it’s been almost a year now… is the bg3 fandom finally ready to talk about how gale’s “hubris” is the sole product of actively feeding his insecurities further and straight up denying him help & guidance when he was at his lowest and needed it most. it’s not one of his core traits and never was. he isn’t some closeted power hungry monster that is just waiting to be enabled. what he wants is admiration, recognition and acceptance. which is also what he sought from mystra before the orb disaster happened. he had no desire whatsoever to become a god himself or challenge her rule, he simply wanted to be seen as sufficient in her eyes (“to serve her better”). to be as equal as he could possibly be in a relationship with a literal deity. he has a deep passion for magic and knowledge that affects almost all areas of his life and enjoys the display thereof. he wants to be the smartest person in the room and enjoys when his work is recognized. he may be perceived as arrogant when it comes to his skill, but he IS NOT hubristic. it truly takes so little for him to be wholly content.
After the mess that were the accords, after the Avengers fractured, and half his friends were put into prison, Steve finds himself drifting... drifting... nothing catches his attention, nothing ignites that old spark in his heart, makes his blood burn. Nothing. Nothing...
...until he sees the devastatingly beautiful creature they keep in a tank in Wakanda.
Also up on my Society6 (there’s a 25% promotion on EVERYTHING today!) and my Redbubble shops!! :D
I unloaded all my IW feels on a painting today (because IW thoughts wouldn’t let me write, or concentrate or anything that wasn’t IW). It’s still rough for my usual “I NEED TO EDIT EVERYTHIIIIINGGGGG” standards, and so far from my usual style I have no idea where it came from. So who know when and if I’ll even post it, BUT.
If I do, it’ll be with the tags: “Infinity War Spoilers” and “Infinity War Spoiler Fanart”. If you reblog it, pretty please remember to add similar tags, you beautiful people! ♥
OKAY BUT… REVERSE TIMELINE STUCKY? aka Today’s episode of Nemerambles
Hit by the proverbial lightning bolt this morning. Cool idea, hard to find a “trope name” for it. Let’s go with Reverse Timeline for the time being.
More after the cut ‘cuz this is gonna get LONG.
Basically: Steve’s born sometimes in the… Let’s make it late 80s. So he’s 20-something during the first Avengers movie. He was born skinny, smol, with a laundry list of ailments that was basically a death sentence. He’s picked for Project Rebirth not long before the Battle of New York, and he’s the First Avenger in the sense that he’s Fury’s first pick for the Team, the first to be recruited, and the de-facto leader.
Project Rebirth is based on a study made by a German scientist that came to the US thanks to operation Paperclip. It’s basically a synthetic serum, first thought of during WW2, that “perfects” a human being, eliminating every imperfection and elevating them to an almost God-like status. There’s rumours of the procedure working exactly ONCE during WWII, and of that first subject's blood being used for decades to further the studies. However, there’s no proof or records on another Super Soldier. Steve is the first and only subject to be recognised by the Government. The rest is conspiration theories. Fairy tales.
Steve is given a shield right in time for the Battle of New York, a beautiful, scratched relic that dates back to WWII. It’s made with the rarest metal on earth - vibranium - and the only sure information about it is that Howard Stark himself made it, probably for his war buddy Sg. Barnes back in the day.
Steve LOVES the shield, and he uses it incredibly well, better than anybody who ever tested it. It becomes his weapon of choice, and he brings it with him to fight the Chitauri.
Long story short, soon into the battle the Avengers seem to be losing; so the government launches a nuke over NY to eliminate the threat themsleves. Captain America decides to sacrifice himself for the greater good. He DOES save the city (and the world); he is thought dead and is mourned by all. But the Tesseract actually saved his life, sending him backwards in time.
To WWII.
Steve wakes up somewhere in Europe. Somewhere damp, echoing, smelly. He’s chained to a table, chilled to the touch and with needle-pricks in the crooks of his elbow. This is right after he makes the jump in time, so he’s shell-shocked, reeling, deeply wounded and exhausted. He realises he’s been captured by Nazis, and a scientist named Zola (”hey,” he thinks, “isn’t that the name of the guy who invented the Serum they gave me???”) starts making experiments on him, drawing his blood, testing his endurance, pumping him full of chemicals and so on. Days into this Hell, Steve is found and saved by the most raucous, diverse, ballsy elite team in the history of EVER(the Howlies) lead by one Sergeant James Barnes, whom Steve is immediately smitten with. The group manage to bring Steve to safety. However, Zola had gotten enough of Steve’s blood to replicate the serum and use it on Johann Schmidt, turning him into the monstrous madman later known as Red Skull, and effectively turning the tables in favour of the Nazis, who now fight with renewed fervour under the lead of the crazy man.
Feeling guilty, Steve joins the Howlies and fights in secret against Schmidt’s private army (known as “Hydra”) trying really hard not to leave any trace of himself in history records. Quickly, he becomes Howard’s favourite source of amusement, and gets the scientist to make him a shield tailored to his specifics. You know. THE shield. HIS shield. The one he was given (will be given??) in 2012. He becomes Peggy’s confidant, the source of Colonel Phillips’s migraines… and also Bucky’s lover. And this is a hilarious get-together story, because Steve, bless his modern boy idiocy, is kinda convinced that Bucky couldn’t love him back because… he’s from the 40s, you know. No other reason than that. Just the period he was born in. Luckily, Bucky only rolls his eyes at Steve’s level of stupid and silences him with a kiss.
Time passes, and The Howlies score victory after victory…until that fateful mission in the Alps, where Steve falls off a train, leaving Bucky to mourn and lead the suicide mission that eradicates Hydra once and for all.
Steve, however, DOES NOT DIE. The Tesseract, or Tony, or Dr Strange, or Vision… someone or something intervenes and brings him back to his own time. He doesn’t adjust quickly to his return, if at all. He’s been “dead” for a few weeks in his proper timeline; but he also spent something like two years in the past. Two of the most wonderful, intense, painful and beautiful years of his life.
Overcome with nostalgia, Steve looks up the Howlies, reconnects with the few that are still alive, reads the biographies of the ones who are not, looks up their files in the SHIELD database, goes to visit Peggy in the hospice…
…and then SOMETHING pings on his radar because, WAIT. Something doesn’t add up. Looking closely at the files, it’s easy to see that Zola DID have a test subject that he used and abused for decades. Someone he used Steve’s blood on, turning him into a super soldier, yeah; but also into an unwilling, unfortunate prisoner, someone that’s been treated with less dignity than an animal for his whole life.
Overcome with guilt (AGAIN), Steve starts investigating and finds a suspicious pod stored in an abandoned warehouse. Not knowing what he’ll find, Steve drags the pod to the Tower, and asks the Stanner (Stark+Banner Science Bros FTW) to help him open it.
The scientists poke and prod the capsule until it opens with a hiss of smoke…
…and out spills Bucky.
Naked, wet, frozen, with no left arm, but BREATHING, beautifully, incredibly, impossibly alive.
It turns out that Hydra had searched for the Red Skull’s body after Bucky’s suicidal stunt, but had found the Sergeant’s instead. His body was “deeply damaged”, Zola wrote in his notes, but “salvageable”. So Zola injected the serum he had left in Bucky’s body, and basically used him as a bargain chip to be included in Operation Paperclip. He was brought to the US, completely free, pardoned, and was given founds for his research. Not that anybody knew he had Sg. Bucky Barnes prisoner, mind you. For the longest time, he was believed dead, and the shield he’d used for his last few missions had been stored by Howard and Peggy as far away from their eyes as they could, since it did nothing but bring them bad memories of their dead friends.
Tony volunteers to make Bucky an arm (unless he already has one), Bruce helps with his trauma (despite not being THAT kind of Doctor…) and Steve is over the moon with joy because he has his Bucky back.
(This is Steve though, so he feels guilty about being overjoyed, and then sad that he can’t enjoy the miracle, and then angry, and then Bucky rolls his eyes and kisses him speechless, like he did a lifetime and 70 years before…)
°˖✧◝ESCLUSIVE MISSING SCENE FROM CIVIL WAR◜✧˖° Team IronMan: ...are they done? Can we. Like. Fight now? Hawkeye: *LE GASP* You do not interrupt the ship when they're kissing! D: Team Cap: Nope. No. You truly don't. Nuh-uh. Natasha: Exactly.
Okay, so, no episode of Neme Rambles was published today
But I’m turning it into fic????
Multi-parter, though. Or at least, longer than the 1000 words I’d planned because I’m 1936 words in and we’re STILL at the fall scene. Hopefully this will come out nicely! :D
…I dive into a crack-ish prompt, and ask us all: Where’s the Sailor Moon R Stucky AU?
No, no, not the completely AU story where they’re reincarnated warriors (even though… uh. Tempting.) But—
— something located either post-CA:CW or post-CA:WS, in which a brat literally *falls* onto the Avengers’ heads, proceeds to intermittently charm them and get on their nerves; endears and antagonises them, time and again, for months, while also bringing one HUGE treat to town.
After a while, this brat slips and calls Tony “uncle” (or Tasha “aunt”?). More breadcrumbs are left here and there until we’re told: the Brat is from the Future. And not just that: the Future is in danger, and Brat’s come back in time to ask the Avengers for help in saving the present and the future both.
Cool!
But then Brat shows some…uh… strange aptitude with the shield. Like *someone* might’ve put Brat through intensive training. And, oh! Lo and behold. Is Brat actually enhanced?!
So the Avengers discover that Brat is Steve’s future child and they all go oooh–ing and aaaah-ing and tease Steve, starting a running bet/game on who the mom’s gonna be.
Brat is TIGHT LIPPED about it, but goes bug-eyed when people start shoving random girls at Steve, and forcibly extracts a spluttering, embarrassed Steve from the situation every time.
Brat is also positively GLUED to Bucky’s side (if he’s reformed and with the good guys. If he’s not, Brat is GLUED to him all the same; and also forces the Avengers to accept him by virtue of “HE’S ONE OF YOU IN THE FUTURE SO GO AHEAD AND WORK ON ACCEPTING HIM NAO, OTHERWISE HE WON’T BE THERE TO SAVE YOU THAT ONE TIME. OR YOU THAT OTHER TIME. OR YOU AND YOU AND YOU THAT OTHER, OTHER TIME.”).
I think we all know what the reveal’s gonna be, even if we haven’t seen Sailor Moon R before: Brat’s actually a clone (or adopted? Adopted works too), and the parents are BOTH Steve AND Bucky.
The kick is if the boys actually get together in this Universe *because* of Brat. They already are in love, or fall in love during Brat’s stay; maybe they even manage to confess during that time, but even if they stay close lipped, they get close(r) and are sweet and mushy and intense… even as they quietly angst that they “could never be” since Steve was going to have a child in the near future.
