#i can see the way wind is blowing because the wind is a goddamned hurricane

[bestworstcase]

ok wait. ok.

some roses will never bloom some dreams will rot on the vine some lives will end much too soon some evil will never ever die […] sometimes it’s worth it all to risk the fall and fight for every life

vs.

’tis the last rose of summer left blooming alone […] i’ll not leave thee, thou lone one to pine on the stem since the lovely are sleeping go, sleep thou with them thus kindly i scatter thy leaves o’er the bed where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead.

...hm. anyways.

"the lies come out of you so easily. like-minded souls, indeed."

summer rose telling lies! first time for everything—but the first first first inkling we get of summer's character is "now i'm nothing but a liar and you're thrown into the fray."

the way yang tells the story in 2.6 draws a direct line between summer disappearing and the fact of raven's existence being revealed to her; tai and summer withheld this information.

in 7.4 ruby asks qrow if summer's last mission was "another oz secret" and qrow answers "there were a lot of those back in the day" but that no, "this one was a summer secret."

9.10 we see summer put on a mask for tai and then a different mask for raven. "you're... just going to leave them?" raven asks, and summer deflects like a pro: "you're one to talk!" and "if i get this right, there's nothing to worry about. trust me."

"saw you in a dream/are you who you seem?"

"you were born to hypnotize them all."

she lied, ruby says.

summer rose is the reason raven has Trust Issues.

listen.

ozma lied. salem trusted him. he lied to her for years let her support his ambitions in the only way she knew how for years before he told the truth. "this isn't what he asked of me." "ozma told salem everything: the true reason the god of light had brought him back, the relics that lay scattered around the world, and the day of judgement he had been told to prepare for."

"if i get this right, there's nothing to worry about. trust me." "let's get it over with, i guess."

the god of light's mandate, the divine relics, the day of judgment he had been told to prepare for. don't you see? none of that matters anymore.

summer left her kids behind, but the spring maiden, a child whom raven loved enough to have a kindred link, died that night.

raven blames herself for that girl's death. salem blames herself for the deaths of her daughters.

"leave." <- there is a reason these scenes are paralleled. also

"and so we must... press on." / "and now i have to live with that forever." she blames herself.

anyway--the point is--

"if humanity were ever to stand a chance at being united, one thing was clear..." "he had to destroy salem."

"how can i destroy salem?" "you can't! :)"

"we don't have to kill you to stop you; and we will stop you." "your mother said those words to me. she was wrong, too."

listen. listen to me.

what happens if ozma chooses to stay with salem?

what if—after he tells her everything, after he pours out all the things he's kept festering inside of himself for years because the god of light told him salem lives, but the woman you hold dear in your memories is gone and where you seek comfort, you will only find pain—after he tells her about the relics, about the mandate, about the blade hanging over remnant's neck—what if, when she says none of that matters, he answers you're right, and takes her hand?

what happens if salem chooses to stay with him?

what if, when he tells her that the world is doomed and that he alone is meant to save it because the god of light anointed him for the task, she says very well. let's get this over with, i guess. what if it's salem who balks in the end?

summer rose is both of these questions. she is the ozma who convinced salem to embrace the mandate and she is also the ozma who rose out of the smoldering ruin of the world she couldn't save and decided to take the hand salem held out to her.

(tai never leaves his isolated home in the woods. raven retreats into the wilderness to lead her bandits. ruby rose believes that the world is worth fighting for. summer left him—summer stabbed her in the back—summer lied.)

[mylordshesacactus]

A Writer’s Guide To Hurricanes, I Guess

I realized with a bit of chagrin that, while I’ve spent years bitching about how it drives me up the wall that nobody (in fandom or, in fact, mainstream media) has a goddamn clue how hurricanes work and yet insists on portraying them anyway...I’ve never actually tried to help by explaining what they’re actually like.

So, here’s a genuine, non-sarcastic, good-faith attempt by a Floridian to help you guys who might want to write this stuff at some point understand it, just a little.

So here we go, chronologically in terms of the storm’s progress.

The storm itself is the least of it.

This is the thing non-hurricane places don’t....get.

You can see a hurricane coming. You can watch it. You have, in fact, no choice. I need to reiterate this.

You have no choice but to sit there and watch a hurricane coming.

I’ve actually talked a lot in another post about what that feels like, and why hurricane parties are a thing. But try to imagine what that feels. Just...try. You have to sit there, for about a week, watching the wrath of God bear down on you.

You watch it come and you hope the path changes. You hope it veers off back into the Atlantic, of course, but you also--you hope it hits somewhere else. You know wherever it goes people will die and you hope it goes somewhere else. And you feel kinda bad about it; but you also don't because these are just facts, this is a fact of hurricanes, they will go somewhere and people will die in that place and all of us hope it goes Somewhere Else and if it does, we know that the people Somewhere Else are praying frantically that it gets back on course and hits us instead and we understand.

(And when it does change course, when it doesn’t hit you, you almost feel....cheated? Because you spent so much time and energy preparing and fearing and coming to terms and accepting and bracing and then it--doesn’t happen.

And the guilt of praying it would go Somewhere Else is nothing compared to being disgusted with yourself for actually feeling disappointed that you were spared the apocalypse this time.)

The wind is different.

If you listen to weather reports on hurricanes you’ve absolutely heard the phrasing “sustained winds of X miles per hour with gusts up to Y” without really thinking about what that means.

Now, of course everyone’s been in windy conditions. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly how the hurricane is....different, so I’m just going to describe what it’s like.

The wind always comes from one direction. There’s no being “knocked this way and that” or whatever; the wind comes from the direction the wind is coming from. Always.

(If you’re near where the center of the storm passes, this direction will slowly change as your position relative to the eye changes. But it changes over a matter of hours--like the angle of the sun.)

The wind is a constant, unrelenting force. There’s no....there’s no dips in the wind. It never lessens, it only spikes and then returns to baseline. In a normal windstorm, no, it’s not that the wind ever stops blowing, but...there’s an ebb and a flow. A hurricane is a wind tunnel in which every so often someone revs the engine and there’s a few seconds of higher wind, but it never drops below where it’s set.

(The wind will snake under plywood and storm shutters; it will rip them clean off, if you haven’t screwed them in properly. Screws, not nails. The wind makes deadly projectiles of anything not fastened down. Plywood and storm shutters can be broken, by anything travelling fast enough. It is standard procedure, if you have lawn furniture or anything else not secured that doesn’t float, to carefully lower that furniture into a pool--if you have one. It will stay untouched, and won’t be flung through your neighbors’ plywood.)

This is why hurricanes take down so many trees, why they do so much structural damage. Buildings in hurricane zones are built to withstand high wind, and most trees in these areas can survive high wind too or they wouldn’t have survived so long. But there’s only so much that nature and engineering can do about sustained high winds, without a moment’s rest, for hours, unending, no respite...

In landfall footage--ie, the stuff you see on the news--you likely see this effect in the palm trees-watch how instead of tossing, they’re just bent. It never lets up. In the instances where a bent tree violent bounces back before bending again, trust me--that’s not a letup in the wind speed. That’s the tree having been bent too far, and springing back from the sheer pressure on its internal structure. That’s the tree being stronger than the wind--for now

It’s mostly not like the TV reports.

There’s a reason I referred to “landfall footage” above. News broadcasts, for a lot of reasons, focus on the storm at its worst. The highest storm surge, the highest winds, the most brutal damage, occurs where the eye wall first crosses from being over water to being over land.

(Remember--by the time a storm “makes landfall,” everything for miles around has been experiencing the storm for hours already. “Landfall” is when the EYE of the storm first hits land, not when the storm “arrives”.)

But hurricanes are...vast. Look up satellite footage of hurricanes. Really look at it. Look at how much sheer area they cover.

Most places do not experience landfall-level disaster. That’s why, when people evacuate--well, when residents evacuate, the tourists and recent transplants tend to panic harder--you’re basically always evacuating to someplace that will still have vanished under that mass of swirling clouds. Evacuation sites are still inside the hurricane, but wind speed, storm surge, etc--everything drops dramatically even a few miles from the eye.

On a related note, the eye itself rapidly starts shedding power the moment it’s no longer over open water. Generally, the simple act of making landfall instantly drops a hurricane at least one category in severity. Hurricanes are eldritch gods; they rise from the sea and from the sea they take their power. Cut off from it, they starve.

Do not think for a moment that just because you’re “only” experiencing Cat 1 winds that this storm can’t kill your ass dead. Do not underestimate what the death throes of a dying god can do.

Storm surge isn’t high waves, and it isn’t rain.

Storm surge is the actual sea level rising. The entire ocean being dragged onto land by the power of the storm.

Particularly wet and slow hurricanes might--rarely--drop enough rain to cause flooding. However, that’s unusual; most places here can handle heavy rain. The rain isn’t the problem.

(Slow hurricanes are killers on another level. It’s everything I’ve already said about the unrelenting brutality of the wind, coupled with the fact that--as, again, the vast majority of the storm has been raging for hours by the time it “makes landfall”, and hurricanes draw power from the Eye being over the water--it now has hours upon hours of fully-fuelled destruction before it begins to weaken by being cut off from warm water. It doesn’t weaken, it just....keeps going. And the storm surge is present that entire time.)

I’m just gonna direct you to this NOAA diagram on how storm surge works.

The northeast quadrant is the strongest.

This isn’t a proper subheading it’s just something I rarely see people not from Florida acknowledge. 

No matter where the storm is coming from or what angle it hits at--the northeast quadrant is the killer. You do everything in your power to avoid being caught northeast of the storm.

In hurricane-prone areas, the threat is felt year-round.

All the major intersections? Our stoplights aren’t hung on wires from wooden poles--those blow down too easily. They’re bolted to thick metal pipes, “hurricane-proof”. Major roadways that are above floodlines are labelled as evacuation routes.

Things like that.

Hurricanes make their presence known long before the disaster begins.

You start to get “hurricane weather” days--days--before it hits. The sun is out, the weather is fine except for a...

Well, a constant, low-level breeze, with much less variation in angle and direction than usual, fewer gusts, but still primarily a natural breeze. And then you go outside and you look up at that cheerful blue sky and it’s already there.

They’re called cloud bands. You look up and the entire sky is just fluffy white clouds, racing at speed in one direction...

(The breeze, in those early few days, is light. Present, but light. The clouds are always, always racing as if before a gale. There’s a pervasive, eerie wrongness about this, looking up--the clouds moving much, much faster than the wind that should be driving them.)

A hurricane is not a thunderstorm.

This is the cardinal sin and the clearest, most common misconception. Hurricanes are not thunderstorms. In fact it’s actually very rare to have lightning or hear any thunder at all during a hurricane, compared to an average summer storm in hurricane-prone areas.

People often portray hurricanes as basically....the worst storm they can remember, but bigger, and badder, and worse. Hurricanes aren’t just big and intense, they’re....different. They’re something different.

Hurricanes are...quiet.

Except that they’re not.

You know when people talk about the wind howling? Think of the most intense storm you’ve ever sat through. Think about the sound of the wind.The way it whistles through leaves. Hold that experience in your head.

Now forget it. This is different.

Hurricanes don’t sound like that. Hurricanes are....

The sound a hurricane makes is a howl, yes. It makes palm fronds and grass steps and leaves whistle like a rapier scraped against a sheathe, yes. But you barely notice those shallow details, because the sound a hurricane makes is below that, stronger, more powerful.

Hurricanes moan.

Hurricanes are the entire world around you slowly and steadily fraying at the seams, and it moans, low and deep, agonized and hungry, and it never stops. Never. Not until it’s over.

Hurricanes are a world ending.

The storm passes, and the hurricane has only begun.

Do you think people stock up as heavily as they do, with generators and nonperishables and such, for--what, for a few hours of wind and rain, however alive?

No.

Because once the tempest is past, now you have to...exist.

You will not have power. If you were in a very, very lightly-affected area, you might have cell service. Most of your neighbors have evacuated. Many roads can’t be used because they’re washed out, or there are trees or power lines down across them.

It’s very common to lose water pressure. Common practice in hurricane-prone areas is to fill your bathtub with water before the storm--so that, when you lose water pressure, you can use a bucket to flush your toilet. Because those conditions, assuming you’re in an area that can be repaired and not rebuilt, can take weeks.

Weeks without running water, a flushable toilet. That gets grim fast. You brace for the storm. You prepare for what follows.

A hurricane is an eldritch abomination.

Hurricanes are alive.

Hurricanes are Old Gods.

Sitting through a hurricane is not like sitting through a bad storm or like sitting through a tornado, which is fast and unstoppable but then it’s over like it never existed save for the destruction left behind.

In order to get a clearer understanding of just how much the universe is vast, how much it does not, cannot, even notice you enough to want you dead because you are so small it would not comprehend you as possessing an existence if it tried--you would have to go to space.

And while the world moans around you and something out there, alive, growls at a frequency you can’t hear but you feel--you don’t cuddle for warmth during a hurricane. You just don’t.

You keep the generator running outside in the lee of the house where it won’t kill you all with gas fumes, connected via wires that snake around through a cracked door somewhere it won’t get blown open. You make sure it doesn’t run out of fuel, that it doesn’t get water blown into anything important. You use it to power a TV first--to keep the weather report on. You power lights second, if it’s a decent one. You can’t afford one powerful enough to run your refrigerator; you ate the ice cream before this started.

You play games. We’re human; it’s what we do. We play games in the face of our own helplessness. But while you play, you listen. You can’t not.

It’s always there. The world creaks on its hinges. You feel the edges threatening to dissolve. If you sit for a moment and are quiet, that ever-present moan is there, something ancient and powerful on a scale outside your comprehension. There is no cozy comfort of being bunkered down safe against the storm, not here.

There is no “safe” against this. You sit still and quiet and bear witness.

And when the sun rises in the aftermath, you’re surprised to find the world--even a wrecked and altered world--still exists. It shouldn’t. You were there when it ended.

And--and I cannot emphasize this enough--there’s no fucking thunder.

[shinobimagpie]

Hello!!! Am i late for bingo 😬? Can I ask for a Shikatematayu with the prompt "nuclear diffense mode" please? I was thinking it would be fun a Shikamaru and Temari jealous about Tayuya spending a lot of time with someone else or maybe Orochimaru wanting Tayuya back to the sound village. (Sorry if i keep asking for the same OT3 but its your fault i ship them)

I wish for every fan-creator I know to have a follower like @anaaaaaa0120 a who requests their fave ships and tropes from them and makes their whole week!

Thank you SO much for this request, I literally gasped when this hit my inbox. Like, if there was a trope I really hoped someone would request it was this one, and then you attached it to my faves and kajdjldskfj! Thank you! Let’s suppose that Orochimaru dug up Kimmimaro, Edo Tensei’d his ass and sent him to either collect or eliminate his errant sound ninjas, because who doesn’t love a guy with swords in his arms? (Tayuya doesn’t, that’s who.) Also given that Tayuya seemed to be mildly terrified of Kimmimaro when he showed up in canon, one of the only people she ever seemed intimidated by, he struck me as a good challenging/scary opponent for the three of them. :)

I hope you enjoy reading this even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. 💜 Defender for the 25 Follower Bingo Event (requests still open until I get a bingo or hit 50) Characters: Tayuya/Temari/Shikamaru Prompts: Nuclear Defense Mode Warnings: Canon-typical violence and Tayuya-typical language The world tips and tilts in front of her as Tayuya struggles to pull herself up from the dirt at the base of the tree she’s just hit. Her lungs burn and her limbs feel like lead, the world around her a dull roar. What kind of attack she was aiming for before she hit the ground is lost on her, brain thoroughly rattled by being slapped halfway across the clearing. She’s lost her flute on the trip, sure from the wet streak she feels down the side of her face and neck that she’s blown out one of her goddamn eardrums, and no matter which way she tilts her head there is a high-pitched ringing fuzzed over everything. By the time her eyes focus, her opponent has vanished...

Fuck fuck fuck, which way is he coming from?

She senses the blow from above her a second before it connects; she doesn’t even truly see it, just feels the motion of the air barely soon enough to react and launch herself to one side.

She avoids a deadly strike in favor of an excruciating one.

Being slashed or stabbed is routine in this work, something Tayuya can normally endure and push past; her own chakra can heal a minor wound if she focuses enough. Having a bone blade wedged with force into an already twice-broken joint that hurts her even on some good days is entirely another matter.

Tayuya screams, recoiling around her wounded leg, slashing blindly at her attacker through watering eyes. He spares a hand to block her blow but it’s evident from the casual way he proceeds to twist her wrist back, his cold expression barely changing, that she doesn’t truly concern him as a threat now.

That he hasn't just killed her already means she probably never did.

Shit; he's been dead all this time but with her mark sealed even years of training hasn’t let her match him...

Tayuya feels panic wash over her with a fresh wave of pain, trying to center herself enough to pull together a scream with some good concussive force behind it. If she can just catch her breath, get some distance…

And then she hears it.

“GET OFF OF HER!!"

Temari’s voice, thundering over them, shrill with utter rage.

"Wind Style! Concussive Gale!"

What feels and sounds like a miniature hurricane slams through the clearing, ripping the startled Kimmimaro off his feet and half the trees off their roots. Tayuya feels the breath practically sucked from her lungs with the force of it, although somehow she stays anchored to the ground as it rushes over her.

Temari comes tearing past her a second later with a furious scream, excess chakra pouring off of her with the next swing of the war fan. A narrowly focused blow of air slams her regrouping opponent right back to the ground with a deafening crack that shakes the earth.

Tayuya lies stunned and breathless in the dust, transfixed by Temari for several moments before she registers Shikamaru’s presence, melting out of the remaining forest’s darkness at her side. The tendrils of shadow he’s held her down with fall loose around her as she pulls herself up to sitting and his hand finds her cheek, sliding back along her jaw to thread his fingers securely in her hair. Tayuya feels more than a little like collapsing into his arms for a moment, and not just because her knee is definitely broken for a third time.

“Are you alright?” Shikamaru’s voice is tight with anger and worry despite her immediate nod, his dark brows knitting as his eyes flicker between her and Temari, assessing which of them needs his assistance more. He quickly settles on Tayuya; Temari seems to have Kimmimaro on his back foot for the moment, keeping him pinned with relentless attacks that roll into one another.

“I lost my flute,” Tayuya says dumbly, heartbeat rushing in her ears. Her cheek still feels hot where he’s touched as Shikamaru shifts back to wrap his hands around her bleeding knee, putting painful but necessary pressure on the wound. She curses, but doesn’t waste time pulling bandaging from her belt and starting to wrap the joint up tightly. She can’t just lay here, can’t keep him distracted. Temari is keeping Kimmimaro down for now but it took a bowl-cut on steroids and a fucking jinchuriki to take him out before...

“We’ll find the flute,” Shikamaru tells her firmly, eyes fixing reassuringly on hers as he helps wrap her kneecap. “And we’ll bury this asshole again while we’re at it.”

Tayuya swallows hard at the rumble in his voice, the way his eyes take on a vicious gleam as they settle beyond her shoulder on Kimmimaro. He doesn't seem nearly as worried as Tayuya feels he ought to be...

She looks back to see Temari whipping aside a volley of bone projectiles with her fan, still incandescent with anger, chakra steaming from her skin in almost-visible ribbons. She shouts as she winds her weapon back for another strike and Tayuya finds herself sharply reminded - with dry mouth and pounding heart - that Temari was nearly a jinchuriki herself. Shikamaru tugs her bandaging tight and gets back to his feet, offering Tayuya an arm up, an impressed smirk stealing across his face as they both pause to take in Temari’s ferocity for a moment more. "Think she needs a hand?" Tayuya suggests, pulling a summoning scroll from her waist; time for a different approach. Shikamaru tugs a flash bomb from his vest pocket and smiles in a positively vicious way that makes Tayuya want to kiss him more than a little. "Come on, let's not let her have all the fun."

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Supercorp Inhumans AU

Okay, look... Inhumans sucks balls. But I want to try a version that doesn’t, so how about this-- the Luthors are the ruling family of Attilan. Lionel and Lillian have some basic Respectable superpowers... say, Super Speed for Lionel, and Telepathy for Lillian, because nothing says emotional trust like a manipulative mother who can read your goddamn mind. Any way, Lex is their natural son and heir, who fronts with a similarly Respectable type of superpower, like Hyperintelligence, but with a secret dose of Coercion, meaning he can basically rumor someone into doing whatever he wants.

Lena is a lower caste orphan who is rescued from the mines by Lionel, whose Genetic Council finds an odd quirk in her gene sequencing that promises a superpower unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. The only problem is that the ability never manifests. So instead everyone treats her like a charity case taken on to appease the increasingly restless rabble of the lower castes. She endures her new family for years, lonely and sad, and though she grows into a great beauty, no one ever forgets her lack of ability.

For her own part, Lena never forgets where she came from. She often speaks out on behalf of the lower castes, and spearheads as much charity aid and social change for them as she can convince her family to capitulate to. The people love her for it, even though there is no hope that she would ever be the ruling voice of Attilan.

The coup still happens, but this time it’s not a member of the family, but Lionel’s most trusted advisor, Morgan Edge Sr., who catalyzes a plot to kill the royal family and assume control of Attilan. Of course, what no one knows is that he’s actually working on behalf of Lex, who intends to flee the initial attack and then return to oust the pretender and proclaim himself a hero. 

But what Lex doesn’t anticipate, for all his prodigious intelligence, is that Lionel’s first reaction to the assault on the palace is to find his adoptive daughter Lena and send her to Earth. Right before she steps through the portal, Lionel pauses and wastes precious moments to tell her that she is secretly his true daughter, and that he had loved her birth mother more than anything in the world. He then sends her through with a kiss and prayer, and she is left to survive alone on a world that is not her own. 

While Lex’s forces kill Lionel and “imprison” Lillian (she’s not initially aware of the coup, but when she learns that Lex is behind it she inevitably supports him), Lena meets alien and superhero Kara Danvers. Being the kind-hearted person she is, Kara swiftly takes Lena in and shows her what life on Earth is truly like. Lena shares everything about Attilan with her, and Kara shares everything about Krypton, and unlike everyone else in Lena’s life, Kara doesn’t blink at the fact that Lena doesn’t have powers. She’s used to humans being perfectly ordinary.

Lena settles into her new life, unaware that her brother is scouring Attilan and then Earth for her (to bring her into the fold, preferably, or to kill her if not). She establishes a new normal... until the day Kara meets her match in an alien adversary who kicks her ass to the desert and back. Lena watches from the sidelines as Kara goes head to head with her opponent, and sees the exact moment her powers fail a split moment before Kara’s slammed into the pavement.

Lena’s heart starts to race, and her fear and anxiety swirls in her chest, quickly overwhelming every rational thought. She’s so focused on Kara lying unmoving in the cratered concrete that she doesn’t notice the hurricane being summoned around her, with pelting rain and winds at speeds that threaten to blow people from their feet. 

What she never knew-- what no one ever realized-- is that she’s the greatest elemental manipulator the world has ever seen.

...because there is no atmosphere on the moon.

[barnesandco]

Seafarer

Loosely based on the following prompt by @drink-it-write-it​ :

“You said that I’d get to have you all weekend. Why can’t you just tell them you can’t go?”-“Because it’s my job, and it’s important.”-“And I’m not?”

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings: Angst, talk of groping.

A/N: I personally think this to be an embarrassing piece of work. Nothing more than an exercise in writing internal monologue, particularly of the sad variety. Sad both in terms of content, and quality. You have been warned.

“Sweetheart, open the door.” Bucky mutters, resting his forehead on the solid oak. He got back from his mission half an hour ago, and has spent that time standing at her doorstep, knocking, begging her to let him in. She’s pissed. Has every right to be, Bucky thinks to himself. He made her cry, after all. Left her crying.

“Go. Just go. Back to your apartment, the Compound, I don’t care. Why don’t you just go on another goddamn mission? You seem to love those.” She says, bitterness edging into her tone at his betrayal. Bucky swallows nervously, the lump in his throat becoming more prominent. He opens his mouth to answer, but his voice fails, leaving him gaping like a fish. He tries again.

“Darling, angel, doll-” 

“Don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me any of that after abandoning me when I needed you. Go away.” Comes the watery reply, her voice breaking off at the end, like she’s holding back more tears. Of course she is. Any girl stuck with a heartless jerk like him is bound to cry. He knows he can’t leave her like this. Not again. 

“I’m not going anywhere until we talk about this.” 

“Well then, you’ll be waiting a while.”

“Baby, I-”

“I told you to quit it with the pet names. I won’t tell you again. Fuck off, Bucky.” She orders, voice trembling, heart in her throat and hand clenching the doorknob, as if she’s seconds away from opening it and saying it to his face. Not that she’s in any condition to - tears staining a tale of sorrow down her cheeks, bottom lip shaking and bitten red with the effort of containing her rage. 

“I don’t-”

“Please.” She pleads, desperate now. She isn’t sure if she can resist his attempts to speak with her for much longer. Bucky sighs, defeated by the tormented request. It’s no use pushing further. They’re both too emotionally wound up to resolve their conflict reasonably. Why does he have to be the voice of reason? Screw reason.

Still, he turns and leaves, thundering down the stairs. All twelve flights of them. The elevator’s in perfect working condition, but he hates the damn things. There’s no escape route. Unhealthy for his neurotic claustrophobia, catastrophic for emergencies. Disaster waiting to happen. 

Much like him and her, he supposes woefully. Their relationship has always been a stormy one. A hurricane. One that she is both the centre of, and a sanctuary from, which, now that he thinks about it, are one and the same thing. It’s calmest in the eye of the storm, right? Suddenly, Bucky isn’t so sure anymore. Doesn’t have to be, really, he’s a soldier, not a sailor. He wants to be a lover, though. A good one. That’s all he was trying to do, when shit hit the fan that day.

“Bucky? What are you doing here?” She says, putting her bag down slowly, in awe of the sight before her. He’s standing in the tiny kitchen of her tiny apartment, next to a dinner-table set for two. A candle-lit dinner table. 

“Hi, sweetheart. Thought I’d surprise you.” He smiles sheepishly, coming closer to help her out of her coat. He bends down, unbuckles her shoes. She lets him, but his kindnesses don’t distract from the nightmarish nature of her time at work. 

“You've… succeeded.” Her lip wobbles dangerously, like a child on the verge of a tantrum. Bucky picks up on it immediately. It’s only been six months, but he knows her like he knows every fire exit in the building - it’s imprinted into his mind.

“What’s wrong? You look upset.” He asks, rubbing her arms gently. She shakes her head.

“It’ll ruin the mood. I shouldn’t talk about it right now. Let’s just enjoy dinner. Which looks delicious, by the way.” She gestures towards the table, where he’s laid out a lasagna she would’ve inhaled by now if she weren’t so upset.

“Baby, I can see something’s off. Come on, just tell me.” Bucky persists, hand at the small of her back guiding her to the sofa in the adjacent room instead. There are more candles here, lights turned down low, roses in as many vases as they own between the two of them. Looking at all the effort he’s put into tonight’s the drop that makes the bucket run over. The first tears, glimmering in the firelight, roll down her cheeks, as she begins talking.

He should have listened to her, he thinks as he steps out into the September night, bracing himself against the chill that’s already starting to settle in. His every misery begins and ends with this sentiment - he should’ve listened to her. Not pressed the matter. She would have talked when she was ready to. But he didn’t, and as a consequence, is now on the streets of Queens without any idea what to do with himself.

It’s late. Not too late, of course, Bucky would never want to disturb her while she’s sleeping. Would have waited till morning anyway if he wasn’t so anxious about the fragile state of their relationship after the fight they had before he left. But he didn’t. He came here, as soon as formalities like debriefing and cleaning himself up were settled at a break-neck speed. The sun was setting, then. It’s gone now, leaving only darkness punctuated by lampposts, shop signs, and the headlights of oncoming cars. So really, not much darkness at all. It’s only ten, still early, especially for New York, the city that never sleeps. He knows he won’t be able to sleep either, not tonight. The sound of her sobs from that night will haunt him. He recalls the three simple words that started the spectacle that’s driven him out at this hour.

“I got fired.” She says finally, wiping her eyes with the tissue he hands her. New tears immediately replace those she just erased, and from then onwards, it’s a hopeless cause. 

“What? Why?” He exclaims, shocked. More than shock, the vibrations of worry shake his system. For her, and on her behalf. She needs this job. Claims she does, anyhow. Bucky’s happy to provide her with anything she could ever ask for, he’s told her as much, but after much arguing, he has been made aware that that’s not how things work. At least not for her. She needs to stand on her own two feet, and if that means working herself to the bone, in addition to her post-graduate studies, then so be it.

“I slapped a patron. He came around the bar - it was a busy night - squeezed my ass and made some lewd comments. Nothing I haven’t heard before, been catcalled more than I can remember, but this was up close. And he touched me, which hasn’t happened before.” She explains, eyes downcast. His blood pressure skyrockets, and he sees red.

“I’m gonna kill him.” He snarls, immediately softening when her gaze turns to him, frightened. He thinks she’s afraid of him, although she would reassure him of the contrary, as she always does, if she was in any state of mind to do so. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” He tries, gentle this time. She buries her face in his sweater, sobs into his chest. He can feel her chest shaking with the effort of her heaving cries. Bucky wraps his arms around her, heart in his throat at the pain he can physically feel through their points of contact. “Hey, hey, easy there. Calm down, sugar.” This was the wrong thing to say. She straightens up and faces him. 

“Calm down? You know what the manager said?” She asks fiercely. Resumes her furious rant when he doesn’t say anything. “He lectured me about the whole the-customer-is-always-right spiel, and how we have to put up with this stuff - as if he’s ever been groped - and then yelled at me for scaring clients. Then he called me a- a dramatic bitch and said I shouldn’t bother to show up to work tomorrow.“ She counts off the three points on her fingers, voice cracking at the end, and closes her eyes and breathes. She turns back to him. "So you see, Bucky, I can’t calm down.”

He grimaces internally at the reminder of the hurt she had exhibited. All the hurt he ignored. No, he most definitely will not be sleeping tonight. There’s no point in going back to his place in Brooklyn, or the Compound, like she suggested. Everything comes back to her. It has to. She’s the moon, and he is the voyager dependent on her for the tides that guide him to shore. She is also the shore itself - a safe place, somewhere to call home and build a life. Not for long, if they can’t resolve this argument. Their latest one. At the moment, he has only the dirty, echoing subway station, and the trains within.

The platform emits the perennial scents of urine and alcohol, and the drunk stragglers responsible for both having taken up their regular spots in the provided area. Lighthouses that repel those who surround them instead of attract them. A strand of hair comes loose from behind Bucky’s ear as a train rushes out from the tunnel to his right; he tucks it in its place impatiently, ice-blue eyes scanning the platform. The brakes screech as the doors open and the soft, robotic voice inside announces the station to its passengers. He throws caution to the wind and enters the train. He doesn’t know where it’s going, but then, he doesn’t know where he’s going either. Doesn’t need to, as long as it takes him away from everything. He’s good at that. Running away. He ran away from Steve at the Triskelion and in Bucharest. He ran away from her when she needed him, because he thought she didn’t.

“What is it, Sam?” He answers the phone, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. Closes his eyes as his teammate delivers the blow. The Avengers are needed,  somewhere in the world. Urgently so. “Do I have to? I’m in the middle of something.” He tells Sam, glancing over at her. She’s already figured it out. “Fine, fine. Yeah, I’m ready, give me a call when you get here.” Putting the phone down, he nervously runs his hands through his hair. “I- I have to go.” He says. 

“Where?” 

“Argentina. One week, tops. I’m sorry.” Bucky apologizes. It’s not enough to quell her concerns. Her pain. The torment he sees in her eyes. He wishes he could stay. Perhaps she’s better off without him, he considers.

“Stay. Please.” Clearly, she disagrees.

“I want to, doll, I really do. But they need me.”

“So do I.”

“Don’t do this to me.” He begs of her, because he can’t bear to see her like this. He’d give her the world if she asked, but at the moment, he can’t even give her the consolation she needs after a traumatic ordeal.

“Bucky, I don’t want to be the damsel in distress here, but I am in distress. I can’t cope with all the shit that went down today. That man- and ugh. Please, Bucky.” She’s pacing now, in front of the coffee table, and the tears are back in full force. Bucky averts his eyes.

“I wish I could, but Sam says-”

“Just tell him you can’t go. This one time.”

“I can’t do that. It’s my job, and it’s important.”

“And I’m not?”

Bucky thumps his head heavily against the window behind him. Closes his eyes against the onslaught of guilt and shame. He shouldn’t have left. Not then, with Sam, and not now, alone. He could have waited in the hallway. Instead he’s gotten on a train bound for nowhere, with nothing on his mind but the one person he can’t live without. Besides Steve, naturally. That punk is the bane of his existence, and Bucky wouldn’t want it any other way. They’re his people. The ones he needs to keep safe at all costs. Sam, too, occasionally, not that Bucky would ever tell him that. Evidently, he failed. He hurt her when he swore that he would be the one defending her from any such thing. 

Now here he is, in a train under the city he calls home, but feeling more homesick than he ever has. He never thought he’d fall in love this quickly. Six months is all it took for him to hand his heart over to a woman who seems hell bent on throwing it back in his face. He doesn’t blame her for rejecting his soul, broken and bruised as it is. He does blame himself for thinking that any balm that soothes those scars would last forever. Their courtship was too good to be true. He ponders this, and her tear-streaked face, as the train carries him deeper into a direction he does not care to go. He does not care to go anywhere she isn’t, however, the more he tries to return to her, the further he seems to drift away. Lost at sea, never to be found.

Taglist: @buckyreaderrecs @mermaidxatxheart @corneliabarnes

[makeste]

a BnHA playlist/fanmix thing

@psqqa so I finally put together a list of some of my BnHA playlist tracks! this is by no means comprehensive because I have literally half a dozen different playlists with different themes (e.g. “instrumentals”, “BakuDeku”, “songs that either remind me of Kacchan or that he would work out to”, “angsty apocalyptic final battle”, and so forth) and omg it’s a lot. but this is my most inclusive playlist, which consists of general character theme songs for most of class 1-A, the League of Villains, and a few others. my taste in music generally leans towards alternative/indie/rock/grunge, but it can kind of go all over the place. so the genres may vary here and there, especially since I opted to go with whichever song I felt fit the character best regardless of how well the tracks all blended together musically.

also I have a bakudeku bias but THAT’S NOT EXACTLY BREAKING NEWS what can I say. and this is actually me holding back lol but oh well.

Deku - Rise (Katy Perry) - “makeste did you really just kick off your BnHA playlist with a Katy Perry song” yeah I did! because!! I won’t just survive/oh you will see me thrive/can’t write my story/I’m beyond the archetype. like, this song was made for anime protagonists. oh ye of little faith/don’t doubt it, don’t doubt it/victory is in my veins/I know it, I know it. this kid just doesn’t give up. this is no mistake, no accident/when you think the final nail is in, think again/don’t be surprised/I will still rise.

bonus: Blood (Archis) - this song is fucking gorgeous both musically and lyrically. don’t let them win/don’t let them get/under your skin, into your head/they’re full of it/you’re full of life/you’ll prove them right if you’re giving up/so let’s go for blood. it really is fucked up how dismissive BnHA society is of anyone who’s quirkless. it’s so stupid too, because the majority of quirks aren’t even all that great. “look at me I can make DSLR lenses pop out of my body!” lol fucking great. so obviously superior to normal people who have to take pictures with actual cameras like fucking scrubs. anyway, so Deku was written off from a young age as helpless, defective, and deficient, all because he lacked a quirk. so it’s been so fucking great to watch him finally prove them all wrong. (...by getting a quirk. lol. but STILL.) well it sure took a while to turn it around/but I never gave up on me.

Bakugou - We Will Rock You (VonLichten mix) (Queen) - I like this version of the song because it adds a bit of an extra oomph and it’s a little bit fiercer. anyways, this has been my Bakugou theme song since day one, and what I love about it is that each verse works for a different stage of his ~journey~. buddy you’re a boy/make a big noise/playing in the street/gonna be a big man someday -- this is Katsuki as a fearless young child, with hints at the growing chip on his shoulder (kicking your can all over the place). and then the second verse is him a little older, starting out at UA -- buddy you’re a young man/hard man/shouting in the street/gonna take on the world someday -- and proclaiming to the world that he’ll be number one. and lastly we have the final verse, with its line gonna make you some peace someday, which I know is meant in a make-peace-with-things-before-the-end kind of way, but in a BnHA context you can totally tweak it to be a reference to the man he’s aspiring to be. gonna make you some peace, because he’s gonna be greater than the Symbol of Peace himself someday.

bonus: Defy You (The Offspring) - the wind blows/I’ll lean into the wind/my anger grows/I’ll use it to win/the more you say/the more I defy you/so get out of my way. perfect song for a boy who cannot and will not be stopped. you cannot stop us/you cannot bring us down/never give up/we’ll go on and on. or, in his words: “I will win... that’s what heroes do.”

All Might - Legends Never Die (League of Legends OST) - listen I have never played League of Legends lol, but ever since I heard this song in a Marvel edit, this has been the All Might song for me. you could probably just watch the Kamino battle on mute with this song in the background and everything would fit. legends never die/when the world is calling you/can you hear them screaming out your name?/legends never die/they become a part of you/every time you bleed for reaching greatness/relentless, you survive. the lyrics basically speak for themselves. we stan a champion.

Aizawa - I’ll Make a Man Out of You (Mulan OST) - y’all I went through so many songs looking for something that summarized Aizawa’s tiredness/doneness-with-life while also alluding to his mentor side, and then suddenly BAM, it hit me. anyways so yeah. you’re the saddest bunch I ever met/but you can bet before we’re through/mister I’ll make a man out of you. also just try to listen to the “say goodbye to those who knew me/boy was I a fool in school for cutting gym/THIS GUY’S GOT ‘EM SCARED TO DEATH” part without picturing 1-A bitching about their scruffy teacher overlord whom they secretly love.

bonus: I’m So Tired (Fugazi) - if you’re looking for something more musically cohesive with the rest of this playlist in general, as opposed to SUDDEN DISNEY SONG OUT OF NOWHERE, this may be a bit more up your alley lol. I’m so tired sheep are counting me/no more struggle, no more energy/no more patience/and you can write that down/it’s all too crazy and I’m not sticking round. anyways Aizawa needs a nap.

Todoroki - Alive (Sia) - I grew up overnight/I played alone, I played on my own/I survived/I wanted everything I never had/like the love that comes with life/I wore envy and I hated it/but I survived. guys this little candy cane boy has been through some shit. but he hung in there and now he is thriving. I’m still breathing/I’m alive.

Ochako - You Gotta Be (Des’ree) - because she’s a badass. you gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser/you gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger/you gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together. anyways I sure would like Ochako to get the spotlight in an arc again one of these days. she’s the best.

Iida - Never Die (FNDTY) - it was actually pretty hard to find a song that fit Iida’s unique forty-year-old man personality since my musical tastes usually run towards moody shit and he’s pretty much the opposite of that lol. but I think the tempo of this song fits his quirk, at least, and it makes me smile, which he does also. you can run/you can fly/you can never die.

Kirishima - Guts Over Fear ft. Sia (Eminem)  - so this is a song all about overcoming your insecurities and finding the courage within yourself. I freaking love how the pre-chorus I was afraid to make a single sound/afraid I would never find a way out builds up and transitions into so here I am and I will not run/guts over fear. I’m so proud of Kiri you guys.

Momo - You Are Young (Keane) - another song about getting the better of your personal doubts and demons! hey now, don’t be scared, baby, don’t be scared at all/of all the things you don’t know/you’ve got time to realize. Momo has so much potential and she’s going to be such an incredible hero one day. now that she’s gaining more confidence the sky is pretty much the limit for her. you’ve got time/you’ve got to try/to bring some good into this world/cause you are young.

Mina - Safe and Sound (Capital Cities) - oh hey it’s the most upbeat song in the world, for the world’s most cheerful and optimistic and endlessly delightful person. I could fill your cup/you know my river won’t evaporate/this world we still appreciate/you could be my luck/even in a hurricane of frowns/I know that we’ll be safe and sound.

Kaminari - Thunderstruck (AC/DC) - okay yeah maybe I didn’t try too hard on this one lol. BUT IF THE SHOE FITS and honestly, it does. title aside, I think this song fits Kaminari musically too. it’s badass and it puts a smile on your face. went through to Texas/yeah Texas/and we had some fun/we met some girls/some dancers who gave a good time/broke all the rules/played all the fools. and then, of course, the chorus. you’ve been thunderstruck.

Jirou - Dream On (Aerosmith) - you know I had to go with a rock song for Jirou, so might as well go with a classic that’s all about (a) loving music (sing with me, sing for the year/sing for the laughter, sing for the tear) and (b) shooting for your dreams. dream on, dream on/dream until your dreams come true.

Tokoyami - Dark Necessities (Red Hot Chili Peppers) - I could have possibly gone with something a bit more goth for Toko as opposed to the Chilis, but the lyrics just fit so well though. you don’t know my mind/you don’t know my kind/dark necessities are part of my design/tell the world that I’m falling from the sky/dark necessities are part of my design/do you want this love of mine?/darkness helps us all to shine. Tokoyami doesn’t get enough respect for being a teenage edgelord without being a cringey mess. he’s setting such a good example for others.

so that’s pretty much it for my 1-A songs, but here are some bonus BakuDeku songs because I am obsessed

Muddy Waters (LP) - this is my theme for Deku VS Kacchan 2. goddamn Katsuki is such a hot fucking mess during this fight. and he’s hurting so much, and he’s reaching out to the only person he knows to reach out to in the only way he knows how. I will ask you for mercy/I will come to you blind/what you’ll see is the worst me/I’m not the last of my kind/in the muddy water we’re falling/in the muddy water we’re crawling. this song brings that good angst you guys. this is a relationship that has been through the wringer, and two boys who have basically no idea what they are doing, just kind of stumbling along. it is not clear why we choose the fire pathway/where we end is not the way that we had planned/all the spirits gathered round like it’s our last day/to get across you know we’ll have to raise the sand. anyways these kids chose the highest possible difficulty level for their path forward, but they’re doing it though. together, y’all.

Admiration (Incubus) - because Izuku is frankly infatuated and doesn’t even try to hide it. you’re an unfenced fire/over walls we’ve trampled/it’s you I admire/my living example. “an amazing person who was even closer to me than All Might.” he’s so open in his respect and awe for practically everything Kacchan does. just staring at him in starry-eyed wonder. and this part of their dynamic has always been so compelling to me -- how unconditional it is on Izuku’s part. that is some fiercely strong love there on his part that it can survive all the bullshit Kacchan heaps onto it, and all his best attempts to snuff it out. he just latched on and wouldn’t let go. anyways it resulted in something extremely unhealthy for quite a while, but it’s turning around now and being reciprocated, even if Kacchan’s version is prickly and tentative. don’t get ahead of me/could we just this once see eye to eye?

Ordinary Love (U2) - I can’t fight you anymore/it’s you I’m fighting for/the sea throws rocks together/but time leaves us polished stones. I fucking love that metaphor, though. yeah, just give them time. they’re gonna figure this all out one day.

and have a bonus theme song for class 1-A in general before we move on

Charlie Brown (Coldplay) - something about this song just embodies that restive, fidgety energy of youth to me. all the boys, all the girls/all that matters in the world/all the boys, all the girls/all the madness that occurs/all the highs, all the lows/as the room a-spinning goes/we’ll run riot/we’ll be glowing in the dark. there’s like a disorderly, disheveled beauty to this. say what you will about Coldplay, but some of their songs are like the musical equivalent of a rainbow.

anyways so now I’m gonna segue into some songs for a few of the season 4 characters. starting with...

Nighteye - While I’m Still Here (Nine Inch Nails) - ticking time is running out/yesterday I found out the world was ending. I still can’t get over how psychologically devastating Nighteye’s quirk is. it’s basically just Major Bummer: The Quirk. this season is really going to fuck me up emotionally isn’t it. a little more/every day/falls apart and/slips away/I don’t mind/I’m okay/wish it didn’t have to end this way. fucking hell. guess I better brace myself for some solid gut punches to the soul.

Eri - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) (Florence + the Machine) - nothing to see here, just a little girl being treated as nothing more than a human bloodbank, and told that her quirk is nothing but a curse even as her abuser hoards it and uses it to wage a war. this is a gift, it comes with a price/who is the lamb and who is the knife?/Midas is king and he holds me so tight/and turns me to gold in the sunlight. but I also picked this song for Eri because of the way the POV slowly gathers up their courage and tries to fight back. I wish that I could just be brave/I must become a lion-hearted girl/ready for a fight/before I make the final sacrifice. excuse me I need to go hug Eri.

Mirio - Carry On (fun.) - okay so it was kind of hard to pick a song for Mirio, I think maybe I was overthinking it. anyways I ended up going with something hopeful to try and embody his endless, determined optimism. this song has kind of a quiet courage that builds up as it goes on. my favorite part is the second bridge: cause we are/we are shining stars/we are invincible/we are who we are/on our darkest day/when we’re miles away/so we’ll come/we will find our way home.

bonus: Mirio and Tamaki - Kids (Acoustic) (OneRepublic) - back when we were kids/swore we would never die/you and me were kids/swear that we’ll never die. lol at least we have one healthy childhood friendship to stan in this series.

and now on to THE VILLAINS, yay. this is probably the most musically cohesive section of this playlist, since VILLAINS!! means I can go with an overall darker ambiance.

All for One - Sympathy for the Devil (Neptunes Remix) (Rolling Stones) - didn’t even have to think about this one. please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste/I’ve been around for a long, long year/stole many a man’s soul and faith. this is the gentleman villain song and a perfect fit IMO.

Tomura - Pet (A Perfect Circle) - or really, this is more “AFO and Tenko”, I guess. manipulating a traumatized child into hating the world and raising him to become a killer. pay no mind to what other voices say/they don’t care about you like I do/safe from pain and truth and choice and other poison devils/see, they don’t give a fuck about you like I do/just stay with me/safe and ignorant. this is one of those songs where literally the entire song fits both lyrically and musically. just perfect. I’ll be the one to protect you from your enemies and your choices, son/they’re one and the same/I must isolate you/isolate and save you from yourself. like it’s a struggle here not to quote the entire song. ...eh, one more. swinging to the rhythm of the new world order and/counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums.

bonus: Flesh and Bone (Black Math) - Tenko angst. god that last arc was so fucking good. I walk alone, beside myself/nowhere to go/this bleeding heart that’s in my hands/I fell apart. stupid manga with its darkly compelling villain character arcs.

Dabi - Shadow on the Sun (Audioslave) - aaaangst lol. and I can tell you why/people go insane/I can show you how/you could do the same. p.s. Dabi you still owe me a flashback! also “shadow on the sun” is a pretty good metaphor for his relationship with Endeavor. fire quirks make for such great metaphor potential.

Toga - Bones (MS MR) - you know I really have no idea why this song pings me so hard for Toga lol. but whatever, it is what it is. marinate in misery/like a girl of only 17/man-made madness/and the romance of sadness.

Twice - Misfits (Third Eye Blind) - my people are the misfits/the ones that don’t fit in. this is another song that clicked pretty naturally without requiring much thought on my part. well those are the ones for me/yeah those are the ones for me/the misfits, the freaks, the enemy/you and me.

Spinner - Normal Person (Arcade Fire) - is anything as strange as a normal person?/is anyone as cruel as a normal person/waiting after school for you/they want to know if you/if you’re normal too/well are you? this song is such a burn on quirk society and all of its issues. I can’t tell if I’m a normal person, it’s true/I think I’m cool enough/but am I cruel enough? I especially love the ending -- if that’s what’s normal now/I don’t want to know.

and a bonus League of Villains song:

Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears cover) (Lorde) - just change “rule” to “destroy” I guess lol. help me make the most of freedom/and of pleasure/nothing ever lasts forever/everybody wants to rule the world. god I love this cover. this is one of those songs I’ll play over and over again anyway so it’s nice to have a good excuse what with the direction this new arc appears to be headed in.

and lastly, a couple of Hawks and Endeavor songs because they don’t really fit in any other section and I didn’t really plan out this post!

Hawks - Weapon (Matthew Good) - just a really nice, angsty theme for the man who goes too fast, off on his spy mission of doom. careful, you be careful/this is where the world drops off. plus some bonus angst about how he’s trapped in this role that he never wanted to be in. and you give in/and you give out for it/ain’t it so weird/how it makes you a weapon.

Endeavor - Find My Way (Nine Inch Nails) - lord my path has gone astray/I’m just trying to find my way/wandered here from far away/I’m just trying to find my way/you were never meant to see/all those things inside of me/now that you have gone away/I’m just trying to find my way. I don’t really need to comment more on this, do I? also, the part where Trent Reznor’s voice drops to a whisper and says please/I never meant for this, though. omg. Endeavor you’re such a bitch and you had all of this coming, but even so. oof.

and that’s pretty much it! she said, like this post wasn’t long af as it is lol. anyway so there are... 34 songs here, lol. I should probably try and put it all into a youtube playlist or something for convenience. I’ll edit once I’ve done that.

edit: playlist!

[canarhys]

jason shouldn’t have lightning powers.

hear me out. look at nico and hazel. they are both aspects of the same god, hades/pluto. nico has the death aspect (dead summoning and contact, shadow-travel, banishing to the underworld) while hazel has the wealth aspect (gem summoning and manipulation, mist-control?, cursed gemstones). the only things they have in common are that they could consume persephone’s pomegranate seeds and go into death trances, and they are huge targets by monsters. it’s creative and fun to see different kids of the same parentage.

but then there’s thalia and jason. thalia is amazing, as she summons lightning and electricity, the thunder side of zeus. it’s also great to see that she is acrophobic, and is unable to fly or summon the wind, because that totally breaks the thought that demigods aren’t scared of the things they can control.

then we have jason.

he has the whole package without consequences. he summons lightning and the wind, he can fly and electrocute, and he is totally fine on land, sea, and air. what? that’s a major problem that i have in riordan’s writing - jason’s powers are generic for a son of zeus/jupiter. sure, it’s possible that a demigod can have all the aspects of their parents, but it doesn’t work for jason. riordan made him sound too perfect, too much of a percy 2.0 and less Character with a Personality.

i’m not saying that i hate jason, because i love him so much. but he seems to be like a character who’s just...a hero. that’s it. no flaws, nothing. so i’m just going to go forth with my ideas for how jason should’ve been:

first, he only has aerokinesis. don’t even try me. think of how amazing that would be. when he first arrives at camp jupiter, a lot of people make fun of him for only having the wind side of jupiter. in theory, they think that a child of jupiter without lightning power is a child not worthy enough to be named a kid of the big three. to them, wind is just the breeze on the back of your neck. he doesn’t seem all that powerful if you think about it, despite his cold blue eyes and a wolfish stare. they called him airhead all the time, and say he’s only good at flying.

jason, at first, is angry. he hates that he’s unable to control lighting, the thing that zeus is most famous for, and he hates it - that is, until he accidentally causes a tornado around him when he is being teased again. he watched as the wind picked up the guys surrounding him and threw them several feet away. then came his drive, which drove him to, instead of sulking about the powers he doesn’t have, develop the powers he does. and he becomes an absolute beast on the battlefield.

spectators watch in shock as jason releases a massive column of air from his mouth, blowing back enemies at alarming distances. they watch him fly over the land like some kind of eagle, finding his next prey and striking. his mere presence could make it hard to breath. one time on a quest jason fucking swooped down like an eagle and massacred a whole battalion of monsters. and that doesn’t even count the one time while fighting krios that he summoned a goddamn hurricane.

next, he’s seasick. i got the idea from a post i saw on tumblr (i’d credit you but i forgot who you are, sorry!). he hates the ocean. it scares him to the point where he will fly to get across the atlantic, even if it kills him. his biggest fear is drowning, which almost happened to him once - worst experience of his life. he bonds with hazel over this, and they both try to ease other’s phobias (and throw up over the side of ships together).

as a bonus, i kind of feel like jason would be sorta afraid of thunder? he doesn’t like how it just happens at random - there’s no warning, and suddenly there’s a giant boom and he wakes himself up at night and he can’t tell anyone because he’s supposed to be a natural leader, not a wimpy teenager.

three, he has anger issues. it’s common for children of zeus, and jason, like thalia, is no exception. sure, he looks patient, but his patience is as low as the earth’s core and he gets angry easily - especially if someone won’t take him seriously. if he thinks you’re slacking off, he’ll correct your behavior gently at first, but if you manage to make him lose his resolve (which is half-hard, half-easy), you are absolutely fucked. also don’t mistreat someone in his presence, or you’re equally - if not more - fucked.

but the it’s to the point where he will lash out a bit more severely than you’re supposed to. it’s not his fatal flaw, and wrath isn’t his strong suit. but when he gets angry, the winds drop and you can see lightning in his eyes and he becomes so intimidating that you can’t even stare into his pupils anymore.

he has a giant pet eagle, fuck you (tempest was just riordan’s way of making percy 2.0).

finally, his fatal flaw is ambition. this is the same as thalia’s flaw, and i feel like it fits for jason too. he wants to be a strong leader and noble warrior, and he pressures himself to be absolutely perfect in order to achieve his dream - to be the person everyone can look up to. he doesn’t want them to feel abandoned, to feel like they’re useless and stupid and worthless, and he wants to be an example that: “hey, if that guy could grow from being abandoned at a young age and having zeus’ weakest power to being a hero, why can’t i?” he has the need to be perfect, to be a shoulder to cry on, a person who rose from nothing. he doesn’t want them to feel like him when he was left in lupa’s hands. when he was being downgraded just because he wasn’t a lightning boy.

but that means he criticizes himself severely and doubts himself a lot. and i mean A LOT. to the point where he makes himself train and train and fight and fight till his body falters to become the hero he strives to be, to be known. sometimes he worries that he isn’t enough. he shouldn’t be a leader, and he feels like a failure a lot. he pushes himself too far and gives everything his all. even if he passes out in the end. he wants to be a hero. he wants to protect all the kids he’s ever known and let them know that they are worthy, they are able.

he just wants to be someone for them.

[artificialqueens]

save your breath (Branjie) - PinkGrapefruit

A/N - Yo! I am back because all I ever do is write nowadays. I wrote this on a whim at 10 pm last night after a prompt someone sent in. Thanks to FreyKitten for beta-ing me and being an awesome human as per usual as i write weird lines about orchestras and carnations. It’s written to the song ‘save your breath’ by Adore Delano and is from Brookes POV. As always, all work is my own and although this is based on real people, both the characters and the story are my own interpretation and therefore fully fabricated. Enjoy! x

*

When you think about me

Do you remember when

You were all about me

Or am I just a myth?

Do you remember the way our hands intertwined? The fluttering of black on red that day by the tree. Do you remember that, baby? Because I do. I remember it like yesterday, my mind filled with clouds, and apple cider, and you. Because you feel like coming home and nothing will ever beat that feeling. You could give me a handjob and make it feel like a pas de deux. All graceful and elegant and shit. You could buy me a thousand purses and pumps and a goddamn planet but I would love nothing more than I love you. Because I love you like a cat loves catnip or some other analogy that I don’t have the heart to make up. You took my heart and crushed it under my own pointe shoes. You placed it prettily on the floor and watched me pirouette my way over it. If God is a woman, she is cruel and unwavering in her choices.

Do you remember that time by the beach? The one in Florida after I met the Mateos. That’s where I realised I love you. Not in some club in wherever the hell we were. Not even in Toronto when I watched you look, with so much joy, at the place I’m from. No, I realised it on a beach at 2 am when my mind was so addled by sleep that the tide was covering half my legs. When you pulled me up and made me dance with you under the stars of Tampa. Your head was heavy on my chest and your breath was warm. It smelled like Panda Express and cider and your hair of cologne and prop glitter. And then I took you to my hometown, God. We stood at the top of Church near Old Toronto and you wanted to see my old haunts so badly so I let you pull me into The Drink. Later you tugged me back out and demanded I showed you all of the touristy destinations so we hired bikes and cycled them all. We shared long, languid kisses in front of each and everyone and savoured each other like it would be our last hurrah.

Do you remember the way I took you in my arms that night? How I made you scream? How you told me you loved me in between sweaty sheets and heavy breaths. I remember the way that undeniable feeling of home swelled in me like a symphony. Like the violin solo reaching its crescendo and when we crashed back down like waves against the shore - the pitch, fuzzy in my ears. You are fortissimo, brash and loud but you can be kind when needed. Like pauses in the bar. I am mezzo-piano. I am moderately soft and though we both know I can get loud, I do not broadcast that. That is not the world’s secret to know. That is not yours to share.

I loved you hardest

Happy, just loving you

And to be honest

Sometimes I think I still do

It would take a lot for me to say that I do not love you. But the thing about love is that it is rarely enough. Love is never the sole emotion, it is always supported by others. You can have love and jealousy, love and rage, love and pure, unadulterated joy. But you never just have love. The same way that the organ supports the strings section, all other emotions support love because it is fickle. It is easy to break. It is easy to detune, destring, derail. Just like we were. And yet I love you. I love you like I am going to break if I stop. Like I will cease to exist. Loving you feels like I am constantly in the eye of the storm. The winds are swelling around me like the strings and you are the conductor. You are the maker of chaos and the ruler of the winds.  The king of my goddamn world. When did I forget that you’ve always been the king of the world?

I think about you a lot. It’s mostly just me wondering if you’re thinking about me too because this feels like I’m drowning and I don’t think you can save me anymore. I need to learn to swim or find a place, high and dry, to smoke a cigarette or two before I go down. It’s awfully hard to keep your head above the water when you can’t remember why you’re there. This ocean I am stuck in, this whirlpool I cannot escape, it’s just a storm in a teacup. The hurricane’s coming. We both know it will wipe us out.

I never thought leaving would be a precautionary measure. I didn’t realise that I needed caution till I met you but now I see that I was wrong. Because leaving is the biggest precaution one can make when trying not to get hurt and Lord knows I am the master of that. You don’t spend your life as a dancer without knowing how to avoid injury. You learn how to stretch. How to feel when a muscle is straining and how to differentiate between good and bad pain. I am the master of my body, I am the master of my soul. I am not the master of you. I know when my hip is about to go out, how long I can hold an arabesque to still move my knees. I have learned when to take off my pointe shoes and when to say enough is enough. Why can I never do that with you?

You’re losing oxygen

And I can’t find the words

You’re a fire that’s losing oxygen. A powder keg about to explode. You’re running out of fuel but you’ll blow up at any second and it's dangerous but I’ve always liked dangerous. I’ve  never feared getting burned. As I said, I know how to avoid getting hurt. It’s funny how we worked, how we would work if we weren’t overtired and underpaid and running on the fumes of tomorrows and good tequila. I’ve always been more of a vodka kinda gal but maybe that’s the Canadian in me. If you were here you’d make a joke a about having Canadian in me and we’d laugh and then I’d call you a hypocrite. One of us has had Canadian in him more often than the other.

I remember the way you burned on Drag Race. The way the fire within you would roar rather than just flicker. Because alcohol fuels fire, it doesn’t destroy it the same way that loneliness does. I’ve never been a fragile person but watching us again kills me a little. I long for the days when we weren’t so busy. When we had no reason not to be together. I don’t know where you found the words to impose this ban on us. I certainly don’t have any. We made our bed and now we have to lie in it but this time the bed is a single and there are two of us. Because this game shrunk the bed and I want to get out. Twitter is not a substitute for texting. It is not a substitute for love and affection and the physical closeness I crave.

This game we play is orchestrated but my feelings are not. Your fire does not control what I do or who I see or how they end up in my bed. I tell myself this in the hope that I will learn. In the hope that it will teach me not to fall in love again. Because you cannot play the violin to the tune of my soul. No drumbeat can replicate the beating of my heart when I held you in my arms and whispered love into your hair. I am someone else when I am in love, and you broke that.

The air is getting thin

Silence is all we heard

How’s the air up on your high horse? How do you feel in this atmosphere you’ve made? Are you jealous of me because I didn’t have to make the call? I was too naive to see that we couldn’t stay together. I wasn’t strong enough to fight the tide. The crashing waves of saltwater that burned all of my cuts. Every scar filled with salty tears and every painful thing I’ve felt exacerbated by the cool flow of the ocean. If you read this you’d tell me that I sounded like a Pisces and I’d be inclined to agree if that wasn’t so Libra of you. You’d say it like it’s a compliment but the context just screams insult. Isn’t that just adding insult to injury here?

We only talk online but really all that means is we haven’t spoken in months and you know how I was talking about an orchestra? Well, this newfound silence is deafening. It’s the long pause after that crash of the symbols. The day after the rain. It’s the quiet of an early morning but without you in bed with me and fuck. It hurts, baby. Your forte was always loud but I miss it now. I’ve never regretted being quiet before but I’m aching for the noise that you took away. My life has been one constant note. It never wavered until you. Then you came crashing in and it became a vibrato, technical and beautiful. And then you left. And it feels empty without the melodies. The harmonies we made were visible from the very beginning on Drag Race and whether we thank the editing for that or not, we both know it’s true. We were opposites in public but two peas in a pod alone.

When we would lay in bed, your head on my chest, my fingers grazing your tattoo and your hand in my hair: that’s the only place you were quiet. The air was heavy with love and familiarity and it pooled in my stomach like summer and home. It trickled down your neck like hot chocolate, soft and smooth and filled your lungs with flowers till you coughed up petals onto our bed. Red carnations for love. Bouvardia doubles for life. Sweet pea for departure after a good time. Now silence looks like sweet peas and sex hair and I can’t live my life in that.

You know our last goodbye

Keeps playing through my mind like

Ah ah ah

My mind feels like a compilation video these days. It’s taken every good moment we had and made a supercut. One day I will take it and splice it, titling it happiness.mov. I will watch it until I am old and haggard. When my legs are feeble and I’ve lost all muscle tone in my body. When life has drained from my eyes and my feet no longer support me en pointe. That is when I will let go of these memories. You see, in a way, they made me who I am. Every kiss you gave me, slow and soft under harsh club lights. Every green room I waited in for you and vice versa. Every dollar of tip money I’ve thrown at you - that’s part of me now. You are part of me and I will carry you in my heart like a scarlet letter.

The last time we said goodbye felt more like a hello. It was warm and quick but the way you smiled isn’t something you can fake. Neither of us can act but we are clever enough to play pretend when we need to. We are too young to know better but too old to be fooled. I was not fooled. You directed Courtney with ease, told her what to do like the producers did back then and when I looked at you, you whispered something. So soft, I didn’t hear what it was, but I got lost in you all the same. You still smelt like apple cider and dreams and when you placed your small hands on my waist - when you pulled me in as you did in Florida and in Toronto; well, I could have sworn I heard angels sing. I felt you smile into me and I know you welcomed the feeling too.

I am grateful to Courtney and Nina for suggesting we did that. I am grateful for the video that I have watched a million times. It hurts less than watching Drag Race. Maybe that’s because I know that this wasn’t in our honeymoon phase. Now we have a grip on reality and we aren’t just letting the waves pull us together. We’ve swum through the riptide and I can’t say that we’re stronger but we’re certainly still here.

I often let my mind wander when I am in the depths of despair. I question whether you have watched the video like I have. Whether you will view it with the same sliver of hope and painfully real emotion. I wonder if it stirs your heart and messes with your head to see two people look so in love. If it breaks you down a little to see us look so in love. We may be too old to be fooled but we aren’t near old enough to be blind. Nina made me promise when she sent that video, promise not to go mad. Her warning was belated. All I smell is sweet peas and apple cider and Tampa Bay - and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Love was already dead

Did you know, red carnations are common in funeral bouquets? They say the word ‘carnation’ comes from the Latin, God in the flesh, and in that case, I suppose I understand how they link to you. If you are a carnation, red like anger and love. I am a peony. Bashful and compassionate and completely indignant. I am angry because this is an injustice, I am indignant to the world and to you. I love you bashfully and with my whole self. I love you with compassion and joy and I long for the good health and prosperity that peonies symbolise. If God is a woman, let her have the heart to see that we cannot be over just yet, I am not content with being a peony. I wish to be a daffodil of new hopes and beginnings. I would like you to join me in them.

Love was already dead

What do oceans and orchestras and flowers and fires and God have in common? You. You are the fire that burns in the dead of winter, keeping the rest of the world warm even if it means you burn out. Too selfless to save yourself, too selfish to let me burn out with you. You are the ocean that swallows me whole and deposits me back on the shore when I swim too far out. You are the conductor of symphonies that all bear my name. Every piece is personal and swells and dips like the North Sea. You play gracefully although your instrument isn’t typical for a twenty-something drag queen. You are the red carnation to my peony even though I pray that one day we will both be daffodils in March, swaying in the gentle breeze with the early sun on our backs. You are the controller of my fate, the author of my destiny. With every breath I take in, I exhale blue roses. I can’t have you but I can’t stop thinking about you. That sounds about right.

Love was already dead

So save your breath

Our love isn’t dead, but you can’t just talk your way out of this one, babe.

Do you remember us?

Because I do.

[rocinantescoffeestop]

Anthony “Tony” Stark, age 21, reads eulogy at his parents funeral on Dec. 22, 1991

or, in other words, the fanfiction I write at 00:14 because the idea of Tony being and angery smol at his parents funeral wouldn’t leave my head as I was trying to sleep. Pre-Series, duh. FYI: I didn’t edit, just wrote and posted, so please ignore the switching of tenses. I’m exhausted and too impatient to edit. Thank.

“Okay, so…”

The boy at the stand swallowed nervously. He never got nervous, never. Teachers loved and hated that about him, peers admired that about him, and his best friend, Rhodey, rolled his eyes at that fact about him. Here and now, standing before the gathering of people his parents’ lives had touched, Tony felt too small for the pulpit, too weak for words on the page before him, and too emotionally-charged to think clearly. In the front row, right where Tony could see, sat the only two people who mattered to him. There was Rhodey, his best friend and brother, and Obadiah, the figure more fatherly than his own father.

“I’m gonna use a, uh, script this time,” he said, lifting the page off the pulpit enough for the audience to see. “I don’t– can’t really remember…” He shook his head. “You know what? I’m just going to start. Yeah, I’m gonna start.”

He took in a deep breath.

“It’s funny that, um, the last time you see someone, you usually don’t think it’s going to be like that. I mean, I was just on the couch after some big flight in when Dad walks in and suddenly announces he’s going someplace, and he’s taking Mom, too? I mean, not surprising. It always happens. Since ever, I could hardly get a, uh, a moment alone, you know… with him…”

Tony sighs. The air leaves his mouth through his top and bottom front teeth. His tightly-wound jar turn the sound into a crisp but soft blast, like two pieces of cardboard sliding suddenly across each other. “You know what…?” he mumbles, but it is loud enough that the front three rows can hear him. He surveys the audience before looking down at the page in front of him. None of the words felt right. Absolutely none. He sneers at the paragraphs, then lifts his head up to regard each and every face bearing into him. He normally loved the spotlight. Today, he hated it. As usual, he buried that deep-set hatred and proceeded in a manner he always strove to be” completely aloof.

"Sometimes, I feel like I hardly even knew my Dad, for starters. Everyone else probably knew him way better, what with all the newsreels and shit. Surely, a father should have some time to spend with his son?” He left the question hanging, but the way he pronounced every goddamned syllable made the answer crystal clear: not MY dad. “Mom could always bring him down for a bit. Almost always. Half the time. Well. Whatever.”

Tony shrugged. He hoped everyone was drinking in his heartless act. He was NOT sad. He was NOT sad! He refused to feel even the edge of sorrow with the tip of his toe.

“I guess if she had to go, he better, too, because god or whatever forbid I have to stand him alone.”

His words were even MORE clipped than before, his voice hard as iron, his jaw as rigid as stone. He never realised just how much anger boiled inside him. It churned like a hurricane trapped and straining to be free. Dark grey storm clouds. Lightning flashing. Winds hurtling around a central point at hundreds of miles per hour. The faces in front of him blinked; some gasped and others glared. Rhodes was giving him a both pained and fierce, shut up now! look. Obie merely shook his head at nothing in particular, but Tony knew. Brown eyes flicked down at the page and jumped in their sockets to find the page crumpled in a tight fist, knuckles already turning from red to white. He couldn’t even see the residual red marks from yesterday’s fit of repeatedly striking the wall.

He totally clenched his fingers around the page and dragged it off the podium. His teeth ground together.

“I’m not–“ –he gulped down a sob, but his sentence derailed before he could get a handle on such an emotional outburst. “To my dead parents, everyone,” he spat.

Nothing and no one stopped him as he stomped down from the stand, down the aisle, and kicked open the door at the very end. The heavy slab of mahogany slammed into the exterior wall with an ear-shattering bang, but Tony remained the only one who didn’t jump in shock or fear (or both) at the sound.

“Thanks for nothing,” he muttered darkly, hoping the words might catch in the wind and blow to wherever dead souls gathered. He wanted his father to know, without a doubt, how much it sucked to be here without a decent memory to hold onto. Everything sucked.

Life sucked.

So, he hid himself behind a particularly large trunk of a tree and let loose the tears he promised he would never show anyone, not even the audience inside.

Especially not them.

[dirtyfilthy]

Pack the bong with fireworks, blow your face away

Generally speaking, my mind expands to fill all the drugs available. Ah, but not you ketamine, my wretched little red headed step child. You can go live with your mother, and  I don’t want to hear from you until the next court appointed visitation.

Unfortunately for me the same wasn’t true for the gram of amphetamine that was burning a hole in my pocket, then my nostril. And so of course I had try using it rectally, and man….. I was waaaaay too high. Like: compulsively jacking off for twelve hours / avoiding saying anything at mandatory zoom meetings while keeping my camera turned off / dodging colleague & co-worker / feeling like a fried egg in a “this is your brain on drugs” advertisement / scorchingly, motherfuckingly HIGH.

Jesus Christ, I knew boofing it avoided first-pass metabolism, I just didn’t think it would make such a big difference.

One interesting side effect of this was I went a full 14 hours without dosing any opium. In the ordinary course of things, while I wouldn’t be in the full pits of withdrawals after 14 hours, I would most definitely be feeling out of sorts. Instead, didn’t even fucking notice.

Figured “why look a meth horse in the mouth?” and used the opportunity to cut my dose for today by 25%. This is whole idea of the ketamine, so I can stop using opium as an anti-depressant. Cos I know the roller-coaster always twists the same way. Kicking ain’t that difficult. It’s what inevitably happens afterwards. the punch-in-the-guts of existential loneliness,  then, a quantum koan.

Student says to the Master: “Master, I feel absolutely unlovable at the very atomic core of my being. What can I do?”

Master says to Student: “All matter is an illusion. Consider, there are no atoms. In reality you are unlovable at the level of quantum foam, in reality, you are an indivisible,  unlovable one-ness with no beginning or end.... Now go and start making me my dinner you worthless sack of shit and for goddsake stop fucking moping for a minute.”  

Upon hearing this, suddenly the Student was / was not enlightened.

I have this dry wry internal voice telling me (like a crypt door creaking open):  “go ahead kid, admit it, nothing is ever going to change so you may as well go throw yourself over your balcony. Aw kid, whattsamatta? — are you scared of heights? Well then, in that case, as your lawyer I recommend that you order a gram of heroin on the dark web and then just down the whole lot. That’s right. Everything at once, at the same time, in one go. It’s easy: all you need to do is push the boat out from the pier a little bit— & from that point on, it’s smooth sailing”

He looks at me, grinning madly. I’m beginning to think it’s the only expression he knows how to make.

“No need to turn off the lights when you leave, kid. These are the kind of candles that will snuff out themselves”

Fuck off death breath, you plastic old carnival skeleton.. Not yet. NOT YET. You’re trying to cash out insurance policies for psychic real estate you simply don’t hold the deeds for. “Nice place you got here” — I can hear you chuckling as you light a cigarette, then hold up the still flaming match at eye height afterwards — “be a real shame if it all burned down, folks can get so careless”

I say: shut your goddamn mouth, skull features! Before I turn you into some kind of smoking accessory & start packing weed into your empty eye sockets. Before I donate you to some kind of charity for needy goth kids, or worse, slip you in a Halloween store sale, sometime after October.

Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards.

& you’re nothing but a pile of old bones. I’ve seen you at the cross roads when I went there to meet the Devil, came to do a little horse trading, and maybe swap myself a tall tale for some old soul or two; So I know that you know at least how to whistle to the one single note of your own leitmotif: , & hell, you may even know how to dance to it— especially when that old gallows wind from the West comes calling. 

You don’t like dancing. —I get it! You are lazy, and everything aches when you move.. But when that cold old wind comes calling, all groaning  and moaning like a dead man with insomnia seeing yet another unwelcome morning sunrise,   - a dead man who can’t seem to get any of the forty winks he feels that are owed to him, because he hasn’t slept for an entire century,  and so he groans with all the horrible weight of those endless years of bad debit & compound bitterness (you see: he was promised “a well earned rest”, it would be “like sleep” they said,  you’re going to get “a good long sleep, sweet sleep without dreams”, but now everything just feels a constant, crushing nightmare & however much he tosses and turns and rots in his coffin he still remains conscious, & sleep never seems to come). 

So when the wind runs up, coming at a full gallop with a groan rising in the back of its’ throat like a hurricane of pain, it’s hooves striking lightning,  the tongue of the storm cracking and crackling and attacking at random, like the snap of some terrible whip laying about itself with absolutely no regard for friend or foe or favourite, spitting out curses in ancient Enochian, the teeth of the ocean gurning and chewing on the lips of the shoreline -- this being no lovers kiss, not gentle at all but gleeful, with a kind of savage cannibalism, just straight up biting out whole bloody chunks of the cheeks of the beach and casually peeling open the hulls of great sailing ships like the shells of so many pistachos, when that very wind starts to shake your gibbet like a rattle and then begins to play xylophone with your rib bones

Dance! dance! dance me a pretty jig, oh my darling!

But I know this truth too: that old show tune you like to sing does not exactly ring melodious to living ear-drums. The song of Death is just so completely, utterly, monstrously monotonous.. Plainly, considered simply as a song to tap your toes to, it basically totally sucks. To those of us with ears to hear, Death sounds a lot like the village idiot, just mindlessly humming the same single, boring, utterly unremarkable note, over and over to Himself, in no particular time signature, forever to eternity. But the great tragedy of Death is that he honestly thinks he can sing real sweetly.  Utilising those far better acoustics that always seem to exist within the walls of our own heads, Death believes he sounds like the mythical siren, luring us out on to the ocean, only to dash ourselves onto the rocks in search of his irresistible music. But the truth is, we just want that fucking humming to stop, and we’re willing to risk a shipwreck to get it over with.

He also thinks that thing he does with his jaws is a smile.

You see: we are still things with skin, and so we haven’t forgotten yet that to smile & smile genuinely involves the involuntary movement of muscles, it also  invokes a certain twinkling in the corner of the eye, with a judicious pinch of pixie dust (this, despite being a completely imaginary ingredient,  is, none-the-less, entirely indispensable for proper operation).

A real smile is something you can’t fake. It mints it’s own certificate of authenticity, emits it’s own hologram,, and any attempt at counterfeit is immediately obvious.  Sadly, a fake is simply tasteless. A fake smile is not worth even the cheap vinyl skin it’s printed on. A fake smile belongs inside the pocket hell dimension of the “merely bad”, that mediocre & boring category of the not-even-kitsch, a generic garbage pile of cheap plastic crap far too dull to be commented on except in the aggregate. “Take this… and bury it.”

Compare and contrast. A real smile has the kind of articulation that requires REAL animation, rather than just animatronics. You cannot describe a smile as a series of steps to be followed. It’s instinctive, not instructive. It is Art without artifice . .   This is not the image of a fire,  but a real actual fire,  that is really here: burning in a cabin, with a real heat in it, that throws up sparks on occasion, it sends soot up the chimney that will definitely blacken your hands if you touch it. This is  kind of fire that you can come right in if you want and sleep next to and you’ll stay nice & warm & toasty… Here, let me open the door for you.  This is not  “"Ceci n'est pas une pipe” but a pipe you can really blow smoke rings out of, It’s a fact, not a facsimile.  

In comparison, the fixed, empty grin of the skeleton isn’t convincing anyone.

It certainly isn’t convincing me.

SO NOT YET. I swear to you I will NOT go down without a knife fight. Oh trust me, I will crochet my counter-argument in a fine stiletto needlepoint: I will pound my reply into your rib-cage like Martin-Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the false church door  

I REFUTE IT THUS:

[twbfics]

Like A Hurricane

Summary: Bucky goes out to a bar and bumps into a familiar face from his days with Hydra.

Pairings: Bucky x Reader (from Bucky’s perspective)

Challenge: Hurricane by Luke Combs, by @yellowtheremarvelfan

Word Count: 5,580

Warnings: Smut, oral (of both kinds), unprotected sex

“We were meant to see this in the theatre,” Steve told Sam as he slipped the Forbidden Territory DVD into the player. Bucky smirked to himself from the kitchen as he poured the popcorn into a bowl. It was something from his past he’d only recently remembered – so of course Steve went out of his way to get hold of a copy of the original movie. The apartment he shared with Steve was small, so Bucky didn’t need his amplified hearing to hear Steve’s retelling of the story. “Except Buck ran into a couple of gals going to see The Gay Divorcee.”

“So you went and saw the Gay Divorcee instead,” Sam said, filling in the gaps.

Bucky returned with the popcorn in hand and sat down on the couch cushions they’d thrown on the floor. “Not quite,” he laughed.

“No, because we only had money for two tickets and Bucky over here offered to buy the girls’ tickets for them.”

“Hold on a minute. You’re telling me you paid for some chicks to see a movie by themselves? Smooth move.” Sam shook his head, hand diving into the popcorn bowl as Forbidden Territory started to play.

“I told them we were gonna get popcorn and meet them in there. Me and Steve used to break into the movies all the time when we were kids. Just slide in through the fire exit, no one noticed.”

“Except they’d gotten wise to it by then. We bust the door open to find a security guard standing right in front of us.”

“He chased us half a mile. Only stopped ‘cause Steve had an asthma attack and the guy felt bad.”

Sam drowned out Steve arguing with Bucky about the ‘real’ reason they stopped getting chased, because he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He paused, popcorn halfway to his mouth. “It’s Natasha,” he interrupted. Suddenly Steve and Bucky were on high alert, movie forgotten. “It’s Clint’s last night before he goes back to the farm. She wants to go out for drinks.”

“All of us?” Bucky asked, his mouth dry.

“Yeah, you too Tin Man.”

Sam showed them the text: Can you drag the dinosaurs out of extinction for one night?

There was a tense moment as Steve and Bucky stared at each other. Forbidden Territory bumbled on forgotten in the background. “Clint’s the one with the bow right?”

“Yeah, he was on our side.”

Fuck. That meant Bucky owed him. He peered over at Sam’s phone, scrambling for an excuse. “Could’ve been a mistake. Maybe she meant dinosaur. Singular.”

“Nat?” Sam laughed. “You think she’s ever made a typing error in her life? Seriously.”

Bucky knew it wasn’t a mistake. Sam was right, Natasha Romanoff didn’t make mistakes. He knew how meticulous she was because he remembered training her back when he was the Winter Soldier.

He’d trained her alongside you. Or more accurately, he’d watched you getting your ass kicked.

As the Winter Soldier he’d stalked the floor, his back always to the cage as he watched you from every angle. You weren’t a trained assassin like Natasha and you hadn’t been pumped full of serum like the Winter Soldiers. Hydra said you had a special gene they’d activated that allowed you to transmit electricity at will to anything you touched.

He only spared a few words for Natasha: No skin contact. Your boots are insulated, use them. But his advice to you went from plentiful, to nothing but a cold disappointment. You couldn’t control your abilities, which made you weak. You were barely more than a civilian.

Natasha kicked you square in the chest and you collapsed, coughing for air.

“Hvatit,” he ordered, (enough), and Natasha backed off, leaning against the bars as she caught her breath. The Winter Soldier stood over you.

“She shocked me a little,” Natasha said, in English for your benefit.

“You didn’t flinch,” he shot back, never taking his eyes off you.

“I’m trained not to.”

“Get up,” he spat, firmly kicking your thigh. You got to your feet, bruised and exhausted, waiting for reprisal as he stared at you with those dead eyes. But he didn’t use words.

He swung for you with his fist but you managed to dodge the blow, more out of luck than skill. But as you readied yourself for the next swing he’d already changed tactics, grabbing your calf and pulling, which sent you falling hard to the stone floor. The force knocked the wind out of you and before you could get your bearings he was on top of you, his metal hand around your throat. You thrashed against him but he was immovable, and stronger than you could ever hope to compete with. It was futile but you grabbed his arm with both hands anyway, trying desperately to pull his hand away. He shifted his stance slightly, his knee digging into your hip and sending a sharp pain shooting through your body. If he wasn’t cutting off your air you would’ve screamed, but thankfully you did something much more useful. You managed to use your power – and with both of your hands on his vibranium arm you gave him a shock so powerful that he screamed and let go of you immediately.

It changed something in him. His eyes weren’t dead anymore, they were wide and confused. Scared. You could almost see him trying to work out what was happening. Where he was, why he was attacking a woman and whose eyes he could feel on him from the edge of the cage. It was the only human thing you’d witnessed since Hydra had brought you here and you reached out and touched his hand. He swallowed and climbed to his feet, backing away from you.

“Go again,” he croaked to Natasha – and if she’d noticed the change in him, she ignored it.

 You’d escaped Hydra two years before Bucky had and found sanctuary in a school full of mutants. Full of people like you. Hydra soon replaced you with a pair of twins, which turned out to be the last tenuous link Bucky had to you.

“Is the kid going?” Bucky asked. Steve knew where his mind had gone.

“Wanda? I don’t know. Her and Clint are pretty close, there’s a good chance she’ll be there.”

“Do you think—”

“Dude, you’re going,” Sam interrupted, already texting Natasha back. “It’s about time you get out of this goddamn apartment. Besides, I need to see these ‘women skills’ in action.”

The bar was fairly quiet, but then again it was Thursday night. It was the perfect reintroduction Bucky needed. The woman behind the bar was as polite to him as she was to the rest of the patrons who flirted with her and it gave him a chance to practise some of his rusty lines.

“Better watch this one,” Sam grinned at the barmaid as he grabbed some of the drinks. “He’s the kind of guy who’ll buy you movie tickets and never show up.”

Bucky laughed and shook his head, thanking the woman as he turned to take the last of the drinks back to their table, but a flash of blue stopped him in his tracks. Beer sloshed onto his boots from the sudden stop and he kicked it dry absentmindedly. A mutant was at his table, laughing with his friends. He hadn’t felt quite as secure since Wanda started hanging out with the mutant crowd – your crowd. He pulled himself together, giving the newcomers a forced smile as he set the drinks down. Steve gave him a knowing look. He knew all about you. You were one of the first people he tracked down on the hunt for Bucky – the only other Hydra escapee this decade. He could tell you knew Bucky from the look on your face and he pressed you about it until Professor Xavier ‘kindly’ asked him to leave. Thankfully, you weren’t with them tonight.

“There’s a lot of mutants, Buck. She doesn’t even live at the school anymore, don’t worry,” Steve smiled, slapping Bucky on the back. Bucky let out a deep sigh and forced another smile. Steve was right though. Just because you were one of them, didn’t mean you knew every mutant.

“You are Bucky?” asked the blue thing with a tail. Bucky’s stomach twisted up as the mutant nodded at his arm. “Y/N told me about your arm. How did you—”

Bucky didn’t hear the rest. He’d stopped listening. Because you walked through the fucking door. He jumped up from his seat and escaped back to the safety of the bar. Steve was beside him in seconds.

“Relax, she’s trying really hard Buck. She’s not a threat.”

“You’ve been in contact with her?” he asked, his voice strained. He didn’t dare look in your direction. Right now, he could at least pretend he hadn’t noticed you.

“We stayed in touch. I know about the kiss.”

The kiss. Either Steve didn’t know everything or he was being polite. During your time at Hydra, you and Bucky had developed a symbiotic relationship. He’d forget about your connection every time he was wiped but you found a reliable way around that. Natasha would kick your ass and eventually the Winter Soldier would become so frustrated with you that he’d attack you himself. Every time he nearly killed you, you learned more about controlling your power. But more importantly, every time you shocked him he got a little piece of his old self back. After every shock, he could remember you. What the two of you were secretly doing for each other. The last time you ever saw him, he had you trapped against the bars, holding you above the ground by your neck. Your legs flailed and the panic helped you produce your biggest shock of all. The problem with that was, you weren’t just touching his arm. Your back was against metal bars and the surge of electricity tripped the security system, forcing the cage doors open.

The lights turned off, replaced with the flashing red emergency lighting a second later. Sirens blared and a voice over the speaker demanded everyone return to their quarters. Natasha obeyed the command, but Bucky didn’t and neither did you.

It was the first time the two of you had been alone and somehow, you both knew it would be the only time. A second of nervousness passed where the two of you just stared at each other, before his hands were on your face and his lips were crashing against yours. Both of you knew there was no chance of escaping. There was just this frantic moment and you both intended to make the most of it. You fumbled with his belt, moaning under your breath as he pressed his tongue into your mouth. Just as he pushed his hand down your trousers, there was a voice from behind him.

“Sergeant Barnes.”

Both of you froze, your hand on his belt buckle and his hidden beneath your waistline. He broke the kiss and let out a shaky sigh, forehead pressed against yours and his eyes shut tight. Wishing he could stretch out just a few extra seconds. But he could hear the sound of footsteps running down the hall so he pulled back, sparing you one last look before he walked away.

“Wipe him and keep them separated. It’s time to move Y/N on to Phase Two.”

That was the last time he ever saw you. Until tonight.

 “I can’t do this Steve.”

Steve stared at him for a second. Bucky kept glancing in your direction but he wasn’t making any move to leave. “Two whiskeys on the rocks,” Steve ordered to the bartender who had been patiently minding her own business. Funnily enough, she’d been standing near the whiskey bottle. She probably recognised the look on Bucky’s face.

Bucky looked at you over Steve’s shoulder. You were talking to the blue mutant, and Bucky saw him mouth his name. Bucky. You looked at the table and then turned, clearly searching for him. Bucky took a fast step back, so Steve was blocking your view of him. Not the best hiding place if you already knew he and Steve were friends, but at least Steve was tall enough to hide behind now. The bartender set the glasses down on the counter and Steve gave her a sweet smile as he handed her a few bucks and told her to keep the change.

“There isn’t any change,” she laughed after counting it.

“I know,” Steve answered, still smiling. When the fuck did Steve get so smooth?

Bucky shook his head and pushed his glass away. “I’m heading back.”

“Clint’s not here yet. Drink. It’ll help you find your nerve.”

“I can’t get drunk. Neither can you,” Bucky reminded him.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t try,” Steve answered, leaning back against the bar and leaving Bucky out in the open. He quickly hunched over the glass, letting his hair fall in front of his face. “I haven’t seen you this worked up over a dame since Edith sent you that Valentine in eighth grade.”

“This isn’t about Y/N.”

Steve leaned in, like he was sharing private intel. “Thing is? It’s all about her.”

“Hi Steve,” came a voice that made Bucky’s shoulders tense. There was a pause and your voice became tighter as you added, “…Bucky.”

He swallowed. There was nowhere left to hide so he just nodded, keeping his head down. “Y/N.”

“You look good,” Steve smiled politely. “Doesn’t she, Buck?”

Bucky could’ve happily knocked him on his ass in that moment. Unfortunately, he settled for closing his fist around his glass, which cracked and shattered under the force and made him look like an idiot. The bartender jumped and Steve made apologies, offering to pay for the glass and cleaning it up. Bucky was ignoring him, partly because he was pissed off with the whole situation but mostly because without the glass as a distraction, he was forced to finally face you.

Steve was right. You looked good. Fuck. His memories of you hadn’t done you justice, because you looked so much healthier now you were free. His vanity made him wonder if he looked healthier to you too, or if he just looked as tired as he felt.

Your eyes moved from the broken glass, to him. “Do you want to sit down?” you asked and he found himself nodding and following you to a table just out of view of the others.

“So… you joined a school,” he said, wishing he still had the distraction of a drink to look at. Staring at the table didn’t quite cut it.

“Yeah. I’m not really a student though, I’ve just been getting help with the professor. He can control minds so he’s been undoing a lot of the damage that... well, we’ve been working through some stuff. We’ve been doing training sessions too.”

“Training,” he nodded. “What kind of training?”

You didn’t know him well enough to recognise the edge in his voice. This was the last place he wanted to be and you were the last person he wanted to be here with. But he was stuck here now and he was bitter. So he’d walk you right into a trap – the only way this conversation had ever been going to go.

“You know, how to control my power. How to use it.”

“Right. So you went from one organization that wants your power straight to another. Smart. You think it’s different because he calls it a school?”

He could hear himself being a dick but he couldn’t stop. You were caught off guard and looked hurt but there was this anger building up inside him that all seemed to be directed at you.

“We’re a family.”

“Is that what he tells you? Family don’t make you fight.”

“He’s not making me do anything!”

“You said his power is controlling minds, right? So how do you know?”

He could see the emotions flashing through your eyes. Disgust. Fury. Could he feel the hairs on the back of his hand stick up with the static in the air or was that just his imagination? He ignored the warning signs, pushing it further. “You can’t answer, can you?”

“I have to go,” you shot back, giving a tight smile that barely contained the explosion building inside you.

And you did. You left him sitting there on his own with a thousand things rushing through his head that he needed to get out. So he jumped up and stormed after you.

“It’s not my fault you left Hydra to join a cult!” he yelled, knowing no one inside would be able to hear him to hold him accountable. You walked faster, which did nothing to stop him gaining on you, yelling over your shoulder, “IT’S NOT A CULT!”

He grabbed you to stop you getting further away but whether it was mistake or habitual instinct, he’d grabbed you with his metal arm. You spun around, gravel crunching beneath your feet as you grabbed his wrist and shocked him. He yelped and let go immediately, stumbling away from you. For a moment he felt lost and confused. Vulnerable. Like a little boy who hadn’t followed orders. But when he glanced up at you, he didn’t see someone looking at him like he was a defective machine, barely worth the time it took to fix. He saw someone who looked ashamed of their own power.

“Are you okay?” you whispered, taking a step towards him. Your brows were all knitted up with concern. He recognised you. His anchor.

And you looked so beautiful.

He wanted to kiss you but this wasn’t some stolen moment in the Red Room. There were no alarms or guards turning this into a ‘now or never’ scenario. There was just the two of you in a quiet parking lot, with the night splayed out before you.

He sighed, as the first few drops of rain started to fall. “How’re you getting home?”

“I’ll call a cab.”

“Let me…” he started, then rephrased it. “Will you let me drive you home?”

You turned your phone over in your hands a couple of times and nodded.

“I’ll grab the keys from Steve. Don’t…”

“I won’t go anywhere,” you grinned, and he gave a half-embarrassed, half-relieved laugh as he took a few steps backwards and then finally headed back into the bar.

The atmosphere inside seemed so much flatter now that he wasn’t worried about you walking in. Maybe it hadn’t been dread as much as it’d been hope. He still didn’t trust himself to make sense of his own feelings, as much as Steve tried to help.

The table was full now. Clint had turned up – probably through the front doors like a respectable person and not the fire exit Bucky had chased you through.

“Hey man,” Clint nodded, patting Bucky on the back. “Heard these two knuckleheads dragged you out with them. Wondered where you were.”

“Hey, watch who you’re calling a knucklehead,” Sam grinned, beer in hand.

“Yeah, about that… Steve, I need to borrow your keys.”

Clint smiled sympathetically and said something about small steps, trying not to make a big deal out of it. Steve looked disappointed though, turning his glass around with his fingertips. “You can’t stay for one more drink?”

“It’s not like that,” Bucky sighed. “I’m taking Y/N home.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Sam interrupted. “You mean to tell me you hooked up with a girl and I didn’t even see it?”

Bucky couldn’t help grinning. Sam’s enthusiasm for everything was infectious, but the way he acted like everything was normal was what Bucky needed the most. Sam was the only one who didn’t look at him like he could fall apart at any minute.

Steve was hesitating. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

Sam tutted and jumped right back in with, “Cap, give him the goddamn keys.”

After another second of hesitation, he finally gave in and tossed Bucky the car keys. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Yeah, no fondue on the first date,” Sam smirked behind his glass.

Bucky said his goodbyes and headed back out to the parking lot, hearing Steve hiss “I wish I’d never told you about that,” to Sam over his shoulder.

His stomach dropped when he stepped outside and realised you weren’t there anymore. Maybe you’d just been humouring him. He couldn’t blame you – he’d done nothing but make your life hell in the Red Room and the first thing he did when he saw you again was yell at you. He leant back against the wall, keys clinking in his hand. The rain had picked up now, providing a static of white noise he couldn’t hear past. He hated that sound.

He briefly considered heading back inside but he’d had enough pitying looks for one night. He’d drive back to his apartment and make up some story in the morning. With any luck, Steve wouldn’t check in on him before he went to sleep.

“Bucky!” His head whipped to the left. You were there, on the far side of the parking lot, standing under a tree. “You gonna unlock the door or do I have to get soaked?”

The relief hit him instantly and a smile spread over his face. He braved the worst of the rain, rushing to the car and unlocking the door. Once he climbed inside and pulled the catch on the passenger’s side, you ran over and hopped in beside him.

“A beetle? Really?” you laughed. He’d never heard you laugh before.

“Yeah, Steve likes it,” he grinned, turning the key in the ignition. It took a couple of attempts before the engine started. You gave him the directions to your place and he drummed his fingers against the wheel nervously. Suddenly all he could think about was whether you’d invite him in or if this really was just a ride home. He’d done a good job of making all school-related talk off the table and since that was pretty much all you’d done since leaving Hydra, the car swelled with silence. It might’ve been comfortable on your end but Bucky was riding on his nerves so he scrambled for something to say.

“What’s the deal with the blue guy?”

“Kurt? He can teleport.”

“Right…” Bucky glanced in the rear-view mirror to make sure Kurt wasn’t hiding in the back seat. “But why’s he blue?”

You fell silent for a moment while you thought about it. “I don’t know. Seemed kind of rude to ask.”

“He recognised me you know. By my arm.”

This time the silence wasn’t a thoughtful one. Eventually he glanced over at you, trying to make sense of your expression. You were watching the rain through the window so it was difficult to tell. Maybe he was just trying to stroke his own ego but you looked… shy?

You cleared your throat before you finally answered. “We started talking when I was working on my training. I’d planned on doing it alone but he was insistent so uh… we said we’d do it together. Park up in that gap, my building’s just over there.”

He parked like you’d asked, frowning to himself. “Do what together?”

You rubbed the back of your neck, still hesitant to answer. Without the hum of the engine, the silence prickled between you. Only the heavy sheet of rain provided a distraction and it wasn’t a very good one. Eventually you mumbled, “Bust you out.”

“Wait, what?”

“You want a drink?” you asked, not bothering to wait for a reply as you quickly escaped from the car and ran up the steps to your apartment block, leaving Bucky in the car. He quickly followed your lead, locking the car before he jogged up beside you.

“What do you mean, ‘bust me out’?”

You managed to delay the inevitable all the way up to your apartment door, when Bucky finally took hold of your arm to stop you reaching for your keys.

“I was training,” you sighed. “So I could get stronger. Kurt was going to help me infiltrate Hydra so I could get you out. The professor knew about it. But just when I was starting to feel like I might be ready, Steve found me. Said you were on the run.”

“So… you were gonna come back for me?”

“Course I was. You think I was just gonna leave you in there and forget about you? You would’ve done the same for me.”

You were so certain about him in ways he couldn’t be. You’d seen something in him in the brief moments of clarity you’d afforded him back then and it felt too good to be true. But at least now he knew it wasn’t just in his head. You felt the connection as well.

He loosened the hand around your arm, running it up to your shoulder and then to your neck. His thumb traced your jawline, but before he could figure out whether kissing you would be crossing a line, you grabbed his shirt and pulled him into you.

He’d forgotten how good it felt to kiss a woman. Your lips were so soft that his own mouth sunk against them like pillows. He pressed you up against the door, trying to gain your full attention as you scrambled for your keys in your purse. It worked for a few seconds but as the kiss became more intense, both of you needing to catch your breath, it became obvious you really wanted to get inside and blindly routing around for the keys with one hand wasn’t cutting it.

“I can’t find my fucking—”

You didn’t need to finish the sentence, because Bucky slammed his hand hard against the door, right beside your head, and broke the lock. Then his lips were back on yours, one hand around your waist as he walked you backwards into your apartment.

“You better fucking fix that before you leave,” you laughed, as he kicked the door semi-shut behind him.

“I will, I swear.”

You didn’t turn the lights on but he wasn’t complaining, he didn’t want to be separated from you for a second. He was happy to let you lead him to your bedroom in the dark.

His hands found the edge of your shirt and dipped beneath it, and you raised your arms so he could pull it over your head. Thunder rolled outside as you unclasped your bra and dropped it to the floor. Bucky didn’t even take the time to look but he definitely took the time to feel. His mouth was back on yours as he cupped your breasts, feeling the weight of them and squeezing. They were nice – real nice – but he wanted something else.

“Can I taste you?” he whispered, hands moving from your breasts to your thighs. “I really wanna taste you.”

He took the breathy moan you gave as a yes. Lightening flashed and illuminated you for a brief second, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling your jeans off. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable it was to have his cock straining against his trousers – not that he was complaining.

He got to his knees and pulled his own rain-streaked shirt over his head, tossing it aside with your bra. “You got anything? Protection?” he asked. You shook your head. “Shit… alright.”

“Can you pull out?”

“Uh… yeah. I can do that. Lie back.”

You did as he asked, lying with your legs draped over the end of the bed. Without your eyes on him, he could take the time to properly admire you as he unbuckled his belt and kicked his trousers off along with his boots.

Rain battered against the window as he put a hand on each of your knees and spread your legs wide. He didn’t waste time with foreplay, with slowly kissing or licking up to what he wanted. Instead, the first thing you felt was his stubble right at the top of your thigh and his hot breath against your clit. He took a slow, deep breath and groaned, edging closer, lips against your soft, plush skin. Your toes were already curling by the time he spread your folds open with his thumb and gave one, firm swipe with his tongue from your opening all the way up to your clit.

“God you taste good, Y/N.”

Then he went to work. Ten minutes felt like an hour with the torment he gave you, his tongue dipping inside you, sucking and pulling your clit into his mouth, keeping you trapped there and swollen with the suction as he lapped at you. Every time you got close, he pulled back just enough to drag it out longer. He started to use his fingers, leaving you without his tongue in favour of watching you stretch to accommodate him. He slowly thrust into you, getting a little deeper each time. Once he was in up to his knuckle, he pulled out and stretched you wider with a second finger, starting the whole process again.

He had to wrap an arm around your hips to hold you down, not that he wasn’t having immense fun watching you squirming around, pulling at the sheets and cursing him to let you finish. It wasn’t until your angry cries of “Bucky just stop fucking stopping!!” mellowed out into soft pleas and ragged breaths that he pulled his fingers out of you, wrapping them around his cock and stroking himself, smearing your wetness along his length as he gave you what you wanted.

He pressed his face into you, furiously lapping at your clit and using his free hand to pull you against him and keep you trapped there. He was moaning into you, rock hard now as you got louder and louder. Finally, when your thighs closed around his head and trembled, and your orgasm made you curl in on yourself, he forced your legs apart and pushed his cock inside you to feel you coming for himself.

Your eyes flew wide and you both groaned in unison as he fucked you through it, pulling another orgasm from you before the first had even finished. You wrapped your arms around his neck and he had the good manners to wipe the taste of you from his face before you kissed him. Most of it anyway. It didn’t seem to bother you as you pushed your tongue inside him and he happily kissed you back. It would’ve been a lie to say that he hadn’t imagined what would’ve happened that day in the Red Room if you hadn’t been interrupted, when he was on his own at night and couldn’t sleep. You were the only sweet memory in the horror of that place.

But being tangled up in you like this, your fingers digging into his hips and your legs twisted around his to help pull him deeper, was better than anything his sex-starved mind had conjured up. But it was hearing you call him ‘Bucky’ while you asked for it harder that almost pushed him over the edge.

“Oh shit I’m—”

He quickly pulled out of you, his hand taking over where you couldn’t while he cupped himself with the other, ready to protect you from being splashed. Or so he thought. What he hadn’t counted on was you quickly sliding down the bed, pushing his hand away and taking him into your mouth.

“What are you… oh fuck…” He pressed his lips together tight as you took over, your tongue flicking against his head. He gently tucked his fingers into your wet hair, struggling between not wanting to tear his eyes away, and not wanting to come right then.

“I can’t hold it…”

He pulled back a little to give you room to escape but your mouth followed him, bobbing faster against his cock as you worked him with your hand. That was all the permission he needed. He kept his eyes fixed on you for as long as he could, watching you take him in that beautiful mouth. He only had seconds before you pushed him over the edge and he had to bunch the sheets in his fists to keep him from groaning loud enough to disturb your neighbours. He felt your mouth tightening as you swallowed around him, looking up at him with those wide, sex-glazed eyes. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

When you’d finished you took his hand, leading him further onto the bed and lying against the pillows. He collapsed beside you, looking like he’d just discovered the meaning of life. It took him a moment to realise you were gazing at him and trying not to laugh.

“Sorry… that was uh…” he mumbled, trying to catch the words inside his head. “It was… yeah. Wow.”

You leaned over at pecked him on the lips, grinning at him. “You want some cocoa? I want some cocoa.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah cocoa sounds good.”

His eyes followed you as you kissed him again and got up to walk to the kitchen naked. He heard you calling from the next room, “And you need to fix my lock!”

He grinned widely, rolling onto his front and burying his head into your pillow to hide his goofy smile. He hadn’t felt this happy in a long time.

[minky-for-short]

No Longer A Memory

Thank you to @my-dearesteliza for being my beta and suffering through the sad with me :,) <3

Also on AO3 here

<i>1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - Paces! Fire!</i>

Alexander closes his eyes, anticipating to feel the blind hot pain of the bullet go right through him. He supposes that he shouldn’t have been too surprised that Burr actually had it in him to fire the gun, but he held onto the hope that he wouldn’t have. Burr has always thought out every action carefully, never acting until he’s weighed out every possible pro and con. It wouldn’t have done him any possible good to fire at him, so Alexander had entered this duel with a calm mind, never fearing for his life for a moment. Until the moment he heard that gunshot, anyways.

He keeps his eyes tight shut, still lifting his arm to point his pistol up into the sky, waiting anxiously for the moment for Death to claim him.

So he waited.

And waited.

...and yet..

Alexander cautiously opens an eye, peeking up to find the bullet, to his immense confusion and shock, suspending harmlessly in midair. His eyes open fully as he intently takes in the scene in front of him: the paused bullet, how the sparks in the gun gripped tightly in Burr’s hand have yet fully disappeared, how everything seemed to have just...stopped. Including the four men scattered across the field. Nathaniel, William, and the doctor all wore the same looks of horrific realization, all of them having appeared to begin springing into motion before they were frozen in place. He then looks ahead to Burr, standing seven feet away from them, wearing a look of blind fury that was plainly directed towards him.

It was looking at Burr, that Alexander finally realizes he still has his mobility as he slowly lowers his arm back down. He takes a cautious step forward, right towards the bullet. He looks at it with a sick sense of curiosity, realizing that the bullet would have hit him right between his ribs had time not stopped.

A warm glow of hope begins to flood him..was..was he being given another chance?

Was this an opportunity for him to escape his fate?

“I’m afraid it’s not..”

Alexander turns around sharply, lifting his gun towards the new voice, only to pause when he realizes the source of the new voice. His eyes stay transfixed on the figure in front of him, a figure that he had sworn, up to this moment, was merely a bad memory. To anyone else, the being in front of him would be considered a normal woman, but he knew better. He lowers his gun slowly as she approaches him, almost as though she’s floating. Before, she had always looked like a ghost, a shape that would appear in the corner of his eye, only ever catching a full look of her in the truly bleakest of circumstances. Such as the deaths of those he had held dearest to his heart. Now, however, she was as opaque and present as the grass underneath his feet, and he could fully take in her image. She was beautiful, he couldn’t deny that, with dark skin, short black curly hair that was gathered at the top of her head, and a simple black dress that seemed to flow in the wind as aimlessly as she did. What caught him the most off guard about her were her eyes, how soft and caring they looked, how they seemed to carry an apology in them.

Looking at her as she is now, had he not known better, Alex would have never expected her to be the angel of death that had been a shadow through his entire life.

Alex’s pistol now hung limply by his side as he eyes her suspiciously, keeping his guard up for every moment she drew closer to him. He takes a instinctive step back, “You’re real.” There’s no question, no wonderment, just a truth that he’s always known.

Death nods, a small smile gracing her face, “I’m afraid so..” it was strange, she seems almost human. Nothing like the distant, unattached creature he’d always expected her to be. Her gaze moves past Alexander, and she was now looking over to where Burr stood with a vaguely surprised expression. “I won’t lie, I didn’t expect him to actually go ahead and fire at you.”

Alexander closes his eyes, taking a shuddering breath, “So this <i>is</i> the reason you’re here, I’m not leaving this field alive.” he mutters, his shoulder slumping as the truth begins to dawn on him. He doesn’t see Death lower her eyes, almost sorry that this moment had finally come.

“Well,” Death starts, “that’s not exactly true,” Alex turns to look at her, a subtle surprise on his face, “I won’t be collecting you right away. I’m just here to, well,” she turns to face him in turn, their eyes meeting for the first time in forty seven years, “prepare you for the inevitable.” They’re standing face to face now, their clothes blowing in a silent breeze. Death and the man who was cursed to see her.

For one of the few times in his life, Alexander feels speechless. He digs through his mind, thinking of anything to say to the being before him, searching for all of the questions that had been buried for as long as he could remember.

Only one came forth. “You have stopped time for others?”

Death seems as surprised by his question as he did. Still, she decides there’s no harm in answering one that had a straightforward answer. “Some, not all,” she shrugs, “there are those whose end comes quickly, and I just arrive to guide them to the other side, like I did for your friend.” Alexander’s memory flashes to more than twenty years ago, when he received that letter, informing him of his dear Laurens’s untimely death. He had always wondered whether or not John had seen the entity that was in front of him now, if he had felt her presence even before those bullets had run him through.

“And others..” Alex whispers, his steady voice contradicting the shaky grip on his pistol, “Like my mother? And my-” he takes a deep breath, “-my son?”

Death regards him sympathetically, though there’s no sorrow in her voice, “I know what you must think of me, Alexander,” his eyes widen at her casual use of his name, “but I am not a monster who derives pleasure from taking your loved ones away from you. I was just doing my job, but yes, I did stop time for them,” she lifts a hand, slowly and debatingly, before placing it back down to her side, “to assure them that you would be fine, that Elizabeth,” Alexander feels his heart clench tightly, “would be fine.”

For the first time since time had frozen,  Alexander could feel himself becoming angry, “Fine..you told them I’d be ‘fine’..” his voice is low, shaky with a fury that he hasn’t felt in a long time. “I was <i>not</i> fine!” His head jerks up, his eyes alive and wet with tears as he stomps forward until he is face to face with her. “Because of <i>you</i> I had to wake up next to my mother’s corpse, alone and horrified, for hours until the doctors came to take her body away! And maybe I could have begun to heal, to move on from what had happened, if you hadn’t decided to take me cousin away from me next,” Once Alex started, he couldn’t bring himself to stop, ”but that wasn’t enough for you, was it? I can’t count how many times I have caught flashes of you during that goddamn hurricane, and don’t even get me <i>started</i> on the war! Then you took John away from me and then, for years, I thought you were done, I thought you were <i>finally</i> going to grant me peace until it was my time to be collected by you...but no..you-you had to take my son-my <i>son</i>-away from me. You had to make me watch as you approached his sickbed, take him away right in front of me..in front of his mother..and I don’t think I ever hated you more than I did in that moment. I wanted to scream, and curse at you, demand that you stay away from him, even though I would’ve looked like a mad man in front of my wife..but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to hurt her anymore than I already had.”

Once Alexander finishes, his shoulders are shaking with tremors as he huffs deeply, his face red as tears began streaking his cheeks. He realizes quickly that he had just unloaded years of confusion, anger and grief on Death herself. He steels himself for her reaction, but all that is on her face is patience and a quiet understanding. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised; he certainly isn’t the first person to rage against Death, and there’s no way he’s going to be the last.

What she does next does surprise him a little bit. She gently lifts her hand to his shoulder, the tremors there easing almost immediately. “How do you feel now?” she asks, her voice as calm and clear as it was before.

“Honestly,” he murmurs, his racing heart now steadying to a soft thumping, “like this heavy weight has been lifted from my shoulders.” He backs away from her slightly, but to his own surprise, does not shake her hand from his shoulder.

The two stand in silence for a few moments, the frantic anger Alexander had carried only minutes ago was now almost completely dissipated. Death strokes his shoulder comfortingly, almost motherly, “You still have much on your mind..” she states, tilting her head almost curiously at him. Alexander almost smiles, completely exhausted from his venting as he looks back up at her, nodding slightly, “Now is the time to share, if you wish to.”

“There’s just..so much that I haven’t done yet,” he says with a shrug, his eyes drifting back to where the bullet hanged for a brief moment, “So many mistakes I have yet to fully atone for.” His mind wanders right towards his family; his sons and daughters, his wife...his wonderful, beautiful Betsey. “I feel as though I have spent the earlier years of my life waiting for you, almost anticipating the day where you’d come and take me away, but now...now I’m just..I’m not ready, I can’t..I can’t just leave my family behind like this.”

Death lets out a soft sigh, “No one is ever ready to say goodbye to their loved ones, some aren’t even given the chance,” she lifts her hand from his shoulder to his chin, gently urging him to look at her, “but you will be. You will leave this field alive, you will have the chance to say goodbye to your family, I can at least grant you that.” Alexander’s eyes widen softly, his eyes glistening with new, unshed tears. He nods; it’s the only thanks he can give without succumbing to his tears.

Death looks back towards the open field, where Burr and the bullet waited for Alexander. She lets out a deep breath; despite how unattached she had to be, she sometimes wishes that she could keep time frozen for them forever. “It’s time.” She breathes, slowly backing away from Alexander. He takes deep steadying breaths before raising his head high, walking back to his original position on the field. Soon enough, he’s back where he was at the beginning: seven feet in front of Burr, and the bullet coming right towards him. He looks back to Death, wearing an almost childlike plea on his face, one she understands instantly, “I will stay with you until the end.”

Alexander doesn’t say anything to her, just turns back to face Burr, taking one more deep breath as he begins to lift his pistol to the sky.

“Raise a glass to freedom..”

As time speeds back up, it takes mere moments for the bullet to hit him. Though in that brief window, Alexander swears, for just a moment, Burr’s eyes looked passed his and widened in fear at an entity invisible to all but him..

***

It was surreal, looking down at one’s own body. Alexander wishes that he could reach out to his wife, who was ,now curled around his body, silent tears streaming down his face as she hugged him close and tight, almost afraid to let go. He wants to assure her that he is still here, but all that happens as he tries to touch her trembling shoulders is that his hand disappears right through her. He sighs, sadly taking in the sight of his newly widowed wife, his sister-in-law in the hallway, swallowing back her own tears as she tries to comfort his children, and he feels the painful stab of guilt for leaving them behind so suddenly.

“I’m afraid it’s a little late for regrets,” Death says apologetically, approaching Alexander’s side with her usual quiet grace.

He lets out a small huff, “I know that,” he mutters sadly, his eyes never leaving his wife, “but it’s still painful..” Death’s eyes soften as she rests a hand on his arm, a small comfort. She joins him in looking down at Eliza. “How long..” Death raises an eyebrow in slight confusion, “How long am I going to be parted from them?”

Death lowers her eyes in thought, “I cannot give you an exact answer, for even I rarely know when I’m supposed to be collecting another life. However, I can tell you that they will all live long lives, if that means anything..” Alex gives a soft nod of understanding, seemingly pleased with the answer. “In the meantime, you do have others who are looking forward to your arrival,” she offers him a smile, “and I should be taking you to meet them right about now.”

Alexander’s eyes stay on Eliza for as long as he’s able before he finally turns away, allowing Death to do her duty and guide him to the afterlife. However, even as they begin their journey, Alexander can’t resist one last look back.

“My love, take your time...I’ll see you on the other side.”

[trahylta]

1 The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem: 2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” 3 What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? 4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. 7 All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. 8 All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. 9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 11 No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. 18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

Ecclesiastes 1 (I'll never forget when I was in the hospital and Pasquale, a man old enough to be my grandpa, came to me while I was crying in the tv room late at night and read me this verse. He said his children, who had all died in hurricane Katrina, came to him in his dream and told him he needed to read this to me specifically so I could understand "God's plan". He said god then woke him up, and even though he was on curfew, he left his room and immediately started searching for me. When he found me, he said nothing, didn't even acknowledge my wailing crying, he just started reading. When he got to the last part, he repeated it several times, then told me his children came to him in a dream, and said god wanted me to know that I am exactly the way he meant to make me, and that I was only so depressed and anxious because I'm so "book smart and aware" and that god had a very specific purpose for me being this way and finding out so many bad things so young. I don't believe in the Christian god, but I never mentioned it. And to this day, these verses and this experience still brings me more comfort in bad times than any modern medicine or therapy or coping mechanism has ever done for me. I'm aware I was in a mental hospital and it could've just been the ramblings of a severely mentally ill person but that doesn't change a goddamn thing to me)