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

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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For the random title fic meme, from @littlestartopaz:  Sugar and spice. Miraculous! Fandom

This is obviously the fic where Alya is convinced that her best friend is cheating on her boyfriend who is…also cheating on her?  It’s all a little confusing, honestly, there are a lot of people to keep track of in this…love trapezoid, or so she tells Nino when she commandeers recruits him to help figure it out.

There are three problems with her mission to figure out what the hell is going on with Marinette and Adrien.  Little problems.  Tiny, really.  She can barely see them, they’re so small.

First of all, Marinette and Adrien are impossible to keep track of, which means she can’t even get a good picture of the guilty parties caught red-handed.  Alya can get around this, okay, she is a skilled journalist, she’ll figure it out even if she has to bug the little bastards.  (Nino thinks this is going a bit far, but she did not ask for his opinion, thank you very much.)

Second of all, neither Marinette nor Adrien will even entertain suspicion of each other, which under any other circumstances Alya would consider a good thing.  Really!  But how are they so dense, she wonders aloud on more than a few occasions to Nino.  Hell, they’re always running off without explanations, anyone would be suspicious.

Third of all, and this might be a slightly bigger problem, the other half of this set of guilty couples is pretty high profile.

But how do you just up and accuse the heroes of Paris of cheating with a couple of high school students?

A request from @littlestartopaz: Polaris AU set in the American Revolution?

AHAHAHAHA YES.  This turned into kind of an ode to Ade North, the woman in command of Polaris, and I have no regrets.

So Polaris is a covert part of the colonial army, stealing patriots out from under the noses of the redcoats.  Ade North—North for the star, North for the sky, North for freedom—is a grim-eyed escaped slave, and she knows the risks of what she’s about to do, but she storms straight into the base outside New York City. The General—slave-owner, she diagnoses immediately, at a glance—isn’t the first one she finds, but rather a hot-tempered red-haired captain who grins at her when she tells him that I just walked through gunfire to get here, boy, do you think I’m about to run because someone might try and hang me?  He vouches for her, and some strings are pulled, and…well.  Her old master is a Tory.  She’s not afraid of taking advantage of double-standards when they’re held out to her in both hands.  And Ade North has never in her life backed down.

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Request from @littlestartopaz​ for Harry/Corlath from the Blue Sword on the music meme.   I got Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons, so…yeah…that happened.  ALL RIGHT HERE WE MOTHERFUCKING GO, goddamn but I love these books.

Corlath had known what it was to be king since his father’s death when he was a young man, only just eighteen.  He had known he would fight a war for even longer, since before his kelar came to him—maybe he’d known it forever, maybe it was what his mother sang to him at his birth and whispered to him when he was wakeful at night.  The first time he tasted the Meeldtar, it snatched him away from himself and brought him visions of Thurra and his fierce white stallion, streaked with blood and battle rage.  When he came back, he dropped the leather pouch as if his hands were suddenly as weak as a sickly child’s, and he wept for the terror that was not his and the battle he had seen, and his father had soothed him with a gentle hand and quiet voice.

It was not until he was on the field before the Bledfi Gap, his soldiers holding well against the mere trickle of Northerners coming through, and he felt the prickle of his kelar stirring, that he understood that old vision.  It was not his battle, no—but it was his terror.

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A set of facts from this post, on request from @littlestartopaz​.  “Kid Death, Soul Eater. Also Harry, from The Blue Sword”

Death the Kid

• Canon: Kid’s hair stripes apparently go all the way around his head once he’s a full-blown shinigami, and that’s adorable to me for some reason.
  
• Headcanon: I tend to imagine that Kid had a rough time adjusting to ‘normal’ people.  Like, the other meisters were reticent with him because of…who he is and who he’s related to, and he comes at everything with a very arrogant perspective, especially early on, so I tend to think that he has a horribly rough time learning to make friends.  Like, Patty and Liz were probably his first close friends.  I’m pretty committed to that.
• Heartcanon: Oooohhh, I dunno, I was pretty pleased with stuff.  I feel like Kid actually has a devious side under that wide-eyed anxious exterior, would’a liked to have that pan out more fully.
• Soulcanon: Kid becomes a shinigami and replaces Death and has a few conversations with various people who protest that it’s just not traditional for the Grim Reaper to dual wield pistols.  They make lengthy and detailed arguments against his actions, there are sources, there is, on one memorable occasion, a PowerPoint.  And Kid nods and ‘hmm’s and he continues to dual wield pistols.  I don’t fucking care how it happens, he makes Patty and Liz immortal somehow.
• Crotchcanon: I actually have no idea.  Because every time I sit down and try to think about Kid and sex, I inevitably end up wondering about the logistics of sex with a shinigami.  Like.  How does that shit even pan out?  Do you need to worry about condoms, or are death gods naturally infertile?  Or in control of that sort of thing?  Does Death have a body under that robe?  Do the weird black shadow-tentacle things come into play?  HOW DOES THIS WORK.  So, as you can see, I have never made enough headway on this train of thought to have an opinion.

Harry (Angharad, Harimad-sol)

• Canon: Harry Crewe is canonically good with any and all (non-demon) animals.  Giant ill-tempered warhorse?  Sure.  Loner hunting cat?  No problem.  Harry Crewe is also a stone-cold badass, and all of you should read The Blue Sword and appreciate her.
  
• Headcanon: Harry definitely causes small-to-middling disasters as she learns to use her massively powerful kelar for things other than bringing down mountain ranges.  And as handy as that ability to fucking wreck an opponent is, it’s a little hard on Corlath’s City, and they all look on with a sort of benignly exasperated affection.  Kelar tends to cause problems, but even Corlath never 'fixed’ a stone door and accidentally melded it with the frame.
• Heartcanon: Damarian weddings have some kind of family-of-the-bride aspect and Mathin gives Harry away, or whatever the equivalent is, as the Daughter of the Riders.  He cries a little and she cries a little and no one ever says anything about it.  Also, Corlath very very quietly slaps Mathin with some kind of title, whatever he can get away with, as the father of their new Queen.  Mathin isn’t informed of this for almost an entire year.
• Soulcanon: Aerin and Harry meet.  In the flesh.  At some point.  I don’t give a fuck who argues with me on this.  And Aerin visits Harry in her dreams and at first Harry’s very deferential and nervous, but she lightens up over time, and Aerin gives her advice on being a queen and being a legend and being a mother.  (At some point, when Harry is just exhausted of everything and frustrated with everyone and ready to ride off into the desert just to get away, Aerin turns up and tells a story about a very vain girl named Galanna who got her eyelashes shaved off and could have been rolled out a window, she was sleeping so heavily.  Harry laughs herself sick in the dream and wakes up smiling for the first time in weeks.)
• Crotchcanon: Okay but we can all agree that there was definitely some desperate, maneuvered-around-wounds, I-can’t-believe-you’re-alive-and-here sex in Corlath’s tent after that reunion scene, right?  And once everyone was recovered and back in the City, there was definitely a day where Harry was just like “Update: I moved all your meetings and acquired snacks” and they just literally spent an entire day having sex in the blue stone garden.  I can’t be alone in that assessment.

A 5 Headcanons request from @littlestartopaz. “Okay, let’s see…. New Star Trek world, where old Kirk came through with old Spock.”

Oh my God I love it, it would be a mess, we’re gonna do double headcanons for it, I love these guys.  We’re gonna need a read-more on this sucker, and I swear to God that this is only ten headcanons, but it got so out of hand.

• Through methods unknown but probably involving the Nexus, ex-Admiral James T. Kirk got snatched off the bridge of the Enterprise just before the collapse that would have killed him, and between one blink and another he’s on a sleek silver-and-white ship with an elderly Vulcan at the controls, bursting out of…what, a black hole? Maybe he’s dead after all, because what the fuck.

• “Who the hell are you?” Kirk blurts before he can think it through, and the Vulcan spins around like…well, like a human, startled and alarmed.
• “Jim?” the Vulcan demands after a long pause, and that look of unsuccessfully repressed shock is familiar.
• “Spock?” Kirk half-shouts.  And then they’re being sucked into a giant tentacled ship and it’s suddenly very hard to figure out what’s going on, what with the swarms of Romulans and everything.  

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@littlestartopaz​ asked for the answers to F, W, X, and Y from this post, sooo here we go.

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it. 

Answered here.

W: Do you like more general prompts, or more specific ones?

As I believe we’ve established, my writing operates on a very strict rule: the less specific a prompt is, the faster it gets out of hand.  Do I like general prompts like “Hamilton Star Wars AU” that I can write about at length?  Absolutely.  But I also really don’t have time to do a lot of them, so perforce I’m going to say ‘specific’.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

…all of them.  Ever.  Specifically?  Um…nah, I’m going to stand by that.  The more I like a character, the more I want to see them cry over the bodies of everyone they’ve ever loved.  One of my most beloved original characters actually has that exact experience in the canon plot of her novel, and everyone I killed for it were characters I adore.  No one is safe.

Y: A character you want to protect.

I’m going to assume that it’s perfectly feasible to both like making a character suffer and want to protect them, so…yeah.  Wanda Maximoff is the first one to come to mind, also Kurt Wagner, Jean Grey, and Warren Worthington III, John Laurens (I can include historical characters, I do what I want), Grantaire, Enjolras, Cosette, Eponine, Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff…Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls…the Animorphs if anyone gets THAT reference…Aerin Dragon-Killer, which is even MORE obscure…Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, Colossus…this list could go on.

“Miraculous! Adrinette where Marinette is an upperclassman. Her main interaction with Adrien is at her parent’s shop, where he always grabs something during lunch break. She’s still a hot mess around him, and he’s still a complete flirt with Ladybug. Go.”  For @littlestartopaz , on the AU meme.

C’mon now, we’ve all basically agreed that I’ve co-opted this meme as an excuse to get AU prompts and write a lot on every single one of them.  So Marinette is seventeen here and Adrien is still a lonely fifteen-year-old kid who gets devoted to anyone who seems like they care about his feelings. There’s no regard whatsoever for the canon timeline here, we’re pretending that they’re already working together by the time he starts public school.

• The first time Adrien Agreste walks into her parents’ bakery, Marinette hides behind the counter and hyperventilates for a solid minute while he looks around.  She stutters her way through taking his order, and he gives her a small smile that genuinely makes her heart stop a little.  (She’s going to feel bad about that later, once she knows how much it bothers him when people get fluttery over him, but look, just look, he’s a very handsome boy and she’s awkward, this is a matter of record, Alya has the proof.)
  
• And then he actually sits at the counter and picks through his sandwich and talks to her, and he’s nice and funny and wry, with a sweet self-deprecating smile.  Marinette can barely string a sentence together, but he doesn’t make fun of her or question her and he seems fine with pretending that she has no idea who he is.  She might die, she might have a heart attack, but what a way to go, that’s all she’s saying, under those bright green eyes.
  

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For @littlestartopaz from my vast repository of prompts from her.  R from this post, Steve/Bucky/Sam friendship (“This is without a doubt the stupidest plan you’ve ever had.  Of course I’m in.”)

Okay, some stealth feelings about Steve being all alone in the 21^st century snuck in there, but they’re real small and mostly this is very funny, I have no regrets.  Timelines for the first two should be obvious, the third one is some time after they drag Bucky’s poor exhausted self out of cryo again and go fight more shit. Because Steve is a fighty shit and Bucky would never be able to let him run off alone and Sam is rapidly falling into the same black hole of stress.  

“This is without a doubt the stupidest plan you’ve ever had–”

“Well, now, Buck, we both know that’s just not true,” Steve protested, half-laughing.

“The stupidest plan you’ve ever had,” Bucky repeated firmly, and knocked back the rest of his beer without breaking his scowl.  “Except for that time you became a lab rat,” he allowed as he lowered his glass, “this is the stupidest.”

“So are you gonna bail on me?”

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