Ficlet requests
-
for wabbitseason.
Prompt: They say I'm supposed to keep up with the times/ But nobody ever tells me how. - Captain America interacting with someone other than Tony Stark? Main comicverse is fine.
Note: Janet takes Steve out to find a new computer. It's not set in any specific time-frame, but I figured Steve might feel better about going computer-shopping with someone who was less of a nerd and less likely to babble at him about technological stuff.
Janet gently took the dead laptop away from Steve once they got to the store and patted his arm. “There’s nothing we can do for it, you know. It’s sort of like when a dog gets rabies. We can either think about recycling it or giving it a proper burial somewhere later on.”
“I’m not attached to it. We just need to find one that looks just like it.”
She couldn’t blame for being so solemn and serious about. He probably hated knowing he’d downloaded a virus and that without realizing it had allow a bunch of malware to take over sections of his computer. The reason he’d called her was simple. She was probably the least interested in technology out of the Avengers and he probably was hoping she’d be more sympathetic.
So far, of course, Janet had been, but she’d also had to break it to him gently that he’d loused up another computer. His fourth or fifth laptop in about six months. Originally it had taken a long time to get Steve to warm up to the idea, but he’d been given one for his birthday and had enjoyed it for all of ten minutes maybe until he couldn’t figure out how to get anything to work and Tony kept telling him to just use the mouse.
At some point, he must have mastered computer basics, but Steve still didn’t seem to like them and they still kept dying on him. Being a super soldier and being Steve Rogers, he didn’t seem to like failing at anything, and she imagined it was frustrating being surrounded by people who loved typing, texting, e-mailing, and spelling things wrong on purpose. Steve probably thought everyone else had a better grasp on all of it than he did and had yet to realize that computer problems were everyone’s problem in the long-run. He probably just needed something sturdy like a Macbook, but she wasn’t even going to suggest it. Any Mac operating system would probably make him feel even stupider than he already felt.
“Why don’t we just get you a better one?” Janet asked. “We could get one with Vista on it. Save you a lot of grief.”
“If it was the same, no one else would know.”
“Oh, please. Who even cares? If anyone gives you a hard time about it, I’ll beat them up for you and take their lunch money,” she promised.
He smiled a bit before moving forward, all but prodding at one of the display Toshibas. “What’s Vista?”
“It’s another sort of operating system. Um, you know how you had that little icon at the beginning when you turned this old hunk of junk on? That was for Windows XP.”
He hadn’t interrupted, but he looked a little vexed when she was done explaining. “I know what an operating system is.”
“Some people don’t and they still use computers,” Janet pointed out. “See? You’re doing much better than some people. Anyway, Vista is sort of like the little sister of Windows.”
Janet hoped he’d never seen the commercials about it, but Vista seemed like a good idea for some people. Like senior citizens who probably only wanted a computer of their own to use E-bay, check their e-mail and look at pictures of their grandkids online. It wasn’t that she thought of Steve as a senior citizen, but he was pretty old in some ways, and she wasn’t going to be able to explain any of this the way Tony or Hank or one of the others might have.
“Do they sell typewriters?”
“I’m sure they do somewhere, but what’s the point? You can’t check your e-mail on a typewriter.”
“I don’t get that many e-mails.”
“You must get some,” she insisted. “I send you e-mails.”
“Well, yes, you do and the others do and those spam doctors in Nigeria do.”
She couldn’t help laughing a little at that. “Don’t read anything from people you don’t know. Just delete them.”
“I could just not have a computer. You guys could just call me.”
She grinned. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How are things working out with your cell phone anyway?”
“Just fine,” he muttered.
“You haven’t accidentally put it in a washing machine again?”
Steve made a face. “Next time I need help, I’m asking Bruce.”
“Aw, cheer up,” Janet replied, lightly taking his arm and steering him over towards other laptops that had Vista and were cheaper. “Besides, if I remember correctly, you smashed up your first computer just fine on your own.”
-
for walksbyherself.
Prompt: I wanna be irreplaceable/I wanna be of use/I wanna be functional/I wanna give you peace - Anything Iron Man related
Note: Basically just a hospital scene of Tony and Pepper. This is me borrowing what happened to Pepper in Invincible Man 3 and writing about it happening in the movie-verse.
She wondered how anyone would have expected her to say no. Pepper had plenty to live for and plenty of reasons to say yes. She didn’t have a single reason to say no, which wasn’t due to any lack of experience with using the word around her boss.
There were small scars and looking at the thing glowing in her chest made her uncomfortable so eventually she tugged up the sheets. The arc reactor wasn’t going to perform any miracles with regards to her sex life, but what did? She leaned back against the pillows as Tony came in.
“So how are you doing?” he asked as if he hadn’t interrogated every doctor and nurse in the place. Even in varying degrees of conscious- and unconsciousness, she’d heard people complaining about him. Every time it made her smile.
“I feel just fine. Sort of.”
“Takes a while to adjust,” Tony agreed before pulling a chair over. “You look better.” They’d finally wiped away most of the blood from her skin and now the only marks on her were some burns and some freckles.
“Thanks to you and a really skilled surgeon.”
“Don’t thank me.”
He’d been a hero long enough that “thank you”s didn’t mean much, but Pepper was positive the reason he was refusing credit was he blamed himself for the bomb, for the buildings, and for the people that died. Because, of course, they’d found his logo on what was left of the device that had been left behind.
The only people to blame were the men and women recently taken into custody by S.H.I.E.L.D. She could have just as easily blamed herself for not running fast enough, but you couldn’t outrun an explosion you couldn’t predict anymore than you could predict the explosion itself.
“Who else am I going to thank, Tony? Who else was going to make me an arc reactor?”
“You shouldn’t have been there.”
“I always go to your social functions.”
“Because I don’t.”
“Because I know virtually everyone who attends them,” Pepper countered. “What would be the point of sending you? You’d recognize four people out of two hundred.”
He couldn’t disagree with that, and his lips quirked slightly before he slumped. “If you’d d-”
“I didn’t so don’t talk about it.”
“Can I be sorry? Hypothetically? If I wanted to be?” No one was ever going to accuse Tony Stark of apologizing much too often.
“Sorry I got hurt? Sure, but I sort of figured that out on my own.” He’d sent her more flowers than anyone else outside of Agent Coulson. “You about as subtle as…” She couldn’t think of anything. If Tony asked, Pepper was blaming the pain killers.
“Something that’s not very subtle at all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Water,” she decided. The pitcher was already in the room and after a few sips, she pushed the glass away. “When do I get out of here?”
He laughed. “Ready to get back to work already?”
“Yes.”
“Well, your ribs have to mend and we have to see how this reactor thing works for you.”
She grimaced and turned away, but when he took her hand, she squeezed it before taking hers back. Her skin still hurt a bit and touching didn’t help, but she wasn’t going to say that and she appreciated the gesture. “How long?”
“Probably a week or two.”
“Wonderful.”
“It’s not so bad. You got TV and pudding. Or jello. Something.”
“Are you sorry enough to visit me a lot?”
“Sure and Rhodey wanted to come, but I wasn’t sure if you were in the mood for company.”
“You figured you’d come pester me anyway?”
“I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”
“Meaning you’ve been at the hospital since I got here?”
“What’s two days without sleep?”
“A mistake?”
He chuckled and leaned back. “For your information, I thought about going home for longer than it took to take a shower and grab some clothes, but it’s pretty empty there and I don’t know where anything is.”
“I guess you need me around after all,” she murmured, smiling a bit before yawning.
“I guess so.”
-
for th_esaurus.
Prompt: how sure, how right / can anyone be on sight? / i said i had hope. i lied. - Something dark or angsty and Tony-ish
Note: Features Bruce Banner. But it does not take place in the same fic-verse as Forfeiture. I wrote a darker fic that was more like Forfeiture, but I’m not sure I want to post it so I’m posting this one instead. Twist my arm and I'll probably add the other one.
Bruce never really went away completely. He left from time to time without any real warning and Tony felt some of the tension drain away until the next visit. It never took long. Something always went wrong and Bruce always came back. Sometimes it would take months. Sometimes it would take Bruce actually Hulk-ing out properly to drive him back to Malibu. Sometimes Tony thought it was just that Bruce was lonely.
Every time, Tony would hesitate before opening the door and he would calculate the property damage he would properly suffer if he didn’t. He considered the population of Malibu and approximated the number of people living in the towns nearby. He considered his projects waiting in the basement and the fact that Bruce had nowhere to go. That there was no one who ever wanted to see Bruce outside of that Ross woman. A woman that Bruce seemed determined never to find again.
He always opened the door. Somewhere along the way, Bruce Banner had become his problem. Hardly a desired outcome, but perhaps it was an inevitable and obvious one.
Once he allowed the gamma monster inside, Tony would ignore him for hours. Bruce tended to pick up on not being wanted and when he got back, Bruce always seemed too tired and drained to care. He would putter around in the kitchen or the rooms upstairs and Tony would retreat to the basement. He’d fall asleep on the couch and wake up to find Bruce curled up on the other end of it like an unloved dog. Some nights, the other man’s head would be resting on Tony’s thigh. Some nights, he didn’t think he had it in him to shove the other man off and some nights he did.
Sometimes if he thought the other man was asleep and unlikely to notice, he would ran a few fingers through his hair and see what he could glean from the files on Bruce’s beat-up laptop.
He could have reported all of this to S.H.I.E.L.D., but the last thing they needed was a good reason to keep Bruce in a glass box of a room somewhere. Maybe that would have been the right thing to do, but all it would have taken was another career choice or a PHD to put Tony in a similar position.
All it would have taken was a little less money and a little less of an interest in circuit boards to make him a monster instead of the guy with a dysfunctional heart.
At the end of the day and at the end of every period of meditative hesitation, Tony opened the door because he knew what it was like to fuck up as badly as Bruce.
“This isn’t a halfway house, you know,” he muttered on the umpteenth visit. He wanted to be angry about having to send the twins he’d been hoping to score with home. He wanted to be anything but unsurprised and numbly tolerant. “It’s not even a safehouse.”
Bruce was doing his best to look as harmless as possible. Most of the time he was. “That doesn’t prevent me from being homeless.”
“I heard about what happened in Kemi.” What the hell sort of grudge can you possibly have against snow castles in Lapland? was a question he decided not to ask.
“I thought the cold might help,” Bruce mumbled, tugging the tip of his baseball cap further down as Tony sighed.
“Nothing helps you, does it?”
“Not really.”
It took a few days, but Tony wasn’t even surprised when Bruce found a reason to turn into the Hulk. The damage to his house was minimal and more than anything he wished they’d assemble a team of Avengers already so that other people would have to claim responsibility for the other man.
Instead, he hurried down to the basement, put on his suit and flew to where the monster was growling and destroying various cars. A few repulsor blasts and the monster followed him down to the beach, angrily grabbing at the air around Tony, but missing him every time.
Until they were finally closer to the water and then Jarvis miscalculated. Or Tony miscalculated. Either way, he got snatched out of the air and held upside by one boot until he took off his helmet.
The green dumb thing sat down, eying him thoughtfully before eventually tossing him down in the sand. It was a light toss. It didn’t hurt. Attempting to go back to hovering, resulted in being picked up like a toy and clutched at. Tony warily allowed it.
The sun came up before the monster’s grip finally slackened. Tony wandered down to the shore to throw pebbles, not really wanting to watch Bruce change back.
He was watching one skip across the surface of the water as Bruce joined him.
“Did…”
“You didn’t kill anyone.”
“No,” Bruce murmured. As if he could have known or remembered. “I didn’t you hurt you, did I?”
“Nope. Looks like your monster’s got a thing for me too.”
Bruce snorted and looked out at the water. “I think about… I think I should give up. That there isn’t a cure. I think about turning myself in.”
Tony shrugged, attempting to look bored instead of concerned. “If you want.”
“I’d never see you.”
“You don’t know that.” Even if it was probably true.
“I know you wouldn’t mind much. It’s okay. I know you don’t like me.”
“You don’t know that either.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t. You don’t want me around. Not that I blame you, but…”
In all honestly, Tony didn’t even know how he felt about Bruce. There wasn’t much fun to be had in making someone else feel even worse about themselves than they already did. Living up to people’s low expectations was a drag too. Tony hated that just about as much as he did being obligated to keep an eye on someone.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that all I want right now is breakfast,” Tony decided, putting his helmet back on. He headed up the beach, not having to look back to know Bruce would follow him.
-
for wabbitseason.
Prompt: They say I'm supposed to keep up with the times/ But nobody ever tells me how. - Captain America interacting with someone other than Tony Stark? Main comicverse is fine.
Note: Janet takes Steve out to find a new computer. It's not set in any specific time-frame, but I figured Steve might feel better about going computer-shopping with someone who was less of a nerd and less likely to babble at him about technological stuff.
Janet gently took the dead laptop away from Steve once they got to the store and patted his arm. “There’s nothing we can do for it, you know. It’s sort of like when a dog gets rabies. We can either think about recycling it or giving it a proper burial somewhere later on.”
“I’m not attached to it. We just need to find one that looks just like it.”
She couldn’t blame for being so solemn and serious about. He probably hated knowing he’d downloaded a virus and that without realizing it had allow a bunch of malware to take over sections of his computer. The reason he’d called her was simple. She was probably the least interested in technology out of the Avengers and he probably was hoping she’d be more sympathetic.
So far, of course, Janet had been, but she’d also had to break it to him gently that he’d loused up another computer. His fourth or fifth laptop in about six months. Originally it had taken a long time to get Steve to warm up to the idea, but he’d been given one for his birthday and had enjoyed it for all of ten minutes maybe until he couldn’t figure out how to get anything to work and Tony kept telling him to just use the mouse.
At some point, he must have mastered computer basics, but Steve still didn’t seem to like them and they still kept dying on him. Being a super soldier and being Steve Rogers, he didn’t seem to like failing at anything, and she imagined it was frustrating being surrounded by people who loved typing, texting, e-mailing, and spelling things wrong on purpose. Steve probably thought everyone else had a better grasp on all of it than he did and had yet to realize that computer problems were everyone’s problem in the long-run. He probably just needed something sturdy like a Macbook, but she wasn’t even going to suggest it. Any Mac operating system would probably make him feel even stupider than he already felt.
“Why don’t we just get you a better one?” Janet asked. “We could get one with Vista on it. Save you a lot of grief.”
“If it was the same, no one else would know.”
“Oh, please. Who even cares? If anyone gives you a hard time about it, I’ll beat them up for you and take their lunch money,” she promised.
He smiled a bit before moving forward, all but prodding at one of the display Toshibas. “What’s Vista?”
“It’s another sort of operating system. Um, you know how you had that little icon at the beginning when you turned this old hunk of junk on? That was for Windows XP.”
He hadn’t interrupted, but he looked a little vexed when she was done explaining. “I know what an operating system is.”
“Some people don’t and they still use computers,” Janet pointed out. “See? You’re doing much better than some people. Anyway, Vista is sort of like the little sister of Windows.”
Janet hoped he’d never seen the commercials about it, but Vista seemed like a good idea for some people. Like senior citizens who probably only wanted a computer of their own to use E-bay, check their e-mail and look at pictures of their grandkids online. It wasn’t that she thought of Steve as a senior citizen, but he was pretty old in some ways, and she wasn’t going to be able to explain any of this the way Tony or Hank or one of the others might have.
“Do they sell typewriters?”
“I’m sure they do somewhere, but what’s the point? You can’t check your e-mail on a typewriter.”
“I don’t get that many e-mails.”
“You must get some,” she insisted. “I send you e-mails.”
“Well, yes, you do and the others do and those spam doctors in Nigeria do.”
She couldn’t help laughing a little at that. “Don’t read anything from people you don’t know. Just delete them.”
“I could just not have a computer. You guys could just call me.”
She grinned. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How are things working out with your cell phone anyway?”
“Just fine,” he muttered.
“You haven’t accidentally put it in a washing machine again?”
Steve made a face. “Next time I need help, I’m asking Bruce.”
“Aw, cheer up,” Janet replied, lightly taking his arm and steering him over towards other laptops that had Vista and were cheaper. “Besides, if I remember correctly, you smashed up your first computer just fine on your own.”
-
for walksbyherself.
Prompt: I wanna be irreplaceable/I wanna be of use/I wanna be functional/I wanna give you peace - Anything Iron Man related
Note: Basically just a hospital scene of Tony and Pepper. This is me borrowing what happened to Pepper in Invincible Man 3 and writing about it happening in the movie-verse.
She wondered how anyone would have expected her to say no. Pepper had plenty to live for and plenty of reasons to say yes. She didn’t have a single reason to say no, which wasn’t due to any lack of experience with using the word around her boss.
There were small scars and looking at the thing glowing in her chest made her uncomfortable so eventually she tugged up the sheets. The arc reactor wasn’t going to perform any miracles with regards to her sex life, but what did? She leaned back against the pillows as Tony came in.
“So how are you doing?” he asked as if he hadn’t interrogated every doctor and nurse in the place. Even in varying degrees of conscious- and unconsciousness, she’d heard people complaining about him. Every time it made her smile.
“I feel just fine. Sort of.”
“Takes a while to adjust,” Tony agreed before pulling a chair over. “You look better.” They’d finally wiped away most of the blood from her skin and now the only marks on her were some burns and some freckles.
“Thanks to you and a really skilled surgeon.”
“Don’t thank me.”
He’d been a hero long enough that “thank you”s didn’t mean much, but Pepper was positive the reason he was refusing credit was he blamed himself for the bomb, for the buildings, and for the people that died. Because, of course, they’d found his logo on what was left of the device that had been left behind.
The only people to blame were the men and women recently taken into custody by S.H.I.E.L.D. She could have just as easily blamed herself for not running fast enough, but you couldn’t outrun an explosion you couldn’t predict anymore than you could predict the explosion itself.
“Who else am I going to thank, Tony? Who else was going to make me an arc reactor?”
“You shouldn’t have been there.”
“I always go to your social functions.”
“Because I don’t.”
“Because I know virtually everyone who attends them,” Pepper countered. “What would be the point of sending you? You’d recognize four people out of two hundred.”
He couldn’t disagree with that, and his lips quirked slightly before he slumped. “If you’d d-”
“I didn’t so don’t talk about it.”
“Can I be sorry? Hypothetically? If I wanted to be?” No one was ever going to accuse Tony Stark of apologizing much too often.
“Sorry I got hurt? Sure, but I sort of figured that out on my own.” He’d sent her more flowers than anyone else outside of Agent Coulson. “You about as subtle as…” She couldn’t think of anything. If Tony asked, Pepper was blaming the pain killers.
“Something that’s not very subtle at all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Water,” she decided. The pitcher was already in the room and after a few sips, she pushed the glass away. “When do I get out of here?”
He laughed. “Ready to get back to work already?”
“Yes.”
“Well, your ribs have to mend and we have to see how this reactor thing works for you.”
She grimaced and turned away, but when he took her hand, she squeezed it before taking hers back. Her skin still hurt a bit and touching didn’t help, but she wasn’t going to say that and she appreciated the gesture. “How long?”
“Probably a week or two.”
“Wonderful.”
“It’s not so bad. You got TV and pudding. Or jello. Something.”
“Are you sorry enough to visit me a lot?”
“Sure and Rhodey wanted to come, but I wasn’t sure if you were in the mood for company.”
“You figured you’d come pester me anyway?”
“I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”
“Meaning you’ve been at the hospital since I got here?”
“What’s two days without sleep?”
“A mistake?”
He chuckled and leaned back. “For your information, I thought about going home for longer than it took to take a shower and grab some clothes, but it’s pretty empty there and I don’t know where anything is.”
“I guess you need me around after all,” she murmured, smiling a bit before yawning.
“I guess so.”
-
for th_esaurus.
Prompt: how sure, how right / can anyone be on sight? / i said i had hope. i lied. - Something dark or angsty and Tony-ish
Note: Features Bruce Banner. But it does not take place in the same fic-verse as Forfeiture. I wrote a darker fic that was more like Forfeiture, but I’m not sure I want to post it so I’m posting this one instead. Twist my arm and I'll probably add the other one.
Bruce never really went away completely. He left from time to time without any real warning and Tony felt some of the tension drain away until the next visit. It never took long. Something always went wrong and Bruce always came back. Sometimes it would take months. Sometimes it would take Bruce actually Hulk-ing out properly to drive him back to Malibu. Sometimes Tony thought it was just that Bruce was lonely.
Every time, Tony would hesitate before opening the door and he would calculate the property damage he would properly suffer if he didn’t. He considered the population of Malibu and approximated the number of people living in the towns nearby. He considered his projects waiting in the basement and the fact that Bruce had nowhere to go. That there was no one who ever wanted to see Bruce outside of that Ross woman. A woman that Bruce seemed determined never to find again.
He always opened the door. Somewhere along the way, Bruce Banner had become his problem. Hardly a desired outcome, but perhaps it was an inevitable and obvious one.
Once he allowed the gamma monster inside, Tony would ignore him for hours. Bruce tended to pick up on not being wanted and when he got back, Bruce always seemed too tired and drained to care. He would putter around in the kitchen or the rooms upstairs and Tony would retreat to the basement. He’d fall asleep on the couch and wake up to find Bruce curled up on the other end of it like an unloved dog. Some nights, the other man’s head would be resting on Tony’s thigh. Some nights, he didn’t think he had it in him to shove the other man off and some nights he did.
Sometimes if he thought the other man was asleep and unlikely to notice, he would ran a few fingers through his hair and see what he could glean from the files on Bruce’s beat-up laptop.
He could have reported all of this to S.H.I.E.L.D., but the last thing they needed was a good reason to keep Bruce in a glass box of a room somewhere. Maybe that would have been the right thing to do, but all it would have taken was another career choice or a PHD to put Tony in a similar position.
All it would have taken was a little less money and a little less of an interest in circuit boards to make him a monster instead of the guy with a dysfunctional heart.
At the end of the day and at the end of every period of meditative hesitation, Tony opened the door because he knew what it was like to fuck up as badly as Bruce.
“This isn’t a halfway house, you know,” he muttered on the umpteenth visit. He wanted to be angry about having to send the twins he’d been hoping to score with home. He wanted to be anything but unsurprised and numbly tolerant. “It’s not even a safehouse.”
Bruce was doing his best to look as harmless as possible. Most of the time he was. “That doesn’t prevent me from being homeless.”
“I heard about what happened in Kemi.” What the hell sort of grudge can you possibly have against snow castles in Lapland? was a question he decided not to ask.
“I thought the cold might help,” Bruce mumbled, tugging the tip of his baseball cap further down as Tony sighed.
“Nothing helps you, does it?”
“Not really.”
It took a few days, but Tony wasn’t even surprised when Bruce found a reason to turn into the Hulk. The damage to his house was minimal and more than anything he wished they’d assemble a team of Avengers already so that other people would have to claim responsibility for the other man.
Instead, he hurried down to the basement, put on his suit and flew to where the monster was growling and destroying various cars. A few repulsor blasts and the monster followed him down to the beach, angrily grabbing at the air around Tony, but missing him every time.
Until they were finally closer to the water and then Jarvis miscalculated. Or Tony miscalculated. Either way, he got snatched out of the air and held upside by one boot until he took off his helmet.
The green dumb thing sat down, eying him thoughtfully before eventually tossing him down in the sand. It was a light toss. It didn’t hurt. Attempting to go back to hovering, resulted in being picked up like a toy and clutched at. Tony warily allowed it.
The sun came up before the monster’s grip finally slackened. Tony wandered down to the shore to throw pebbles, not really wanting to watch Bruce change back.
He was watching one skip across the surface of the water as Bruce joined him.
“Did…”
“You didn’t kill anyone.”
“No,” Bruce murmured. As if he could have known or remembered. “I didn’t you hurt you, did I?”
“Nope. Looks like your monster’s got a thing for me too.”
Bruce snorted and looked out at the water. “I think about… I think I should give up. That there isn’t a cure. I think about turning myself in.”
Tony shrugged, attempting to look bored instead of concerned. “If you want.”
“I’d never see you.”
“You don’t know that.” Even if it was probably true.
“I know you wouldn’t mind much. It’s okay. I know you don’t like me.”
“You don’t know that either.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t. You don’t want me around. Not that I blame you, but…”
In all honestly, Tony didn’t even know how he felt about Bruce. There wasn’t much fun to be had in making someone else feel even worse about themselves than they already did. Living up to people’s low expectations was a drag too. Tony hated that just about as much as he did being obligated to keep an eye on someone.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that all I want right now is breakfast,” Tony decided, putting his helmet back on. He headed up the beach, not having to look back to know Bruce would follow him.
-