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

skymurdock asked: for the headcanon meme: Steve Rogers the angry little chihuahua.

On Monday, the very angry Stevie got beaten up in one parking lot, but he was still angry.  On Tuesday, the very angry Stevie got beaten up behind two diners, but he was STILL angry.  On Wednesday, the very angry Stevie got put through three experimental procedures, but he was STILL angry.  Anyway, gonna do me some Steve Rogers for this ask meme.

A: what I think realistically

Adapting to the 21st century isn’t really difficult, once he can face the reality of it properly.  It reminds him, more than anything, of that first week after the serum–everything is too bright and too loud and too fast.  But now the world is unfamiliar to boot and there’s no one who cares enough has the time to help him adjust.  It’s a rough couple of months before he masters the situation.

Unrelated to the above, Steve was actually great friends with most of the chorus girls.  At first they were…uh…suspicious, to say the least, because he was a massive brick house of a dude who could lift a motorcycle and looked like the ultimate version of the assholes they put up with on the regular.  So they didn’t speak to Steve past the most basic courtesies for a week and a half.  

Then they went out drinking after their first performance in a new city and Steve sat quietly in the corner with a water until he saw Cheryl sitting stiff and toying with a fork as a man’s hand crept up her leg.

“Back off,” Cheryl said sharply.  The guy did not.

No one was more surprised than Cheryl when Steve loomed up from the corner like the wrath of God and sharply announced, “Buddy, if you’re not going to leave the lady alone, you and me are gonna have problems.”

The next day, Steve showed up to the theater ready to sit off to the side as usual.  Instead Cheryl plopped down in front of him, held out a handful of bobby pins, and said, “I need an extra set of hands to put my hair up.  You braid, Cap?”

“Um, not really,” Steve said, blushing.  “But I can learn.”

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Highlights of Steve in the modern grocery store include:

- Steve And The Grudge Against Weird Bananas

- Steve And What The Fuck Do You Mean You Want Five Dollars For This Tomato

- Steve And Wow You Can Get Vaccines At A Grocery Store–Wait What Do You Mean People Believe Vaccines Are Dangerous

- Steve And Hey You There Leave That Cashier Alone Unless You Wanna Settle This Outside

- Steve And The Girl Scouts of America

- Steve And The Struggle of Grocery Shopping Without Getting Recognized

- Steve And Really What The Fuck Is Wrong With Bananas

Needless to say, Steve isn’t really allowed to do the grocery shopping anymore.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

SHIELDRA dumped all their files onto the internet, courtesy of Natasha’s salt-and-burn solution to HYDRA’s infiltration.  Steve has been in the modern world for a good few years by now, so he sits down and starts searching through it for information.

He shouldn’t be doing it.  He knows it’s just torturing himself.  He hasn’t known where Bucky is since Insight went down, and none of this will help him find the Winter Soldier if he doesn’t want to be found, Natasha assured him of that.  But…he just has to know.

Capture.  Surgeries.  The arm.  Missions.  Cryostasis.  “Programming.”  More missions, more cryo, more programming–torture, it’s torture, God, all this time he was mourning his best friend while Bucky was being tortured.

Steve lasts through five files before he throws up.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Y’all, Steve is Wanda’s weird adopted big brother and no one can stop me from believing it.  He shows her a bunch of Disney movies that she missed out on as a kid and she asks him for advice about Vision and he jokes about how he’s definitely the wrong person to be asking for romantic advice.  They have a good weird relationship.

skymurdock asked: FIC MEME S, V and X

Yaaaay, more asks for this fic meme

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

There are a number, but some I can think of right now are:

BED SHARING (especially if they’re still in that phase of ‘how DARE you suggest i’m interested in that person’ or alternatively ‘I can’t actually stand within six inches of this person without swallowing my own tongue and/or blushing so hard I combust’)

Soulmate AUs.  I know they’re super fucking tropey and predictable but sometimes I just need a happy ending.

I know you know this, but Winter Soldier AU’s are my fucking weakness.  I’m actively working on one for Hamilton and I’ve got plans to write one for The Song of Achilles and I wrote that general overview for 

V: If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

…um, off the top of my head I’d love to write a prequel OR a sequel for The Philosopher Poetic by @defractum, Silence Is the Speech of Love by someone whose tumblr url I can’t find, and In Spite of Song by @seagreeneyes who it will not let me tag, which are real good Les Mis AUs.  I want a sequel any way I can get one for Dragonsfire, that one Aragorn/Arwen fic, including writing one myself.  I desperately want to write literally anything in the universe of The Son of Man by @copperbadge, which is an absolutely fantastic JARVIS fic.  

…this list could get long, okay, so I’m going to cut myself off here. 

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

Listen, I never met a character I didn’t enjoy torturing.  All of them.  God help them if they have a rough canon or anything even tangentially in common with a tragic archetype, because that just gives me Ideas.

skymurdock asked: look I am sleepy and tired and I've got some school shit to attend to pre-enrollment tomorrow so HEY MORAN how would you write an AU where Steve Trevor ends up as the Winter Soldier figure. bc we need more of that trope always.

Okay so I’m real into Winter Soldier AUs where their identity is discovered in the WORST AVAILABLE WAY (well, all WS AUs tbh but like come on I like to see people break down), and also this morning @littlestartopaz suggested that the Waynes are basically the Starks but more humanitarian and less weapon designer (also please note that I generally adhere to Unpretty’s Batman personality because I like it).

So basically what I’m saying here is that Bruce, after the League has formed up and suffered a nasty battle that dredged up a lot of people’s old issues, returns to the unsolved case of his parents’ murder and mulls over the information .  He has done this for most of his life when things go awry, not so much because he expects to solve the crime anymore or even because he’s still as emotionally locked in that moment as he once was, but just…it’s his parents and he doesn’t know and if there’s one thing the Batman hates, it’s not knowing.  

This time he has actual people, though, and while Clark mostly goes home to Metropolis and his day job, Diana is formally speaking on leave from her day job and she knows who he is and he lets her stay in his mansion because she really loves his gardens.  (This is what clinches it for Diana–the Batman is a marshmallow under that layer of body armor.)  So she comes across this research and the two of them start poking around and they find a loose end that Bruce hasn’t seen before.  They start pulling on it and at first they think that it goes nowhere, that it dead ends in a conglomerate of the wealthy and ethically deficient that dissolved decades ago and took all their records with it.

Two days later, Dick Grayson (probably around seventeen now) hears a quiet beep when he opens his car door and it’s only the years of practice that let him throw himself back fast enough to escape most of the shrapnel.  Bruce shows up to the hospital where Dick is getting bandaged up (burns to his left forearm and lower leg, two cracked ribs, and a nasty bit of road rash on his right cheek and shoulder) like the wrath of God, and Diana is already on site, sifting through the debris for a clue.  This is a warning, plain and simple, targeting the eldest son–death of the firstborn, Dick says like it’s at all funny, aren’t there supposed to be some other plagues before that?–but a critical mistake has been made.  Bruce Wayne is rich and powerful and people know it, and feel threatened even by ‘eccentric playboy Brucie’ because, well, one time he found out someone was paying off a surveyor to build one of his buildings on a burial site, and he came down like the fist of an angry god.

Batman, defending his partner and adopted son, is going to rip these people to shreds.  

“Huh,” Diana says with interest, tapping her comm so that Bruce can hear her.  She’s picking over what’s left of the bomb itself, armored and disinterested in the police nervously milling about.  “I haven’t seen a weight trigger like this since I was in the trenches.”

The manhunt that gets underway is subtle, at first, Diana and Bruce operating from the shadows or with the mild interest of superheros who happen to be in the area, while Clark calls in a few favors to look into the names that Bruce and Diana were pulling at.  The rest of the League isn’t told, not yet, because Bruce is protective of his identity and even more so of his secrets and he’s still adjusting even just to Diana and Clark.  

Diana does a lot of the legwork.  Clark has a secret identity to keep up and Bruce has an injured kid to duct tape to a bed (the entire Wayne household redefines ‘bad patient’ to levels that frankly amaze Diana even now) so Diana is mostly the one quietly talking to people, pushing for information, searching, seeking, hunting.  

It draws attention to her, because it looks like Bruce took the warning seriously while she did not.

It takes less than a month for someone to be sent to…deal with her.

Diana is just leaving the house of a woman whose dead husband’s brother’s boss might have had something to do with the whole mess–all of her leads have been like this, but Diana doesn’t mind because Bruce should see that people don’t always have darkness in their souls.  She’s willing to work with his kids and Clark on proving the point.  Also, she finds the concept of attacking children as horrific as she did a century ago at Veld, and Hades have mercy on anyone who did, because Diana certainly wouldn’t.  (Dick had protested that he’s almost an adult and besides he’s been fighting crime since he was nine, and Tim sat on him.  Carefully.  With affection.)  So yeah, she’s fine with digging through people who are at two or three removes from the situation on the off chance that they might have information.  Also this particular woman makes lovely home-mixed tea with rosehips and lemon and honey, so there’s also that.

She’s not certain that she’s being followed until she turns into an alley and the figure drifts after her, and…he’s good, she almost missed him.  Diana admits it at once–never underestimate your opponent, Antiope’s voice whispers through the years–and twists on her heel to face him.  She believes he’s male, but he’s masked, hard plastic too pearly to be skin that covers his face from just below his eyes all the way down, hiding mouth and keeping his jaw closed like a muzzle.  His hair was buzzed short at some point, but it’s growing out, as if no one tends to it, and his eyes are as cold and empty as the clear sky at midwinter.

Diana feels a little sick.  She was ready to take him down, hard and fast, but the man following her looks more like a tormented hunting hound than anything else.  Like he’s forgotten what it’s like to be treated as human.

“Why are you following me?” she asks, holding a hand out, palm down, as if gentling a nervous horse.  “Can you tell me who sent you?”

He raises a gun and shoots twice without so much as batting an eye.  Diana barely gets her bracers up in time, and then the alley is a melee battle, gun and blind determination against lasso and lifelong training.

Obviously, Diana wins, and the gun clatters away, followed by not one but three knives and a second small gun.  Her opponent carries more weapons on him than Bruce does, which is no small feat, and finally she tackles him outright, bracing one knee on his left wrist and catching his right in her hand as she uses all her strength to deny his attempts to throw her off, already demanding answers.

“I said,” she snarls, hooking her nails under the mask and ripping it away, “who sent–”  Her words strangle on her tongue as the mask drops from nerveless fingers.  “Oh Hades,” she breathes, and reaches out, hand trembling.  “Steve?”

He takes the moment of weakness to slam his head into her nose, and she rocks back as he rolls away.  She lashes out on instinct with her lasso, catches his ankle and yanks him back down onto the asphalt.

“Steve,” she says again, getting a better look at his face this time.

He bares his teeth at her, as if threatening to tear her throat out if that’s what it takes.  “Who the hell is Steve?”

skymurdock asked: as someone currently writing a WS!Steve Trevor AU I completely agree. yes I want them to be together and happy! I also want Suffering.

Listen, if you can do both at once you are Living The Dream my dude.

(ALSO IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE THING GO, FLY MY PRETTIES, READ THE THING)

skymurdock asked: Star Wars or Hamilton, 1 2 3.

STAR WARS IT IS

For this thing

1. Name your politically correct ship that no one ever questions.

I really genuinely like Han/Leia because I am a sucker for the “I just really enjoy shouting at this person and get really furious when they risk their life suRELY THIS DOES NOT MEAN FEELINGS” thing and I feel like that’s…all of Hoth.  The whole time.  All of it.  

Also, listen.  I will die on the hill of The Damerons as a totally adoring, poly unit of heroes in which Rey sleeps with her back to the wall and her head on Finn’s chest and her fingers tangled with Poe’s, who gently traces the line of the callous on her thumb in his sleep, and Finn lies there and stares at the ceiling and wonders how the FUCK he got this lucky.  (Because you deserve it, baby, you fucking deserve it.)

2. Now name your trash ship.

…I mean…Anakin is a trash can, so does Anakin/Padme qualify, or does Padme’s general quality everything lift them from the dumpster fire?

Although for real trash, you can’t do better than Rey/Phasma having really bitter angry hate sex.  Before Rey figures herself out and marries her two husbands, of course.

3. And your really trashy I’m-going-to-Hell ship.

…do I have one of these?  I don’t think I have–

oh no, yes I do, oh god I didn’t realize what the ship was for the fic but it was SO GOOD and I just.

Sith!Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan was not a ship I saw coming but F U C K.

It’s a really good fic okay, it sold me hardcore.  It’s this series by @poplitealqueen.  I should reread it because it’s been updated.  I’ll go sit in a hole now.

(I just really like Sith Qui-Gon and also Darth Venge, who I don’t think shows up in this one but is a big player in Re-Entry, which is like. Yeah.)

skymurdock asked: pssssst talk to me about Schuyler sisters in reincarnation AU. or more Alex/John whatever. rolls away.

The Schuyler sisters!  My queens!  The rest of the AU is here!

Alicia Laramie is seven years old when she remembers.  Her parents bring home a little girl, and she looks different from the olive-wood skin and tumbling black curls of Alicia and her parents and her little sister Maggie—this girl all gold-tinged ivory skin and silky dark hair framing solemn black eyes. She’s a year younger than Alicia and her parents haven’t even gotten out “This is Lisa Tian” before she’s rushing forward to enfold the girl in her arms.

“Eliza,” Angelica whispers into the girl’s long dark hair.  Bemused, the girl hugs her back, and Angelica says, “I’ll take care of you, Eliza.  You’re the best thing in my life, I’ll choose your happiness every time.”  The girl is confused when Angelica stands back, but she gives a smile, the same sweet smile Angelica remembers, and it’s good.

***

When the fifth grade class goes to the Grange for a field trip, Lisa spends three hours in semi-hysterical sobs, refusing to go through the front door, and the terrified tour guide calls the first emergency number on her phone.  Twenty minutes later, a sixth-grader spills out of a cab and swoops down on her like a hurricane in rose and gold, and Eliza clings to Angelica like the last lifeboat on a sinking ship.  

“It’s okay, Lizzie,” Angelica soothes.

“Angelica, I—I–”

“I know,” Angelica sighs, stroking her hair.  “Take a couple deep breaths, ‘Liza, it’ll pass.”

“I miss him,” Eliza whispers into Angelica’s hip, and the stroking doesn’t pause.

“I know,” Angelica says.  She gives a small, rueful smile.  “That part won’t pass.”

Eliza laughs a little at that, muffled by Angelica’s jacket, and her grip tightens.

***

So…when Maggie Laramie is fourteen their house gets robbed.  She gets caught and held at gunpoint, and she barely manages to not say “My father has gone to raise the Minutemen.” Instead she steadily states that he’s called the police, and when the three guys in black scramble like their lives depend on it, she smiles at her sisters.

“Maggie, that was amazing,” Mrs. Laramie says breathlessly.

“Peggy,” she corrects, and Angelica and Eliza glow.

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