Hello Sine! I see you are doing a fic ask meme thing and was wondering if you would be up for writing about "Like a Comet Streaming On" or maybe your most recent fic "The Devil in Us All"?
I talked about Comet in a previous ask, so I will take Devil here. This is one of those stories I have wanted to write for a while so I'm really glad that jelly, who won me for MTH, just told me to write a thing I already wanted to write, or I probably never would have gotten around to it.
So one of the things we know about Steve, canonically, is that he's an artist. This is one of the things the MCU kept about him -- we see him sketching in CATFA, I think. So there are a lot of MCU AUs where, like, modern-day Steve is an artist and he meets Tony at a gallery show or whatever and I love them all.
But also I wanted to write a story about 616 Steve being the kind of artist that he is in canon. We do occasionally see him sketching in 616, and I'm not saying that he doesn't use art to express his creative impulses, but that isn't really... the kind of artist Steve is, in the comics. Steve is a commercial artist. There's actually a fair amount of comics canon devoted to him making art pretty much for money. His backstory gives him a WPA job painting murals (this was mentioned somewhere very incongruous, like maybe a Cable & Deadpool issue?) and there is a period of time in the early 80s where he decides he wants to be a commercial artist. And that's what he does.
And I think it's great, but also he doesn't get to do a lot of things he really likes in that art career. He's illustrating men's adventure magazines he clearly doesn't like. He's working for shitty editors who insult his art and say shitty anti-Semitic things (Steve quits, of course, but then eventually comes back after the guy apologizes). He's working for ad agencies. Honestly I think the only thing in this era he enjoyed drawing was when he decided he was going to be a comic book artist because that sounded fun and he got a job drawing Captain America comics for Marvel.
So I wanted to write a story about Steve in that era of canon, but I also wanted to give him an art job he'd actually like. So I figured if I set up a situation where he was broke enough and would draw anything for money I could make him stumble into drawing gay S&M porn for money and then have him find out that this was actually a great time. Because why not write a story where Steve gets to draw gay porn about him and Tony? I felt like, you know, we in the gay porn segment of fandom might relate to that and it would be fun and a different angle on his commercial work. It's a job! Someone's got to draw men in bondage! They don't just draw themselves!
And, okay, yeah, I thought it might be fun if it were also a kink-discovery kind of story where Steve didn't actually realize at first that he was drawing gay bondage art and thought he was just A Regular Guy drawing something that surely everyone would like (a sexy dude being bound and beaten) because obviously he would know what Regular Guys like because he is totally a Regular Guy and he thinks that looks great. So everyone else will like it too. Problem solved! Except it turns out that that's actually, y'know, a bit of a special interest.
And of course Tony was going to be into it too, so, yes, the whole thing was basically plotted out with the idea that the reveal was going to happen when They Both Reach For The Same Gay Porn Magazine Oh No. Then it actually turned into a story about the nature of art and creativity and kink when I wasn't looking. Whoops.
(Honestly I'm pretty proud of the last chapter, mostly because I think I was so funny thinking of that one last identity reveal. Is it an identity reveal if it's not actually... true? I don't know. But I laughed a lot when I thought of it.)
