Hi! I hope you're doing okay in these crazy times. I just wanted to ask if Can't Part the Sea, Can't Reach the Shore has been shelved for lack of a better term and if so, do you think you could give this fan a glimpse as to what you were planning? I was following the story from the beginning and I am dying to know what was going to happen! No pressure of course, just curious! Really though, I hope you are doing okay. Things are not easy but things usually work themselves out most times!
Hi lovely!
It’s on hiatus for the moment, I guess 😖. I got a bit burnt out and I’ve had a very busy time from August I’d say. New house and a load of reno which has sapped a lot of my energy. I intend to finish the fic, though I can’t commit on timelines unfortunately! Don’t really want to spill my secrets on main but if you want to message privately off anon I’m happy give you the gist!
“There are two MLKs. There once was a man named Martin Luther King Jr. who actually lived and breathed. He was a radical who believed in the redistribution of wealth, argued for slave reparations and that wrote that moderate whites who didn’t speak out on racism were just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan. Seventy-five percent of Americans disapproved of that man when he was killed by a white supremacist in 1968. Then, there is the Martin Luther King Jr. that exists in the collective white memory. Through a complex combination of whitewashing, self-guilt and the intentional rewriting of history that absolves them of their hatred, they have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a civil rights icon whose dreams were fulfilled by America’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic hologram of King that is ahistorical, but still “based on a true story.” Their Martin was a lover, not a fighter. They remember a socially conservative, respectable reconciler; not an anti-establishment revolutionary. And, for their sake, his doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple “nonviolence.” This is the King they will remember this weekend.”
— Martin Luther King Jr. and the White Delusion of a ‘Non-Racist’ America
(via blxckberrying)
37. “Welcome to fatherhood.” with someone telling tony that after seeing him with Peter? Maybe uhhh... Clint? Is he the one with a wife and kids? Sorry if this doesn't make much sense lol
Sorry for taking your prompt and pretty much doing the farthest possible opposite of what you were envisioning but I thought Tony with amnesia would make for a hilarious scenario! Thanks for sending this and I hope you enjoy!!
Combining with anon’s prompt #7: “Well, that’s tragic.”
Summary: Tony wakes up in the MedBay with amnesia from an apparent flying magician attack, but it takes him no time at all as soon as Peter enters the room to assume that he’s got a kid. A kid.
Legally Speaking, Not Biologically
When Tony wakes up with the most killer headache of his entire sixteen years on earth, he figures he must have skateboarded down one too many stair rails at MIT and paid the price for it.
He coughs and flails a bit, which does nothing to help the headache (since when did anyone expect him to be competent at anything beyond calculus, though?), and slowly cracks open his lids to register the fuzzy outline of Rhodey’s head hovering just slightly off-center over him.
Eyes crusty, throat dry as the earth before Noah’s flood, Tony croaks out, “You look so old, Jim. What the hell happened to you?”
“Excuse me?”
There he is, deadpan as ever.
Tony goes to rub his eyes and clear the crusties from them, but there are IV lines attached to his hand and the jerky movement sends a sting up his arm. He hisses at the pain and then groans.
“Take it easy, Tones. Take it easy. Lemme get that for you.” Rhodey makes quick work of easing the line out of his hand--which--okay, what the fuck. When did Rhodey get so competent at all this medical stuff? And if he’s in the hospital, why the hell doesn’t he just call in a nurse for this? Tony’s pretty sure that yanking out somebody else’s IV is, like, on the list of hospital crimes or something that could get you banned from visiting hours. Or worse, the hallway vending machine.
“Welcome back to earth, Tony, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“The last thing I remember,” Tony says snippily in his undignified rasp, “is your mug not looking like a wizened potato.”
“Hm,” says Rhodey. “Sounds like your memory is shot, but your mechanism for sarcasm is still intact. Hooray.”
Tony coughs into his fist and struggles to sit up straighter, while his best friend fluffs his pillows with that combination of solicitousness and complete ennui that only Jim Rhodes can achieve.
“Where am I?” Tony coughs again. “What happened? And hold up--what the fuck.” What the fuck, indeed, because holy hell, did his voice just drop thirty-seven octaves?
Rhodes lifts a brow dryly at him. “What the fuck seems to encompass the situation pretty accurately, but you’re gonna have to be a bit more precise.” He pats Tony’s shoulder that is nearer to him--earning him a token wince from Tony--and settles back into his bedside chair. “Well, let’s see. Typical rendezvous with the criminals--solo mission from the sound of it, is what I gather from FRIDAY--seriously, Tones, can’t you just have one brunch in the city without it all going to shit? Anyway. What did I expect.” He waves his hand generously in the air and puffs out a breath between his teeth. “Your kid swoops in to help you, everything’s going great, and then--get this--magicians--and I’m not talking regular Harry Potter ass wand-flicking nitwits, I’m talking flying magicians--”
“The whole Bedknobs and Broomsticks works?” Tony interjects, unable to help himself, despite the fact that he one-hundred-percent, absolutely has zero clue what’s going on and what any of the words coming out of Rhodey’s mouth right now mean.
“The whole nine yards,” Rhodey concurs with a nod. “Your kid’s swinging, you see ’em first and fly up to knock him out of the way, you get blasted with whatever technicolor spices they cooked up for the day, and then bam, you’re falling a couple dozen feet to the ground with FRIDAY’s systems all shut down.”
“What the fuck,” Tony says again into the long pause that follows Rhodey’s simultaneously dramatic and dry-as-saltine-crackers retelling of his adventures. Still nothing has been demystified for Tony, but this much he can gather: he’s middle-aged, somehow (which, ew, gross), he’s some kind of flying superhero with magical flying enemies, some assistant named Friday couldn’t keep their shit together during this mission, and--oh, that’s right. He has--he has a goddamn kid.
He hardly knows which part to ask about, much less react to.
“Tones?” Rhodey says in a rather...interesting tone of voice. “Everything...okay up there in your thick skull?”
“Yeah, no. Where is this Friday guy? I need to chew the hell outta him for--”
“Right--about that--”
Neither man gets to finish his sentence, however, because a second later both jump halfway out of their skin at the chaotic entrance of a woman and kid at the doorway.
“Tony!” the woman cries out first, kind of all choked up but with her face contorted as if she’s keeping everything under wraps. She’s got her dark hair all tumbling out of her bun in waves at the sides of her face and her gold wire-rimmed glasses are askew in a way that seems somehow frightening rather than flustered.
Must be the wife, Tony thinks.
“Oh my God, you’re finally awake!” the pipsqueak in front of his presumed wife says. “I am literally so sorry for being inattentive back there, you have no idea, like, Mr. Rhodey here probably had to pry my hands away from you as soon as the paramedics came--”
“It’s true,” Rhodey affirms with no small amount of amusement coloring his voice.
“Peter, let the man breathe,” says the woman, placing one hand on her hip in a practiced gesture of fond exasperation.
“Right! That would be--that would be a good idea.” The boy, apparently named Peter, drops unceremoniously onto the edge of Tony’s bedside and beams half-nervously up at him.
Right.
So this would be the kid.
God, Tony’s already groaning internally at how his own motormouth from his early years seems to have found a sturdy foothold in Peter’s DNA.
He’s distracted then by the clicking of approaching heels, and his heart jumpstarts at the rhythm--call it habit, call it PTSD, it’s all been one and the same up to this point in his life. Still, he can’t help but let his gaze be arrested by the vision of ginger curls and mile-long torso and power suit shoulders that fill the doorway behind Peter and his mom.
Now Tony’s heart is well and truly quickening, and he doubts it’s any longer from fear. Well, maybe a little bit. He always did say a healthy dose of intimidation did him wonders in the realm of attraction.
And then Tony’s thought process spirals from there into an indecipherable succession of if the other woman is my wife, I really fucking hope this isn’t my mistress, to maybe we’re divorced? and this redhead is my new wife? to oh, God, how did I actually get myself into a situation involving the word alimony, to wait. so is my kid with the first woman a superhero? Rhodey said-- and rapidly downward to the overarching holy shit I have a KID.
“Pepper,” Rhodey greets the redheaded woman warmly. The first woman with dark hair straightens from her position leaning against the wall to engulf Pepper in a brief hug with a kiss on her temple.
Okay...so...friendly exes?
“Hi, Mrs. Pepper,” Peter says with a little two-finger wave from where he’s still sat on the edge of Tony’s bed. “He’s awake, but he hasn’t been saying much.”
Pepper arches a brow. “Well, that’s a real first. How are you feeling, Tony?”
Tony figures the vibe of the entire room is chill enough to settle on complete honesty. “Like that time me and Rhodey slept in the closet of the chem lab with a box of Taquitos because we got locked in overnight and when we woke up again I felt like somebody had rearranged half my spinal cord and all my phalanges.”
Both women raise their brows at him now, and then at Rhodey.
Rhodey says. “Not a tall tale. That actually happened. For the record, that was his fault, not his.”
“Course it was,” Peter says in what Tony can only describe as a disgustingly sweet and traitorous voice. “Whenever was it not?”
Tony raises a finger in the air to get their attention. “Excuse me. Hold up. Are you all saying I let my own son talk to me this way?”
It’s Peter’s turn now to let his eyebrows shoot skyward the moment the phrase my son leaves Tony’s mouth. Peter’s mother sucks her mouth into a fish-like shape, tongue in cheek, and seems to be looking elsewhere, anywhere but at the testy invalid in bed. Tony can’t be sure with this crowd he barely knows at the moment, but he’s pretty darn certain there’s an air of laughter being painstakingly held in.
The heavy silence punctuated by various rhythms of pained breathing is finally broken by Rhodey. “Uh,” he says. “About that. As far as I can tell, Tony has amnesia.”
“Well, that’s tragic,” Tony says wryly.
Rhodey rolls his eyes. “He still thinks he’s a teenager.”
“Is he gonna forget everything he said the next time he wakes up?” Peter asks before the last words have even left Rhodey’s mouth. “Oh geez, please tell me FRIDAY got this on video. Oh, God. This is too good.”
“Hold up, kid, hold up,” Tony protests. “I’m pretty sure amnesia doesn’t fucking work that way.”
“God, he was worse as a teenager,” Peter’s mom deadpans. “I never thought it was possible.”
“Hey!” says Tony. “A little dignity, please? Just because we’re divorced doesn’t mean you get to shit all over the invalid here.”
Peter’s eyes bug out of his head. Pepper lets out an inelegant, high-pitched sound somewhere between a sigh and a porcupine-like shriek, and promptly folds in on herself on the nearest chair on the other side of Tony’s bed. She definitely looks the type of woman to be surprised at finding herself undone.
“May is my freaking aunt,” says Peter. “You and--ew. No. Ew.”
“I’m not that unattractive,” May and Tony speak over each other at the same time.
“Pepper,” Rhodey pleads.
“Rhodey,” she pleads back. They all probably need some gas medication in here, stat.
Tony slaps a calloused hand over the side of his face and groans long-sufferingly. “I’ve just been shot out of the sky by flying witches, apparently, and I can’t remember shit past my skateboarding accident on the stairs, so excuse me for getting a little mixed up here on the family trees when you all haven’t even given me any goddamn context.”
“I’m Rhodey,” Rhodey volunteers.
“Knew that,” Tony shoots back. “Geezer.”
Rhodey ignores him. He points at Peter. “That’s the kid.” Peter wiggles his fingers back. “And I mean the kid, not your kid, but that’s debatable--legally speaking, not biologically. Christ, Tony, you should’ve seen your face.”
“What the hell do you mean ‘legally’ and ‘not biologically’?”
Rhodey shrugs. The smug bastard. “Welcome to fatherhood.”
Rhodey goes down the line in the room. “That’s May Parker, the kid’s aunt-slash-guardian. You two have this weird thing where you bicker all the time and she ships Peter off to you when she’s had enough of his schooltime idiocy and it’s your turn to give him some lab science idiocy. And that over there is your lovely wife--Virginia--”
“Virginia,” Tony says again, looking back at the ethereal and--yup, still frightening--specimen of woman at his other side.
“There’s a reason you call me Pepper,” says Pepper. “FRIDAY has it on video. You’ll have all the time in the world to review it later.”
“--and there’s a whole bunch of others who sometimes live in the Tower, but that’s beside the point. Right now, you’re the one in the MedBay,” Rhodey finishes off.
“Lordy,” Tony says. “I need a New Coke.”
“They don’t make those anymore,” says Rhodey with the straightest face ever.
“God fucking dammit,” Tony says without missing a beat.
It’s been a while, and I’ve been told this is the thing to do, so here is a masterlist of everything I have written in the Irondad fandom :) All links lead to ao3 where warnings can be found.
Multi-chapter:
All the Things We’ve Lost (And All the Things We’ve Gained) – Canon divergent after Infinity War. Months after setting the world right, Tony is kidnapped and interrogated by the last vestiges of Hydra. They want something, and they know just what (or who) to use to force his hand.
Can’t Part the Sea, Can’t Reach the Shore – Peter doesn’t know how he ended up in this hospital, in this place where they tell him he’s suffering with delusions, that he made up Spider-man. But he does know that they’re wrong. Right? (WIP)
Tis but a scratch (I lied, please help me) – My contribution to Whumptober 2018. While this is multi-chapter, each chapter can stand on its own, which leads us to….
A Spider Isn’t Just for Christmas — In which a trip to pick out a Christmas tree leads to a couple of horrible bad very not good days for Peter.
One shots:
What We Leave Behind – After a fight that doesn’t go so well, Peter spends some time in the hospital, warring with what it means to be both a dad, and Spider-man.
Kryptonite – Peter is acting weird at the lake house. Tony tries to figure out why.
Of Needles and Ice Cream – After a close call, Tony decides they need to have a supply of Peter’s blood on hand for emergencies. Too bad Peter is deathly afraid of needles.
The World, Blind – Someone with a grudge goes after Peter, but not for the reason you think.
The Strongest Wills – If you have the ability, you have the responsibility. Peter has a revelation while holding the gauntlet in the battle, and does something very Peter.
Love in Ones and Zeros – DUM-E listens, watches, and learns. A story of a boy, a bot, and a bond through the years.
HBD Loser – It’s Peter’s birthday, and those who love him want to make it great.
Swinging Axes – Tony gets a visit from Peter, but there’s something… off about him. In fact, Tony isn’t sure this is Peter at all.
Against the Dying of the Light – Post-Infinity War. On the Benetar, drifting through space and with only a few hours of oxygen left, Tony does some reflecting.
i think one of the reasons fandom is so unwilling to criticise itself is because its internalised the simplified whitefem logic of how female gaze=progressive, fandom=female gaze, therefore fandom=progressive and uses it in a way as to never examine the social constructs that the gaze was built upon, like what factors attractiveness/desire arise from.
you could say that fandom is the female gaze in its most tangible, autonomous form - it’s media for women by women, without bureaucracy and hurdles and censorship, something that never had the chance to develop because mainstream media for women is usually controlled by men. there are very few creative spaces that offer the anonymity and autonomy of internet fandom where we can all truly let our freak flags fly.
but that doesn’t mean female gaze is absolved of the issues that permeates typical forces of oppression. the female gaze is aimed at different directions, and it ranges from sexual attraction to escapist fantasy, but the female gaze when it becomes an en-masse multi-community movement has the swaying power to focus on certain characters, ships and narratives. and when it does, it paints a very telling picture of who and what it values.
female gaze regards desire/attraction first, and in white supremacist culture this means the hierarchy of white dudes, then white women, then men of colour, then women of colour. looking at overall patterns in who gets written about and who gets shunned, female gaze in fandom patterns seems to be pretty representative of the social hierarchy that ranks most-to-least valuable/humanised people.
introduction to fandom studies tells us about the values of fandom as mostly-female created space, but it rarely goes beyond that. the female gaze can be racist. it can be imperialist, ableist, transphobic, misogynistic, despite it being a concept that aims to subvert the male gaze because it did not develop in a vacuum; it developed in a society that’s oppressive and marginalising, therefore it bears the capacity of being equally oppressive and marginalising just like all other forms of media.
fandom as a manifestation of the female gaze may be more progressive than male-controlled mainstream media, but doesn’t mean it’s automatically absolved of the social issues it was born in.
