#damn you [redacted] for wanting to try another build /j

[wing-rain]

And now I've finished the entire party for sure this time, with a lovely oni bard who is full of love, Madake!

[amberandmetal]

Numbers 40 & 56, Stuckony Get creative here, surprise me 🖤

40 & 56: “I made this for you” & “It brings out your eyes”.

This became long, like ca 1800 words, and woops, it kinda turned ABO with Alpha Bucky & Steve and Omega Tony. There is no smut but mentions of sextoys and a heat. It’s a worn trope but one I have never written and I wanted to take a shot at it. 

Okay so this is the first time I write Stuckony and tbqh I am not really happy with it. But this is good: I’m learning and what I’ve learnt is that more than 2 characters confuse me so that is something I have to work on. Yay for progress, amirite? Anyway, I hope you’ll like it anyway. I realise ships are what I need to work on since I apparently have way easier writing reader inserts. (I do love writing Tony though, because he is both my baby and kindred spirit)

    Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. Grown ass Alphas, tripping over themselves like they’d just barely popped their first knot. Tony sighed, mildly exasperated. He knew he smelled good, damn good thankyouverymuch; he also knew his oncoming heat was slipping into his scent, turning up the cloying sweetness to, as they say, eleven; Tony also knew that he wasn’t the first omega Super soldier one and two had come across so really, there were no excuse for their behaviour.

    He strolled into the kitchen, sleep rumpled and still in his PJ’s, only smiling once he caught sight of the freshly made pot of coffee. Bless Bruce, he thought, just bless him.

    He made grabby hands for the pot and started clumsily search for a clean cup. The scent filled his nostrils and he gave out a happy little hum, toes waggling as he took his first sip and then outright groaned. Oh, yeah. That’s the stuff. He took another sip, and then a big gulp, making little happy noises at the warm feeling in his belly and the prickling in his mind as his brain cells slowly came back to life.

    He downed what was left in the cup, his taste buds having been scorched beyond repair eons ago, and filled it up again. This time around he tasted the richness in the flavour that was very new and very pleasant. Really bless Bruce, he would have to put that on a T-shirt and wear it every damn day, that man was truly a genius. He licked his lips and leaned back against the counter, humming a little with every sip.

    “Ow!”

    Tony’s eyes snapped open just in time to see Barnes retracting a sharply pointed elbow from Cap’s ribs. They both looked slightly odd, and slightly.. flushed. Hm, interesting.

    “Morning, Cap. Sarge.” he nodded, raising his cup.

    “Good morning, Tony,” Steve smiled but looked a little sheepish, “although it’s more like noon.”

    “Healthy sleep schedules are for amateurs.”

    Barnes snorted at that, but still looked slightly.. off.

    “Listen, are you two okay?”

    They both shared a look.

    “Yeah, Tony..it’s just.. we thought,” Steve began, glancing at Barnes as if looking for help but the Sarge just held up his hands, “you smell really nice, by the way, and we-”

    “Hold up. Are you two serious right now? I thought maybe I was imagining things but you’re actually serious? A little bit of omega pheromones and you two just let your hormones take over the by the wheel?” Tony turned to fill up his third cup of coffee with shaking hands, because really, ”I’ll tell you what, I’ll just keep to my workshop and my suite until my heat wears off and you two can behave like people again, sound good? Yeah, thought so.” And then he was gone, storming off down to his workshop, telling Jarvis to black out the windows, locking everyone but family (i.e Pepper, Rhodey, Bruce) out and blasting his music high enough to rattle the walls- if it didn’t scare Dum-E it wasn’t loud enough.

    He had left Dumdum 1 and Dumdum 2 sitting at the kitchen table looking every bit as stupid as they ought to feel. Had they actually fucking propositioned him? Just because he smelled damn near delicious? Thanks but no thanks, he was more than just his biology even if they weren’t, and he could perfectly well get through a heat without an Alpha.

    After all he was used to it by now. He hadn’t shared a heat since before Afghanistan; somehow intimacy had started feeling a lot more intimate after that and he just couldn’t bring himself to share that with anyone. Although he had to admit to having had some rather filthy and sappy fantasizes about the aforementioned dumdum 1 & 2, but he wasn’t gonna give in just because they felt a biological pull. If anything was to ever happen it would be because they wanted Tony, not Tony the Omega. And as that was as unlikely to happen as Tony waking up popping a knot, he’d just have to make do- and keep away.

    He sipped at the quickly cooling coffee and groaned as he started to feel the telltale ache building low in his gut. Just perfect.

              ~~~

    A couple of days, a string of broken toys, 7 showers and 5 different sets of sheets later Tony’s heat finally cleared; and he was relieved to the point of tears.

    It had been a rough one, with his lizard brain chanting at him to go to the very eligible and very wanting Alphas who’d so clearly expressed interest.

    Breed, breed, breed.

    Ugh, disgusting.

    He went through his regular routine before leaving the bed: yawn, stretch like a cat, roll and stretch again, unavoidably get tangled up in the sheets, detangle, yawn, stretch and repeat.

    When he finally emerged from his penthouse, clean shaven and some fresh clothes (yeah, he was not gonna miss the sweating) he was met with two super soldiers blocking his way to the kitchen, and in extension, the coffee.

    “Do you two have a death wish?”

    “Bruce told us your heat had cleared.”

    Traitor. All previous thoughts of blessings of his ex best friend have hereby been redacted.

    “So the death wish is a common theme then.”

    Both Cap and Sarge looked at him like he’d grown another head.

    “Right now you’re the only thing standing between me and my coffee after a frankly unpleasant heat so either move or be moved.”

    Barnes smirked then in a way that said he’d really like to see Tony try but Steve elbowed him before he could say anything.

    “Yeah, alright but can you just please listen first? What I tried to say before, what we tried to say before, it came out all wrong and-”

    “Fine. Coffee first. Then I’ll listen.”

    Steve managed to pull off nervous and completely exasperated at the same time. Had Tony been fully awake he might’ve actually been impressed.

    The two of them sat patiently waiting for Tony’s brain to come back online and when he looked up from his first cup of coffee he found himself in a comically deja vu of a situation.

    “Well, isn’t this familiar?”, he sipped slowly on the scolding but delicious coffee- okay, so he might forgive Bruce, a little.

    Barnes cleared his throat and planted both elbows on the table.

    “See, Stevie here has no game, he is about as smooth as a pineapple, I mean,” he chuckled leaning forward like he was telling Tony something really funny in confidence,” you should have seen him back when, five feet nothing trying to sweet talk the omegas I set us up with. Scent be damned, nobody believed that little punk to be an Alpha.”

    Steve looked less than impressed.

    “Yeah, real funny, Buck. Can you cut to it?”

    Barnes scowled lightly at him but continued.

    “What we wanted to say, tried to say, before was that.. we want to court you.”

    Nothing could’ve prepared Tony for getting a nose full of coffee. He spluttered like an enraged cat.

    “You what?”

    Both of them looked like they could barely contain themselves, their lips twitching as they tried their best to look sympathetic and sincere. Tony was having none of it.

    “You can’t be serious.” He dabbed furiously at the coffee stains on his neck and shirt.

    “We are, we just didn’t know how to tell you and then you started smelling all sweet, syrupy and delicious.” Bucky answered, a bit of heat creeping into his voice. A frankly mouthwatering grin on his lips.

    Tony swallowed thickly, glancing at the Sergeant. Well.. wait, what?

    “We? As in you both? And who courts anyone anymore?”

    This time Steve spoke up, looking slightly embarrassed.

    “We do. Where we come from.. it’s what you did when you were sweet on someone. And we also think you deserve it,” the words started rushing out of Steve and Tony just gaped while Bucky had the look of someone watching a trainwreck in the making, “ you work so hard and you hardly ever get any credit, you’re kind and generous and expect nothing back and we know your heats have been taking a toll on you. But that’s not why we want you,” he hurried himself to add, “even if you never want to share a heat with either of us we’d be just as happy to just be with you.”

    Steve shrugged, apparently done. He looked down, a hint of pink tinting the tips of his ears. Barnes just smiled in a way that honestly just looked heartbreakingly hopeful.

    So this was it then, this was Tony’s life.

    He had a hard time processing everything, and more than half of what had just been said didn’t make a lick of sense, but he’d be a fool to look a gift horse in the mouth.

    He would be lying if he said he didn’t feel a warmth fluttering in his chest the way the super soldiers at his kitchen table were looking at him all expectantly. He licked his lips slowly, nervousness hammering behind his sternum.

    “Fine.. I mean yeah, okay.. Sure, why not?”

    The smiles he got in response were bright enough to put the sun to shame.

    “So you’ll go out with us?” Barnes asked.

    “Saturday good?” Steve added.

    Tony huffed a laugh, rubbing a palm over his face.

    “Yeah, yeah, that’d be great.”

    He couldn’t really stop the mirroring smile tugging on his own lips.

    Ridiculous.

    Suddenly he was crowded against the counter. Barnes put a hand in his left pocket and fished out something silvery and shining. It was a simple silver chain with what looked like a smoky quartz pendant dangling on it.

    “I made this for you,” he held it out in question and Tony hesitantly bowed his head a bit so he could clasp it around his neck.. ridiculous,” Steve drew the design.”

    Cap looked like Tony’d just granted them the world when he looked back up, chain snugly placed around his neck. He took the small pendant between his fingers.

    “It brings out your eyes,” he explained, warmth colouring his voice.

    And then he leaned in, lips just barely brushing Tony’s own, and he would be loathe to ever admit to the moan that he let slip out. Next was Barnes who was a little less sweet and a bit more demanding but just as toe curling. Tony made a little trilling noise in the back of his throat. His cheeks heated but the two Alphas just looked at him like he was simply adorable. He was only a little  annoyed with how good that felt.

    But, yeah.. this could work.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

to help yourself understand the Mueller investigation, read this novel

“This novel” being, of course, a stack of court documents filed in the course of the investigation.

Hear me out.

This isn’t to trivialize or sensationalize an ongoing existential threat to western democracy. Precisely because it is not a fucking game, I think it’s really important for people to get new ways into this story. Because it still seems alarmingly common for even generally well-informed people to throw up their hands and say “well, the right says ‘no collusion!’ and liberals say ‘he’s a Russian agent!’ but the partisans all seem really worked up, I guess the truth is somewhere in between/it must not be as big a deal as they think.”

Maybe sometimes that’s motivated reasoning or sheer ignorance. But it’s also possible that “this Rusher thing with Trump and Russia” is unusually resistant to understanding as a conventional news story. We want our news to be solid, with “hard facts.” Maybe this is more like gas. Like gas, it always takes up as much space as it’s allowed. On slow news days it can expand to envelop everything else; unrelated dramatic events can compress it down to almost nothing. And you can’t get a grip on gas.

This whole bizarre situation is genuinely unprecedented in American history, which is perhaps why special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been doing something unusual in issuing a series of speaking indictments. Remember, a bill of indictment is basically a list of the crimes that a prosecutor has convinced a grand jury that someone has probably committed. Prosecutors are smart to keep these minimal, because every fact they allege in their indictment, they damn well have to be ready to prove. A speaking indictment means that the prosecutor is saying more than they have to say. In a case like this – which deals with a lot of sensitive information, and implicates people who haven’t yet been charged or even interviewed – that’s even trickier, because there’s a lot it has to avoid.

Generally, when a person makes their own job harder, they’re doing it for a reason. And I think at least part of the reason here is that the special prosecutor’s office is trying to tell the American public a story. Our minds can comprehend dramatic plot lines more easily than the seedy, fact-heavy, choppily-paced web of a real criminal conspiracy. There’s a narrative logic to the pre-election events described in the most notable speaking indictments in the order we’ve seen them, moving relentlessly closer in time, space, and relationship to Donald Trump on Election Day, 2016.

So if you’re frustrated or baffled by what you catch of this story in the news or on your Facebook feed, it’s not because you, personally, can’t understand it. You might just need a new angle of approach. If you are a movie person, I can recommend the documentary Active Measures (Hulu, iTunes). If you’re more of a reader, these documents, in this order, can be read like an epistolary novel – specifically, a pulpy, beach read-y spy thriller.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

TO BE CONTINUED [probably]…

I’m serious. Download the pdfs onto your e-reader – remember to make a note of the order! – brew yourself some tea, and turn off pop-up notifications for a while. (Don’t get too hung up on figuring out who “Organization 1″ or “Person 2″ are - sometimes it’ll be obvious, but don’t worry if it’s not. You can just treat the big tables like illustrations: look and see what they’re about, but you don’t need to read every line to get the gist. You can also skip the last page or so if you start hitting headers like “statutory allegations” or “substitute assets.” There’s no post-credits stingers.)

These aren’t all the documents that have been filed in court by the special counsel, let alone in related cases, and I doubt even the courts have heard the whole story yet. Most of the documents related to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn are still redacted. Maria Butina was charged by a different prosecutor’s office just as she was about to make a run for it, but her infiltration of the National Rifle Association could quite possibly be Chekhov’s gun. And it doesn’t even mention the UK spinoff! But I think they’re the ones that are, intentionally, useful to someone who wants to understand.

Still skeptical? Recap/analysis below.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

The first indictment of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort took its focus far away from, and several years before, the main story, deep into a 2010 election in Ukraine which ominously foreshadowed the 2016 election.  Manafort, an old friend of Stone, a Trump Tower resident, and the employer of his co-defendant Rick Gates and of future Sanders consultant Tad Devine, ran the campaign of a buffoonish businessman who was in hock to the Russian government. Their strategy relied heavily on exacerbating ethnic tensions within Ukraine and seeding skepticism about international alliances, as well as a vicious smear campaign of his opponent, an accomplished public servant who would have been the nation’s first woman president. Manafort’s candidate took office, was exactly as bad as his opponents believed he would be, and had his opponent imprisoned and tortured – but was eventually forced to release her and flee the country for Russia.

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

The Internet Research Agency indicted Russian nationals who worked on the propaganda campaign, spending over a million dollars a month to manipulate American public opinion from a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg. The action starts in 2014 and picks up in 2016, but still takes place a continent away. It deliberately stays away from the hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails, and pointedly does not accuse any Americans of committing crimes.

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

An installment with a foot in both worlds indicted Manafort and a Ukraine-based co-conspirator, while also showing Manafort’s corruption of a respected American law firm. This part shows us how Trump’s campaign manager – both his dirty politics and his illicit money – moved from Ukraine to the United States, set in the same time frame as Part II.

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Then another indictment did name the Russian military intelligence officers who stole Democrats’ emails in the spring of 2016, and traced their cooperation with “Organization 1,” which released those emails. This moves the story closer in time to the election, and shows the stolen data moving west from Moscow to Julian Assange’s hideout in London before being dumped on the American public.

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

The next installment targeted Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a New Yorker like Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to hiding what appears to have been early 2016 real estate negotiations for a property in Moscow, and of committing apparently unrelated crimes to affect the election illicitly by covering up the candidate’s affairs in the weeks before the election. The Southern District of New York – filing at the same time and in clear cooperation with the special prosecutor, but not working directly for him – overtly said it could prove Trump’s complicity in crimes. Trump is tagged “Individual 1.”

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

Currently in the barrel is Roger Stone, a longtime supporter of Trump’s political career and an old business partner of Manafort. Stone has a colorful backstory of extensive wrongdoing, but his indictment is laser-focused on conversations he had with a known Russian intelligence cutout in the summer and fall of 2016, and the crimes and lies he tried to use to hide those conversations. This indictment mentions the Trump campaign by name, and it includes a lot of specific conduct by individuals who are not named but are nonetheless readily identifiable. The document is succinct, clinical, clear as a bell. But it leaves one omission which leaped out screaming at just about everyone who read the whole document.

[A] senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.  

If you’ve taken high school English, you already know the million ruble question. “Was directed”? Who gave that direction? The indictment doesn’t say.

If you’re trying to avoid drawing conclusions the way a newscaster might, you would probably think it was not another senior campaign officer – otherwise, why not refer to them as “Senior Campaign Officer 2”? – but still someone important enough to boss around a senior campaign officer. Maybe if the candidate had adult family members who were not given official positions on the campaign, they would be suspects – though only because they could reasonably be assumed to be speaking for the most likely culprit. The simplest explanation for They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Pseudonymed is the most dramatic one. The candidate is not a senior campaign officer. The candidate is the candidate.

We don’t have all the facts yet. The only thing we can be sure of is that the special prosecutor has, quite deliberately, not yet shown this particular card.

But if you’ve taken high school English, you have a pretty good idea about the answer.

Okay, the genre snob reviewers might say it’s a little heavy-handed. Personally, I’ve always felt that subtlety is overrated.