diary of a dialup dinosaur

Buratino

31k words | Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Shuri, T’Challa, Ramonda, and a lot of cameos and OCs.

summary: Bucky Barnes is still tangled in his puppet strings even though he’s free. 

The hand is still pretty far down the line, however, and there are a lot of challenges to conquer before he can even consider it. The next day is his first surgery – surgeries – as the Wakandan doctors will have a go at both of his shoulders. He’s fine right until he’s not and Steve is there when that happens. So is Shuri, who doesn’t understand the nature of his terror, but is very sure that talking him through it will help.

“Knowledge is power,” she tells him as they sit next to a giant machine that looks more like a carnival ride than a medical tool with its vivid colors and wild designs along the sides. “Let me show you how we do things here in Wakanda.”

She makes Steve get inside the machine and then brings up a 3D sand image of his body that Bucky is allowed to touch. 

“I’m poking you in the head,” he tells Steve, who cannot see a thing stuffed into the machine as he is. “Maybe now you’ll make sense.”

The sand image flips him the bird and Shuri’s laughter echoes around the room.

The first girl who arrived was Nirva. She appeared on the horizon in a small rowboat, her too-thin arms fighting the oars as well as the ocean. By the time the sentry ship came for her, she was rowing on will alone, tears streaming down her face and her hands bloody. Her answer, when challenged by Paraskeve, was to hold up a stoppered glass bottle that held a folded a note inside.

“To Queen Hippolyta, from her loyal subject and daughter, Diana,” the outside read.

Nirva and her bottle and her meager pack, tied in a knot any Amazon would recognize from her earliest training, were brought to the Queen. Nirva did not speak - could not speak - and they only learned her name from the letter inside. She was an Armenian from Mardin who had lost her home and her family along with her words and so much else and Diana had sent her to Themyscira to heal. “Please, my Queen, I beg you to let our home be a home to her, let my sisters be sisters to her, let our strength protect her until she regains her own, let our peace fill her heart.”

Nirva’s timorousness and frailty both angered the Amazons and moved them to pity. She was sent to live with Euadne, since there were no such thing as guest quarters in a land with no visitors.

It took months for her to stop flinching at footsteps, longer still for her to find her voice - emerging finally as a scream, primal and raw. Her story, once told, gave rise to much discussion in the Queen’s council over the future of the Amazons and the protection of Themyscira. What was not discussed, at least not in front of Hippolyta, was what had become of Diana.

Nirva grew stronger and less haunted, the dimness in her eyes replaced with the spark of life. She learned archery and horsemanship, since every Amazon must know how to defend herself and her city. But while she eventually earned her own set of armor, she found her true place by the glassmaker’s brazier as an apprentice to Klytie. 

[Originally posted to tumblr and not reformatted. Bolded means they exist (also) at AO3]

MCU

(the story we’re not talking about because there actually is a Second Avenue subway before I finished it, but I swear the file is actually open on my laptop)

Gong Xi Fa Cai - Chinese New Year in the Freezer Burn universe.

Barnes family picfic

(Just Another Manic) Monday: aborted fic start featuring Sam, Steve, HYDRA, and lots of toilet paper.

Status Quo Ante – Sam Wilson from the end of CA:CW to the mid-credits scene. My big story of the year, for better or for worse.

A Symposium on Personnel Management with a Focus on Intra-Team Dynamics (the We Don’t Need No Civil War remix): aka, the reason blackestglass nearly killed me because I went into this knowing it was for a podfic and still wrote 10K. (The podfic version is super-awesome.)

Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang: Pepper Potts in Phase III

Jigsaw: MCU-compliant Bucky & Nat.

Snuff: SHIELD Director Carter and the video of the murder of Howard and Maria Stark.

Soul Food: Steve misses turtle soup and other gustatory weirdness

Hawkeye & Punisher vignette: because Clint is the little black dress of the MCU

Message in a Bottle: Steve is speaking to the Avengers in a language only Peter understands. (This will sail over your heads if you’re not from NYC.)

Reykjavik: Detente, Civil-War style (or, a thinly veiled advertisement for food in Queens.)

Three-sentence challenges (drabbles, more or less): “Bruce after it all goes down.” | “Pepper and Rhodey cleaning up.” | “T'Challa navigates Wakandan society after giving the Avengers Asylum “ | “ Wanda meeting with the families of those she killed while in Wakanda “ | Miranda’s rescue in Freezer Burn

Peggy Carter and the Commandos picfic

Avengers: The Funny Books: Tony commissions comics for the gang

Christmas for the on-the-lam Team Cap

Maqqaba: Chanukah at the SSR

SW:tFA

Rey actual drabble

Rey mini meta

Not with a Whimper, But with a Bang

4k words | PG-13ish | Pepper Potts, Tony Stark

Whither Pepper in Phase III?
 

She came close to being murdered (again) that day, she later found out. She had been on the same list of targets Tony had been on not because HYDRA didn't know if Extremis was really gone or just temporarily turned off, but instead because they feared her mind. "Potts's capacity to command the loyalty and quantity of resources sufficient to destabilize the early phases of HYDRA's new order must be eliminated," read the succinct justification for her murder by helicarrier.

They had feared her business sense and her common sense and her connections and her very human strength, which would have been flattering under other circumstances, but she didn't have the time to revel. She needed all of that to keep Stark Industries afloat after the global collapse of the entire military industrial complex. Everyone was suspect. Everyone was afraid. And everyone was most afraid of the ones who'd contributed, however inadvertently, to what had nearly been the murder of twenty million people on the first day of a global coup. Which for the current purposes included Stark Industries, no matter how long ago they'd divested from the defense sector.

He just sat down next to Steve and waited, past experience telling him that if Steve was this easily findable, he’d start talking on his own. So Sam leaned back and enjoyed the quiet tinkle of the water hitting the rocks and the distant caw of birds and the fact that he wasn’t in an underwater prison anymore and this was pretty much the first daylight he’d seen since Berlin.

“I keep going over the past few months to figure out when I fucked things up so badly to put us on a course to get us here,” Steve finally said. “And I can’t pick a point and go 'there, that’s when you started the dominoes falling.’ It’s not one thing, it’s a whole pile of things and–”

“And you might not be Cap anymore, but you never were the center of the universe,” Sam cut him off. “You don’t get to take credit for everything. Everyone else did their part and everyone else chose their side. Clint came in on his own and Lang understood what we were asking him to do and Wanda fought to be by your side. I stuck with your stubborn ass even after I realized how far you were willing to go and all of the others will say the same. You don’t get to take that from me or anyone else. You haven’t been the Sexiest Man Alive for three years now, so you are plenty resistible.”

She’d never been just his best friend’s sweetheart, not then and not now. During the war, he’d treated her as capable of anything – sometimes far more than she actually was able to do. Now, he had to take the lead in most situations by dint of his greater knowledge and capacity, but he did so in a fashion that was… not deferential, but respectful at least. He phrased what he thought they should do as a suggestion instead of an order, the way he had with Steve back when Captain America had been a greenhorn commander and Sergeant Barnes the experienced NCO. He didn’t seek her permission, but he would wait for something like agreement from her, giving her at least a nominal ownership stake in the decisions, the way he had with Steve because Captain Rogers had to be the one issuing the commands even if he hadn’t thought them up. And he let her make what decisions she could, not just for herself, but for them both: not only when they would travel or where they would stop, but also in the mission planning and execution. He’d put his foot down if he felt very strongly one way or another, but she could expect a reason. In return, she tried to reward his trust by using her authority to protect him where she could, both in their quest (where he was far too reckless with his own safety) and in his quiet struggle to regain his humanity.

Peggy Carter is far from home


 

“I don’t know where I’m going!” she warned over her shoulder as she ran.

“Left,” he called back, but right as she turned and saw a stairwell, she stepped on something sharp and stumbled. He scooped her up with one arm and threw her into a fireman’s carry that was efficient if indecorous, and he ran up the stairs a few at a time. It was all dizzying and disconcerting, the fog of war and Barnes not only being alive, but also his carrying on as Steve once had, reckless and unstoppable, when he’d been nothing of the sort before.

He slowed at the top of the stairs and shifted her off of his shoulder and on to the landing, gesturing for her to shimmy back so that she was leaning against the door. He reached around and unstrapped the pack he’d been wearing on his shoulders – she’d had her face mashed into it as they’d run – and pulled out a roll of bandaging, tossing it to her along with a plastic bottle of water. “Take care of your feet,” he told her, waiting for her to look up before handing over one of the rifles. “I’ll be back in a minute. Shoot anything that moves.”

She could do no more than squeak in protest before he turned around and went back downstairs. And so she multitasked, griping under her breath about the Commandos doing what they did best – frustrate her and make spectacular messes – while rinsing her feet free of debris before wrapping the left one, which was worse off.

Sam Wilson in the MCU is a pararescueman (pararescue jumper, aka PJ) in the US Air National Guard. I don’t think there’s any official statement on his age or military career vis-à-vis how long he was active-duty before transitioning into the reserves – odds are that he would have needed to be active-duty to be considered for the Falcon program – or his rank or even his DOD status, whether he’s officially out, still a reservist, on IRR, or what. So there’s flexibility there to do what you will, I think, within certain ranges. Sam is, however, an enlisted man and not a commissioned officer. I usually put him at E-6, Technical Sergeant.

Sam in fanon is usually the team therapist, based on his role as a counselor-type person for veterans groups. What I’d like to suggest, however, is that Sam could (should?) more often be portrayed as the team medic and someone who is far less risk-averse than he is often shown. He is really going to be the last person to facepalm and tell Steve not to jump out of perfectly good aircraft without a parachute because he wasn’t kidding when he said he does everything Steve does, except slower. PJs are extremely well-trained, both in emergency medical treatment and advanced military skills – they are the most badass EMTs you will ever meet and have an extraordinarily high regard within the military community.
 

( technical details of PJ training and requirements )

Reclamation

( Steve builds his new life on the foundations of his past and he suspects he's the only one surprised by that )