#steve wanted to use his powers to take out nazis; logan did not want to use his powers to be stryker's mutant-killing weapon

[meidui]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011) X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (2009)

[need-a-fugue]

We Grow Together (25)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Tessa Sullivan (OFC)

Chapter Summary: It’s just coffee with an old colleague... nothing to worry about...

Summary: Relationships can be tough, especially when one person is a recovering-from-being-brainwashed-and-tortured former assassin and the other is an overworked mutant scientist. But hey, every couple has their struggles. Right?

“Stop sulking,” she tells him, not even looking up from her computer screen.

“I’m not sulking.”

“James,” she chides, glancing up and seeing him leaning in the doorway of her office, arms tightly folded over his chest.

“I’m not sulking,” he repeats, unfolding his arms and striding in to take a seat on the old sofa in the corner.

“Fine.” She pushes away from her desk, flips her glasses up on top of her head, and leans back in her seat. “Then you’re brooding.” He shoots her an irritated glare. “Just say it. You’ll feel better if you do.”

“I’d feel better if you’d stay out of this.”

“What happened to thinking that me going on missions was hot?” she asks, rising and crossing the room to shut the door. She turns back to him and leans up against the closed door, wiggles her eyebrows playfully before saying, “With great power comes great sensuality.”

He shakes his head. “That’s not what this is. You can’t even use your powers out there.”

“I know,” she says quietly, moving to stand in front of him.

He looks up at her with tired, conflicted eyes. “If you do… if this guy finds out you’re a mutant…”

“I know,” she repeats, dropping her hands to his shoulders and giving him a small, playful shake. The corners of his mouth quirk up just a bit and he brings his hands to her hips. “Have I ever told you, you worry too much?” she teases, before lowering herself down to straddle his lap.

“No. Never,” he replies with a frown.

“I’m just having coffee with an old colleague,” she says, wrapping her arms around his neck and letting her fingers play in his hair. “There’s no need to worry.”

“Undercover operations are the hardest to monitor and the easiest to lose control of,” he tells her with authority as each of his thumbs begin to rub circles into her hips. Her knees squeeze his thighs a little tighter as she sidles further into him, and he finds himself fighting to maintain focus and not get lost in the warmth of her body or the scent of her honeysuckle shampoo. “This could be really dangerous. You can’t lose sight of that.”

“We’re meeting in a public place, an outdoor café,” she tries, her fingers moving to sweep some errant strands of hair back behind his ears.

“Which means anyone can see you. And I could lose sight of you in a second.”

“But you’re not the only who’ll be there.”

“I just don’t like it,” he says, the frown returning to his face as his gaze drops.

“Well, I don’t like that people are – or were – experimenting on mutants,” she says, suddenly stiffening next to him. “And honestly, this is something that I should be involved with. This is something that, like it or not, already involves me… and my family. You’re the one who pointed that out.”

“It’s not your job,” he says plainly.

She scoffs loudly. “I have a suit. That basically makes me a part-time Avenger. And besides… how would you feel if Steve kept you from anything Hydra related?”

His brow furrows deeply as he looks back up at her. “I don’t know. But it isn’t the same. Not really.”

“Babe,” she groans, leaning back a bit and staring down at him with a serious look. “I went to live at Xavier’s when I was 6 years old. I started training with the X-Men at 16. My first real mentor was a brilliant physician who was covered in bright blue fur.” She smiles when he raises a single, suspicious eyebrow. “I know it doesn’t seem like I… identify as a mutant. And maybe I don’t always. Because it’s hard. And scary. And… it can be easy to lose sight of who you really are when you spend so long in hiding.”

His face softens as he takes in her words. If there’s one thing that they truly have in common, it’s this. Both of them have been so many people over the years. Both of them have spent too much time hiding who they are from others… and from themselves. He reaches up and pets back her hair, running his thumb along her forehead. “You never talk about it,” he says softly. “You never talk about your time there, with them.”

She drops her gaze, her cheeks suddenly taking on a bright red blush. “Yeah. Well… it’s sort of complicated. But…” She looks back up and into his eyes. “I am a mutant. And that means more than just having the X-gene in my sequence. To me, that means more. I spent years immersed in the… culture. We have a different history from other humans. We’ve been abandoned, denied, demonized. You think this Hydra facility was the only place experimenting on us? I personally went on at least four missions to rescue mutants – people – who were held for testing or… training. I grew up learning about the secret missions of Nazis to root us out, activate us, tear us apart to see what makes us tick. I spent more nights than I can count listening to Logan’s stories about the Weapon X program, about the torture they put him through to turn him into the ultimate killing machine.”

He cocks his head and narrows his eyes at her. “Weapon X,” he repeats. “Why does that sound so familiar?”

She merely shrugs. “I heard rumors that SHIELD took it over in the 90s… maybe Hydra was involved with that too.” She lets out a long sigh and drops her forehead to his. “But see? That’s the thing. If we weren’t hated, we were ignored, forgotten. There are millions of us on this planet, but most people would say they’ve never met a mutant, maybe never even heard of them.” Pulling back a bit, she locks eyes with him. “No one ever cared enough to save us. No one ever cared enough to even see that we needed saving.”

“I care,” he tells her, cupping his hand over the back of her head.

She smiles a small, sad smile. “If I wasn’t here, if you and Steve and the other Avengers didn’t know me… I don’t know that any of you would care enough to look into this.”

“That’s not true,” he says, hurt breaking through his voice.

“History shows otherwise.” She places her hands on his shoulders and pushes back off of him. “Anyway, all of this is to say… I know what I’m getting into here. Probably better than the rest of you.”

He grabs her waist when she tries to shimmy off his lap, and he pulls her back down. “I just want you to be careful,” he tells her as he wraps his arms around her. She melts into him, resting her head on his chest. “You’re not trained for this… or if you were, well, you’re way out of practice.”

She lets out a small laugh before mumbling softly, “I’m not worried. I know who has my back.”

000

“I never did like this guy,” Clint utters through the coms as he watches Dr. Aaron Scofield dodge traffic on his way to the café down the block.

Tessa sits idly at a table on the patio, lined up perfectly to be in his view as well as Bucky’s from the other side of the quiet main street. “You never met him,” she says softly, masking the movement of her lips with a coffee cup.

“You really think I didn’t know everything about the scientists stationed in Minsk. I know why Genetech hired him.” He continues to peer through the Stark-manufactured sight device, snickering slightly when he sees the doctor stumble as he steps off a curb. “Klutz,” he snorts.

“Whatever.” Through the sight on his rifle, Bucky can actually make out Tessa’s dramatic eye roll. “I worked with him every day for almost a year,” she goes on. “And I can honestly tell you that he doesn’t have enough personality to be either liked or disliked.”

“Can you two relive the past some other time,” Natasha mutters. She sits just a few tables away, but Tessa can only hear her voice through the coms and even when looking directly at her, she can’t tell at all that the woman is speaking. Damn, she’s good. “He’s on your left,” she says simply.

“Dr. Sullivan?” the man asks as he approaches. He extends his hand and offers a meek smile, one almost hidden by his graying mustache. “It’s been a spell.”

She rises and accepts his handshake. “It has been, Dr. Scofield. Thank you for meeting me.” She drops back into her chair and waves her hand at the seat across from her… the seat where Bucky expressly told her to get him to sit so that he wouldn’t be blocked by any other patrons.

Instead, he chooses the seat right next to her, plopping down and folding in on himself, resting his elbows on his knees. “I was surprised to hear from you,” he says, his voice holding more enthusiasm than she’s ever heard from the man. “Though perhaps I shouldn’t be. I have heard stories about working for Stark Industries. I came up with a few gentlemen who worked for Howard Stark back in the day.” He leans back in his chair then, smug look taking over his face. “They left when the boy prodigy took over and started running the place into the ground.”

“Are we recording this?” Clint asks. “I want to play this back for Tony later.”

Tessa raises her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Well, I guess he’s grown up some since then. Business is booming.”

“Tess,” Steve’s voice filters to her through the earpiece. “You’re not happy with your job, remember?”

“Pure luck, I imagine,” Dr. Scofield replies to her. “But if things are going so well…”

“Right,” she corrects with an awkward laugh. “No… well… I mean, business is great. I can’t complain about that. I just… I’m not getting to do the research that I want.” She shifts to the edge of her seat and crosses her legs toward him, leans forward to close off some of the distance between them. “I was thinking…” She smiles lightly, slowly swinging her hanging foot back and forth in an almost hypnotizing way. “The work we did together on the M-gene… attempting to clone it and activate it within certain tissues to spark cellular regeneration and growth… that’s the sort of thing I want to work on. That’s the type of work that could actually make a difference for people.”

“I’ll bet Tony Stark has you doing things like developing technology for cell resiliency that inhibits hangovers,” he says with a smirk.

She chuckles lightly, laying her palm on his knee. “That would be something he could sell,” she says with a crooked smile.

“You might wanna cool it on the flirting, doll,” Bucky mutters. “He’s starting to look a little spooked.”

“Poor guy’s probably only talked to three women his entire life,” Clint mocks. “And one was his mom.”

“I think she’s got this, guys,” Natasha says blankly.

“Well,” Scofield says, blushing as he pushes his giant glasses back up his nose. “Perhaps I should suggest it to him then. I wouldn’t mind making a small fortune.”

Tessa leans back in her chair, still letting her hanging foot draw lazy patterns in the air just inches from his shin. “I was hoping you might know of something,” she says, drawing out the final word.

“Work on the M-gene? No, nothing much has been done with it since Genetech went under. They held so many patents – ”

“What about the X-gene?” she asks expectantly. “I feel like I’ve been out of that world for so long now, that I don’t even know what people are up to these days.”

He straightens up and gives her a suspicious look. “Research on the X-gene is highly regulated,” he says stiffly.

“Yes, Dr. Scofield, I am aware of that. The M-gene, as well. It’s why we had to be carted of to Minsk to study it.”

“Yes, but… X-factor research is… less theoretical. It makes people nervous.”

“Not me,” she intones, holding eye contact with the man as she runs her tongue lightly over her bottom lip.

“Laying it on a little thick, there Doc?” Clint chuckles into the coms.

“Look,” she says, leaning forward once again and changing her tone to a more conspiratorial one. “I’m going to level with you.” The man nods once. “I shouldn’t know this… but I came across some information. I’ve been doing some work with the Avengers recently – ”

“What the hell,” Bucky hisses from his perch on a rooftop blocks away. “What are you doing?!”

She cringes at the near-shout in her ear, but goes on. “They came across some information, from several years ago, that ties you to some… studies.”

“Tessa,” Steve warns.

“Let her go,” Clint says, his voice suddenly serious. “She might have him.”

“They can’t…” Scofield sputters. “There’s nothing…”

She waves her hands in a calm down gesture. “No, no… they’re not doing anything about it. The experiments are all decades old. I just thought… even if you weren’t doing anything in this… field anymore, that you might know someone who is.”

His eyes go wide for a long moment as he moves from panic to curiosity to an odd sort of calm. “If that is what I think it is, then those studies were long ago abandoned.”

“Oh,” she says disappointedly.

“But…” He smiles wide and leans forward. “If you actually are interested… really interested, then I do have a fellow I could introduce you to.”

A genuine smile spreads across her face as she nods excitedly. “I assure you, Dr. Scofield, I am very interested.”

[strike-back-now-info]

I commend whomever wrote this.

To all the people who let this election break up families and friends let this sink in I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.

And you lost your freaking minds.

I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.

The weirdness started on social media late on Election Night, as it became clear Hillary was going to lose. A few of you actually admitted that you were cradling your sleeping children, weeping, wondering what to tell your kindergartner the next morning about Trump’s victory. It continued over the next several days. Some of you seriously expressed fear about modern-day concentration camps. Despite living a privileged lifestyle, you were suddenly a casualty of the white patriarchy. Your daughters were future victims; your sons were predators-in-waiting. You threatened to leave Facebook because you could no longer enjoy the family photos or vacation posts from people who, once friends, became Literal Hitlers to you on November 8 because they voted for Donald Trump.

I admit I was a little hurt at first. The attacks against us Trump voters were so personal and so vicious that I did not think it could be sustained. I thought maybe you would regain your sanity after some turkey and egg nog.

But you did not. You got worse. And I went from sad to angry to where I am today: Amused.

As the whole charade you have been suckered into over the last 18 months starts to fall apart—that Trump would not survive his presidency; he would be betrayed by his own staff, family, and/or political party; he would destroy the Republican Party; he would be declared mentally ill and removed from office; he would be handcuffed and dragged out of the White House by Robert Mueller for “colluding” with Russia—let me remind you what complete fools you have made of yourselves. Not to mention how you’ve been fooled by the media, the Democratic Party, and your new heroes on the NeverTrump Right.

On November 9, you awoke from a self-induced, eight-year-long political coma to find that White House press secretaries shade the truth and top presidential advisors run political cover for their boss. You were shocked to discover that presidents exaggerate, even lie, on occasion. You became interested for the first time about the travel accommodations, office expenses, and lobbyist pals of administration officials. You started counting how many rounds of golf the president played. You suddenly thought it was fine to mock the first lady now that she wasn’t Michelle Obama. Once you removed your pussy hat after attending the Women’s March, you made fun of Kellyanne Conway’s hair, Sarah Sanders’ weight, Melania Trump’s shoes, Hope Hicks’ death stare; you helped fuel a rumor started by a bottom-feeding author that U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley slept with Donald Trump. You thought it was A-OK that Betsy DeVos was nearly physically assaulted and routinely heckled. You glorified a woman who has sex on camera for a paycheck.

You have learned all kinds of new things that those of us who didn’t willfully ignore politics for the past eight years already knew. For example, we already knew that illegal immigrants were being deported and families were being separated.

Some of your behavior has been kinda cute. It was endearing to watch you become experts on the Logan Act, the Hatch Act, the Second Amendment, the 25th Amendment, and the Emoluments Clause. You developed a new crush on Mitt Romney after calling him a “sexist” for having “binders full of women.” You longed for a redux of the presidency of George W. Bush, a man you once wanted imprisoned for war crimes. Ditto for John McCain. You embraced people like Bill Kristol and David Frum without knowing anything about their histories of shotgunning the Iraq War.

Classified emails shared by Hillary Clinton? Who cares! Devin Nunes wanting to declassify crucial information of the public interest? Traitor!

But your newfound admiration and fealty to law enforcement really has been a fascinating transformation. Wasn’t it just last fall that I saw you loudly supporting professional athletes who were protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem? Remember how you fanboyed a mediocre quarterback for wearing socks that depicted cops as pigs?

But now you sound like paid spokesmen for the Fraternal Order of Police. You insist that any legitimate criticism of the misconduct and possibile criminality that occured at the Justice Department and FBI is an “attack on law enforcement.” While you once opposed the Patriot Act because it might have allowed the federal government to spy on terrorists who were using the local library to learn how to make suitcase bombs, you now fully support the unchecked power of a secret court to look into the phone calls, text messages and emails of an American citizen because he volunteered for the Trump campaign for a few months.

Spying on terrorists, circa 2002: Bad. Spying on Carter Page, circa 2017: The highest form of patriotism.

And that white, male patriarchy that you were convinced would strip away basic rights and silence any opposition after Trump won? That fear has apparently been washed away as you hang on every word uttered by James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper. This triumvirate is exhibit “A” of the old-boy network, and represents how the insularity, arrogance, and cover-your-tracks mentality of the white-male power structure still prevails. Yet, instead of rising up against it, you are buying their books, retweeting their Twitter rants and blasting anyone who dares to question their testicular authority. Your pussy hat must be very sad.

But your daily meltdowns about Trump-Russia election collusion have been the most entertaining to observe. After Robert Mueller was appointed as Special Counsel, you were absolutely convinced it would result in Trump’s arrest and/or impeachment. Some of you insisted that Trump wouldn’t last beyond 2017. You quickly swallowed any chum tossed at you by the Trump-hating media on CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post about who was going down next, or who would flip on the president.

For the past few years, I have watched you obsess over a rotating cast of characters: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Carter Page, Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sam Nunberg, and Hope Hicks are just a few of the people you thought would turn on Trump or hasten his political demise. But when those fantasies didn’t come true, you turned to Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels for hope and inspiration. It will always be your low point.

Well, I think it will be. Each time I believe you’ve hit bottom, you come up with a new baseline. Perhaps defending the unprecedented use of federal power to spy on political foes then lie about it will be the next nail in your credibility coffin.

The next several weeks will be tough for you. I think Americans will learn some very hard truths about what happened in the previous administration and how we purposely have been misled by powerful leaders and the news media. I wish I could see you as a victim here, but you are not. I know you are smart; you chose to support this insurgency with your eyes wide open.

Trump 2020 Please copy and pass this on