Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

maelace asked: Okay, for Steve Rogers prompts: Steve is leaving the grocery store and hears some guy yelling at the little Girl Scouts selling cookies about how Feminism Is Ruining This Country and Girl Scouts Are Evil for Supporting Abortion and Lesbians. (Because this actually happens, it happened to me when I was a kid. And once you are like 13 you are allowed to sell without an adult, so me and my friend were alone).

Ahahaha yeah, good times, been there, done that.  Right, so, I’m picturing this as like a month or two after Avengers, while Steve is still Figuring Out the 2000’s.  Also featuring: Steve swearing like a Brooklyn kid who went into the Army, and my weird obsession with time-displaced super soldiers who are angry about bananas.  WARNING: 100% WISH FULFILLMENT.  Some general assholery and Steve losing his temper a little under the cut because…this is longer than I meant it to be.

Steve was sure it would shock any number of people, but his biggest problems with the 21^st century weren’t the televisions, phones, or coffee makers (thank you, Stark).  There was a learning curve, but it was reminiscent of the learning curve after he’d gotten the serum—hell, he’d gone from a colorblind, partly deaf asthmatic with more chronic illnesses than you could fit on a chart to a walking talking superhuman.  The whole world had been brighter, louder, and faster-paced than Steve had ever been remotely prepared to deal with, so he went onto stages and into battles until he adapted.  The 21^st century was brighter, louder, and faster-paced than the forties could have dreamed, so Steve got on his bike and went to tour the country without help.  By the time he got back, he was pretty sure he could manage technology well enough to Google shit like ‘what is Facebook.’

(Google was good.  Steve fucking loved Google.  All the answers were on Google.  Including answers to questions he never needed answered, but he had gotten better at choosing his search terms.)

No, Steve’s biggest problems with the 21^st century, other than the obvious fact that it wasn’t his century, mostly revolved around money.

Example: who in their right goddamn mind paid seven dollars for a pound of apples?  Had anyone ever heard of affordable bread?  What the fuck was happening with the price of potatoes—potatoes, for the love of God.

“Inflation’s a bitch,” a passing college student said in dry amusement, obviously picking up on his bitter muttering. Steve’s scowl deepened and he put the apples in his cart.

For the first time in his life, Steve actually didn’t have to worry about money—apparently seventy years of back pay totaled up to a significant amount of cash—but that didn’t mean that he didn’t wince as he did the math for his food.  If this was usual for one person, what the hell were families paying? Bucky’s family had been Bucky, his ma, his dad, and all three of the girls, plus sometimes Steve.  How was a family of seven affording this food?  He added it to his mental list of things to Google, along with what is wrong with bananas.

Bananas.  Of all the things for the future to fuck up, fucking bananas were weird bland not-bananas now.  Steve had never had strong opinions on bananas before, but live and goddamn learn, apparently.

Anyway.  The money thing was why, upon entering the grocery store, Steve hadn’t paused at the table set up just inside the door, save to read the sign hanging in front of it—it was good to see that the Girl Scouts had survived.  Nonetheless, he could bake cookies his own self and probably get a better net value than six bucks for a tiny box, thanks.  To be polite, he’d waved a little to the girls at the table, both wearing green sashes and winning smiles as they did a slow but respectably steady business, and then he’d gone on his damn way like a civilized human being.

But God forbid that other people could do the same.  Steve checked out with his apples and cereal and soup ingredients (and no bananas), put them in pair of reusable grocery bags, and started for the door just in time to hear raised voices.

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For @littlestartopaz : Steve catches Wanda sulking and invites her to Disney Night with Nat and Clint.  Wanda teases him, and Vision ends up there too.  Better yet, not MCU so we can also have her brother.  Or just ignore that part of the MCU.

GOOD. Also, Quicksilver is alive and healthy after a while in a healing coma, as speedsters do.  I read a wild AU once where he was shot and died, and the comments were full of complaints about how it didn’t make sense.  I am RIGHT THIS MOMENT deciding that this fic and this and this and possibly some others with small tweaks exist in the same universe as this one (I do not have a timeline to speak of) and also I’m disregarding that same wild AU’s belief that Clint lives?  On a farm?  Rather than a shitty apartment building in NYC and the Tower/Mansion?  And that Nat and Clint are not soulmates on a level that makes romance look downright petty, kay-thanks-bye.  AND also I’m so glad we all remember how Wanda and Pietro were kids who were pressganged and conned into service of HYDRA rather than being voluntary recruits.

It wasn’t like Wanda had expected her relationship with Pietro to be all roses after he came out of his coma, but her worry had also done a spectacular job of blurring out some of his less desirable qualities as a brother.  Like, just for example, his overwhelming, pointless, overprotective bullshit.  She muttered a bitter Sokovian curse under her breath and stripped off her jacket, dropping it on the bed without a care for the soot that would certainly stain her sheets.  The rest of her uniform was given the same careless treatment, abandoned on the floor as she yanked on a pair of leggings and a soft shirt two sizes too big.

She wasn’t even sure who she was more frustrated with—Pietro, for yanking her out of the way of a spider ‘bot that she could have taken care of, or herself, for losing focus for long enough to let him take the hit for her.  Someday, he was going to suddenly realize that his fragile twin sister had gone and turned into an adult while he was busy fending off the world.  She hoped it was sooner rather than later, or she might have to beat it into him.  Assuming he even lived that long, which was beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

“Stupid nervous bastard,” she muttered in English, and flopped down on her bed, flat on her back with her fingers laced over her face.  “Martyr.”

“Hazard of the profession,” Steve’s voice said, amused.  Wanda turned her head, untangling her fingers to look toward the door, where Steve was leaning against her doorjamb.  He was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, standard fare for any of them after showering upon returning from a mission.  His hair was a rumpled mess and he had a nasty purple and blue bruise marbling over one cheek, where Bruce had diagnosed a cracked zygomatic.  In combination with the blood that had been leaking from a split in his lip, Natasha had cheerfully commented that he was looking very patriotic indeed.

“Put ice on your face,” she said, frowning at him across the landscape of her comforter.  Steve grinned at her, and winced, raising the cold pack in his hand back to his cheek.  

“Like I said,” Steve said.  His voice was muffled, but his eyes were bright and wild with adrenaline, like blue fire.  “We’re all fucking martyrs, or so I’m told.  Your brother just wants to keep you safe.”

“Well, I just spent months at his bedside because he took eight bullets to the chest and severed his spine,” Wanda said, sitting up sharply.  “So he can get over it.”

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lathori asked: Star Wars Camelot AU Fucking Go <3 Your Wife

• CLEARLY Finn is King of Camelot, destined ruler of all Albion, hero-king snatched from a training center designed to churn out devoted soldiers for a dangerous faction rising in the wake of the previous wicked king’s demise (Palpatine, obvs)

• Rey is his queen and court enchanter, and Finn met her after being separated from his guardsan attack by bandits—she whomped him good with a staff and threw him into a lake with magic.  Naturally, he brought her back to his citadel and was like “This is our new court enchanter, she used to be a feral mountain child” and within a few months everyone went “Hey Finn what if you got married” and he went “Sounds great, meet your new queen!”  And everyone was EITHER really delighted OR completely horrified.  They’re a kickass couple and Rey is really good with seeing possible lines of influence and Finn is actually a killer diplomat and basically they rock.

• With the help of their Most Loyal and Trusted Knight, who would DIE for his king, especially since Finn swooped in and saved him when his quest went horribly awry in the process of booking it from the First Order.  Obviously this is the adopted son of the Lady of the Lake, Sir Poe Dameron (du Lac)…  

• You see where I’m going with this.

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Anonymous asked: 7 and whoever you want

7: I do not believe in love at first sight.  But god damn. (Look at you.)

Two things.  First, it’s a very dangerous thing to say ‘whoever I want,’ because I go straight for the niche fandoms that I love the most. Thus: Animorphs.  Second!  It has come to my attention that I accidentally swapped two prompts—this line is actually prompt 17, and prompt 7 got used for the Sith!Padme AU.  Because I’m a fucking disaster area and my brain likes to pull switches like that on me.  (Math classes suck for this exact reason.)  But like the Sith!Padme AU is done?  And I was halfway through this by the time I realized, so I am VERY sorry but I’m doing this.

Tobias could give you the exact moment he fell in love with Rachel, as a bruised thirteen-year-old kid in a body he barely remembered.  Love at first sight was a fairy tale, but he could give every detail of the moment—it was like light being struck from a match, casting everything in a fresh glow.

Admittedly, he remembered everything about that night in the construction site, about Elfangor’s serious eyes and Visser Three’s terrible morph and the desperate giddy feeling in his chest of yes, yes, I knew it, there’s more to this world.  Which made a lot more sense, in retrospect, but of course at the time he just knew that something had clicked into place.  While everyone else was standing around being awestruck and wondering, Tobias had been too busy feeling a wash of relief that, oh God, he wasn’t crazy, there really was something else and it was exactly as spectacular as he had always believed it would be.

But even in that chaos, Rachel had been like a beacon.

He’d had a crush on her from the moment he arrived in town, of course, but then he could guarantee that about every boy at their school agreed with him, save the ones who were related to her.  He could list five girls off the top of his head who were probably head over heels for Rachel, having a crush on her wasn’t anything special.  She was clever and funny and fierce, her beautiful face was almost an afterthought.

And Tobias had needed something bright and strong to hold onto, and just being around Rachel, in the line of her sharp eyes, was a good start.

So it never did shock him, that he was in love with her.

It wasn’t her grip on his hand as they watched Elfangor die, although he was sure everyone would be shocked to hear it.  That was just…Rachel, scared half to death and still with strength and ferocity to spare.  She clutched his hand because it made her feel better, to steady someone else, and God Tobias had needed it.  He’d almost bolted right then, run back to the Andalite’s side, because he barely had a life to live anyway and he’d felt something from Elfangor’s thoughts he’d never felt before.  Some messy tangle of regret and pride and grief, all centered around a bright hard thing that made affection look like small fry. The loss of it hurt like broken glass in Tobias’ throat, sharp and bloody.  And it was Rachel’s grip on his hand as he cried that kept Tobias hidden behind the wreckage, kept him sane enough to live through the night.

But it was later, that it really hit him.

They were running and, at the time, Tobias had desperately wished for wings.  It was almost funny, now, but probably only to him—he’d never told the others how often he wished he could fly away, before he got a new appreciation for the dangers of wishes.

Here was something else the others never knew: he had three cracked ribs that night. There was no way, even with adrenaline pumping ice through his blood, that he would be able to outrun the Hork-Bajir on their tail.  Tobias’ forgotten human body was tall, but skinny and out of shape, not strong like Cassie or fast like Jake, he was slow and hurt and shocky.  And he had a moment of strange clarity, as if he could see the future as clearly as the Ellimist ever showed it to them.  He would die, and it would be awful, but the others would live and that would be…good.  They had people who would miss them, and he didn’t.  They would live to fight the Andalite’s war, maybe save the world, and Tobias would get to rest.

And then Rachel, tall, athletic Rachel who could probably have outpaced every last one of them, even Jake, slowed, and dropped back.  She was shouting, arms outstretched with a wild, ecstatic look of challenge on her face.  Tobias could only catch about one word in three, but they were…vivid.

That was the moment.  Tobias, tearing across the rough ground of the construction site with impossibility on his heels.  Rachel, screaming curses in death’s face in order to protect the people she cared about. It was more like being struck by lightning than anything so polite as falling in love, but.

Goddamn.

Anonymous asked: prompt: B, ship: E/R. Also I am reading things we lost in the fire and it's wonderful! Thank you for sharing!

2: At my worst, I worry you’ll realize you deserve better.  At my best, I worry you won’t. (I’ve never been better.)  

Modern AU motherfuckers. Behold, I have written fluff.  And thank you so much, I’m so glad you’re liking ‘things we lost in the fire,’ <3

Grantaire tugged at the cuff of his blazer, trying to resist the urge to pick at his outfit with nervous fingers.  Eponine and Bahorel had selected it for him, and although Bahorel wasn’t particularly menacing, Eponine had a key to Grantaire’s apartment, a Sharpie, a switchblade, and even odds on using either one—he wasn’t in a rush to disobey her. So, nice jeans, a graphic t-shirt, and a blazer it was.  It didn’t mask the fact that he still looked semi-exhausted, but Cosette had informed him, in her sweetest and most anxiety-reducing tone, that as long as he wore a thin layer of stubble, he looked much more the lovelorn artist than the over-caffeinated grad student.

He was pretty sure she’d only said it to make him stop hyperventilating, but it was a nice sentiment.

“R!” Enjolras shouted from down the hall.  “You’re going to be late!”

“Fashionably late is a thing that exists, Apollo,” Grantaire said, giving one more nervous tug to the blazer before he stepped away from the mirror.  “How do I look?” he asked Enjolras, holding out his arms and trying to look Enjolras in the eye instead of letting his gaze wander to a safe corner of the ceiling.  “Ridiculous?”

“Shut up, you look incredible,” Enjolras said.  “And fashionably late may be a thing that exists, but not when you’re going to your own thing.”

“Sure it is,” Grantaire said, dragging his eyes away from the ceiling with difficulty and flicking a glance at Enjolras.  “You really don’t have to come, it’s not a big deal.”

Enjolras shot him a Look and knocked one foot against the floor, not quite a stomp, but enough to make the sole of his shot thud loudly as he plucked pointedly at the lapel of his red coat.  “It’s your first gallery opening.  If you think I’m not going, you have another one coming.”

“It’s not really, Cosette’s father–”

“Don’t care!” Enjolras interrupted, sharp and bright and grinning.  He stepped over and pressed a kiss to the corner of Grantaire’s mouth.  “R, love, it’s going to be fine,” he murmured, taking Grantaire’s hand.  “You didn’t get this because Valjean knows the gallery owner, you got this because your paintings are incredible, and you’re going to go let a bunch of people with a lot of money tell you so.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire breathed, and offered Enjolras a shaky smile.  “I don’t deserve you.”

“I strongly disagree.”

“I know. I hope you never realize you’re wrong,” Grantaire said, and his smile was more earnest this time.

“Are you ready?”

“Never better, Apollo,” Grantaire said, breathless, and let Enjolras steer him out the door.

For @twistedangelsays: AU where Wolfgang takes up his uncle’s criminal empire.  Obviously, spoilers for the special episode of Sense8.

• So Wolfgang’s uncle was a fucking crime king.  He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.  He’s all ready to shoot the offer down and go on his merry way—who the fuck offers a quarter of Berlin to some safecracker just because he happened to off the old boss, anyway—and then…  He imagines Sun, in prison because she wouldn’t throw her brother under the bus, and her dark eyes glittering in the harsh light of her cell. He imagines Nomi, constantly reaching out to visit them in order to not go stir-crazy in the hiding places the American government is forcing her into.  He imagines Lito, barely treading water against the downward drag of prejudice, and Capheus, who has already swapped so much of his innocence for medicine. He imagines Will, already taking on the pale look of an addict to protect them all.

• Look, it’s simple.  Wolfgang has always been good at looking out for number one, and now number one is an eighth of a whole.  Looking out for number one, these days, means making sure that he looks out for all of his fractional selves, and they need money, and clout, and somewhere safe.

• He takes the offer.  He’ll figure it out as he goes.

• It’s dark in Seoul when he visits Sun that night—he’s really gotten himself in over his head this time, and he needs her steady presence—and she gracefully flips herself down from where she’s doing a handstand against the wall.  He’s sitting against the wall of her cell when he says, “I’ve got a fucking story to tell you.”  Sun nods, folding herself into a cross-legged position, and he takes a moment to wonder how he’s supposed to explain.

• He can’t come up with anything particularly diplomatic, so he takes a deep breath and says bluntly, “My uncle was in charge of a quarter of Berlin, and it turns out I’m his fucking heir.”

• Sun stares at him like it’s the craziest thing she’s heard in weeks, which he finds unlikely.  “What?”

• Wolfgang bares his teeth and says, “I got promoted.”

• It’s a fucking trip to explain it to the others. Kala is disappointed, which…he wishes he was surprised by that, but it’s not like he’s lied to her about who he is. Nomi probably rolls with it best, except for Capheus, because Capheus is just unconquerably happy whenever the cluster is together and no petty little criminal empire is going to change that.  He hugs Riley and gets a kiss on the cheek from Lito and actually laughs like a kid when Wolfgang admits to the situation.  Nomi starts making suggestions immediately, and under any other circumstances Wolfgang might be offended, but the truth is that he needs the help, so he nods and writes down what she says.

• Riley is the first one to bring up the obvious question, because for all that she’s quiet and shy even within their cluster, she’s ferociously loyal.  “So,” she asks, a quiet murmur that nonetheless brings debate to a halt, “can you help get Sun out of prison?”

• Sun looks up in surprise from where Lito is teaching her a clapping game to keep her busy in her cell.

• Wolfgang grins.  “Well, I didn’t take the offer for the fucking benefits.”

• It’s unfathomably weird, some month and a half later, to have a tiny Korean woman in a business-formal dress turn up at his door, really truly there and scowling at his bodyguard (he only has one, and only because he couldn’t make him leave).  She’s been yelling in Korean for five minutes by the time someone gets Wolfgang, and her frown evaporates as she throws herself at him in a hug.

• “Look!” she shouts in Korean that he understands, dragging him outside into the perpetual Berlin rain—worse than usual today, plastering her hair to her face. He lets himself be dragged, because it would be bad for his reputation if he was beaten up by this tiny woman, and Sun-Capheus-Riley-Lito grabs his hands to spin in a circle.  “I am free!”

• “Yeah,” Wolfgang laughs, feeling his fractional selves at his back.  “Yeah, you are.”

Anonymous asked: If you are in the mood to write pain (and, really, when aren't you in the mood to write pain): Rachel/Tobias during the early war

*mean cackling* So when I’m in a very particular mood about the little girl I used to be and how much she was screwed over, I tend to take it out on my characters.  Ergo, I am banned from touching my Alleirat story until our houseguest leaves, and will instead be writing Animorphs because how much worse could I make it.  Sorry.  And since this got pretty long and also there’s not exactly loads of Animorphs fic, I crossposted it to AO3.  If you like Animorphs, maybe comment on that shit or something.

here we stand (with our arms folded)

It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since the disastrous attack on the Yeerk pool, the sun still over the trees at the edge of the forest where it butted up against Cassie’s farm.  The horse she’d morphed, whose quick legs had saved Cassie and one single woman the night before, was loose in the field, and Rachel was cross-legged on a crate in the barn as Cassie murmured to a wounded rabbit.  Rachel felt dazed, with exhaustion and shock, as if every blink and turn of her head demanded a fresh calibration of her brain, a new moment of I’m alive and nothing is okay.  She’d spent an hour in the shower after getting home, with the water as hot as she could stand, but she could still feel the grit of the Yeerk pool floor on her palms and feet, and kept expecting to catch a glimpse of Hork-Bajir blood on her human teeth in the mirror.  

Cassie didn’t seem much better, her hands still where she would usually be smoothly going through her tasks and her voice mindless nonsense, as if she was as numb as Rachel.  The silence wasn’t quite tense, but there was an unmistakable taut feeling that kept even the noisiest patients subdued and quiet.

“Did Jake say why he wanted to talk to us?” Rachel finally asked, and Cassie glanced up, shaking her head.

“No,” she said. 

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the power goes out in the fray

For @littlestartopaz: What would have happened if Leia was sent to Tatooine and Luke to Alderaan?

This sounds like an excuse for my very favorite thing: blatantly strong-in-the-Force Jedi Leia. I was gonna do headcanons but instead HERE is the first scene of Leia Skywalker of Tatooine finding some old asshole in a brown robe.  *backflips out*

Leia scowled at the old man—Ben Kenobi, her ass—and the droid at her knee warbled happily.

“You lied,” Leia said.  The sweet-faced boy draped in white robes on the recording had asked for an Obi-wan, but Kenobi’s aren’t exactly a dime a dozen since the old homestead was annihilated by the Tuskens.  She can do the math.

“From a certain point of view,” Kenobi said with a shrug, smiling down at the droid.

“The boy on the recording–”

[Prince Luke Organa of Alderaan] the droid offered.

“—very helpful, thanks, Prince Luke said you were his only hope,” Leia said, prowling forward.  “What exactly qualifies you for that, old man?”

Kenobi looked up at her with a start at that, blinking pale blue eyes at her, and gave a brittle half-laugh.  “You’re very much like your father, when I knew him,” he said distantly.  And then he launched into an epic tale about Jedi and her father and Leia stood, feeling shock shiver through her.  She had known that her father was a general, but a Jedi?

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Clint’s perspective of meeting Natasha in that one soulmate AU, for @littlestartopaz.

Clint’s soulmark curves under the line of his collarbone, in tiny, precise handwriting.  And it’s…interesting.  It’s in Russian, he learns that real quick as a kid, and when he’s seven, still living at home with his parents and his brother, he finds out that one of his teachers speaks the language.  He rushes up to her the very next day and explains, hasty and stammered, and she smiles kindly, offering to translate it for him.

He pulls down the collar of his shirt—he sees her eyes drag on the hand-shaped bruise on his wrist, but she doesn’t say anything—and she leans down to read his words.

“Let’s see,” she says, and reads out the Russian words.  Clint tries to memorize the sound of it, so that he’ll know his soulmate when they meet him.  “Oh,” the teacher says quietly, and smooths his shirt back over his mark.  “Listen, baby, I don’t think it’s anything you need to worry about just yet, okay?”

“What does it say?”

She gives him a smile, sort of grim and sad and confused, and says, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m not going to tell you. You don’t need that on your conscience today.”

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Some Nat/Steve friend fluff for @littlestartopaz, in that soulmate AU from earlier, reading it probably isn’t necessary but I’m always in search of approbation.  This is probably just a few months after the Avengers were formed, in my bastardized movies-comics-wishful-thinking-verse where they all live in Avengers Tower.

Steve and Natasha are sparring, because Steve gets nervous about sparring with fragile normal humans and Natasha is willing to bully him into it.  Tony isn’t generally one to spar, given the suit, and Clint’s still recovering from the cracked rib he sustained on their last mission, and Thor, who could take Steve’s full strength punch without batting an eye, is still off-planet handling his psychopath brother.  (No one asks Bruce to spar, because they all like being un-splatted.) So Natasha drags Steve’s protesting ass into the ring and punches him in the face until he fights back.  Unless he manages to actually grab her, it’s a pretty fair match.

It’s a system, okay, and if Natasha thinks it’s funny that he’s afraid he’ll hurt her, that’s between her and the inside of her own skull.

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