was fairly sure that was Barnes. He sounded a little agitated too.

“It’s not dangerous anymore, Buck. Tony fixed it.”

And that definitely was Cap, alright.

“You sure about that?-”

“Course he is-” Tony croaked out, coughing due to his throat feeling bone dry. “I redesigned it.”

“And that automatically means it’s safe?”

He managed to open one eye to glare at Barnes. “You doubting my intellect, Barnes?” Tony frowned and glanced around. Wait a second, what the fuck was Barnes doing in his hospital bed. “Water, please.”

He heard Steve scuffle around and soon enough a straw was offered to him. He sipped from it carefully and sighed in relief as the water re-hydrated his throat.

“What? No. I’m just worried, Tony.”

“Okay. New rule, you, plural, don’t get to call me Tony until you earned it. You will call me Anthony or Stark. Two, get the fuck out of my bed, Barnes. Three, never insult my intellect again.”

Steve spoke up. “Tony I doubt-”

“Shut up, cap.” Tony bit back.

“Hey.” Barnes gently patted the back of his hand as if the man was scolding a goddamn child. What a fucking nerve!

“One, We will call you Anthony or Tony and we will prove to you we can be trusted. Two, you practically pulled me in. Three, I wasn’t insulting you, Tony. I’m worried you’re going to get hurt again. So stop acting like a child and let’s talk about this.”

This absolutely wouldn’t do. The universe was trying to screw him over. That’s what this was. That’s why Barnes and Rogers were his soul mates. There was no other explanation. Stupid Alpha, actually making sense…

“Fine you wanna talk, let’s talk.” Tony snapped, his throat felt scratchy once more and he started coughing profusely.

“Easy, Tony.” Steve started rubbing his back and held the glass of water steady for him.

Fuck he hated this. He didn’t want to feel this dependent on these two Alphas. But his Omega was reveling in their attention. Little fucker was really enjoying their touch and presence and Tony hated that. He didn’t try to fight it though. If you can’t beat ‘em, join them. Right? He didn’t have the energy to fight the Alphas right now.

When his body was finally done coughing Steve guided the straw back to his lips and he obediently drank from it again, letting himself relax against Barnes. He wasn’t enjoying this, just for the record. He was very much against all of this.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Barnes suggested softly.

“You mean the night you killed my mother?” That was a very low blow and he knew it. But dammit the man had to pay for that. Brainwashed or not.

“Tony!” Cap sounded appropriately scandalized at least.

Barnes sighed. “No he’s right.”

Woah, wait a second, what? Did he just hear that right?

“I can’t bring her back, Tony. I can only say how incredibly sorry I am that I did that to you… I’m so sorry Tony. If I could undo what I’ve done, I would…”

Fuck, now he felt like a dick. Shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen, he wasn’t ready to accept this, not really. “I’m sure you would.”

Barnes actually looked away for a second and he could see a lonely tear roll down the assassin’s cheek.

“Buck?” Steve carefully reached out to the other Alpha.

“I’m fine, Stevie.”

He really wasn’t. That much was obvious. Goddammit.

“You want to hear about the twins?” He didn’t really want to start on what had happened in the VAULT.

He shivered a little, his left side actually started feeling a little chilly. Steve seemed to notice though and set the glass of water aside for now. The Alpha walked around the bed and sat down on Tony’s left side. “Mind if I join in?”

“Get the hell in here, I’m cold.”

It actually drew a chuckle from Barnes. “Guess that answers that question?”

Steve chuckled as well and kicked off his shoes, climbing in to carefully snuggle up against the Omega. Tony hummed in content, he was warm on all sides and the heat soothed his painful body. Not to mention that it was quite… interesting to be sandwiched in between two super soldiers.

“Anyway, twins.” Tony cleared his throat. “I first found out about them when I was thirty two…”

June 5th, 2002

“I’m sorry, mister Stark.” The doctor looked at him with great sympathy, but it barely registered in Tony’s mind. Pregnant? At thirty two years old that was no small feat…

“No, no I can’t be pregnant.” Tony muttered, shaking his head as he got up and paced through the small office.

“Tony, darling, please sit down.” Aunt Peggy gently tried to guide him back to his seat.

“No, goddammit! No! I’m not pregnant! You’re a fraud! I can’t be pregnant!”

“Tony, calm down. This isn’t good for the baby.”

“I’m not fucking pregnant!” He screamed, he could feel a vein on his forehead throbbing as anger and denial coursed through him. He felt a sharp pain in his abdomen and he doubled over in distress, clutching his stomach. It was the first time he felt fear for anything but himself. What if he was pregnant and he was losing the baby due to his stubborn nature… He couldn’t live with that.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely positive, mister Stark…”

Tony

The Omega chuckled. “That’s how I found out. Aunt Peggy wouldn’t stop fussing over me for days.”

“Did she knew them?” Steve asked softly.

“Aunt Peg?”

He felt Steve nod against his back.

“Yeah, she knew them.” He smiled sadly, “They’ve called her Nana all their lives. All of the kids. She was there when Oliver, Thea and Yalina were born. She was even there when I picked up Harvey and Laura from their foster family. Even though Uncle Dan died not hours earlier.”

He felt Barnes exhale softly before his gentle breathing resumed. “What were they like? Oliver, Thea and Yalina, you know, when they were little.”

Tony felt a flutter of warmth travel through him, though he pushed it down quickly. He was just doing this to stay warm, they weren’t bonding. Nope, no such thing. Yet he couldn’t help but smile gently.

“Oliver was so quiet, he didn’t cry when he was born. Not a single sound escaped him. Freaked everybody out with his silence. And then Maria, who screamed her head off until she was right next to her brother again. The two of them have always been inseparable. Oliver’s an artist, loves to draw, Thea doesn’t have the patience but she loves to be active. I could barely keep up with her when she was a toddler. Oliver, he was easy, I’d give him crayons and some paper and he’d be occupied for hours. But Thea?”

He chuckled.

“She made me run around the mansion and tower so many freaking times I’ve never had to visit a gym in almost fourteen years.”

Steve laughed at that. “That sounds just like you, Buck.”

“You kidding me, punk? You were more trouble than I ever was.” James grinned. “You know, I’ve been wondering. The story Rhodes told us, that you were kidnapped and inseminated… is all of that-?”

He sighed and nodded. He’d have a stern word with Rhodey after all this, but he couldn’t really blame his best friend either. Tony understood why Rhodey had broken his promise.

“As fucked up as it is, yeah, it’s all true. I was captured, released, found out I was pregnant, carried them, gave birth. Been raising them all this time. But it’s true, I was captured and inseminated… and now I know it was Ross who ordered it all.”

Both Steve and James froze up at those words. “What?”

He swallowed heavily and nodded. “Yeah, Ross told me he sanctioned the procedure. Damn bastard had it all planned out. I believe he called the twins, perfect little weapons of mass destruction. Thank god he never got to use them as such.”

“They’re not.” Steve muttered. “They never were.”

James nodded. “Steve’s right. They’ve never been weapons. You kept them from becoming that, Tony.”

It was more praise than he felt he deserved. He just raised his kids the way he thought was right.

“You want to hear about Yalina?”

James smiled a very gentle smile, which was a little weird. Did, did he feel parental over his little girl? Nah, that couldn’t be right. Alphas hardly ever felt parental over a child that wasn’t theirs. He doubted James Buchanan Barnes was any different.

“Yeah, tell us all about her.”

“It was three months before I became Iron Man. I was going through the desert of Afghanistan in a convoy, just made a major weapons deal. Next thing I know we’re attacked and I’m forced to leave cover. I hide behind this rock, try to use my phone. Then a grenade with literally my name on it lands next to me and goes off. There’s shrapnel all in my chest, I’m miles away from medical facilities and I think… this is it. I’m dying. Next thing I know I wake up in a cave with a car battery hooked up to a magnet in my chest. The Alpha doctor who saved my life is there too, he keeps me alive during the next few weeks and then one day my heat starts…”

He let those words sink in for a minute before continuing.

“I didn’t want to be raped by the Ten Rings leaders, not by terrorists… So I beg the doctor to help me through my heat. After a little while he agrees, Yinsen and I lay together and the next morning my heat’s already disappearing. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out I was pregnant. I became Iron Man while carrying his baby, after he gave his life just so I could escape Afghanistan. So in order to honor him, I named my baby Yalina. After Yinsen’s sister.”

“Jesus, Tony…” Steve wrapped his arms around him and cuddled closer, basically pressing him into James.

“I’m sorry..” James whispered, running his hand through Tony’s hair.

“I’m not. He gave me Lina, I can’t think of a better gift. I just wish I could’ve protected her brother…” A sob escaped him, causing the Alphas to cuddle closer, wrapping him in their warmth.

“Ross executed him because I refused to give up the twins’ location. In the end it didn’t matter, he still found them. Ahmed died for nothing, Yinsen’s oldest pup died for nothing.” He cried into James’s chest.

“You’re wrong.” James gently lifted Tony’s chin up. “He died protecting his sister. He died for what he believed in. Ahmed’s a hero, and he will be remembered as such. If this Yinsen is as noble as you say he was, he would’ve been proud of his son and of you. The two of you protected his little girl.”

“Buck’s right. Yinsen would’ve understood.”

He wiped away his tears and sniffled a little. He didn’t want to tell them any of these things but the words just kept coming. He shouldn’t feel this safe or comfortable around them, he shouldn’t feel any of this but he did. He did and he hated it.

A knock on the door pulled him from his thoughts and the three of them looked up to see Coulson in the doorway.

“It’s time.”

#stuckony #mpreg #aboverse #alpha steve #alpha bucky #omega tony

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pardontheglueman · 7 years ago

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The Lost Genius of The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question - which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages - who is the best footballer never to have played at a World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also undermines the case for New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, the Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime, 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s longtime fans to ask the age-old question, the one that escapes from our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘why did you let this happen, dear Lord, why?’

Consider some of the flotsam and jetsam that has (dis)graced the charts since the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In no particular order, I give you Vanilla Ice, The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Milli Vanilli, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker, Black Lace, MC Hammer and Sting. And, that’s just the tip of a very embarrassing iceberg!

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second-rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to the Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still, the record buying public remained unpersuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made the Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translates as - The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1986-1996.

Publié en novembre 1996.

The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

Pixies: Doolittle

The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

Portishead: Dummy

PJ Harvey: Dry

Tricky: Maxinquaye

Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

Massive Attack: Blue Lines

Beck: Mellow Gold

The Feelies: The Good Earth

REM: Automatic For The People

James: Stutter

The Divine Comedy: Liberation

The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

The La’s: The La’s

De La Soul : 3 Feet High And Rising

Bjork: Debut

Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment, true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; they’re follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, a familiar pattern soon re-emerged - critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner -

“The Go-Betweens have been described as the quintessential critics’ band. They made an art form of commercial failure. But as Bernard Brown reports, they’re happy to have earned the industry’s respect, even if the dollars didn’t follow.”

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that the Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great songwriting partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

McLennan and Forster, back in harness

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Spring Hill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood, when it subsides and the drowned bodies of animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent. At first, it seemed as though she had only left the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he had heard guitar playing coming from her room and had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing against the open strings, that he finally knew she wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible. He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that geography might rescue him but after one week in the Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which he had never seen before, was only frozen water. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. But was it really possible for him to cope with the magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him. Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect. The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had been repossessed. She had left her traveling clock though thinking it incapable of functioning in another time-zone; so the long-vacant days of expensive sunlight were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of her hours.

Not the stuff of the three-minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio-friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Spring Hill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter, I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen the Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed to be only a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun-kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennans’ ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s longtime admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-in’s with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

Forster, Morrison, Willsteed, McLennan, Brown - the line-up at the time of 16 Lovers Lane

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His successor, John Willsteed, seemed the perfect replacement though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ‘16 Lovers Lane’. Unfortunately, Willsteed was a somewhat disruptive personality who seemed to relish making enemies within the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to the Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

At the exact same time as the Forster/McLennan friendship, begun long ago in the Drama department of the University of Queensland, was starting to disintegrate, the power-brokers at the group’s management company were trying to push McLennan into the limelight at the expense of Forster. Author David Nichols, in his book The Go-Betweens, is clear about the re-alignment that took place “every promotional video from ‘Right Here’ onwards shows Forster completely back-grounded”. Seen today the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could do’ makes a toe-curling Exhibit A, with McLennan and Brown cavorting centre stage while Forster is stationed well to the rear. Morrison was deeply unhappy, particularly about the decision to draft in producer Craig Leon. In an interview with Sydney’s ‘On The Street’ she was scathing about the shift in emphasis;

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUxZvuRe9k (Exhibit A)

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended as far as the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ‘16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun-kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a Fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder-length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ‘16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

‘16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ - a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfP6G0LSEA

‘Streets Of Your Town’ was such an obvious choice for a single that they had two cracks with it, releasing it first in October 1988 and then, refusing to accept defeat, the following summer. Sandwiched in between the twin versions of this neglected classic were two more ‘easy on the ear’ contenders, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’ (McLennan) and ‘Love Goes On’. Both met the same miserable fate – they were steadfastly ignored.

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in the Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That the Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ‘16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All the Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

The Go-Betweens, however, did make minor inroads upon the UK Independent Charts. Before signing for Beggars Banquet the band had recorded for Rough Trade and Situation 2, qualifying them for inclusion in the Indie charts. Between 83 and 86 they had three entries in the top 40. ‘Cattle and Cane’, an autobiographical McLennan song voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001 as one of the country’s 30 greatest songs of all time, reached no. 4 in March 1983, while ‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’ charted at no. 24 toward the end of the same year. A 12 inch only release of ‘Lee Remick’ peaked at no. 7 in November 1986. And there the trail runs cold.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of the Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

In September 1985 the band had signed with Elektra, hoping for better promotion and distribution of their work. Forster was in optimistic mood “We’ve gone with Elektra – start our LP in just over a week. Without any doubt the songs are our best, we are playing our best, and with ourselves producing this unknown masterpiece, it might be great.” Within weeks Elektra had gone belly up and the band was back to square one again, much to Forster’s chagrin;

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster, they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

“We might have been one of the most lauded bands in the country, but we sold bugger all records. That’s a shame. So let’s not go on about it being one of the most lauded bands in the country, cause who cares? We didn’t sell records, we weren’t a popular band, and I’m sick of hearing about the fact that we were so fabulous – because if we were so fabulous, why didn’t anyone buy our records?”

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of the Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that the Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice…..take the Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to the Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go-Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800-page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account the Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Spring Hill Fair’ and ‘16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the torturous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and the Only Ones……there’s a place for the Go-Betweens.”

http://www.go-betweens.org.uk/

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