Musing Way Crossover - Incident One - Can't Take The Sky
Recently I signed up for a new project - a community on Dreamwidth called Musing Way. (Consider this my pimping for it.) The idea of MW is to sign up with a character that's in your head a lot who you like to work with and you answer prompts about them or even AS them. There are also open roleplay posts and the like.
Now... ages and ages ago... I posted the 'Her Boy Friday' Iron Man fics, with Tony Stark as a lady and Toni snowballed into her own little animal hella-fast. She sort of... moved out of my Her Boy Friday AU into this huge sprawling thing based on a single comic page, earth_3490 that quipquipquip and I have been playing out together. (If you poke your head over don't mind the erratic threads and shit, that's just how we roll. We need a proper and complete reading order post like woah, still.)
So ANYWAY when Musing Way cropped up, I took my invite code, strolled on over and set up shop with Toni - writing her early early EAAARLY in the Earth 3490 timeline (oh god yes there's a timeline). It's mid 2005, she's part of the Avengers, the public knows her as Iron Man, she drinks like a fish and her life is both awesome and kind of terrible all at once.
Musing way's prompt for Week 7 was 'Freedom'.
Toni!Muse shook me down and got me to write this at 5:30 in the morning after I'd been quite upset about stuff earlier in the evening and... I am kind of surprised how well it came out, so I wanted to share. =)
Title: The Black
Author: glassfishgirl
Fandom: Marvel Comics AU
Character(s)or Pairing: Toni Stark
Rating: PG-13 maybe for language?
Wordcount: 503
Notes: n/a
Warnings: This got... surprisingly depressing for being writing about 'freedom'..
Summary: There are times that just breathing the air down on the ground feels so smothering...
----
'Take me where I cannot stand...'
It's part of a song, something Pepper was always watching on the TV a few years back. She's a Joss Whedon fangirl, just a little bit, but Toni's never shared the obsession. Whedon depresses the fuck out of her.
The shit he writes is just too much like her real life - funny, fantastic, crushing and bitterly cruel at the most random moments, and totally and unequivocally entertaining to everyone but the people who have to live it.
But Firefly was a bit of a different stroke she supposes, and she did like the theme song.
Take me out, to the black...
Doesn't that sound like the sweetest vacation in the whole wide space of existence; to be up in the stars and weightless and just fucking FREE.
There are times that just breathing the air down on the ground feels so smothering...
Toni's liked planes ever since she was small, but nothing has ever thrilled her the same as that weightlessness of a fast descent, as feeling the turbulence rumble over the wings and shake her up a little. It made the atmosphere charging past outside into something real.
She hadn't really grasped that that tactile closeness to the sensation of flight would be something the Maiden could give her until she'd tried it out for the first time. Hovering around the workshop damaging her paperwork (and her face) was one thing. Stable flight, rocketing up and UP and OUT like a missle set off for nowhere was just...
She hadn't known she could want to climax and cry in the same moment before she first looked out through the clear glass of the visual feed and saw only endless sky before her.
tell them I ain't comin' back...
Nothing feels like this. Nothing in the world can duplicate that bullet fast ascent.
Climbing, climbing, 'engines' roaring and slowly dying under her feet as the altitude strains the limits of their burn. She drives herself past the clouds, storming forward until she's breathing nothing but canistered air and each limb is frosted over titanium alloy be damned.
She goes up until she can feel the cold of the outer atmosphere. It seeps through the Maiden's metal shell, through it's insulation, through to the neoprene suit that's plastered to her skin, and straight down to the core of her bones, and she groans in pleasure when she can no longer really feel her body and her breath clouds up against the face plate.
She goes up, until the sky is so clear that she can't imagine that all those billions and trillions of stars could be any further away than arms reach.
Out beyond the grasp of light and reason Earth glows under the clouds and Toni touches diamond scattered blackness.
I don't care, I'm still free...
She presses herself to the edges of the stratosphere, laughing high and hysterical because otherwise she'll cry, and she wonders how far she can push before gravity lets her go.
She wonders for how many moments she would live if she breached that last limiting thread of need to stay grounded.
She wonders, most of all, if the split seconds before death in the vacuum would be worth it.
You can't take the sky from me...
Now... ages and ages ago... I posted the 'Her Boy Friday' Iron Man fics, with Tony Stark as a lady and Toni snowballed into her own little animal hella-fast. She sort of... moved out of my Her Boy Friday AU into this huge sprawling thing based on a single comic page, earth_3490 that quipquipquip and I have been playing out together. (If you poke your head over don't mind the erratic threads and shit, that's just how we roll. We need a proper and complete reading order post like woah, still.)
So ANYWAY when Musing Way cropped up, I took my invite code, strolled on over and set up shop with Toni - writing her early early EAAARLY in the Earth 3490 timeline (oh god yes there's a timeline). It's mid 2005, she's part of the Avengers, the public knows her as Iron Man, she drinks like a fish and her life is both awesome and kind of terrible all at once.
Musing way's prompt for Week 7 was 'Freedom'.
Toni!Muse shook me down and got me to write this at 5:30 in the morning after I'd been quite upset about stuff earlier in the evening and... I am kind of surprised how well it came out, so I wanted to share. =)
Title: The Black
Author: glassfishgirl
Fandom: Marvel Comics AU
Character(s)or Pairing: Toni Stark
Rating: PG-13 maybe for language?
Wordcount: 503
Notes: n/a
Warnings: This got... surprisingly depressing for being writing about 'freedom'..
Summary: There are times that just breathing the air down on the ground feels so smothering...
----
'Take me where I cannot stand...'
It's part of a song, something Pepper was always watching on the TV a few years back. She's a Joss Whedon fangirl, just a little bit, but Toni's never shared the obsession. Whedon depresses the fuck out of her.
The shit he writes is just too much like her real life - funny, fantastic, crushing and bitterly cruel at the most random moments, and totally and unequivocally entertaining to everyone but the people who have to live it.
But Firefly was a bit of a different stroke she supposes, and she did like the theme song.
Take me out, to the black...
Doesn't that sound like the sweetest vacation in the whole wide space of existence; to be up in the stars and weightless and just fucking FREE.
There are times that just breathing the air down on the ground feels so smothering...
Toni's liked planes ever since she was small, but nothing has ever thrilled her the same as that weightlessness of a fast descent, as feeling the turbulence rumble over the wings and shake her up a little. It made the atmosphere charging past outside into something real.
She hadn't really grasped that that tactile closeness to the sensation of flight would be something the Maiden could give her until she'd tried it out for the first time. Hovering around the workshop damaging her paperwork (and her face) was one thing. Stable flight, rocketing up and UP and OUT like a missle set off for nowhere was just...
She hadn't known she could want to climax and cry in the same moment before she first looked out through the clear glass of the visual feed and saw only endless sky before her.
tell them I ain't comin' back...
Nothing feels like this. Nothing in the world can duplicate that bullet fast ascent.
Climbing, climbing, 'engines' roaring and slowly dying under her feet as the altitude strains the limits of their burn. She drives herself past the clouds, storming forward until she's breathing nothing but canistered air and each limb is frosted over titanium alloy be damned.
She goes up until she can feel the cold of the outer atmosphere. It seeps through the Maiden's metal shell, through it's insulation, through to the neoprene suit that's plastered to her skin, and straight down to the core of her bones, and she groans in pleasure when she can no longer really feel her body and her breath clouds up against the face plate.
She goes up, until the sky is so clear that she can't imagine that all those billions and trillions of stars could be any further away than arms reach.
Out beyond the grasp of light and reason Earth glows under the clouds and Toni touches diamond scattered blackness.
I don't care, I'm still free...
She presses herself to the edges of the stratosphere, laughing high and hysterical because otherwise she'll cry, and she wonders how far she can push before gravity lets her go.
She wonders for how many moments she would live if she breached that last limiting thread of need to stay grounded.
She wonders, most of all, if the split seconds before death in the vacuum would be worth it.
You can't take the sky from me...