freakface
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Cee and Ezra have safely escaped the Green and rejoined the line. But safe is only the first step and neither of them wants to think about what comes next.
aka what's worse: condemning yourself to being alone in an uncaring universe or Having To Talk About Your Space-Feelings?
Bookmarked by freakface
13 Feb 2023
Bookmarker's Notes
But to that point, nonetheless, the final trait Ezra has noticed in their travels is that they each hide the truth of themselves far too well. But they did so in vastly different ways. Ezra did by being big and loud and with a broad and stupid grin on his face the whole time. If you never stopped talking then people never had the chance to figure out the truth of you. If you made people think you were a wide-open book, then they wouldn’t go searching too far for what they thought was sitting right in front of them.
Cee was the opposite. She was closed off, folded down into herself tiny and tight like intricate origami. When she spoke, when she acted, when she performed tasks that would make a grown man blanch, her face revealed almost nothing. Like her writing, Ezra finds it as impressive as it is heart-breaking because he can only guess what Cee must have been through to have to develop that kind of mask, to hone and refine it and ensure that it would not break, even in the face of her father’s death.
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stay, i pray you by orphan_account
Fandoms: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man (Comics), Black Widow (Comics)
28 Sep 2019
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There is a tap on the table top and a quiet, “Scusatemi, signorina,” and she looks up. There is a boy there, no more than twenty, and he is undoubtedly American, though his Italian is so polished that even she would be unsure if not for his hesitant slouch— discomfort, it says I am out of place. His gaze is not demanding. It is not cold, either— but intelligent, distant. Not assessing, but calculating. As if she is made of code, and he is reading her.
“I speak English,” she tells him, “better than Italian.”
He slumps with something akin to relief. “Oh- that’s. That’s cool. I’m really sorry to ask-“ and he looks it, wincing and pulling his own fingers, “-but would it be okay if I sit with you? My mamma is in a formaggeria across the piazza and I desperately don’t want to stand in there and smell cheese for an hour so I was gonna grab an espresso but every other table is filled and I don’t want to impose but—?” He looks at her. He is sharp, ardent with a wisdom that puts her teeth on edge. No young man should look like that: as if he has stared straight into the barrel of a gun and laughed at the bullet, swallowed it whole.
He looks old for his age. He just. He looks.
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Bookmarked by freakface
17 Jan 2025
Bookmarker's Notes
stay, i pray you by floweryfran
She showers, scrubbing her skin until it is red and then scraping even harder, burgundy stains like wine dribbled upon a white tablecloth. Her fingernail catches on the skin of her thigh and it bleeds, weeps fat crocodile tears down the curve of her muscles and puddles on the porcelain beneath her feet. Her hands shake as she rinses it and rinses it and rinses it and it bleeds and she bleeds and somewhere down the street Tony is bleeding, too, and she needs to go staunch it for him.
She cannot put her finger upon the moment he became her responsibility. All she knows is that he is. He is hers, and she is his, somehow. They do not kiss. They do not fuck. They certainly do not make love. And still, he is hers. He is hers. He is hers.
Every beat of her heart sings it.
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She can find happiness in other places. She will. She'll do it. It's her next mission.
Objective: find happiness.
Objective: enjoy it while it's here.
Objective: let it slip through her fingers.
Objective: put a tracker on it so she can find it again.
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The Twitches are twins separated at birth. This astounds the two of them. They make JARVIS scan their DNA to see if they are twins separated at birth. They aren’t, but that’s okay. They’re, like, the inverse of it: people who were born different, but came together as one later on.
She thinks it’s much more poetic this way.
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(Peter doesn’t like it when Tony risks himself. Peter has a tendency to do stupid, wonderful things to protect Tony Stark. Her and Peter bond over this while she teaches him to spar. Sometimes they get so frustrated about Tony’s lack of self-preservation skills that they end up injuring each other by mistake and then laughing about it as blood drips into their mouths, or whatever. Peter is another one she kinda loves. She’s got a lot of people she kinda loves now.)
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She has already been mourning the loss of Tony for twenty-two days when a fuckoff mothership shows up and Tony is lead off of it by a blue girl.
What else did she expect? Tony always finds a way home. Especially when there isn’t one.
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the boy in the window by thesemovingparts
Fandoms: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
18 Dec 2021
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this fic has MAJOR no way home spoilers
enter at your own risk
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Bookmarked by freakface
16 Jan 2025
Bookmarker's Notes
When her babies fall and fly for the first time it is like choking up her own heart to feed to them.
Perhaps that’s the life of a mother, though, to give and give and watch it all fly away on a strong gust of wind.
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“You did your job, you know?” he looks down at his hands, cracker crumbs rolling between his fingertips when the sun begins to go orange at the horizon. “You did– You taught them what they need to know so they can take care of themselves and it’s not– it’s because of you that they can. It’s because of you that they’ll keep going even if nothing else will ever be home the way this is home…
“You made them strong, and you taught them well, and that’s– that’s your legacy. Everything they do with that, all the good they do– that’s your legacy too. Not the fuck-ups though. Those are on them.”
[...]
“I know it’s going to be lonely, for you and for them,” he goes on, breath on the wind of big, big noises. “But you haven’t done anything wrong. Nothing wrong.”
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by the last of his wits by whowhotellsyourstory
Fandoms: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
26 Jun 2019
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Rhodey had watched Tony take a swan dive hundreds of times, but he had never let him fall.
Bookmarked by freakface
21 Dec 2024
Bookmarker's Notes
When Rhodey was thirteen, his little brother fell into a lake. He'd watched the whole thing – the water was shallow, and the kid was stumbling up and down a rocky ledge, running half the length of the shore. It was only a matter of time before the idiot tripped. Rhodey had said nothing, deciding it wasn’t his fault or responsibility, and let it happen.
His brother cried for half an hour. Rhodey crossed his arms and called him stupid, which earned him a cuff round the head.
You can either hold him up or let him fall, his mother had scolded, there's no in-between.
That was the day Rhodey realized stupidity was a collective endeavor. He'd take on half the racists in town for his little brother, after all – if he was so willing to protect him from the world, why was it any different when it came to protecting him from himself? Loyalty, he decided, was no friend of wisdom, and Rhodey was no great carrier of humanitarian life lessons.
A brother was a brother, and Rhodey was supposed to keep him above water. At some point, everyone had to figure out there were selfish people in the world, and there were people who let them be selfish. Rhodey, like anyone before him, had to pick which he could live with, which one he’d become.
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“When it's my funeral, will you stop by?” Tony had asked of him, the day his parents had died. The words were slurred – he was characteristically drunk for an uncharacteristic reason – and Rhodey pursed his lips in response. “Just so there's someone there.”
“You die before me, I'll kill you,” Rhodey threatened, the first time he'd allowed himself to express open affection for the intoxicated asshole two seconds away from being sick all over his lap.
“God, Rhodes, that line was old the first time someone used it, in whatever soap opera invented bromance.”
“I’m serious.”
Tony permitted himself a smirk. “Race you to the finish line.”
[...]
Tony won their race. And of course he did – Rhodey was always a step behind.
“It’s like we’re back in MIT, and he’s binging through his assignments,” Rhodey had told Pepper, back when Iron Man was born, and the missions were all new and urgent and exciting. “A week straight running on coffee.”
“I don’t think he’s the kind of person that has to scrape the last of his strength to keep going,” Pepper had replied, softly, even back then alerting Rhodey to how much wiser she was to the contents of Tony’s character. “I think he’s the kind of person who’s going to lack the strength to give up, when the moment comes.”
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"Say, Rhodey, what do you do about the bus that could hit you tomorrow?"
Rhodey leaned against the wall and pondered the question. "Bus isn't here yet."
"What does that mean?"
"Means I don't know about the bus, what am I supposed to do about it?"
Tony jolted up then, and Rhodey felt a little better to see him energized in that familiar way. "But you do know about it."
"Then why would I get in its way? Do something about it."
"Exactly."
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Rhodey never thought himself the type of person who would need to speak to a grave, but the years had funny ways of changing people. Life was a series of unfinished conversations, that was a lesson Tony had taught him. “Sometimes,” he said to one of Tony’s memorials, “I imagine a world where I have the power to save you. Every single time, you tell me you’re the only one with the power to save yourself. Self-righteous bastard.” Tony couldn’t return the volley, not anymore.
I believed in him first, Rhodey thought, walking around this strange new world that didn’t have Tony Stark in it. A ghost on every wall, on every window; every step he took revealed someone else's tribute. One after another, so many, and every single one painted with the care and devotion of a life that Tony had touched but never come near.
Rhodey stopped to admire a mural in Queens, only once – the sight of an Iron Man suit, flying in all his glory, as though painted from the perspective of a child's adoring gaze – and it made him think, fiercely proud, I loved him first.
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you held his hands, it felt like flying (now he's just another man) by silvernaut
Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
17 Dec 2021
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[NO WAY HOME SPOILERS]
Spider-Man moves on.
Peter Parker does not.
Bookmarked by freakface
01 Dec 2024
Bookmarker's Notes
Peter’s fingers freeze over the keys and his heart feels like it stops and sinks to his feet and he doesn’t know if he’s relieved or scared because he can’t drag them back in, he can’t, not after how happy they are, but he’s always been selfish, and he’s always wanted people in his rapidly emptying corner.
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(Spider-Man is, still, a staple of the Avengers. He doesn’t go offworld. He doesn’t go out of state. He stays as a friendly neighbour, and he helps this new Hawkeye with gangs and he gives Captain America more information than he’s probably supposed to, and Peter can’t help but feel as if he’s too young.)
(Spider-Man moves on.)
(Peter does, too. Eventually.)