fanfic: (X-Force) "Provoked"
Title: Provoked
Fandom: Marvel U
Characters: Rictor, Shatterstar, others
Prompt: So then he said...
Word Count: 814
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Deals with revelations about Rictor and Shatterstar, respectively, from X-Force #30 & 34. I suppose you could say it's a sort of missing scene stream of consciousness.
Author's Notes: I'm calling this pre-slash. Props to justlikemagic for doing a beta read.
Hypothetical question: what would you do if a guy you thought you knew pretty well -- a guy you trusted to watch your back in a fight, a buddy, maybe even guy you thought was kinda attractive and who showed signs of maybe thinking the same thing in regards to you -- what would you do if he suddenly wanted to tell you about his never-before-mentioned wife? Who does that? Keeps the fact that he's married a total secret and then drops it on you like a friggin' bomb?
I'll tell you what I did. I ran the car up over the curb, is what I did. Then I cursed at Shatterstar (my personal bomber on this occasion) and put the car in reverse and parked it properly, and cursed some more. He received this reaction with an air of mild puzzlement not far off from how he looks when I yell at him for deciding to channel surf in the middle of a show I'm watching.
He's a one-man disruptive force it my life. It sucks.
"What the hell?!" I finally wound down to. "I leave you alone for a few hours and you elope? Who is she? Where is she?"
I think I can be forgiven for making the assumption, wrong as it was. Turns out he hadn't eloped while I was shopping. He'd been married for years, since before I met him; since before he came to my planet. I asked why he'd never mentioned this before and he shrugged. It hadn't seemed important, he said. I refrained from suggesting it might have deterred Feral from hitting on him all the time, because I honestly don't think it would have.
So I told him to shut up, turned the radio on loud, and pointed the car towards our base. At least I knew he wouldn't razz me for speeding.
I doubt it was even five minutes before he turned the music down and started talking. See, Shatterstar has two default conversational settings: "textbook definition of taciturn" and just plain "textbook". Sometimes he just spits out paragraphs, all perfect grammar and mangled slang. Usually all in one breath, too. When he gets like that, it's a gargantuan effort to get him to just shut up.
This was one of those times.
He said her name was "Windsong", and I meanly wondered if that was the Mojoverse version of "Bambi". He said she was a dancer, and I didn't ask if that involved the removal of clothes. He described her to me, said he'd been shown a vid of her performing when he was told she'd been chosen as his mate.
He explained -- and I listened, despite myself -- that this match was made when they were both still slaves; that he'd never met her face-to-face, and never expected to. Their genetic material would have been used to produce a child in a gene lab, to breed a new generation of arena fighters. He told me he couldn't be sure children hadn't been produced, and that it hadn't seemed important as more than a backwards mark of prestige until he came to Earth. He'd found out by chance that Windsong was free, had joined a different resistance cell than his own -- and beyond that bit of knowledge, he hadn't thought about her much.
I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.
We were barely back at our team's headquarters when we got sucked into doing stupidly hectic mutant stuff. I'm still trying to work out what all happened, but afterwards -- I was still ticked at Shatterstar, and he knew it, and he tried to make amends without actually apologizing. He showed me the news report about my family. He guilt-tripped me into going to see them, and I let him, because deep down part of me still wants to believe in that whole TV "family is Important" shtick that he's only now learning.
So now I'm on a flight to Mexico with a cyborg whose evil clone killed my father and an albino who has pretty much been basting herself in sunblock every twenty minutes. I can think of a hundred ways or more that this can go wrong wrong wrong, I am nervous as hell, and I'm realizing that I forgive Shatterstar. Or rather, I get that there's nothing I need to forgive. He didn't know what my concept of a "wife" or a "family" was until he saw it on TV, sadly -- and he really doesn't have either one, not as I understand them. The fact that he's not only figured out what these things mean to me, but decided to tell me about Windsong is.... interesting. Potentially kinda scary. Definitely something I have to deal with later, though, because the plane's landing.
Huh. Never thought the big reunion with my relatives would be a distraction.
Cross-posted to ricstar
Fandom: Marvel U
Characters: Rictor, Shatterstar, others
Prompt: So then he said...
Word Count: 814
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Deals with revelations about Rictor and Shatterstar, respectively, from X-Force #30 & 34. I suppose you could say it's a sort of missing scene stream of consciousness.
Author's Notes: I'm calling this pre-slash. Props to justlikemagic for doing a beta read.
Hypothetical question: what would you do if a guy you thought you knew pretty well -- a guy you trusted to watch your back in a fight, a buddy, maybe even guy you thought was kinda attractive and who showed signs of maybe thinking the same thing in regards to you -- what would you do if he suddenly wanted to tell you about his never-before-mentioned wife? Who does that? Keeps the fact that he's married a total secret and then drops it on you like a friggin' bomb?
I'll tell you what I did. I ran the car up over the curb, is what I did. Then I cursed at Shatterstar (my personal bomber on this occasion) and put the car in reverse and parked it properly, and cursed some more. He received this reaction with an air of mild puzzlement not far off from how he looks when I yell at him for deciding to channel surf in the middle of a show I'm watching.
He's a one-man disruptive force it my life. It sucks.
"What the hell?!" I finally wound down to. "I leave you alone for a few hours and you elope? Who is she? Where is she?"
I think I can be forgiven for making the assumption, wrong as it was. Turns out he hadn't eloped while I was shopping. He'd been married for years, since before I met him; since before he came to my planet. I asked why he'd never mentioned this before and he shrugged. It hadn't seemed important, he said. I refrained from suggesting it might have deterred Feral from hitting on him all the time, because I honestly don't think it would have.
So I told him to shut up, turned the radio on loud, and pointed the car towards our base. At least I knew he wouldn't razz me for speeding.
I doubt it was even five minutes before he turned the music down and started talking. See, Shatterstar has two default conversational settings: "textbook definition of taciturn" and just plain "textbook". Sometimes he just spits out paragraphs, all perfect grammar and mangled slang. Usually all in one breath, too. When he gets like that, it's a gargantuan effort to get him to just shut up.
This was one of those times.
He said her name was "Windsong", and I meanly wondered if that was the Mojoverse version of "Bambi". He said she was a dancer, and I didn't ask if that involved the removal of clothes. He described her to me, said he'd been shown a vid of her performing when he was told she'd been chosen as his mate.
He explained -- and I listened, despite myself -- that this match was made when they were both still slaves; that he'd never met her face-to-face, and never expected to. Their genetic material would have been used to produce a child in a gene lab, to breed a new generation of arena fighters. He told me he couldn't be sure children hadn't been produced, and that it hadn't seemed important as more than a backwards mark of prestige until he came to Earth. He'd found out by chance that Windsong was free, had joined a different resistance cell than his own -- and beyond that bit of knowledge, he hadn't thought about her much.
I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.
We were barely back at our team's headquarters when we got sucked into doing stupidly hectic mutant stuff. I'm still trying to work out what all happened, but afterwards -- I was still ticked at Shatterstar, and he knew it, and he tried to make amends without actually apologizing. He showed me the news report about my family. He guilt-tripped me into going to see them, and I let him, because deep down part of me still wants to believe in that whole TV "family is Important" shtick that he's only now learning.
So now I'm on a flight to Mexico with a cyborg whose evil clone killed my father and an albino who has pretty much been basting herself in sunblock every twenty minutes. I can think of a hundred ways or more that this can go wrong wrong wrong, I am nervous as hell, and I'm realizing that I forgive Shatterstar. Or rather, I get that there's nothing I need to forgive. He didn't know what my concept of a "wife" or a "family" was until he saw it on TV, sadly -- and he really doesn't have either one, not as I understand them. The fact that he's not only figured out what these things mean to me, but decided to tell me about Windsong is.... interesting. Potentially kinda scary. Definitely something I have to deal with later, though, because the plane's landing.
Huh. Never thought the big reunion with my relatives would be a distraction.
Cross-posted to ricstar