#worth a thousand

[griseldabanks]

Let Me Count the Ways ask game

Requested by Princess of Words from the Fig Tree Discord server

Fandom: MCU Characters: Steve and Bucky (and Sharon) Prompt: "No, I don't care what 'they' think."

Please note this is an AU. I tried to make it work for both of my main AUs, Worth a Thousand and Whole Shards. Basically all you need to know is that Steve and Sharon are married, and Bucky lives with them.

“We have a problem,” Bucky growled.

Steve looked up from the crossword puzzle he and Sharon were working through together in the paper at the kitchen table. Sam always laughed at them and said they were like an old married couple, but...well, they were a married couple, and at least one of them was pretty old. Besides, it was fun.

A brightly colored magazine slapped down on top of the newspaper, and Steve found himself staring at his own face. STEVE ROGERS: TROUBLE IN PARADISE OR POLYAMOROUS THREESOME?! The main photo depicted him walking through a crowd somewhere, holding Bucky's hand. After a moment, he remembered that day, when they'd all gone to Coney Island. He'd grabbed Bucky's hand so they wouldn't lose each other in the crush of people heading towards the Cyclone.

Down the side of the front page were smaller headlines, like No heterosexual explanation for this! and The Open Secret of Captain America's Queer Lifestyle. Quirking an eyebrow, Steve took his arm from around his wife's shoulders and reached for the tabloid, beginning to flip through it. “Oh, apparently I'm bisexual,” he said mildly. “You learn something new every day.”

Sharon laughed, but Bucky's expression was stormy as he dropped into a chair across the table from them. “That trash is all over the place,” he growled, jabbing a metal finger at the magazine. “I could hardly turn around without seeing our faces everywhere.”

“Well, that's hardly new,” Sharon said reasonably, putting a calming hand on his arm. “You're probably always going to be in the public eye somewhat, and it's not always going to be positive.”

Bucky pulled away from her, leaning back and crossing his arms tightly. He sat there, looking uncomfortable for a few moments, before awkwardly muttering, “I can...move out. Today, if you want.”

Steve looked up in surprise from a cursory and not particularly relevant overview of public opinions of homosexuality in the 1940s. “Move out? Why?”

Except for when Bucky had gone off to war before Steve, and the stretch of time when Bucky had been captured by Hydra and didn't remember who he was, Steve and Bucky had lived under the same roof since Steve's mother had died. Even after they'd been reunited and Bucky was stable enough that he could have managed on his own, neither of them had even questioned it. Of course they were going to live together.

Now Bucky scowled at him. “Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”

“You can't let something like this scare you away,” Sharon scoffed, flipping through the magazine to a page plastered with photos of her. “Look—they're actually trying to call it incest!”

“What?” Steve laughed, craning his neck around to look at the article. “How do they figure that?”

“Because the love of your life was my great-aunt, obviously.”

“Peggy and I never went on a single date! And that wouldn't even—“ Steve gave up, groaning into his hands.

Sharon nudged her shoulder against his. “This is the part where you're supposed to say I'm the love of your life, dear.”

Before either of them could continue, Bucky burst out, “So none of this bothers you? The things they're saying?”

“Well, they're certainly being very rude.” Sharon picked up the magazine and walked over to the recycle bin, dropping it in with a satisfying flump.

Steve shrugged in answer to Bucky's question. “We know it isn't true. So does anyone with enough of a brain to not believe everything they read in a tabloid.”

Bucky still looked troubled, tapping a finger against his metal arm. “You don't think it would be better for me to move out or...something? Just to make it clear they're wrong?”

Steve wondered if that 'something' included things like holding hands as they'd done in the picture on the front page, or the dozens of other ways he expressed his affection for his best friend. Wouldn't they have a field day if they knew how many times we've slept in the same bed.

Aloud, he just said, “It sounds like they've already made up their minds. Not much we can do about it now.”

“So you don't care what they think?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “No, I don't care what 'they' think. I never have. And neither should you.”

Their eyes met, and Steve wondered if Bucky was also thinking about the days when he'd been skinny and beset with a whole laundry list of handicaps and ailments. Back then, there were plenty of people who'd said he was nothing but a drain on society with nothing to offer in return. Not worth the effort it took to keep him alive. Better off dead. Some people had even said that to his face.

But two people in his life had made sure he never believed that assessment of his worth: his mother and Bucky. Especially Bucky. Because if someone like Bucky still thought it was worth it to go out of his way to keep Steve around...he must really be worth something.

“Exactly,” Sharon said, taking her seat again and lacing her fingers through Steve's. “You can move out if you want to, Bucky,” she added, holding out her hand to him as well, “but do it because you want to, not because someone's never heard of friendship before.”

Slowly, Bucky's arms unfolded and he let Sharon take his right hand in hers. “I, um....” Clearing his throat, he averted his gaze. “If...you don't mind, I'd like to stay here...for now.”

“I don't think we mind,” Steve laughed, “do we, darling?”

“Of course not!” Sharon said with a bright smile. “If this is what a threesome is, I want it to stay like this forever.”

Steve and Sharon both started laughing, and this time, Bucky joined in too.

[dragons-hoard-of-fandoms]

AO3: *goes down*

Everyone:

[egophiliac]

I DID IT I GOT MY PINK HAYATE now I am never doing that again!

(at least until they give me, like, a frilly unicorn Kamui or something)

[theeconfession]

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Faun by FlammenmenschArtWatch

[fatherphaniel]

this isn't an indirect to anybody and i don't want to start any fights BUT

if you genuinely think dan is being out of touch/hypocritical/whatever for being politically left wing and also having money/privilege, please read this

this is exactly the same as saying that men can't be feminists, white ppl can't be antiracist etc. just bc you're privileged by a system it doesn't mean you can't criticize it. in fact, you should criticize it, bc 1- ppl in power are more likely to listen to you and actually change something and 2- the more you educate ppl about the problems, the more ppl join the cause

also, when we think about who really benefits from capitalism, it's not ppl like dan and phil. if they stopped working tomorrow, they wouldn't have infinite money that they don't ever have to think about for the rest of their lives. they don't have an amount of money that could solve world hunger, climate change, poverty and every other fucking problem

you know who does? billionaires.

of course having money, even if it's not billions, makes you comfortable under capitalism. but if you have that, you see that other ppl don't, and you wish that everyone had access to what you have, you're gonna criticize capitalism. you're gonna hate billionaires that hoard wealth. you're gonna talk about your left wing politics

the real horror is ppl who don't want to lift a finger to the status quo

[pocketgalaxies]

We want to destroy my mother. (insp by @dadrielle)

[dkettchen]

tangerine picnicking

[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

I actually imagine he looks really good in blue

[lukolabrainrot]

Communicating Through Photos 😍😍

These two just shine/glow together... I can't quite explain it 😭❤️️😭❤️️

[spacedace]

Reluctant War AU Part 4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Everything I know about Flash and the FlashFam (& Flash enemies) comes from fandom and theflashmuseum on tiktok so fair warning on that lol

Sorry if Barry is out of character or things don't line up with canon. Canon is a stranger I think I passed in a crowded room once, I did not ask for its number lol

Anyway, time to touch a bit more on that whole Ancient of the Speedforce Elle thing yeah? Here be a sprinkle more of that and I promise there's more to come haha

Gonna start posting this on Ao3 soon, probably Monday or Tuesday, so heads up I may stop adding these parts here on tumblr once I do

---

It lived beneath his skin.

For a long time Barry had never believed in magic. His world was grounded, scientific, made of predictable rules and laws. Tools that could be used to explain everything strange or supernatural away as just another odd twist of the massive universe they all belonged to.

It took perhaps a little longer than it should have to admit that magic was as real as thermodynamics and gravity and atoms. That the world was a great deal stranger than even science - for all its own wildness at times - could account for. There were things that went bump in the night. Hells below and heavens above and things that crawled and clawed their way out from the places in between.

It was almost a little embarrassing how long it had taken him to admit to such things, when considering his relationship with the Speedforce.

A force of the universe. Like gravity or time, pushing and pulling everything along. Something that could be explained with all the familiar scientific concepts that had buoyed him along in life for so long.

Except.

Except.

Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful but felt. Making his hair stand on end, his fingers tingle and numb. Sliding against his veins, bouncing between scar tissue and freckles. Pressing out from the confines of his sternum, rattling against his rib cage as it shifted and moved. Twining around each and every vertebrae. Coiling over and under itself within his skull, darting along the paths of his neurons and nerves. It hummed in every cell in his body. Darted and danced in the space between the atoms that made up his very existence.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

Lived.

Not existed. Not contained. Lived.

He couched it in terms of science, but science - despite his long time refusal to acknowledge it - wasn’t really able to explain the full scope of what he could feel. Not just the power of the Speedforce, but the…the identity of it. The living part that made it’s home in his body, existing in a way that was separate from him. Distant and indistinct most of the time, but…sentient.

He could feel it. Warm and excitable, delighting every time he tapped into it. Pushing him from behind urging him on and on, tugging him forward from ahead beckoning to go, faster, faster. Joyful in his victories, despairing in his loses.

It lived beneath his skin.

Until it didn’t.

He followed its joyful calls, pushed beyond what he should, what he knew was safe. Chasing that welcoming chant of faster, faster until he was there. In the Speedforce. More even, was the Speedforce.

He was everywhere. Beyond everywhere. In every possible everywhere it was possible to be. Every world, every universe, every multiverse.

To enter the Speedforce, to merge with it, was to become part of existence itself.

He couldn’t remember everything about it once he came back. He got flashes, sometimes, quick moments in dreams of places, of moments. What stuck with him most had been the feeling of it all. That had been the hardest part of returning. The sense of terrible loss, of having been surrounded by such a giddy, delighted, devoted love only to be pulled back from the heart of it. Returned to how he had been before, drifting at the edge of it all, it had been painful, agonizing even.

He…adapted, eventually. The sense of it all was still there, just distant. Something he’d come to feel he’d see again, someday.

It had been different, recently.

His powers were the same, he just as fast as ever, but…there was something…off. Changed. A sense that while his speed remained, the Speedforce had become, for lack of a better word, quiet. Distant.

He’d been having dreams, since it started. Not the quick glimpses of his time where he’d merged with the Speedforce. No, instead they were more nightmarish. Not nightmares exactly, though he felt like they should be with what they contained, but something else. Something that felt unnervingly real, left him confused and reeling when he woke with the certainty that when he opened his eyes he’d see the same as what his dreams held.

In the dream, he was in a room.

Cement and metal, hostile and brutalistic in design. He was bound in place, standing upright with feet and hands spread wide and locked in place within strange devices. Gleaming chrome and brilliant green, a painful thrum of energy surging through his body - not the Speedforce, something else, deeply unpleasant pulsing through every cell of his being and freezing him in place more firmly then the restraints did. Projectors hung from the ceiling, displaying images of landscapes, changing every ten second or so.

The sight of them made him nauseous, body shivering and spasming with the burning, agonizing need to go, but at the same time there was something distantly soothed by them too. Like a gnawing hunger abated with water and crumbs. The need for food not gone but the pangs diminished by the false feeling of being full.

In the dream he felt like he was dying.

In the dream he was afraid that maybe he couldn’t.

That he’d be trapped alive in that state forever, watching places he’d never see in person again as he was trapped in one place. His mind spiraling his Core splintering under the weight of it all, scared so scared. He wanted his brother, wanted to see the cement walls explode into dust and debris and see him there, ready to save the day like he had so many times before.

He just had to wait. His brother was looking for him, would have everyone in the Realms looking for him. He just had to hold on.

Barry didn’t have a brother. He only remembered when he woke, heart hammering in his chest fast even by his own standards, mouth tasting of bile and body aching with the need to go.

He hadn’t been sleeping much these days, even before the King of the Dead declared war.

It was having its effects, as sleep deprivation always did. His mind drifting, catching again and again on the dream, attention far away from the world around him. How many times had he been startled by someone calling his name, touching his arm? How many times had they given him a pinched, worried look that told him they’d been trying to reach him for longer than they should have before he noticed.

He was aware, distantly, of the glowering, stern faces around him. The flinty looks of his friends’ and partners’ eyes as they stared at the image of Waller’s scowling mug.

She’d declined an in-person meeting, hunkering down in some bunker somewhere trying to avoid the consequences of her latest atrocities. Or maybe just trying to avoid the very real possibility that one of the members of JL Dark might try to kill her for what she’s caused.

Or JL light, for that matter.

Bruce and Clark had their rules that they lived by, but Diana certainly wouldn’t hesitate to splatter Waller’s brains across the nearest available wall. In reviewing footage of one of the last battles - she’d been at the other one at the time, trying to contend with a ghost in the shape of an ethereal dragon - she’d recognized the spectral figures of Amazons long dead, fierce even in death as they fought with a warrior’s pride along side the rest of Phantom’s armies. They followed a figure that towered even above the Amazons, four arms and gleaming armor and a name that Barry associated with ruin and forgotten hope but who was so much more to Diana. Heroes long departed to the fields of Elysium, stepping out of their well earned rest to fight once more.

A few hadn’t survived the weapons the GIW shot them with. Barry didn’t know what that meant, for a ghost to die. If they simply returned to their afterlife or -

He tried not to think about the or.

They’d been going back and forth for awhile now. Voices faraway, muffled. The world felt as if it was underwater, blurred and cold. Clark had gotten to his feet at some point, Waller’s grip on a pen so tight on the screen he expected to see if burst at any moment. It was an important meeting, an important discussion. One he needed to be apart of, aware of, but it all escaped him. Sand held too tightly, slipping through his fingers. On the screen, Waller hit a button on the computer beside her and the image changed.

The world burned back to life in sharp relief.

The dream.

The room.

Cold cement. Projections of unreachable places on the walls. Chrome and green machinery in a configuration meant to contain.

It looked larger on the screen.

Maybe it was how small the figure held prisoner inside it was.

She was young. A child, no older than Superboy Jr. or Robin. She looked like Phantom - her father - but there were differences. Her hair was white, but it didn’t look like the spun starlight of her father’s. Instead it burned, the bright hot crackling of the plasma of a lighting bolt striking. Skin the blur of shapes caught just at the corner of the eye as you ran past, Eyes -

Looking at him.

The image had come up, a live feed - he knew it was live, knew he was looking at her where she was at that exact moment - and she’d been as he was every time he tried to sleep. Trembling and shuttering, eyes squinting against the pain, trying to stay open so as not to miss a single moment of the flat images imposed on blank cement walls. Desperate to fill the fathomless hunger burning deep down in the Core of her.

But then a shuttering breath and her eyes - the burning green of an afterimage - snapped up to the camera. Snapped up to look at him, recognition in her young face. And despite never having seen this girl before, he recognized her too.

The Speedforce lived beneath his skin.

She lived beneath his skin.

He could feel her there. Buzzing, burning, blistering. Not painful, but felt.

Not as felt as she used to be.

The image snapped back to Waller’s face, smug and self-satisfied. Talking - lying - about the how the girl was there, what the GIW’s intentions for her were. Barry was on his feet, but so was everyone else. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, could only hear static, the rush of wind, the crack of the lightning bolt. A call for help.

It was then that the alarms began to blare. On the screen someone rushed in to whisper into Waller’s ear. Bruce was running out of the room towards the Zeta tubes and Barry was right there with him and there was so much chaos around them, men in white and Gothamites and Ghosts banding together to rain terror down upon them and something massive and horrible and living towering above it all and Barry let go of that last bits of logic and thought.

Instinct, older than he was. The echo of a voice that had called him for years now, carrying him along, biding him forward:

Run.

Someone might have shouted after him as he left Gotham behind. He didn’t know.

All he knew was the pounding of his feet upon the ground, the wind in his face, the Speedforce lashing and frantic and hopeful burning and sizzling beneath his skin. Calling him further and further away until he stood in a vast, empty field staring at a single, rusted shack near ready to collapse before him.

He wasn’t alone.

Wally. Bart. Max. More still. Not just his family and friends. Eobard. Hunter. Thaddeus. Everyone touched by the Speedforce.

They didn’t speak. Bodies humming and thrumming, crackling with energy and intent.

Minds as one, they focused on the shed, the hidden hatch inside, the base hidden deep below.

The Speedforce lived beneath their skin, and no one was going to steal it away from them.

[griseldabanks]

"Worth a Thousand" and "The Ambassadors" for the fic writer game!

132 words for Worth a Thousand! (Tentatively calling this chapter "waves of darkness" for now, but I'll probably glean a title from "Diving Bell" by Starset, because that song perfectly captures how cheerful this chapter is going to be.)

There is no shelter from the cold. Nowhere to hide from the darkness. The Soldier huddles beneath the one last, flickering light, watching the waves grow higher and higher.

(I also didn't realize I was going to do it in present tense, but that's how it's coming so far!)

155 words for The Ambassadors!

But then Father Mark peeked up at him with kindly brown eyes and gave him a reassuring wink. Swallowing hard, Sean murmured the same words he'd heard Father Mark speak so many times. “May the grace of the Great Eagle be upon you.”

Kick-in-the-Pants Writer's Game

[dragons-hoard-of-fandoms]

The Sonic fandom will fight tooth and nail over a lot of things, but at least at the end of the day we all love Cowboy Hat Knuckles.

[shigayokagayama]

as funny as a statement "teru meets mob and does an 180 degree personality flip" is we need to acknowledge that it was a 360 degree personality flip. teru realized his powers didnt make him special and went from there to "me knowing that my powers dont make me special makes ME special. and kageyama-kun too he's even specialer because he's known it longer 💖"

[team-avia]

"Who do you think you are, running around leaving scars, collecting your jar of hearts, tearing love apart"

[tennessoui]

just want some sort of au where they meet at a rich peoples party and obi-wan thinks a nervous anakin is nervous because they’re obviously flirting and he’s getting all sweaty and stammery from the attention but ACTUALLY anakin is a thief who is at this function for illegal purposes only and currently has invaluable jewelry and gems and gold tucked under his shirt and was just trying to blend in with the crowd as part of his cover

but then this really hot man started talking with him and now he’s getting all sweaty and stammery for two completely different reasons