#when you phrase it like that it makes me think kamala would be upset or horrified that he did that

[akbarasghar]

lackspraise replied to your post: Do you all like this brand new icon I just...

and like, its clear that people still died in exchange , , so that’s a concern. and hugely sad. but knowing why miles made the deal is so agonizing bc wow he just wants his friends to not be dead fellas

Honestly I am so here to explore this aspect of him. I have always loved Miles and how dynamic of a character he is. He just wanted his friend alive and he made a choice ;;

[apparitionism]

Monday

I wrote the following brief scenes a while ago as part of a potential story that refused to coalesce. It may yet, someday, but for now this is merely a scrap of unfruited AU narrative; I’m posting only to prove to myself that I’m not completely incapable of doing writing-related things, even if it’s just tidying up generic, trope-y bits of dialogue. I intended Christina, about age seven, to be an important story lever in this, with this Myka and this single-mom Helena as coworkers of some sort (I was thinking insurance, possibly, because risk management has been on my mind). Such fuzziness was part of why the story as such never took off... in any event, it doesn’t matter. Here is what does matter: if you are a U.S. citizen who is able to vote, do it; choose Biden/Harris and every down-ballot Democrat. This HAS TO BE a landslide repudiation of that horrific, corrupt individual and the party that enables him.

Monday

Turning points arrive in their own time.

Myka and Helena were eating lunch together. That in itself was of course not unusual, for they were colleagues and friends. And as colleague-friends, they tended to eat lunch together.

“You seem upset,” Myka noted. Helena was picking at a salad, but differently than she usually picked at her salads. Usually she picked because she was picky and would eat only the most pleasing elements; today she was merely moving salad components from one region of the plate to another.

“I’m not upset.”

“But you seem upset.”

“Well... I have to break an engagement. It’s impolite.”

Being forced into incivility was indeed the kind of thing that would drive Helena to stab, lift, and re-place arugula. “Why do you have to break an engagement?”

“You know Mrs. Carter, the neighbor who usually sits with Christina. She was called out of town. An ill relative. This morning—but I had plans tonight.”

“Could your plans happen at your house instead? Without sitting?”

Helena wrinkled her brow. “It’s a first date. Far too soon to bring a new person into Christina’s life like that.”

A first date. The words punched Myka hard, leaving a queasy burning in their wake. Her analytical side leapt to make sense of this extreme response: It’s the first time you’ve heard Helena say anything about such a thing, so it surprised you. You’ve never liked surprises; ergo, you’re just reacting poorly to being surprised. Because of course Helena would go on a first date, because of course she would want to find someone, someone to be with, and Myka didn’t know why that hadn’t occurred to her before, but she and Helena hadn’t really talked much about relationships, so maybe Helena went on a lot of first and other dates that she hadn’t bothered mentioning to Myka, and maybe that meant their friendship wasn’t as close as Myka had thought, because maybe they really were more colleagues than friends, and... Okay, just stop. Whatever this is, stop. She breathed her way through the aftermath of the punch and said, “I’ll do it, then. Babysit.”

“You will?”

“You were planning to go out. You should go out.”

“You haven’t asked me with whom.”

“That’s probably not my business,” Myka said, because it wasn’t, despite her unexpected, inappropriate impulse to claim it as entirely her business. Just stop.

“Claudia’s new manager in platform development. Claudia described her to me as, and I quote, ‘absolute fire.’ Which I presume is good.”

“So you asked her out.”

“No, she asked me. And I said yes, because... well, is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

Was that intended as bait? But it couldn’t have been. Logicking it out again: Myka had never felt such a weird surge (no, a twitch, it was only a twitch) of possessiveness before; thus Helena couldn’t have identified it so quickly, and with such precision, that she would immediately challenge Myka on the point. Could she? “Of course not,” Myka said. “What time do you want me to show up?”

*

That evening, Myka kept her still-reeling gut at bay by concentrating on Christina, who was delighted to have Myka all to herself. “You and Mom talk about boring things,” she pronounced as soon as her mother left. “Tonight you don’t have to do that!”

No... all Myka had to do was imagine what sorts of non-boring things Helena was talking about with her date who was absolute fire. But she managed not to do too much of that imagining, at least while Christina was awake, while they were building with Legos and renaming her plastic and puffy animals and manipulating slime. This latter was a fad that had, according to Christina, faded some time ago, but she found the texture soothing; she asked Myka, very seriously—as if Myka’s verdict would be the final word on the subject—whether that meant it was okay not to give it up. Myka said that in her experience, truly calming things were few and far between, so she thought it was more than okay. Christina enjoyed the phrase “few and far between.”

Myka was tempted to let Christina stay up late, late and later, but she supposed it wasn’t fair to deprive a child of sleep just to rescue herself from herself.

She fell asleep on the sofa, and that was a blessing; she didn’t have to hear Absolute Fire’s car, didn’t have to think about anything that might be happening in that car. She awoke just as Helena was stepping inside and taking off her coat. Helena turned around and smiled, and Myka struggled to sit up and look alert, saying a sleep-hoarse “sorry” as she did.

“What for? Being asleep at ten at night? That seems reasonable. Ideally I’d have been asleep by now, if I’d been home.”

“It’s only ten?”

“Dinner was short. The fire may be absolute as far as Claudia is concerned, but there were no sparks that I could see. Or feel.”

Thank god, Myka thought, too fervently. Then, Just stop. Aloud, she tried for indifference: “Maybe Claudia should go out with her instead.”

“Maybe she should. Did my own small bit of fire behave herself?”

“She was great. I’m never going to fully appreciate the appeal of slime... but I can report that bath, story, and bed were peaceful. No conflagration.” This news would make Helena happy: meltdowns at bedtime were common. Christina was often fearful of some unspecified something that would happen overnight, and she was never clear on whether it would be a good something or a bad something, just something, of which she would be unaware.

Helena did, in fact, smile her relieved “Christina is fine for tonight” smile. “Did she wear you out completely? Or might you stay for a glass of wine?”

“Weird way for you to end your date. A drink with the babysitter?” Trying to sound normal. Like the friend she was.

“Better than the date. No, that’s too callous. It was fine. But it wasn’t anything.”

Myka had the drink. Just the one, slowly, as they sat and talked about what Christina would have deemed “boring things”... but Helena had two. And a half. She was eyeing the bottle like she might be inclined to head for it again, so Myka said, “I really should go.”

Helena said, “Should you?” Myka wanted (wanted so much) to make of that what she was pretending she didn’t want to make of it, but she determined instead to make nothing of it. No one should make anything of what anyone said when they’d had a couple of drinks at the end of a long week. And at the end of a failed date, she reminded herself, then cringed at the pleasure she took in knowing that it had failed. Whatever this is, stop.

Standing by the front door, Helena gave her a vaguely unsteady half-hug, a clasp of her left arm around Myka’s shoulders. Myka didn’t want to not reciprocate—trying now to act normal, like the friend she was—so she let herself move her own left arm fully around Helena’s waist, allowed herself to rest her hand for just the press of a second on Helena’s hip.

For that press of a second, Myka leaned close and inhaled against the sharp sweet angle of Helena’s cheekbone. For that press of a second, a slide to a kiss was a warm looming certainty; then the second passed, and it was a receding dream. Myka released Helena’s body and said, “I’ll see you Monday.”

*

NOTE: I’d say “TBC,” but since I don’t know whether this will ever function as part of a larger piece, I’ll leave it as a little misfit story-island. You know B&W will find their way to each other; they’re just not quite connecting, in that “this friendship means everything to me and I can’t stand the idea of blowing it” way, on both sides. Anyway I’m not sure who these characters really are, other than coworkers and friends (who clearly need to be something more); plus there’s a gaping hole where a plot should be. Why are these people here? What are they doing? Should any reader care? I have no idea. Again, here is what matters: vote vote vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate, House, and local candidates.

[timeisacephalopod]

Playlist

I figured I’d write more of the YouTube AU with Peter/Stephen/Tony. Honestly, I should do some kind of other AU with them but for now we discuss Peter’s playlists lol.

“Wong has abandoned me,” Stephen says dramatically. Tony and Peter don’t even react because Wong would never abandon Stephen but he seems to think they should be a lot more invested. “Did you two not hear me?” he asks and Peter bites the bullet, sighing.

“We heard you, but we think you’re being dramatic,” he says. How nice of him to take one for the team like that.

Given how offended Stephen looks he’s probably going to regret that. “You think being upset about being abandoned is dramatics?” he asks in a haughty tone.

“Considering you decided Tony being on a business trip and me sleeping was you being abandoned, yeah,” Peter tells him.

Tony probably shouldn’t risk laughing but that’s too good not to laugh at.

*

“I love when people know shit-”

“Yes, me too but it happens so rarely,” Stephen says, cutting Peter off.

Peter sighs. “As I was saying I love when people know shit about the development of a project because this random person tweeted ‘the best thing about going to see Consuming Fire is that you know at one point it was a monster fucking movie’ and that’s hilarious,” he says.

God, yeah. And Peter fought about it for awhile too, which resulted in him nearly getting fired twice until Stephen had made a casual comment about making one of the characters a musician. With an in like that Peter had had a much less difficult time writing something that wasn’t total garbage, even if it was straight people. Then came the fight to cast Kamala and mini Peter in the roles, which resulted in a bunch more rewrites, but the interest generated from his casting choices alone seemed to appease pissy studios and audiences alike so.

“Imagine if Kamala was the fish man from The Shape of Water,” Stephen says, shaking his head. “Absolutely awful. Unpopular opinion, that movie was awful,” he adds.

“You have no taste,” Peter tells him.

“I thought the fish man was romantic,” Tony says and Stephen wrinkles his nose.

“White people are monster fuckers,” he mumbles. “Something went wrong in Europe.”

Peter starts laughing and Tony sighs, “dude, Sam dresses up as a furry on a regular basis. This isn’t just a caucasian problem- every race of human is into some weird shit.”

Stephen shakes his head, “Sam is an exception and should not be counted and when did he decide he was a furry?” he asks, frowning.

“Dude dresses up like a bird all the time,” Peter points out. “Calls his alter ego Falcon and he doesn’t even fucking dress up as a falcon.”

“He should dress up as a great tit,” Tony says and Stephen looks like his soul has died a little.

“We’re not talking about furries or monster fuckers anymore. We’re talking about Peter’s strange ability to make a playlist for every possible situation,” Stephen says. “Shall we go through the stranger ones?”

He pulls Peter’s phone out of his pocket and Tony snatches it, scrolling through the absurd amount of playlists. “Oh here’s one. ‘That feeling you get when you fuck at three a.m but actually you want to die.’ I don’t know what that means.”

Stephen pulls the phone back and starts scrolling. “Oh lovely- ‘for when you’re in Medicine Hat, Canada and the Tim Hortons is being held up.’ Are these built on personal experience?” he asks, squinting.

Tony takes the phone back and scrolls a little before sighing. “Seriously? ‘The feeling you get when you look at Tony Stark’s ass’? Is that a real thing?”

Stephen takes the phone back and laughs, “it was made three years before he met you,” he says. “That’s funnier.”

Peter snatches his phone. “I don’t even know how you two got that,” he mumbles. “And by the way- okay you know what, I will give you ‘Frankenstein vore playlist’ because I don’t even know what that means,” he says.

Stephen pulls a list from his pocket, “I’ve made a list of the strangest playlists though I did manage to somehow miss that one,” he says, wrinkling his nose at Peter. Tony leans over to look at the list and snorts at what he finds there. Honestly only Peter would have a playlist dedicated to making egg salad in someone else’s kitchen while you rob them.

“You have an ‘evacuate the building in case of fire’ playlist. No one will be listening to these, they’ll be exiting the damn building,” Tony says.

“Wedding in a classroom in rural Alaska- why is that a playlist?” Stephen asks.

“You went with that over ‘tickle my ass with a feather’ playlist?” Tony asks, giving Stephen a judgmental look.

“That one’s for Rocket,” Peter says, giving them more information than they wanted, Tony is sure.

“Got my ass kicked by a ballerina with teeth for a face- what? What does that mean, Peter?” Tony asks, baffled.

“What’s on the tin- it literally says it all in the title.”

Stephen rubs his temple and sighs. “Accidentally laughed at a funeral?” he asks.

Peter shrugs, “its been known to happen.” Even Stephen, the most cold hearted person Tony knows, clearly thinks that’s a dick move.

“Got caught in a government scandal?” Tony asks. “You don’t even understand politics.”

“Its worse because he has political opinions,” Stephen mumbles.

“Oh like that makes me any different than politicians,” Peter says and just because he’s right doesn't mean he should be.

“CIA mind control playlist?” Stephen asks.

“Are we going to read these all day, I feel like we’ve got better content than this,” Peter says.

Stephen squints at his list, “workplace serial killer playlist? I get work place shooter because that happens. I get disgruntled employee because that happens. I get serial killer because those are a thing. But in what world does a person have a problem with a work place serial killer?” he asks in a haughty tone.

“Well when you say it like that it sounds ridiculous,” Peter mumbles.

He gets a look from Stephen for that, “it sounded ridiculous the whole time. Like your damn monster fucking romcom.”

“It could have worked, we have vampire shows,” Peter points out.

Tony rolls his eyes, “that’s not monster fucking, that’s a cop out. You better be fucking something only vaguely human looking or you’re a pussy.”

“Structurally speaking female genitalia is the superior design, I don’t know why we use those as an insult. We should be calling people gonads on account of the poor design choices evolution made there. Or backs. The spine is basically a pixie stick holding up your meat sack- its an insult to biological architecture,” he says like that’s a phrase anyone but him has thought up.

Peter starts laughing and Tony decides to call it a day because there’s no coming back from that.

*

“So people have been writing meta on why our dynamic is so watchable,” Peter says, “and I honestly never thought I’d hear the phrase ‘Tony Stark is the straight man’ but here we are.”

Tony frowns, “I’m bisexual,” he says. How is it possible to fuck two whole assed dudes and still end up being called straight? Though there are those conspiracies about him being brainwashed and held captive because that’s the gay agenda these days, he guesses.

Stephen lets out a long sigh but Peter explains. “Its not a sexuality thing, its a comedy thing. There are the nutty characters and then the normal one who grounds them all- the straight man. You’re the one who grounds me and Stephen,” he says.

Tony squints, “cite your sources,” he tells Peter. Pepper is the straight man normally. Rhodey, he might be straight man passing if he didn’t always go along with Tony’s dumb plans. Pepper though, she lives and breathes common sense and forces him and Rhodey to also live and breathe common sense. Tony can’t imagine how he’s the straight man.

Peter nods, “yeah, so normally that’s not what the fuck you’d be on account of being a quirky billionaire genius who casually blows shit up on such a regular basis that its normal to you. But you hang out with a man who once faked a haunting to get rid of a roommate, casually refers to his coworkers killing people and how it inconveniences him because of hour cutbacks, and is sometimes actually magical. Couple that with your other partner in crime, me, who got into a several months long fight with a studio over whether or not I can make a monster fucking movie because I can’t write straight people, who got famous after writing a sci-fi musical space opera about his daddy issues, has a playlist for being murdered by sheep, and literally has a friend named ‘Rocket Racoon’ and your shit is no longer weird. You are the straight man only because the two people you’re with are so weird that your weird no longer looks weird in comparison,” Peter says.

They all sit on that for a long moment before Tony crosses his arms and glares straight ahead. “I don’t want to be the straight man,” he mumbles.

Stephen pulls a handkerchief seemingly out of nowhere and throws it at him. “Go cry me a river,” he says.

He picks up the handkerchief and frowns. “This is monogramed. And where wee you hiding it?”

*

Wong scrolls through the comments nodding to himself. “My favorite thing about these videos is my strange but adorable cult following,” he says.

Yeah, Wong is kind of a series regular but people have grown to like him with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. Stephen, however, looks irritated with this. “They have poor taste,” he mumbles.

Peter pets his head, earning a dirty look for his efforts. “Don’t worry, only about half the audience hates you now,” he chirps in an overly cheerful tone.

“Half the audience needs standards,” Wong murmurs, taking a sip of Stephen’s coffee.

Stephen pulls his cup back, “yes, half the audience needs to grow up and come to the conclusion that I’m far superior to Peter,” he says. “And on par with Tony, I suppose,” he adds.

Wong takes the coffee back, “that wasn’t that half of the audience I was referring to, Stephen, and we both know that. And Peter is superior to you on account of having a personality that isn’t the equivalent of sand paper on the senses.”

“I have a playlist for that too,” Peter says, grinning.

Tony rolls his eyes, “you have a playlist for drowning in quicksand in the middle of a forest on a planet in another solar system. We fucking know you have a playlist for it,” he says.

“Have a playlist for when your irritating best friend all but forces you to pick up his questionable boxers in the morning and you feel a little bit of your soul slip into another dimension?” Wong asks and Peter frowns.

“I uh... no, I don’t,” he says, looking lost and confused.