#angel-gidget

[therentyoupay]

1-sentence fic — acupuncture:

They send him to every homeopathic grandma, every apothecary, every healer in Republic City, but no matter how many sessions they charge him for, no matter how many needles they stick him with, no matter how he grits his teeth or begs or quakes or lies in restless wait, the water of the world does not, will not, cannot heed his call—and likely never will again.

[kiragecko]

Had a thought, had to share it. What if Tim's civilian friends have mixed cases of face blindness and can't-be-bothered-to-follow-news-too-closely. So Ives and others know that there is A Tim Drake that has been the lost poster child in Gotham during No Man's Land. That a kid who happens to be named Tim Drake got shot while giving a speech in the news... but they kinda go a long time without realizing it's THEIR Tim, bc Tim doesn't feel the need to talk about this kinda stuff?

This is really good!

Like, even Bernard, the conspiracy theorist, doesn't put 2 and 2 together. He cares about the world around him, not boring news that only old people watch.

Ives doesn't notice things unless they're pointed out to him, and after that time in 3rd grade where Tim had to explain that the Lindsay Lohan on TV wasn't the same as the Lindsay Lohan in their class, he's learned to ignore celebrity names.

Zo has accepted that all white boys look alike, and that Tim can't even handle basic activities outside his house. He probably slept through No Man's Land.

Tam KNOWS that Tim is Red Robin and is now adopted by Bruce, but even she doesn't associate him with the kid who used to show up at Wayne Ent. sometimes. Those are memories from Before Tim And The Terrifying Ninjas, therefor, they are not of Tim Drake.

[spell-cleaver]

Vader proclaiming his loyalty to the new emperor as the new emperor, Luke, stares at Vader and proceeds to “??!!!??”

Ahhh I still love that one, it was one tiny prompt that @prayforpiett sent me and then it spiralled into my 4th longest fic because of that scene, I'm proud of it :D Thank you!!

What's the most memorable scene from one of my fics?

[ambivalentmarvel]

The fear of losing hold

i’m 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 thank you!!!! the fear of losing hold is one of my favorite works of mine Ever because, imo, i provided a multi-chapter fic with a fulfilling arc in relatively few words (AND i got to include a plot twist!!!) and that’s. a big point of pride for me considering how sometimes i like to Carry On.

for a secret, i don’t have much, but in the other universe i created, peter’s relationship with morgan was inspired by the scenes of adeline with her daughter in the age of adeline!

[afewnovelideas]

fic premise: Tim lands in the middle of Lord of the Rings. Tim quickly realizes LoTR was really just lore of things happening for real in another dimension. So of course, when the fellowship gathers, Tim interrupts before Frodo can. "I will take the ring to Mordor." Bc it's not like Frodo knows what he's getting into, right? Better that Tim be the one driven to madness. Batfam is always ONE step behind catching up, and always get to hear what dumb sacrificial thing Tim did last.

😆 Yeah this is right up my alley.

I'm actually writing something in a similar vein right now with my Elder Scrolls DC project sticking Tim in Skyrim.

Basically, Tim is the unwitting "Chosen One" kidnapped from Earth and dumped in the "Tolkien Hell" that is Tamriel. There are dragons and elves and orcs and swords and sorcery... The only thing he's missing is The One Ring and a flaming eyeball demigod...

But maybe with the right mods...

[dayenurose]

#12, #14, & #28 :)

12. Favorite character to write about this year

Gambit. I really like writing Gambit. I like getting in his head. I like his passion and his pain and his powers. I’ve got to back off on his dialect (I started out so minimally……and it’s taken over my writing….aaahh!). Though, I probably needed a break from writing in his POV after finishing ’Risk and Reward,’ since lately I’ve been writing more from Rogue’s POV again. Then again, I write Rogue and we still end up getting a fair amount about Remy. Hmm…. Yeah, I really like writing Gambit.

14. A fic you didn’t expect to write

Looking back over my year of writing, there’s quite a few fics I hadn’t expected to write. There’s lots of reasons why I didn’t expect to write certain fics—because they’re from fandoms I’m not as involved in (ATLA-thanks for the challenge @hinaoyamas) or ones that I have kind of drifted away from (BatFamily), or because I never expected I would have the opportunity (the FanZine, see more at @holycoloringzine), or because I didn’t think I was ready to tackle certain stories (the unfinished Rogue vs. Carol story), or, of course, the seemingly random ideas which form as you’re talking to friends and had no idea you were going to write them before you started writing them (the prompt from @go-haywire turned into a rather involved Evo fic (thanks for the prompt, Haywire) or the story which I’m calling ‘Queen of Hearts’ and don’t want to spoil with more of a description).

But I think my biggest surprise came with my original fic story. I’d been working on the second book for a while now and it wasn’t working. Pieces weren’t fitting together and I wasn’t happy with it no matter what I tried. What I didn’t expect was the realization that I needed to set aside what I’d already written and start again. And while I haven’t made much progress, I think the new plot works better with what I want to achieve at this point in the series. It’s a bit bittersweet—seeing the progress I’d already made being put aside (for now, I hope to come back to the idea), but I hope that in the end it will make the overall story stronger. And, there’s no such thing as wasted writing. Even if I am the only one who will see this initial draft (well, me and my writing group), I learned more about the characters and the world they live in, I discovered issues with the world building that need fixing, and I still have the story which means I can adapt and use what still works while not feeling weighed down by the parts that don’t. Here is where I’ll thank my writing group for all their encouragement and support along the way. And since @angel-gidget is the only one on Tumblr read it (and has listened to my rambles as I try to work things out), you get a special shout out—thanks Gidge!

28. Longest fic you read this year

The longest fic I read was “The Air That I Breathe” by @chellerbelles (826,442 words and 122 chapters). This story is truly epic in both length and scope. I devoured this story in about a week and a half. It’s an amazing slow burn that you’re on the edge of your seat as you read, just waiting for the Romy moments, and yet, I still absolutely love Vanessa. Rogue and Gambit have an awesome friendship that truly lasts through the ages. This story definitely left me with lots to think on and had an influence on me outside of the world of fanfic. I am looking forward to when I have an opportunity to read this one again. Thanks for the stories, Chelle.

Questions from the ‘fanfic end of the year asks’. Please feel free to ask more…

[edibna]

1 & 5

1. has a comment someone left on a fic of yours ever made you laugh out loud?

Yes for sure. My favorite was one by @al-sahir where they were talking about how they screamed in the jello aisle on one of my updates. I’m happy to say we are best friends now. 

5. if you couldn’t finish (one of) your wip(s) for some reason, what writer would you trust with finishing it, if any? (asker can choose what wip)

Probably, once again @al-sahir. They’ll never believe me but they’re writing is amazing and they practically gave me half of my ideas for my works. 

[nokomiss]

Gonna take this as an opportunity to request a rare pair. Either May/Tony or May/Rhodey for “volunteer chaperones”

It was a mistake. A complete, total, absolute mistake. May was never, ever doing this again.

She looked around, overwhelmed. Yep. She was still surrounded by teenagers armed with battle robots they’d built themselves.  Allegedly they were all to remain at their workstations with proper protective equipment, but they were teenagers. They were absolutely not going to wait until the competition to try out their lasers and saws on each other.  

“Peter, I’m gonna tap out,” May said, trying not to wince as Peter’s robot unfurled a whirring blade and attempted to cut a piece of lumber in half.  “I’ve gone through too much to watch you chop off a thumb now.”

“My thumb is nowhere near the blade,” Peter said, waving his hands in a manner she supposed was meant to be reassuring. “Besides, you never know, it could grow back.”  He gave her a shit-eating grin, and May nobly managed to refrain from calling her kid an asshole.

“Chaperones are allowed coffee breaks, right?” May looked longingly towards the exit. 

“You’re supposed to supervise me the whole time I am engaging the robot,” Peter recited, making air quotes with his fingers. “It’s in the Teen Battle Robot Competition handbook.”

May rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll be gone ten minutes, tops. Cover for me.”

“May!” Peter hissed, adorably frazzled for someone who fought crime on the regular.  She ignored him and wove her way through the crowd, trying not to focus on the terrifying murder robots the children were creating all around her. This was so seriously not her thing. She slipped on her sunglasses and headed out the door, aiming for the nearest coffee shop.

She aimed to be gone for ten minutes, though thanks to the line and the fact that she really didn’t want to return to robot hell immediately, it stretched out past half an hour. She finally returned, iced coffee in hand, pushing through the door while scanning the room for Peter.

Instead she ran directly into someone.  Her hand holding the coffee bumped into her chest, covering her top with iced coffee.

“Shit!.” She shook droplets of coffee off her hand as she transferred the cup to her dry hand, and patted at her shirt with the napkin she’d had wrapped around the cup. 

“By all means, save the shirt, screw the bystander.”

It couldn’t be. May looked slowly up, still dabbing the napkin at her chest, to see Tony Stark standing there, grinning at her.

“What are you doing here?” Crap, that was rude. May tried not to be rude to Tony, because while he could be supremely irritating and smug, he had done things for her kid that she could never repay him for.  But… what was he doing here? And dressed like, well.. A farmer. She quietly chose not to question it too much. Besides, this was her time with Peter, as ill-suited to the outing as she might be.

“Same as you, I assume,” Tony said, flagging down someone who magically had a towel on hand. He offered it to her with a, “I can help if you want.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, thanks,” May said, but she accepted the towel. She dried up the worst of the spill -- it was sheer luck that she was wearing a dark top that wouldn’t stain, merely clung to her damply. Tony seemed to appreciate it, though she raised an eyebrow at him when she noticed him looking.  He had the decency to quit immediately. 

May didn’t love the idea of Tony popping in and taking over her time with Peter, though, no matter how little she was enjoying the killer robots. It was exactly up his alley, and she should bow gracefully out, but… “I hope you aren’t here to be Peter’s chaperone. I’ve got that covered.”

“And bless you for it, that kid is a disaster,” Tony said fondly. “I’m here for that sarcastic little bastard over there.”  He gestured towards a kid in a faded AC/DC shirt who was using a controller to aim what appeared to be a ray gun mounted atop his robot at the ceiling.

“You don’t have a kid,” May said with certainty.

“Nope,” Tony agreed. “But Harley’s a kid I watch out for, and he’s almost as bright as your kid.”

Pride laced his words, and he was watching the boy with a soft fondness that made May feel immediately guilty for her own possessiveness moments before. She of all people should understand the bond you could forge with a child not of your own blood, and know the legitimacy of such a bond. 

“He have superpowers too?”  

“Nope, and it’s probably a good thing,” Tony said cheerfully. “Think Peter will notice I’m here?”

“You think he hasn’t already?” May said. It was the right answer, Tony’s eyes lit up in a genuine way that made it clear to her how often she saw him playacting at happiness.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you to Harley,” Tony offered. “Unless you want me to get you out of those wet clothes first?” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that was so over-the-top that May just laughed.

“Shockingly I didn’t bring a wardrobe change to a day outing. It’ll dry.”  Hopefully she wouldn’t smell too awful when it did.  

“Here.” Tony shrugged off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders like a letterman’s jacket before she could think to protest.  Despite the rough material, it was warm and smelled like Tony  -- expensive and a little much -- but May didn’t take it off.

She didn’t even want to, which… was something she would have to examine more closely.  She was no stranger to gallant gestures, and she didn’t normally accept them from people she wasn’t interested in.  Tony was a force of nature, she told herself. He wouldn’t accept it back even if you tried.

Plus, there were way too many teenage boys in the room for her to really want to walk around in a cold, wet shirt that clung uncomfortably. 

Tony flung his arm over her shoulder, apparently deciding that if his jacket was allowed to do so, so was he, and he led her over to the kid he’d claimed.  

Harley was the polar opposite from Peter -- confident, sarcastic in a biting way, and treated Tony like he was any other human being. It was a sharp contrast to the hero worship Peter tended towards, and the shyness and sweetness that she was always worried was going to be worn away by the world they lived in.  But watching Harley and Tony together made it obvious that deep down Harley was another kid who had been given the short stick by life and was trying his best to carve his own path through it.  

Harley also kept giving her what could only kindly be called the stink eye. It took her a moment to work out why -- he’d watched Tony stroll up with his arm around her shoulder, she was wearing Tony’s jacket like they were going steady, and it was fairly obvious that her expertise was not in mechanical engineering.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the kid was assuming about her, and May couldn’t figure out a casual way to tell him how very wrong he was. Finally she settled on, “I gotta go see how Peter’s robot is coming along.”

“You know he’s actually lined up to battle Harley’s robot,” Tony said, and it was obvious from Harley’s confused expression that Tony had not divulged his connection with the competition. 

He looked back and forth between them. “Who’s this Peter kid?”

“An intern,” Tony replied smoothly.

Harley was clearly not satisfied with this answer. “You’ve never offered me an internship.”

“This is a different thing,” Tony replied. May winced; Tony was entirely too new to managing teenagers to understand what he’d just done.  Harley’s expression darkened and May knew without a doubt that Peter’s robot was a dead machine rolling.

“I’m just going to head back over there,” May said, gesturing vaguely towards Peter’s distant station and hurrying off before she got somehow wrapped up in the argument Harley was about to start.

She hustled off, and only realized she was still wearing Tony’s jacket with Peter raised an eyebrow at her. 

“I ran into Tony -- literally--  and dumped my coffee on myself,” she explained. 

“Very, uh, gentlemanly of him to offer his coat,” Peter said,. “And why was he even here? He hasn’t said hi to me.” He checked his phone, where she could only see messages from Ned bemoaning his parents for choosing this weekend for a family trip.

“Apparently,” May said, stretching out the word to show it was news to her, too, “he’s mentoring a kid in this competition. I didn’t get the details.”

May marvelled as Peter’s expression  became a mirror for one Harley had worn moments before. Tony really knew how to pick ‘em.

“What? What kid?” Peter stood on his tippy-toes, looking around to try to spot Tony. His expression darkened even more when he found him. “That kid? He’s the three-time champion! Last year his robot managed to freeze and set his opponent on fire simultaneously!”

May’s eyebrows raised. “You know him?”

“Some other kids were talking about him earlier,” Peter explained. “They somehow didn’t mention that Tony was with him.”

May thought back to Tony’s appearance and he had appeared more low-key than usual. The jacket she was still wearing was denim, which… she wouldn’t have thought was in Tony’s wardrobe at all, honestly. “I think he’s in disguise.”

“Huh,” Peter said. “I didn’t know he knew how to do that.”

“To be fair, I only realized it in retrospect.”  May shrugged. “I think the fact that he isn’t announcing his presence is doing most of the disguise work for him. No one would believe Tony Stark would show up at a battle robot competition and not try to win.”

“He is though,” Peter said darkly. “With that kid.”

“Well,” May said, looking at Peter’s robot, “guess we just have to kick that kid’s ass.”

Peter grinned. 

An hour later -- and the time seemed to magically fly by much faster than before, now that May had a goal in mind -- it was time for Peter’s first battle. He wasn’t up against Harley until the third round, and May felt a little proud that Tony had assumed Peter would make it through to the finals without any help. Her boy was brilliant, and it always gave her a warm feeling when others acknowledged it, too. 

Especially Tony, but she would never, ever tell him that.

Peter’s robot destroyed his competition in under a minute, and twenty minutes later, in his semifinal round, he took out a robot that seemed to be made entirely of buzzsaws in an agonizing three minute match.  

He won, though, and they settled in to watch the competition. Harley’s robot had destroyed his first competitor in thirty seconds, and in this battle, he revealed that he’d somehow installed a flame launcher on the underside that melted the wiring on the robot he was fighting in the semifinal.

Finally, it came down to Harley and Peter. Tony was beaming proudly, and May had no idea how anyone failed to notice it was him, flannel or no. 

“Kick his ass, kiddo,” May told Peter encouragingly. “You’ve got this.”

Peter gave her a double-thumbs up, and marched into battle.

May slid over to where Tony was watching, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as their kids prepared to destroy each other. “Hope you’re prepared for defeat.”

“You know I can’t pick favorites,” Tony said, “except for how there’s no chance in hell that Harley’s not gonna win this.”

“Wanna bet?” May said teasingly.

“Why, Ms. Parker, I wouldn’t have taken you for a gambling woman, but yes, yes I do,” Tony said. “My kid wins, I get to take you out for that dinner.”  

Tony had been threatening to take her out to dinner for months. “And if my kid wins?” she asked.

“Why, you have to take me out, of course. Terms have to be fair.”  Tony’s grin should make her want to smack him, but May had found that the bastard tended to grow on you. 

She considered it half a moment, but… what the hell. She held out her hand to shake on it.

When she turned back to the rink, she noticed that both Peter and Harley were giving them the stinkeye, even as the ref counted down for the battle to begin.

Once it did, there was absolute carnage. May saw a streak of fluid that looked alarmingly like blood arc through the air after a saw unfurled off Peter’s robot and surprise-attacked Harley’s. Then as Harley’s robot retaliated, there was fire and sparks. When the smoke cleared, both robots were incapacitated.

“A tie!” declared the ref, much to the disappointment of both boys.

May glanced over at Tony. “Guess it’s a draw.”

“So we have to do two dinners, obviously,” Tony said without skipping a beat. 

From the corner of her eye, she could see Harley and Peter turn towards each other, and she was proud to see Peter offer Harley a handshake. A moment’s hesitation, eyes cast towards Tony, but Harley shook firmly.  She had a feeling that was not going to turn out great for Tony.

“It’s a date.”  Tony continued, looking so overly confident that May knew that he was hoping that she’d agree.

May’s attention crashed back into focus on the man in front of her.  This could go so very badly, and there was Peter to think about, for when things inevitably crashed and burned, but…

May had made most of her best decisions in life on impulse, and she knew what she wanted to say. “Pick me up at seven.”