Meme sheepery ficlets: the complete list
The results of my ficlet/drabble request meme post. If a fandom isn't given, it's Avengers or Invaders-centric 616!Marvel fic.
For pandanoai: Hank/Jan (fluff)
Once a year, he asked her to marry him, and once a year, she turned him down. They had done it three times now, and Hank had gotten a lot better at hiding his disappointment.
This time, he didn't flinch when she said no, didn't ask why not.
"But we're living in sin," he said, fingers digging into the muscles of her back, between her wings. "Wouldn't you rather be respectable, honey?"
"In this room?" Jan groaned as Hank's thumb dug hard into a pressure point that wasn't there when she was full size. "We're practically June and Ward Cleaver."
The hotel room had a pair of narrow twin beds in it, not exactly a honeymoon sweet by any stretch of the imagination, but they'd let Luke, Danny, and Jessica take the room with the kingsize bed, and Steve and Tony and Peter and MJ were sharing the room with the two doubles, which was bound to be an interesting experience for all concerned.
There were ways to cope with narrow mattresses, in their case. Jan's down pillow spread out around them like the biggest, softest bed in the world.
"It's been three years," Hank pressed. The fingers on her back stilled, and then Hank was slipping an arm around her waist and nuzzling at the patch of extra-sensitive skin on her forehead where one of her antennae would have been had she chosen to let it manifest -- not that she ever did, but Hank had sworn they would be useful someday and was still dilegently trying to duplicate a pair for himself.
Jan shivered, goosebumps tightening her skin, and leaned back into Hank, turning her head to catch his mouth with her own. She didn't have to worry about her wings being crushed, not with Hank; he fitted himself around and between them automatically, with the ease of long practice.
"Three years," she agreed, when she finally broke the kiss. "Let's not jynx it." She kissed him again, this time on the side of the neck, just below the corner of his jaw, and added, "So, we're in a hotel room in Vegas, living in sin. Tell me, Blue Eyes, am I your ridiculously expensive mistress, or am I the debauched and jaded socialite hooking up with the handsome stranger she met in the casino?"
Hank moaned, his eyes going half lidded -- pheremones, not strong enough to work on a full size human, or possibly not the right kind to affect a normal human at all, though Scott Lang had, embarassingly, also been able to sense them. So could Spiderman, which was why he and MJ were sharing a room with Steve and Tony and not with the two of them.
"Maybe you won me in a poker game," he suggested.
"You shouldn't have bet more than you could afford to lose," Jan purred, wriggling around so that she was facing him, stradling his lap with his arms still around her waist. "Now you belong to me, to do whatever I want with. Carry my shopping backs. Escort me out to dinner. Anything I can think of." She reached down and squeezed, and Hank's breath started to come faster, his hips jerking sharply underneath her.
"Anything," he agreed.
"Because," she prompted, letting her wings beat lazily a couple of times. Once a year, Hank asked her to marry him. After the last time, she'd finally figured out that it wasn't actually legal formalities he wanted.
"Because I belong to you."
"Yes," Jan said, "you do. And don't think, Henry J. Pym, that I'm going to let you forget that just because I'm not going to marry you again."
"Trust me," Hank gasped, shuddering underneath her, "I won't."
***
For dorcas_gustine: Ex Machina ficlet, Bradbury/Mitchell(ish)
For dallin_dae: Hellblazer ficlet (gen)
Most people would not have been able to sucessfully hitch-hike all the way from Los Angeles to Chicago. Most people were not John Constantine. When you were riding the synchronicity highway, there was always someone willing to stop and give you a lift.
Only one of them had turned out to be a serial killer.
John had known something wasn't right with the man as soon as he climbed out of the cab of his truck and spoke to him. He smiled too widely, for one, and his eyes stayed focussed on John's just a little too long.
Truck drivers were, John had learned by this point, not technically allowed to give random, desreputable-looking strangers from nowhere lifts. Truck drivers who were obviously dishonest and probably engaged in some form of criminal activity, on the other hand, were a little more likely to say yes when you held out what looked like a fifty-dollar bill -- American money all looked the same; useful, that -- and asked for a ride.
It wasn't until John was in the truck, ignoring the seatbelt and searching through the pockets of his coat for a pack of cigarettes -- it was pissing down rain outside, and even offering the laws of nature a little otherwordly assistance hadn't been enough to get a cigarette to light and stay lit -- that he slowly began to realize that he might have made a very stupid decision.
The truck's diesel engine rumbled to life with a coughing noise, then settled down to the chugging growl that had grown familiar over the past two days, and the air in the cab began to feel... wrong.
Violent death leaves a mark, a sort of stain on the places where it's happened, and after speading so much time recently getting cozy with Mictlantecuhtli, John couldn't miss it.
It wasn't any of his business, however, so John lit a cigarette, cracking the truck's window a hair when the driver shot him a disapproving look, and settled back to enjoy the ride. He'd get out the next time they stopped for gas.
Of course, it didn't work that way. He was John bloody Constantine, and nothing could ever be that easy.
Two hours into the drive, after John had been subjected to enough whining tirades about American politics on A.M. radio to begin actively looking forwards to finding a new ride, the driver pulled off onto a slip road and drove them down a short stretch of road and into a camping area that in summer would be full of middle class Americans on holiday. This time of year, it was as empty and lifeless as the moon.
When the driver pulled out a gun, John was expecting it. He threw himself sideways while the bullet smashed through the side window behind him, and then called in a few recent debts owed. The atmosphere inside the vehicle was perfect for it, the old blood soaked between the seat cushions crying out for vengeance.
Hitch-hiking by the side of the interstate was a nerve-wracking experience compared to waiting around to beg a ride at a rest station. After the first dozen or so cars whipped past him at lethal speed, John decided to stack the odds a little in his own favor.
A whispered incantation, a few symbols on the asphalt that would leter be obliterated with the scrape of a boot, and he was both irrisistable and harmless. A family in a minivan picked him up, and he rode to the next rest station sharing a back seat with a pair of squalling brats who were entirely too wide awake for two in the morning.
"Cheers," he told the tired-looking female driver an hour or so later, as he handed over a twenty to cover part of her petrol expenses. He waved back at her over his shoulder as he walked away toward the light of the rest station, where a brigthly colored sign over the door welcomed him to Illinois.
The Missouri state highway patrol found the empty truck still parked at the camping grounds three days later, when John was on a British Airways flight to London and currently midway over the Atlantic. There was a bullet hole in the passenger-side window and a single, bloody handprint on the inside of the windshield, the shape of the fingers bizarrely long and thin. The keys were still in the ignition, and the entire cab smelled like sulfur and rot.
The driver's body was never found.
***
For kijikun: Pepper & Dr. Strange fic (technically gen, but I like to think of this ficlet as pre-het)
For ani_bester: Bucky/Toro ficlet
Toro had heard a lot about how wonderful Paris was. Thus far, it was doing a better job of living up to expectations than he'd hoped for.
"To Paris," Bucky said, and toasted Toro with the half-empty champagne bottle they had liberated from a former Nazi officer's quarters. It had probably been very expensive, once. Bucky and Cap worked with the Howling Commandoes as often as they did with the Invaders, and Nick Fury's guys always knew where to find the good alcohol.
"To Paris!" Toro echoed. "To pretty French girls just waiting to give their liberators a kiss."
Bucky laughed, his eyes bright with champagne. "I bet you've never kissed anyone in your life. Let alone a French girl."
"I've had more dames than you'll ever know." It wasn't exactly a lie. There had been one or two girls back before Jim had found him, when he'd still been with the circus. It had never gone any firther than kissing -- he'd barely been more than a kid then, after all -- but it was something. After that... the fire was harder to control when he was excited. Girls tended not to like that.
"Yeah?" Bucky asked. "I don't believe it from you anymore than I do when Cap says it. You both blush just the same way."
"Yeah," Toro returned. "If you were a girl, I could make your head spin faster than..." inspiration ran out, "well, let's just say you'd be begging for more."
Bucky grinned that slightly manic grin that always made Toro think of machinegun fire, and said, "Prove it."
So Toro did.
When he woke up in the middle of the night, hours later, the inhuman screams of men burning to death ringing in his ears, Bucky was still sound asleep next to him, his head on Toro's soulder, one hand settled posessively over his hip.
***
For axolotl_lan: Jan & Peter drabble
"I can't wear this suit! I think it costs more than my old apartment." Peter held out his arms to display the suit jacket, which, if his old apartment was anywhere near as dire as MJ's stories had painted it, probably did cost more than his monthly rent once had.
It was worth every penny. No man every failed to look good in a tuxedo, and since this one had been specifically designed to both flatter Peter's somewhat short and skinny figure and to perfectly match and compliment MJ's dress, Jan would have been extremely disappointed in herself if Peter hadn't looked good enough to eat.
"Think of yourself as a walking advertisement," she advised him. "Like a billboard that reads 'Van Dyne can design mens' formal wear just as well as Armani can,' only less expensive and more subtle."
"Last time I wore a tuxedo to one of these thing, people thought I was with the catering staff and kept handing me their empty glasses and crap the whole night." Peter tugged at the hem of his jacket, doing his level best to ruin the line of the suit and not succeeding.
"Trust me," Jan told him. "You won't have that problem this time."
***
For lasergirl: Book!Bond fic, Bond & Felix
So, this is an excerpt from an imaginary epic-length fic wherein Felix and Bond have adventures in Central America. This scene takes place at some point after the two of them have escaped from the crazy German expatriot and plantain/banana magnate who's obessed with human sacrifice and the ancient Aztecs/Maya/Inca and was going to have his minion cut Bond's heart out with an obsidian dagger, and before they prevent the German plantain/banana magnate from blowing up the Panama canal:
The Central American rainforest is never silent. The Panama isthmus is home to more species of tropical bird than anywhere else in the world, and Bond could hear their trills and squawks all around him. It was like Crab Key all over again, except that instead of fleeing Dr. No's men through a cypress swamp with Quarell and Honey Ryder, he was trudging through the Panamanian jungle with a heavily limping Felix Lieter leaning on his shoulder.
"Remind me again," Leiter panted, "how many miles it is to Gatun?"
Bond frowned, his sunburned and battered face making the expression forboding. "Six miles." Six miles through some of the densest and most inhospitable terrain in central America -- a mosquito-infested combination of rain forest and mangrove swamp that would challenge a healthy man in prime condition. Bond and Felix, both of them injured and exhausted, would be lucky to make it to Gatun at all, let alone within the next twenty-four hours.
If they did not, if they failed to arrive before the deadline, then von Gunther's deadly plan would proceed unopposed, and the massive explosions he had arranged would wipe out the Gatun Dam and the massive Gatun locks, releasing the hundreds of tonnes of water held back for use in regulating the water levels of the canal and rendering the only sea route between the Caribbean and the Pacific completely impassable.
"Six miles," Leiter repeated. He didn't say anything more, but Bond caught his meaning anyway.
He could feel the tremors of strain and exhaustion in the thin frame pressed against his side, and knew that his own reserves of strength were running low. The bullet wound in his arm was a hot, sullen ache, the injury swollen in a way that promised infection.
Leiter stumbled over an exposed root, his useless leg buckling, and Bond just barely managed to prevent both of them from falling. It would be the first of many falls, he knew, as the two of them grew more and more tired.
"James," Leiter said, after a long moment wherein both of them leaned against a strangler fig and caught their breath. "There is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to be able to walk through five more miles of this. You can pretend to be some kind of superhero all you want, but it's time to face reality, and the reality of it is that you can't drag my deadweight through the jungle all the way to Gatun."
Strangler figs, Bond remembered, were polinated solely by a single species of wasp, plant and insect utterly incapable of surviving without one another. Funny, the things the mind latched on to when it was exhausted.
There was no room in this business for sentiment. Bond, when on a mission, was as cold and ruthless as necessary in order to get the job done; you had to be, or one slip up, one yielding to finer feelings at the wrong moment, could condemn the whole mission to failure, and the agent's life along with it.
"I can't leave you behind," he said honestly. "You're the only one of us who speaks Spanish."
Leiter stared at him blankly for a second, and then began to laugh.
[/sad attempt to mimic Flemming's prose style]
***
For mississippienne: Daredevil ficlet, (gen/canon pairings)
Hospitals, like subway stations, were places Matt generally tried his level best to avoid. The smell of disinfectant burned his nose, harsh and sterile, the fluorescent lights hummed maddeningly, and all around him were the sounds of people suffering, people in pain.
It was like going to visit Mila, in the hospital that she was probably never going to leave, the one she was trapped in because of him, and that only made the guilt worse.
Foggy's hand was on his shoulder, steering him down the hallway in that high-handed way that Foggy does sometimes, and Matt was grateful for it. The touch grounds him -- the sound of Foggy's breathing, the smell of his aftershave, of the coffee he'd gulped down for breakfast, the scent still present on his breath.
"She's out of surgery already," Foggy was saying. "They say the bullet went straight through."
She'd asked too many questions, Matt thought. Or asked the wrong ones. He should never have gotten Dakota involved.
He should never have gotten involved with Dakota. Elektra, Karen, Foggy, Mila; everyone he gets too close to suffers for it.
Sounds echo off the tile floors and cinderblock walls, just like in Rikers, making it hard to judge distance, to tell how far away things are. When they reach Dakota's room, he can hear machines beeping, whirring, hear her breathing and smell antiseptic and wound dressings and blood and the heavy taint of anesthetic and painkillers in her sweat, and it makes the whole thing real.
Blood is very red, he remembers that. Matt doesn't dream in images as much as he used to when he was younger, but when he does, his dreams are always entirely black and white except for the blood, which is always bright, deep, primary-color red. It doesn't smell red, though. It smells like raw meat and metal and pain.
"She looks good," Foggy said. "A little pale, but good." He squeezed Matt's shoulder, and added. "The doctors say she ought to wake up any time now."
Touching would have been inappropriate, so Matt closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Dakota's breathing, of her heartbeat, and tried not to wonder when he'd learned to pick that particular rythym out in a crowd. The way he could with Foggy's. The way he'd been able to with Mila's. With Karen's.
***
For geekmama: PotC, OT3 ficlet.
Port Royal held many women who were raising children on their own while their husbands were away at sea. Most of those women, however, were ordinary sailors wives, not the former governor's daughter.
Money was not an issue, not with the tribute the Pirate King was paid, and not with the funds her father had left her, and ready cash and a good line of credit went a long way towards giving Will Turner's wife and child a veneer of respectability.
It didn't go far, though, and Elizabeth was cold and lonely at night. She was a woman grown and married, a mother, and yet the only time she'd ever known a man's touch was that one glorious hour on the beach with Will (Jack's lips under hers, his body against hers as she snapped the manacles around his wrists didn't count, though she had to remind herself of that often).
James was nine, nearly ten, before he ever saw his father, and Elizabeth was nearly thirty, lines forming at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, before she saw Will again.
He hadn't aged a single day in ten years. Even the scar over his heart was still red and livid, as if it had barely finished healing.
Will went back to his ship, and Elizabeth went back to Port Royal, back to pretending to be respectable for her son's sake while pirate gold paid for their clothes, the servents' wages, and the horses and carriage.
When Jack showed up at the next new moon, sneaking into Port Royal in a tiny and bedraggled little sloop in the dead of night, also not a day older than he'd been ten years ago -- if anything, he seemed younger, the faint lines around his eyes that the khol had always only mostly hidden gone now -- and presented her with a glass vial of water and a bargain, she didn't hesitate.
The Pirate King would step out of retirement and arrange for Jack to get the Black Pearl back from Barbossa (again; that ship seemed to change hands more often than some of the smaller Windward Isles, which had been French, Spanish, Enlish, and Dutch in turn) and Captain Jack Sparrow would lend her the use of his compass and the only ship in the world that could outrun the Flying Dutchmen.
Will couldn't set foot on land but once every ten years. No one, Jack pointed out, had ever said anything about the Captain of the Dutchmen's lady wife setting foot aboard his ship.
The water he insisted they drink to seal the bargain was the clearest and purest Elizabeth had ever tasted, and made her skin tingle from the inside out. When Jack waggled his eyebrows and suggested that there were also other, more intimate ways to seal bargains, she answered yes to that, too, and shrugged away any guilt.
Will had given her his heart in a box, and she would keep it safe until she died, but he was also as married to his ship and his duty as he was to her. And ten years alone is a long time.
It wasn't until she looked in the mirror the next morning, and saw the face of a woman who hadn't existed in a decade staring back at her that Elizabeth realized what Jack's water had done to her.
James took to the sea with an ease that would have made both his grandfather and his namesake proud, and Will welcomed Elizabeth and Jack both with a stunned laugh and open arms, but it was still a very long time before she completely forgave Jack for what he had done to her.
No woman should have to watch her son grow old and die while she remains young.
She understood, though; the Flying Dutchmen crossed paths with the Pearl at least once a year, and every year, there were fewer of the Pearl's old crew left, until eventually, the only men and woman left alive who'd seen skeletons walk in the moonlight and fought the Kracken were Will, Elizabeth, and Jack. And Barbossa, wherever he was. It never did well to leave him out of one's reckoning.
Jack might only see them every few months, but when the three of slept in a tangle in the Pearl or the Dutchman's captain's quarters, there was always a satisfied and completely peaceful smile on his face, and on Will's.
No one likes the idea of spending eternity alone.
***
For pandanoai: Hank/Jan (fluff)
Once a year, he asked her to marry him, and once a year, she turned him down. They had done it three times now, and Hank had gotten a lot better at hiding his disappointment.
This time, he didn't flinch when she said no, didn't ask why not.
"But we're living in sin," he said, fingers digging into the muscles of her back, between her wings. "Wouldn't you rather be respectable, honey?"
"In this room?" Jan groaned as Hank's thumb dug hard into a pressure point that wasn't there when she was full size. "We're practically June and Ward Cleaver."
The hotel room had a pair of narrow twin beds in it, not exactly a honeymoon sweet by any stretch of the imagination, but they'd let Luke, Danny, and Jessica take the room with the kingsize bed, and Steve and Tony and Peter and MJ were sharing the room with the two doubles, which was bound to be an interesting experience for all concerned.
There were ways to cope with narrow mattresses, in their case. Jan's down pillow spread out around them like the biggest, softest bed in the world.
"It's been three years," Hank pressed. The fingers on her back stilled, and then Hank was slipping an arm around her waist and nuzzling at the patch of extra-sensitive skin on her forehead where one of her antennae would have been had she chosen to let it manifest -- not that she ever did, but Hank had sworn they would be useful someday and was still dilegently trying to duplicate a pair for himself.
Jan shivered, goosebumps tightening her skin, and leaned back into Hank, turning her head to catch his mouth with her own. She didn't have to worry about her wings being crushed, not with Hank; he fitted himself around and between them automatically, with the ease of long practice.
"Three years," she agreed, when she finally broke the kiss. "Let's not jynx it." She kissed him again, this time on the side of the neck, just below the corner of his jaw, and added, "So, we're in a hotel room in Vegas, living in sin. Tell me, Blue Eyes, am I your ridiculously expensive mistress, or am I the debauched and jaded socialite hooking up with the handsome stranger she met in the casino?"
Hank moaned, his eyes going half lidded -- pheremones, not strong enough to work on a full size human, or possibly not the right kind to affect a normal human at all, though Scott Lang had, embarassingly, also been able to sense them. So could Spiderman, which was why he and MJ were sharing a room with Steve and Tony and not with the two of them.
"Maybe you won me in a poker game," he suggested.
"You shouldn't have bet more than you could afford to lose," Jan purred, wriggling around so that she was facing him, stradling his lap with his arms still around her waist. "Now you belong to me, to do whatever I want with. Carry my shopping backs. Escort me out to dinner. Anything I can think of." She reached down and squeezed, and Hank's breath started to come faster, his hips jerking sharply underneath her.
"Anything," he agreed.
"Because," she prompted, letting her wings beat lazily a couple of times. Once a year, Hank asked her to marry him. After the last time, she'd finally figured out that it wasn't actually legal formalities he wanted.
"Because I belong to you."
"Yes," Jan said, "you do. And don't think, Henry J. Pym, that I'm going to let you forget that just because I'm not going to marry you again."
"Trust me," Hank gasped, shuddering underneath her, "I won't."
***
For dorcas_gustine: Ex Machina ficlet, Bradbury/Mitchell(ish)
For dallin_dae: Hellblazer ficlet (gen)
Most people would not have been able to sucessfully hitch-hike all the way from Los Angeles to Chicago. Most people were not John Constantine. When you were riding the synchronicity highway, there was always someone willing to stop and give you a lift.
Only one of them had turned out to be a serial killer.
John had known something wasn't right with the man as soon as he climbed out of the cab of his truck and spoke to him. He smiled too widely, for one, and his eyes stayed focussed on John's just a little too long.
Truck drivers were, John had learned by this point, not technically allowed to give random, desreputable-looking strangers from nowhere lifts. Truck drivers who were obviously dishonest and probably engaged in some form of criminal activity, on the other hand, were a little more likely to say yes when you held out what looked like a fifty-dollar bill -- American money all looked the same; useful, that -- and asked for a ride.
It wasn't until John was in the truck, ignoring the seatbelt and searching through the pockets of his coat for a pack of cigarettes -- it was pissing down rain outside, and even offering the laws of nature a little otherwordly assistance hadn't been enough to get a cigarette to light and stay lit -- that he slowly began to realize that he might have made a very stupid decision.
The truck's diesel engine rumbled to life with a coughing noise, then settled down to the chugging growl that had grown familiar over the past two days, and the air in the cab began to feel... wrong.
Violent death leaves a mark, a sort of stain on the places where it's happened, and after speading so much time recently getting cozy with Mictlantecuhtli, John couldn't miss it.
It wasn't any of his business, however, so John lit a cigarette, cracking the truck's window a hair when the driver shot him a disapproving look, and settled back to enjoy the ride. He'd get out the next time they stopped for gas.
Of course, it didn't work that way. He was John bloody Constantine, and nothing could ever be that easy.
Two hours into the drive, after John had been subjected to enough whining tirades about American politics on A.M. radio to begin actively looking forwards to finding a new ride, the driver pulled off onto a slip road and drove them down a short stretch of road and into a camping area that in summer would be full of middle class Americans on holiday. This time of year, it was as empty and lifeless as the moon.
When the driver pulled out a gun, John was expecting it. He threw himself sideways while the bullet smashed through the side window behind him, and then called in a few recent debts owed. The atmosphere inside the vehicle was perfect for it, the old blood soaked between the seat cushions crying out for vengeance.
Hitch-hiking by the side of the interstate was a nerve-wracking experience compared to waiting around to beg a ride at a rest station. After the first dozen or so cars whipped past him at lethal speed, John decided to stack the odds a little in his own favor.
A whispered incantation, a few symbols on the asphalt that would leter be obliterated with the scrape of a boot, and he was both irrisistable and harmless. A family in a minivan picked him up, and he rode to the next rest station sharing a back seat with a pair of squalling brats who were entirely too wide awake for two in the morning.
"Cheers," he told the tired-looking female driver an hour or so later, as he handed over a twenty to cover part of her petrol expenses. He waved back at her over his shoulder as he walked away toward the light of the rest station, where a brigthly colored sign over the door welcomed him to Illinois.
The Missouri state highway patrol found the empty truck still parked at the camping grounds three days later, when John was on a British Airways flight to London and currently midway over the Atlantic. There was a bullet hole in the passenger-side window and a single, bloody handprint on the inside of the windshield, the shape of the fingers bizarrely long and thin. The keys were still in the ignition, and the entire cab smelled like sulfur and rot.
The driver's body was never found.
***
For kijikun: Pepper & Dr. Strange fic (technically gen, but I like to think of this ficlet as pre-het)
For ani_bester: Bucky/Toro ficlet
Toro had heard a lot about how wonderful Paris was. Thus far, it was doing a better job of living up to expectations than he'd hoped for.
"To Paris," Bucky said, and toasted Toro with the half-empty champagne bottle they had liberated from a former Nazi officer's quarters. It had probably been very expensive, once. Bucky and Cap worked with the Howling Commandoes as often as they did with the Invaders, and Nick Fury's guys always knew where to find the good alcohol.
"To Paris!" Toro echoed. "To pretty French girls just waiting to give their liberators a kiss."
Bucky laughed, his eyes bright with champagne. "I bet you've never kissed anyone in your life. Let alone a French girl."
"I've had more dames than you'll ever know." It wasn't exactly a lie. There had been one or two girls back before Jim had found him, when he'd still been with the circus. It had never gone any firther than kissing -- he'd barely been more than a kid then, after all -- but it was something. After that... the fire was harder to control when he was excited. Girls tended not to like that.
"Yeah?" Bucky asked. "I don't believe it from you anymore than I do when Cap says it. You both blush just the same way."
"Yeah," Toro returned. "If you were a girl, I could make your head spin faster than..." inspiration ran out, "well, let's just say you'd be begging for more."
Bucky grinned that slightly manic grin that always made Toro think of machinegun fire, and said, "Prove it."
So Toro did.
When he woke up in the middle of the night, hours later, the inhuman screams of men burning to death ringing in his ears, Bucky was still sound asleep next to him, his head on Toro's soulder, one hand settled posessively over his hip.
***
For axolotl_lan: Jan & Peter drabble
"I can't wear this suit! I think it costs more than my old apartment." Peter held out his arms to display the suit jacket, which, if his old apartment was anywhere near as dire as MJ's stories had painted it, probably did cost more than his monthly rent once had.
It was worth every penny. No man every failed to look good in a tuxedo, and since this one had been specifically designed to both flatter Peter's somewhat short and skinny figure and to perfectly match and compliment MJ's dress, Jan would have been extremely disappointed in herself if Peter hadn't looked good enough to eat.
"Think of yourself as a walking advertisement," she advised him. "Like a billboard that reads 'Van Dyne can design mens' formal wear just as well as Armani can,' only less expensive and more subtle."
"Last time I wore a tuxedo to one of these thing, people thought I was with the catering staff and kept handing me their empty glasses and crap the whole night." Peter tugged at the hem of his jacket, doing his level best to ruin the line of the suit and not succeeding.
"Trust me," Jan told him. "You won't have that problem this time."
***
For lasergirl: Book!Bond fic, Bond & Felix
So, this is an excerpt from an imaginary epic-length fic wherein Felix and Bond have adventures in Central America. This scene takes place at some point after the two of them have escaped from the crazy German expatriot and plantain/banana magnate who's obessed with human sacrifice and the ancient Aztecs/Maya/Inca and was going to have his minion cut Bond's heart out with an obsidian dagger, and before they prevent the German plantain/banana magnate from blowing up the Panama canal:
The Central American rainforest is never silent. The Panama isthmus is home to more species of tropical bird than anywhere else in the world, and Bond could hear their trills and squawks all around him. It was like Crab Key all over again, except that instead of fleeing Dr. No's men through a cypress swamp with Quarell and Honey Ryder, he was trudging through the Panamanian jungle with a heavily limping Felix Lieter leaning on his shoulder.
"Remind me again," Leiter panted, "how many miles it is to Gatun?"
Bond frowned, his sunburned and battered face making the expression forboding. "Six miles." Six miles through some of the densest and most inhospitable terrain in central America -- a mosquito-infested combination of rain forest and mangrove swamp that would challenge a healthy man in prime condition. Bond and Felix, both of them injured and exhausted, would be lucky to make it to Gatun at all, let alone within the next twenty-four hours.
If they did not, if they failed to arrive before the deadline, then von Gunther's deadly plan would proceed unopposed, and the massive explosions he had arranged would wipe out the Gatun Dam and the massive Gatun locks, releasing the hundreds of tonnes of water held back for use in regulating the water levels of the canal and rendering the only sea route between the Caribbean and the Pacific completely impassable.
"Six miles," Leiter repeated. He didn't say anything more, but Bond caught his meaning anyway.
He could feel the tremors of strain and exhaustion in the thin frame pressed against his side, and knew that his own reserves of strength were running low. The bullet wound in his arm was a hot, sullen ache, the injury swollen in a way that promised infection.
Leiter stumbled over an exposed root, his useless leg buckling, and Bond just barely managed to prevent both of them from falling. It would be the first of many falls, he knew, as the two of them grew more and more tired.
"James," Leiter said, after a long moment wherein both of them leaned against a strangler fig and caught their breath. "There is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to be able to walk through five more miles of this. You can pretend to be some kind of superhero all you want, but it's time to face reality, and the reality of it is that you can't drag my deadweight through the jungle all the way to Gatun."
Strangler figs, Bond remembered, were polinated solely by a single species of wasp, plant and insect utterly incapable of surviving without one another. Funny, the things the mind latched on to when it was exhausted.
There was no room in this business for sentiment. Bond, when on a mission, was as cold and ruthless as necessary in order to get the job done; you had to be, or one slip up, one yielding to finer feelings at the wrong moment, could condemn the whole mission to failure, and the agent's life along with it.
"I can't leave you behind," he said honestly. "You're the only one of us who speaks Spanish."
Leiter stared at him blankly for a second, and then began to laugh.
[/sad attempt to mimic Flemming's prose style]
***
For mississippienne: Daredevil ficlet, (gen/canon pairings)
Hospitals, like subway stations, were places Matt generally tried his level best to avoid. The smell of disinfectant burned his nose, harsh and sterile, the fluorescent lights hummed maddeningly, and all around him were the sounds of people suffering, people in pain.
It was like going to visit Mila, in the hospital that she was probably never going to leave, the one she was trapped in because of him, and that only made the guilt worse.
Foggy's hand was on his shoulder, steering him down the hallway in that high-handed way that Foggy does sometimes, and Matt was grateful for it. The touch grounds him -- the sound of Foggy's breathing, the smell of his aftershave, of the coffee he'd gulped down for breakfast, the scent still present on his breath.
"She's out of surgery already," Foggy was saying. "They say the bullet went straight through."
She'd asked too many questions, Matt thought. Or asked the wrong ones. He should never have gotten Dakota involved.
He should never have gotten involved with Dakota. Elektra, Karen, Foggy, Mila; everyone he gets too close to suffers for it.
Sounds echo off the tile floors and cinderblock walls, just like in Rikers, making it hard to judge distance, to tell how far away things are. When they reach Dakota's room, he can hear machines beeping, whirring, hear her breathing and smell antiseptic and wound dressings and blood and the heavy taint of anesthetic and painkillers in her sweat, and it makes the whole thing real.
Blood is very red, he remembers that. Matt doesn't dream in images as much as he used to when he was younger, but when he does, his dreams are always entirely black and white except for the blood, which is always bright, deep, primary-color red. It doesn't smell red, though. It smells like raw meat and metal and pain.
"She looks good," Foggy said. "A little pale, but good." He squeezed Matt's shoulder, and added. "The doctors say she ought to wake up any time now."
Touching would have been inappropriate, so Matt closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Dakota's breathing, of her heartbeat, and tried not to wonder when he'd learned to pick that particular rythym out in a crowd. The way he could with Foggy's. The way he'd been able to with Mila's. With Karen's.
***
For geekmama: PotC, OT3 ficlet.
Port Royal held many women who were raising children on their own while their husbands were away at sea. Most of those women, however, were ordinary sailors wives, not the former governor's daughter.
Money was not an issue, not with the tribute the Pirate King was paid, and not with the funds her father had left her, and ready cash and a good line of credit went a long way towards giving Will Turner's wife and child a veneer of respectability.
It didn't go far, though, and Elizabeth was cold and lonely at night. She was a woman grown and married, a mother, and yet the only time she'd ever known a man's touch was that one glorious hour on the beach with Will (Jack's lips under hers, his body against hers as she snapped the manacles around his wrists didn't count, though she had to remind herself of that often).
James was nine, nearly ten, before he ever saw his father, and Elizabeth was nearly thirty, lines forming at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, before she saw Will again.
He hadn't aged a single day in ten years. Even the scar over his heart was still red and livid, as if it had barely finished healing.
Will went back to his ship, and Elizabeth went back to Port Royal, back to pretending to be respectable for her son's sake while pirate gold paid for their clothes, the servents' wages, and the horses and carriage.
When Jack showed up at the next new moon, sneaking into Port Royal in a tiny and bedraggled little sloop in the dead of night, also not a day older than he'd been ten years ago -- if anything, he seemed younger, the faint lines around his eyes that the khol had always only mostly hidden gone now -- and presented her with a glass vial of water and a bargain, she didn't hesitate.
The Pirate King would step out of retirement and arrange for Jack to get the Black Pearl back from Barbossa (again; that ship seemed to change hands more often than some of the smaller Windward Isles, which had been French, Spanish, Enlish, and Dutch in turn) and Captain Jack Sparrow would lend her the use of his compass and the only ship in the world that could outrun the Flying Dutchmen.
Will couldn't set foot on land but once every ten years. No one, Jack pointed out, had ever said anything about the Captain of the Dutchmen's lady wife setting foot aboard his ship.
The water he insisted they drink to seal the bargain was the clearest and purest Elizabeth had ever tasted, and made her skin tingle from the inside out. When Jack waggled his eyebrows and suggested that there were also other, more intimate ways to seal bargains, she answered yes to that, too, and shrugged away any guilt.
Will had given her his heart in a box, and she would keep it safe until she died, but he was also as married to his ship and his duty as he was to her. And ten years alone is a long time.
It wasn't until she looked in the mirror the next morning, and saw the face of a woman who hadn't existed in a decade staring back at her that Elizabeth realized what Jack's water had done to her.
James took to the sea with an ease that would have made both his grandfather and his namesake proud, and Will welcomed Elizabeth and Jack both with a stunned laugh and open arms, but it was still a very long time before she completely forgave Jack for what he had done to her.
No woman should have to watch her son grow old and die while she remains young.
She understood, though; the Flying Dutchmen crossed paths with the Pearl at least once a year, and every year, there were fewer of the Pearl's old crew left, until eventually, the only men and woman left alive who'd seen skeletons walk in the moonlight and fought the Kracken were Will, Elizabeth, and Jack. And Barbossa, wherever he was. It never did well to leave him out of one's reckoning.
Jack might only see them every few months, but when the three of slept in a tangle in the Pearl or the Dutchman's captain's quarters, there was always a satisfied and completely peaceful smile on his face, and on Will's.
No one likes the idea of spending eternity alone.
***