diary of a dialup dinosaur

1k words; Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes (Steve Rogers, Avengers)

Post-Endgame, Sam's got something in his hands he's never not had to give back before. Bucky Barnes is probably feeling some deja vu.

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. 

RADIOACTIVE wild boars roaming European mountains after eating mushrooms contaminated by Chernobyl 

… this is going to be some X-person’s mutant origin story. 

Once there was an up-and-coming chef who’d staged at one of Redzepi’s places and had started their own restaurant with a focus on nose-to-tail single-source boar and a five-course foraged food tasting menu mostly featuring ferns, flowers, mushrooms, and a lichen that only grows on the wood of ash trees that face north and have been peed on by baby deer no older than three months.  

But their single source for humanely-slaughtered-by-bow-and-arrows-shot-by-vegan-virgins boar was the Bohemian Forest and, in the process of perfecting the recipes, they ate enough to have ingested a thousand times more than the survivable dose of Cesium-137 and died young, earning mournful eulogies in both Saveur and Bon Appetit, countless food blogs, and a mention at the Beard Awards. They trended on Instagram for a week. 

At least that’s what the public thinks happened. 

In actuality, our chef fakes their death because they’d noticed that in addition to their tattoos starting to glow in the dark, they were starting to change in other ways. Instead of just being a master of the six tastes (one of their tattoos is, in fact, “oleogustus” transliterated into Adyghe), they were noticing five more – six, if they’d only had kombucha that day. All of this was to the good, but some of the other changes were clearly less so and could not be hidden by plaid shirts and a knit cap. The tail, for instance, which could not be hidden in skinny jeans no matter what. It was time to disappear. 

Getting to Xavier’s school was entirely by accident. They’d rented a converted barn on a farm turned ashram-and-pottery-school in the Hudson Valley and had hoped to hide out there, earning their keep making kale salads and grain bowls for the canteen, but accidentally wound up on I-684 instead of the Sprain Brook after a construction detour on the Hutch. When they took the next exit off and asked for directions, they were instead directed to Salem Center because everyone in Westchester knows what that’s a euphemism for when asked by someone wearing dark sunglasses and covering their face with a Harry Potter scarf in July. 

They weren’t terribly interested in fighting to save a world that feared and hated them, to be honest. They weren’t over the first scathing reviews in The Guardian and if that philistine who couldn’t see why only using water made by melting ice smoked by Laplanders who’d had lutefisk for breakfast made all the difference in the poached plaice, then he deserved whatever fate befell him. But, after some grudgingly accomplished soul-searching, they agreed that helping on a more locally sustainable level would not be a waste of their time. 

So if you find yourself in trouble and then suddenly out of it, especially in a place that sells PBR and microbrews made from beard yeast, if you hear a faint sound of music from a band that you’ve probably never heard of, then know that you have been saved by the mutant known as Hipster. 

Footnotes: 

Rene Redzepi and foraging $600/plate dinners
the “six tastes”
Hudson Valley as Williamsburg North

[also at tumblr | ao3]
550 words | PG-ish | Tony Stark et al.

The Avengers have a Superbowl party because everyone who hosts parties hosts a Superbowl party. Tony’s had one for decades despite honestly not giving a @$^@ about football. But it’s an excuse for socially acceptable day drinking (what he says) and be a normal person for a few hours (what he means) and Rhodey makes sure it’s on the calendar every year because what’s the point of having a billionaire BFF if you don’t occasionally take advantage of that fact (what he says, although he knows damned well that Tony gets more out of the day than a chance to butter up business connections and swill scotch).

The first year after the Battle of New York, the Avengers go to the Superbowl itself. Stark Industries has a corporate box at the event every year, but Pepper’s officially hosting that and Tony’s off with the others (except Natasha and Bruce) in the VIP box with the president and governor and other political types so that he can wave when they’re put on the jumbotron. Steve goes out on to the field for the opening coin toss and you can feel the stadium shake with applause. It’s maybe the first time Steve’s been personally confronted with the public’s reaction to him and he returns to the box a little shocky with it. Tony gets extra loud to draw attention away from him and give him some time and space to recover; Steve thanks him later for it and Tony pretends he doesn’t know why.

After that, the Superbowl parties happen at Tony’s place, just them and a few others and the best 2- and 3D projection screens that exist. Tony says it’s because the commercials are the best part and a catered party is the only way Romanoff is showing up, but it’s also the only way Bruce will consider safe enough to go and he’d rather not see that look on Steve’s face again. Tony uses the suit to fly out to wherever the game is to do the Stark box gladhanding and get back before opening kickoff. 

This becomes their tradition, their Christmas. It’s a secular religious experience where atheism is a-okay and all sins are forgiven and nobody’s allowed to fight. It’s the same old jokes – Thor really does understand the game by now, Steve is not actually offended that the players wear protective equipment that doubles their size from what they looked like in the 1930s, Natasha actually really likes the commercials – and a chance for them to be people around each other. Or androids and people, once Vision joins.

Vision downloaded the entire NFL rulebook and media guide before the first game and watched days’ worth of footage of both teams. But he’s still hilariously bad – really, really bad – at predicting what will actually happen. It becomes a running joke because there is such a dissonance between the statistically best play and how things work out on the field. Vision, who is always talking about how aware he is of human inconsistencies, nevertheless consistently underestimates how much of a factor that is. At Wanda’s suggestion, Tony builds a random play generator – it looks like a Twister spinner – and that has a better predictive game than Vision does. Tony laments out loud that they can’t even make a drinking game out of it because of the likelihood of alcohol poisoning.

Jigsaw

Natasha has gotten used to the missing pieces.

"Why?"

"Why did I double-cross you or why do I need to visit?" she responded, understanding that she was negotiating from a position of weakness, even if she wouldn't appreciate the time constraints until it was too late.

"The latter," T'Challa replied, his voice giving nothing away. "I understand the former now."

She took a deep breath before saying anything because the first time would hurt. The first time always hurt. "You don't understand the former completely and that's why I need to visit."

It was vague, hilariously so if she'd been inclined to find any humor in the situation, but she knew who she was dealing with and that he'd parse it properly.

"He is under my protection," T'Challa warned, proving he'd at least understood part of it.

"I mean him no harm," she assured. "Please, sir."

Snuff

2700 words | PGish | Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, Bucky Barnes, Nick Fury
 

She recognizes the car the moment it appears and, with sick horror, recognizes the place. She'd never seen it from on high, just marched around it at ground level looking for something, anything, that could have explained how Howard had lost control of the car. His blood alcohol level had been elevated, of course it had, but it was Howard and it would have taken far more than that to impair his faculties.

The far more turned out to be a motorcycle and an assassin and her heart soars with relief and the kind of righteous anger that came with knowing how to avenge the murder of her friends. But then comes Howard's final words and the assassin's turn toward the camera before shooting it out and she is frozen, breathless and numb. The CDV finished playing and the machine beeps at her, asking what she wants to do next and she honestly has no idea.

It takes her a long few moments before she can move, reaching out to tap the button to rewind the disc to the moment a man who looks for all the world like James Buchanan Barnes stares straight at her.

A Symposium on Personnel Management with a Focus on Intra-team Dynamics (the We Don’t Need No Civil War remix)

Domenika Marzione/laporcupina (author) ; Blackglass/blackestglass (reader)

9400 words/ 58 minutes | Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Jim Rhodes, Bucky Barnes, Wanda Maximoff, et al.

Sam was on a day trip to Great Adventure with the BBBSA when his phone started to blow up. Getting a text from all of his teammates almost at once could mean many things, depending on the order and quantity. But one thing it didn't mean was that there was an actual Avengers Assemble kind of emergency, so he kept his phone in his pocket and focused on getting his group from the Sky Zooma to Taz's Tornado without losing anyone.

Once all were aboard who were going aboard, he checked his phone and realized that while it might not be a 'get your wings and go' emergency, it was probably not good. Team text chains that began with Tony were usually bad jokes or event suggestions or pictures of new Iron Man tech or, occasionally, actual relevant Avengers news because Steve was the field commander, but Tony was the CEO. Text chains that started with Vision were usually questions being answered with varying degrees of seriousness. Wanda, surprisingly, was the team paparazza and she had deeply unflattering candids of them all. Text chains that started with Steve, however, were never good news because Steve didn't send group messages. Which meant that the first message had been Steve warning him that shit was coming and then everyone else reacting to that shit in Sam's general direction. Because while he might be the Second Most Cuddly Avenger according to PR, within the team he was the Steve Whisperer/Cap Corraller/Sam-Talk-To-Him-PLEASE.

"What the hell did you get up to this morning that everyone is freaking out?" Sam asked when Steve picked up. He'd looked at Steve's text, which had been a simple "hey, feel like a road trip?" and then skimmed the blurbs of the others, which had all been variations of "WTF?!" and then called the culprit directly because sometimes Steve's shitstorms were not textually renderable.

The AO3 link has both the story and the podfic links.

Reclamation