Comment_fic round up
Feb. 21st, 2016 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99I know these are normally in sets of 5 but the fifth one is presently ~ 3500 words long and only half way along (and growing in unexpected directions).
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's/Fox's. No money being made from this.
Characters: Bobby Drake/John Allerdyce
Rating: PG
Prompt: Drabble day - Strict Drabble - X-Men (movieverse), John Allerdyce/Bobby Drake, "You could always stay."
Notes: Minor spoilers for X-Men 3.
John was literally powerless, alone and without a home.
But at least he was alive.
John's defrosted, and looks like a feral cat that's been out in the rain. He'd probably hiss at Bobby if he could. Bobby feels guilty about the way John left, John would say that was part of the reason why he left, that Bobby made everything all about himself. Something John would know about.
Bobby knows all the reasons why what he's about to suggest is a bad idea, but it's the only one that might keep John close and safe.
“You could always stay."
Fandom: Kill Bill
Disclaimer: Not mine. No money being made from this.
Character(s): O-Ren Ishii
Rating: PG
Prompt: Ten Words - author's choice, author's choice, with a whimper
Notes: Spoilers, canonical character death
That night, O-Ren swears she won't die whimpering. She doesn't.
Fandom: Guardians of the Galaxy
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's. No money being made from this.
Character(s): Peter Quill and ensemble
Rating: PG
Prompt: all of their first responses are violence – except Peter, Peter tries to talk his way out of situations first. but everyone’s got a breaking point
Coming up with a plan that does not involve destroying everything in their path is pretty much what he brings to the team. Peter doesn't blame the others, it worked for them before they met each other. Peter's pretty sure that the only reason he doesn't have that as his plan A is because after he'd been picked up by Yondu it had been ten years before he was even scarier than the ship's cat.
Peter wanted it noted that the ship's cat had been a Tarkalian lizard beast that came up to most men's rib-cages. They hadn't so much chosen it as it had come on board and no-one was quite sure how to get rid of it. It did mean that there were no space weevil infestations on-board though so the whole thing was pretty much a win, even if it meant that Peter knew his place and it was way lower than that damn cat.
Drax he could understand, and Gamorra too. She'd been brought up to be Princess Kill-Everything, so that was what she was going to do. Peter sometimes hoped Rocket would help him out on the planning front because Rocket was smart-clever when he put his mind to it, but Rocket just liked seeing shit blow up, so he was always going to be more in favour of the plans where that happened.
The main reason Peter would have liked the back-up on the non-violent plans front was that sometimes, he lost it too, and they could do with having a clearer head involved than Peter who decided that the quickest way of getting his Walkman back from the space pirates who'd crossed them was a full-on death or glory raid.
Peter had tried to reason with the pirates, begged and pleaded after that didn't work because no one was above that when it mattered, but they still refused to give him back his Walkman.
Groot, the only one of them who might have had the temperament to be a Communications Officer if it hadn't been for his vocabulary problem, was making it clear that he thought that this was a stupid idea, while Drax had decided it was a fine cause to die for, which really wasn't part of Peter's plan.
"No, it's not." That was Rocket.
"We've done more stupid things," was Drax's reply.
"Name six."
But Rocket still joined the rest of them (except Groot who was universally considered to be too young to be doing this, no matter how stridently he growled 'I am Groot', and therefore got left behind to pilot their ship) on the attack.
It was a terrible, easy, fight. It couldn't not have been, they were second rate pirates, who'd only got hold of Peter's Walkman because they'd been being attacked by a whole other space fleet at the time. Even if Peter had been on his own, he could probably have beaten them, and would have tried to, even if he hadn't been sure of that. But with the others by his side, it was barely even a fight.
Peter snatched the Walkman away from the head pirate, quickly checking it for damage. There is none. He turned to the head pirate, who was looking around at the destruction caused to his ship, "you should have given it back when I asked you to."
Peter was horrified by the damage they'd caused, he'd caused really, since they'd only come here to get his Walkman back, and he didn't think he'd ever be entirely okay with it and the violence, not that the others are, they just hid it better.
All of that was part of why Peter could have done with someone else to pull him back when he was the one that went blood-crazed, 'cause he didn't want the others to do things they didn't like doing just because between them none of them could come up with a way of avoiding it. Except, now that he was calmer and reassured that nothing had happened to the Walkman, he could see that the others had done their best to minimise casualties. The pirates's ship still worked, Rocket had hit it in places that produced fun explosions but nowhere that would destroy the whole ship, and yeah, all the crew were curled up in pain but nothing that couldn't be fixed and Gamorra was good enough at what she did that had to be deliberate.
Which made Peter feel better. He knew the guys would have his back even when he's not thinking straight, and that's a comfort in their world.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's. No money being made from this.
Character(s): Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers
Rating: PG-12 (Swearing)
Prompt: 5 times an Avenger realizes Bucky Barnes was not a bad boy growing up
When Steve isn't busy saving the world as an Avenger, he comes with Sam on his hunt for the Winter Soldier.
What it turns into is a guided tour of all the back alleys of Brooklyn. It sounds like Steve got into fights in every single one. And that Bucky Barnes saved his ass each time he did.
Sam's never going to know Barnes the way that Steve did, but it helps Sam believe that if there's even a spark of that man left in the Winter Soldier, he's worth saving.
~~~~
Clint wants to extend a friendly hand to Barnes, because they're the charter members of the Natasha Romanov deprogramming school, and if he doesn't, who will?
At least that's Clint's plan.
He doesn't mean to spill his guts, Barnes has enough to deal with without someone throwing their feelings at him, but Barnes has this way of listening, like he's paying attention and that it's not a problem for him to listen.
"It's guilt, you know," because there's one other person on the planet that might understand him, "not just killing people," although that was bad enough. "There was this other guy, a civilian, and he got hit the same way I did, but he had enough about him to put in a fail-safe. And it's, he's a civilian, a fucking civilian, and he coped with it better than I did."
Then there was the other thing - that fear that the only reason they tried to fix him was because they knew him, and that if he'd been anyone else, they would have handed him over for trial like they should have done. There was a payment for that, a debt, a perfectly reasonable one but it still had to be paid - he had to make it seem like he was back to normal, like you could be, completely.
Clint felt ashamed, because really, he'd had an extra eighteen months to learn to deal with this, and he'd barely been under, while Barnes had been under for seventy years. It wasn't like saying this to Nat, they'd seen each other at their worst, but Barnes was barely more than a stranger.
Clint tries to draw back, stop himself from saying more, but Barnes claps him on the shoulder and says, "hey. Don't. Everyone needs an ear now and then."
They're never the best of friends, he has Nat for that, and Barnes and Steve look like every pair of schoolboys he's ever seen, but Barnes is always there to listen when Clint needs and ear, and Clint tries to be there for him. Clint knows what the Winter Soldier did, but he can't really hold that against the Barnes he knows.
~~~~
Natasha makes Barnes cut his hair.
She says it's important that he looks like James Barnes if he wants to feel like him, and Clint can sort of understand. He knows that's why Nat dyes her hair fifteen different shades of red, none of which are her real colour. The Black Widow does her job and Nat tidies up afterwards.
Barnes is allowed out, supervised, of course, with Natasha normally the one supervising, because she's best at jabbing him with a sleep dart and making it look like he's fainted.
They build up to everything, slowly introducing Barnes back to the world outside the cold, steel walls of Hydra bases, into this century. One night they go out clubbing of all things. Natasha wants to believe that they can get Bucky Barnes back out of the Winter Soldier and give him all the things that any American citizen can expect out of the twenty-first century, even if that's shitty music and over-priced beer. She may also have used the phrase 'go, meet people who were not born in the nineteen-twenties.'
Of course she keeps an eye on him. They don't know how Hydra conditioned him, she's been working on best guesses and best practises from other organisations, but she knows other groups have used flashing lights and loud music to the same effect. Natasha had someone set up a fake nightclub in SHIELD's HQ before she took Barnes out, just to be on the safe side. Nothing happened, but you can never be too careful, so she's on water and has line of sight on him at all times.
She decides it's time to intervene when some idiot looks like he's about to try to hit Barnes.
Barnes has the man's wrist in a grip by the time she gets there. "Hey, the lady said no."
For a second it looks like the jerk might actually try to carry on the fight, but he obviously sees something in Barnes's expression that makes him think twice about it.
The jerk turns away, and storms out of the club. The girl is in tears and Natasha recognises yet another clean up job. Bucky is already trying to comfort the girl, "if you need someone to take you home, I'm sure Nat won't mind." The girl said that was very kind of them, but she'd be alright. It didn't stop Bucky giving her the taxi fare home.
Natasha says something, in passing, about the girl not minding if Bucky had gone home with her. It's probably true, Bucky isn't bad looking and the whole World War Two retro thing is in right now. Natasha has tried getting him to wear something that looked like it might have been made in this century but it was a losing battle, so he was wearing a suit, enlivened by a terribly loud tie.
"You don't take advantage of a girl like that. She wants to see you, you'll run into her again."
~~~~
It's like looking after a kid. In fact, Sam decides, if having a kid is even half as difficult as this, he isn't having any.
If you took your eyes off Barnes, he vanished. Then you spent half an hour trying to find him and getting him out of whatever trouble he'd gotten himself into.
This time, Sam finds him up a tree.
He's getting a basketball down for two kids that live up the road. They explain to Sam what happened,
"This asshole in a BMW,"
"Language," Bucky shouts at the kids. It's like living in a Miss Manners echo chamber, except Sam knows for a fact that Bucky swears like a sailor. Still, Sam can't help the eye-roll that follows the telling off. "What?! If my Mom heard me saying things like that at their age, she would have paddled me good. I am trying to save their behinds." Which causes Sam to laugh almost as much as the kids did.
"Okay, so this moron in a BMW,"
"Got," there's a pause where the eldest kid thinks but doesn't say 'pissed off', "annoyed because the ball went near his car. We didn't even hit it or anything. He grabbed the ball and threw it up there. We were trying to get it down when Bucky saved the day." Which makes Bucky smile too, from what Sam could see of him between branches.
Getting up the tree seemed to have been relatively straight-forward, given how high up he was when Sam came along. Bucky threw the ball back to the kids. Getting down was the problem. In the end, Bucky just hurls himself down, nailing the landing but not in a way that Sam would have recommended for anyone not filled with super-soldier serum or a variant. Sam's knees hurt from just looking at it.
Bucky dusts himself off. "Don't try that yourselves. I'm trained." Sam knows that's not going to stop Dave and Eddie, because it wouldn't have stopped him, but he appreciates the effort.
Sam turns to go back into the house, and Bucky follows him, still dusting himself off. "That was stupid."
"Yeah, but they would have gone up and broken their necks, so I thought I'd better do it." Sam thinks Bucky probably has a point, and he's glad Bucky was there to help, 'cause if Dave and Eddie had injured themselves, the local council would have used it as an excuse to cut down all the trees in the neighbourhood, and a little green was always better with families growing up 'round here.
~~~~
Sam supposes it's because they're all military or special ops that they even hear it. They're all trained to notice sounds that other people don't, especially noises that they don't recognise.
That's why he, Nat and Clint immediately lean round the door to peer into the living room of their temporary headquarters.
It wasn't that Steve didn't laugh, he did, normally a quiet, low chuckle.
But Steve didn't laugh so hard and loud that you could hear him in the next room, and he didn't laugh so hard that he's curled up on the floor with it.
Sam has no idea what Bucky said to set Steve off, but he's glad he did because Steve looks happy and it's good to see.
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's/Fox's. No money being made from this.
Characters: Bobby Drake/John Allerdyce
Rating: PG
Prompt: Drabble day - Strict Drabble - X-Men (movieverse), John Allerdyce/Bobby Drake, "You could always stay."
Notes: Minor spoilers for X-Men 3.
John was literally powerless, alone and without a home.
But at least he was alive.
John's defrosted, and looks like a feral cat that's been out in the rain. He'd probably hiss at Bobby if he could. Bobby feels guilty about the way John left, John would say that was part of the reason why he left, that Bobby made everything all about himself. Something John would know about.
Bobby knows all the reasons why what he's about to suggest is a bad idea, but it's the only one that might keep John close and safe.
“You could always stay."
Fandom: Kill Bill
Disclaimer: Not mine. No money being made from this.
Character(s): O-Ren Ishii
Rating: PG
Prompt: Ten Words - author's choice, author's choice, with a whimper
Notes: Spoilers, canonical character death
That night, O-Ren swears she won't die whimpering. She doesn't.
Fandom: Guardians of the Galaxy
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's. No money being made from this.
Character(s): Peter Quill and ensemble
Rating: PG
Prompt: all of their first responses are violence – except Peter, Peter tries to talk his way out of situations first. but everyone’s got a breaking point
Coming up with a plan that does not involve destroying everything in their path is pretty much what he brings to the team. Peter doesn't blame the others, it worked for them before they met each other. Peter's pretty sure that the only reason he doesn't have that as his plan A is because after he'd been picked up by Yondu it had been ten years before he was even scarier than the ship's cat.
Peter wanted it noted that the ship's cat had been a Tarkalian lizard beast that came up to most men's rib-cages. They hadn't so much chosen it as it had come on board and no-one was quite sure how to get rid of it. It did mean that there were no space weevil infestations on-board though so the whole thing was pretty much a win, even if it meant that Peter knew his place and it was way lower than that damn cat.
Drax he could understand, and Gamorra too. She'd been brought up to be Princess Kill-Everything, so that was what she was going to do. Peter sometimes hoped Rocket would help him out on the planning front because Rocket was smart-clever when he put his mind to it, but Rocket just liked seeing shit blow up, so he was always going to be more in favour of the plans where that happened.
The main reason Peter would have liked the back-up on the non-violent plans front was that sometimes, he lost it too, and they could do with having a clearer head involved than Peter who decided that the quickest way of getting his Walkman back from the space pirates who'd crossed them was a full-on death or glory raid.
Peter had tried to reason with the pirates, begged and pleaded after that didn't work because no one was above that when it mattered, but they still refused to give him back his Walkman.
Groot, the only one of them who might have had the temperament to be a Communications Officer if it hadn't been for his vocabulary problem, was making it clear that he thought that this was a stupid idea, while Drax had decided it was a fine cause to die for, which really wasn't part of Peter's plan.
"No, it's not." That was Rocket.
"We've done more stupid things," was Drax's reply.
"Name six."
But Rocket still joined the rest of them (except Groot who was universally considered to be too young to be doing this, no matter how stridently he growled 'I am Groot', and therefore got left behind to pilot their ship) on the attack.
It was a terrible, easy, fight. It couldn't not have been, they were second rate pirates, who'd only got hold of Peter's Walkman because they'd been being attacked by a whole other space fleet at the time. Even if Peter had been on his own, he could probably have beaten them, and would have tried to, even if he hadn't been sure of that. But with the others by his side, it was barely even a fight.
Peter snatched the Walkman away from the head pirate, quickly checking it for damage. There is none. He turned to the head pirate, who was looking around at the destruction caused to his ship, "you should have given it back when I asked you to."
Peter was horrified by the damage they'd caused, he'd caused really, since they'd only come here to get his Walkman back, and he didn't think he'd ever be entirely okay with it and the violence, not that the others are, they just hid it better.
All of that was part of why Peter could have done with someone else to pull him back when he was the one that went blood-crazed, 'cause he didn't want the others to do things they didn't like doing just because between them none of them could come up with a way of avoiding it. Except, now that he was calmer and reassured that nothing had happened to the Walkman, he could see that the others had done their best to minimise casualties. The pirates's ship still worked, Rocket had hit it in places that produced fun explosions but nowhere that would destroy the whole ship, and yeah, all the crew were curled up in pain but nothing that couldn't be fixed and Gamorra was good enough at what she did that had to be deliberate.
Which made Peter feel better. He knew the guys would have his back even when he's not thinking straight, and that's a comfort in their world.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Marvel's. No money being made from this.
Character(s): Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers
Rating: PG-12 (Swearing)
Prompt: 5 times an Avenger realizes Bucky Barnes was not a bad boy growing up
When Steve isn't busy saving the world as an Avenger, he comes with Sam on his hunt for the Winter Soldier.
What it turns into is a guided tour of all the back alleys of Brooklyn. It sounds like Steve got into fights in every single one. And that Bucky Barnes saved his ass each time he did.
Sam's never going to know Barnes the way that Steve did, but it helps Sam believe that if there's even a spark of that man left in the Winter Soldier, he's worth saving.
~~~~
Clint wants to extend a friendly hand to Barnes, because they're the charter members of the Natasha Romanov deprogramming school, and if he doesn't, who will?
At least that's Clint's plan.
He doesn't mean to spill his guts, Barnes has enough to deal with without someone throwing their feelings at him, but Barnes has this way of listening, like he's paying attention and that it's not a problem for him to listen.
"It's guilt, you know," because there's one other person on the planet that might understand him, "not just killing people," although that was bad enough. "There was this other guy, a civilian, and he got hit the same way I did, but he had enough about him to put in a fail-safe. And it's, he's a civilian, a fucking civilian, and he coped with it better than I did."
Then there was the other thing - that fear that the only reason they tried to fix him was because they knew him, and that if he'd been anyone else, they would have handed him over for trial like they should have done. There was a payment for that, a debt, a perfectly reasonable one but it still had to be paid - he had to make it seem like he was back to normal, like you could be, completely.
Clint felt ashamed, because really, he'd had an extra eighteen months to learn to deal with this, and he'd barely been under, while Barnes had been under for seventy years. It wasn't like saying this to Nat, they'd seen each other at their worst, but Barnes was barely more than a stranger.
Clint tries to draw back, stop himself from saying more, but Barnes claps him on the shoulder and says, "hey. Don't. Everyone needs an ear now and then."
They're never the best of friends, he has Nat for that, and Barnes and Steve look like every pair of schoolboys he's ever seen, but Barnes is always there to listen when Clint needs and ear, and Clint tries to be there for him. Clint knows what the Winter Soldier did, but he can't really hold that against the Barnes he knows.
~~~~
Natasha makes Barnes cut his hair.
She says it's important that he looks like James Barnes if he wants to feel like him, and Clint can sort of understand. He knows that's why Nat dyes her hair fifteen different shades of red, none of which are her real colour. The Black Widow does her job and Nat tidies up afterwards.
Barnes is allowed out, supervised, of course, with Natasha normally the one supervising, because she's best at jabbing him with a sleep dart and making it look like he's fainted.
They build up to everything, slowly introducing Barnes back to the world outside the cold, steel walls of Hydra bases, into this century. One night they go out clubbing of all things. Natasha wants to believe that they can get Bucky Barnes back out of the Winter Soldier and give him all the things that any American citizen can expect out of the twenty-first century, even if that's shitty music and over-priced beer. She may also have used the phrase 'go, meet people who were not born in the nineteen-twenties.'
Of course she keeps an eye on him. They don't know how Hydra conditioned him, she's been working on best guesses and best practises from other organisations, but she knows other groups have used flashing lights and loud music to the same effect. Natasha had someone set up a fake nightclub in SHIELD's HQ before she took Barnes out, just to be on the safe side. Nothing happened, but you can never be too careful, so she's on water and has line of sight on him at all times.
She decides it's time to intervene when some idiot looks like he's about to try to hit Barnes.
Barnes has the man's wrist in a grip by the time she gets there. "Hey, the lady said no."
For a second it looks like the jerk might actually try to carry on the fight, but he obviously sees something in Barnes's expression that makes him think twice about it.
The jerk turns away, and storms out of the club. The girl is in tears and Natasha recognises yet another clean up job. Bucky is already trying to comfort the girl, "if you need someone to take you home, I'm sure Nat won't mind." The girl said that was very kind of them, but she'd be alright. It didn't stop Bucky giving her the taxi fare home.
Natasha says something, in passing, about the girl not minding if Bucky had gone home with her. It's probably true, Bucky isn't bad looking and the whole World War Two retro thing is in right now. Natasha has tried getting him to wear something that looked like it might have been made in this century but it was a losing battle, so he was wearing a suit, enlivened by a terribly loud tie.
"You don't take advantage of a girl like that. She wants to see you, you'll run into her again."
~~~~
It's like looking after a kid. In fact, Sam decides, if having a kid is even half as difficult as this, he isn't having any.
If you took your eyes off Barnes, he vanished. Then you spent half an hour trying to find him and getting him out of whatever trouble he'd gotten himself into.
This time, Sam finds him up a tree.
He's getting a basketball down for two kids that live up the road. They explain to Sam what happened,
"This asshole in a BMW,"
"Language," Bucky shouts at the kids. It's like living in a Miss Manners echo chamber, except Sam knows for a fact that Bucky swears like a sailor. Still, Sam can't help the eye-roll that follows the telling off. "What?! If my Mom heard me saying things like that at their age, she would have paddled me good. I am trying to save their behinds." Which causes Sam to laugh almost as much as the kids did.
"Okay, so this moron in a BMW,"
"Got," there's a pause where the eldest kid thinks but doesn't say 'pissed off', "annoyed because the ball went near his car. We didn't even hit it or anything. He grabbed the ball and threw it up there. We were trying to get it down when Bucky saved the day." Which makes Bucky smile too, from what Sam could see of him between branches.
Getting up the tree seemed to have been relatively straight-forward, given how high up he was when Sam came along. Bucky threw the ball back to the kids. Getting down was the problem. In the end, Bucky just hurls himself down, nailing the landing but not in a way that Sam would have recommended for anyone not filled with super-soldier serum or a variant. Sam's knees hurt from just looking at it.
Bucky dusts himself off. "Don't try that yourselves. I'm trained." Sam knows that's not going to stop Dave and Eddie, because it wouldn't have stopped him, but he appreciates the effort.
Sam turns to go back into the house, and Bucky follows him, still dusting himself off. "That was stupid."
"Yeah, but they would have gone up and broken their necks, so I thought I'd better do it." Sam thinks Bucky probably has a point, and he's glad Bucky was there to help, 'cause if Dave and Eddie had injured themselves, the local council would have used it as an excuse to cut down all the trees in the neighbourhood, and a little green was always better with families growing up 'round here.
~~~~
Sam supposes it's because they're all military or special ops that they even hear it. They're all trained to notice sounds that other people don't, especially noises that they don't recognise.
That's why he, Nat and Clint immediately lean round the door to peer into the living room of their temporary headquarters.
It wasn't that Steve didn't laugh, he did, normally a quiet, low chuckle.
But Steve didn't laugh so hard and loud that you could hear him in the next room, and he didn't laugh so hard that he's curled up on the floor with it.
Sam has no idea what Bucky said to set Steve off, but he's glad he did because Steve looks happy and it's good to see.
