Feb 7, 2018
zarhooie replied to your post “I wonder if I can start predicting how bad a storm will be by how much...”
NO SNOW. Our claim counts are already awful. :(
you won. nothing at all here overnight. Just hip pain.
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zarhooie replied to your post “I wonder if I can start predicting how bad a storm will be by how much...”
NO SNOW. Our claim counts are already awful. :(
you won. nothing at all here overnight. Just hip pain.
zarhooie replied to your post “So tomorrow I have onboarding for this new job role and I’m both...”
#insurancebros
My official responsibilities are to “Promote consistency, efficiency, and reduce rework.”
WHATEVER THE HELL THAT MEANS.
zarhooie replied to your post “I am not sure how this happened, but the CPCU Society all-industry day...”
I want swag! Also, you have always been an insurance nerd. <3
If there is swag, I will send you swag :)
Pieces
So, a while back, @zarhooie asked me to write something, and I threw together a little OT3 Sam X Bucky X Steve Drabble. It's her birthday today (so make a mess, Baroness!) and I wrote a little short sequel shot from Steve's POV. Enjoy! PIECES light M Steve knows this shouldn’t work. Three broken people, missing figurative (and some literal) parts trying to be together, to be a family should fail. Stress should buckle the fractures and the whole thing should crumble into dust. But it doesn’t. Bucky came back to them slowly, and there are still days when he’s other. When whatever happened to him in that hellhole the army finally pulled him from gets to be too much and he just shuts down. Days like those, Steve’s grateful he works from home. That he can put down his charcoal and his brushes, and just be there. Just hold Bucky until the worst of it passes. And he’s grateful for Sam. Sam, who has the connections to the best shrinks. Sam, who understands more of the psychology than he ever could. Sam, who knows when to push Bucky and when to back off, like he’s been there all their lives. Sam, who will get the groceries and the cleaning and pick up meds when he just needs to stay. On the good days, though? Oh, the good days are so damn good. When Bucky calls him punk and Sam birdie. When the three of them go for early morning runs at the capital, or spend lazy Saturdays hiking in the Shenandoah National Park. Long weekends driving down to the beach, sno-cones coloring both of their tongues and making them taste like cherry and grape when he kisses them. They get looks, sometimes, but he refuses to care. He’s out enough for him, and that’s what matters. Love is love is love. And he loves them. God help him, he loves them both more than he thought possible. Loves the sounds Sam makes when he slides inside of him while Bucky fist’s glows around his dark cock. Loves the whimpe it rings from Bucky when Sam take him while Steve licks his nipple. Love the feel of either of them in him, pressed against him, chest hair tickling his skin and stubble leaving a burn on his neck. It shouldn’t work, but Steve doesn’t question it any more. Maybe they fill each other’s cracks. Maybe they shore up each other’s fault lines. All Steve knows is that they are more than the sum of their parts. Like family is supposed to be.
The Collateral Damage of Tree Sex
It’s allergy season, and I am pretty miserable today. Let’s just chalk this little drabble up to anti-histamine based hallucinations, shall we? For zarhooie, who thought this was a hilarious idea. Enjoy. *******
The first time it happens, Quill thinks nothing of it. Occasionally, as their crew visits various worlds, he’ll run into something that will trip the same symptoms that have plagued him from childhood. Sneezing? Check. Watery eyes? Check. Congestion? Check. Headache to beat the band? Check. He doses up on the space equivalent of Sudafed and crashes out until the attack is over.
If it seems odd that this time, they’ve been ship bound for at least three days before any symptoms start, well, who knows? Space, man.
The second time it happens, he’s just confused. They’ve been on board the ship, passing through deep space that has an anomaly that messes with hyper drive function for almost six days straight when his eyes start watering and the sneezing starts. Gamora looks at him sideways from where they’ve been sitting in the bridge of the little ship. When he asks her to take over, she nods without comment, and he heads to his bunk and sleep and little acid green space pills.
The third time, it’s just ridiculous. The planet they have just spend time on is a desert world where almost nothing pollinates, and surely nothing he’d be allergic to (succulents and cactuses are his friends). But now he’s wheezing and miserable as he sits at the table in the galley, letting Drax (of all people) make him some kind of tea thing, and he just wants to lay his head down on the table and die.
And that’s when he notices it. A fine dusting, like flour or sand or glitter, coating the table. It’s yellow like a bad earth kitchen color scheme from the 1970s, and vaguely sticky and if he wasn’t so close to dropping face first against the flat surface, he’d never have seen it. “What the…”
Suddenly, it made sense. The first attack had been 12 weeks ago. The second right around six weeks. “Son of a conifer.’ He moved, washing his hand carefully, and then went in search of the dysfunctional duo.
Rocket and Groot sit in their bunk; Rocket cleaning his gun carefully, and Groot …doing that weird meditative tree thing. They both look up at him in the doorway.
“Dammit, Groot, are you pollinating?” Only it comes out sounding weirdly slurred, because allergy meds and an inability to breathe through his nose.
“I am Groot.” The answer, as usual, is incomprehensible without translation. And his raccoon looking friend obliges.
“Dude, you can’t just…you don’t just ask someone that!” Rocket’s level of offense would be funny, if Quill didn’t feel like death warmed over.
“Look, I don’t care normally, but I have pollen allergies. I need to know if that’s what’s happening.”
Groot sits up, looking as sheepish as a tree could look, then nods. “I am Groot.”
Rubbing a hand over his face, again, Quill nods back. “And it happens about every six weeks?”
“I am Groot.”
“Okay.” Rocket sputters at him. “So, six weeks from now, we are going to stop at some planet that seems nice to you, and we are going to give you a few days’ vacation. Deal buddy?”
“I am Groot!”
“He says yes.” Rocket had stopped sputtering and now looked at him. “Do I get a vacation too?”
“Do you pollinate?”
The raccoon shot him a look. “I’ll have you know, that is discrimination!”
Quill sighed. “Vacation for everyone then. Just no more pollinating on my ship, got it?”
“I am Groot.”
“Right.” He turned and headed back down the hall, passing a highly amused Gamora. “Not a word.”
Accepting the tea from Drax, he headed towards his own bunk and his supply of tissues and anti-histamines. Days like this, he can’t quite remember why this whole team thing seemed such a good idea after all.
Sooooo do you just hate happiness, or...?
So what if I do?
Playlist: Kaiju Attack!
“Kaiju Meat”, Crime and the Forces of Evil
“What A Woman’s For”, Seanan McGuire
“Wild Boys”, Duran Duran
“Pacific Rim”, Ramin Djawadi & Tom Morello
“March of Cambreadth”, Alexander James Adams
zarhooie replied to your post: Wait. In the Agent Carter finale...
OMG WHAT IF STARK HELPS PROTOTYPE FOR BUCKY’S ARM.
That is EXACTLY WHAT I AM SAYING.
Look, there are three big buys for the Winter Soldier - three bits of tech they use with him that has to be comic book science. We have to buy the mind control, the arm, and the cryo. The only other buy is on the super soldier serum and we already are hook line and sinker for that with cap and banner, so that is firmly an in-universe given.
They have an explanation for the mind control (the chair in the movie - which works great in the modern setting and now we have Fenhoff to maybe deal with the question of how you get started). The cryo is off screen - just a single word - deus ex machina. But the arm. They sell the arm.
The arm is amazing. Project Centipede did no better in 2014, but Winter Soldier has been wearing that arm or something very like it for decades.
Enter Stark. Stark is, as scientists go - an amoral polymath egomaniac. If he did not know better, he would be the PERFECT sort to recruit to hydra. He is interested in the science, the hard problems. He tackles the problems without moral consideration because someone asked him to and it was interesting to him. He does chemistry, he does physics, he does explosives....I am sure the list goes on and on. He solves the problem sometimes, but his "failed" inventions are catastrophic.
We know that soon Peggy and him are going to found SHIELD. We know that Zola is going to work for them. Zola clearly can't go to him and say - hey - remember James Barnes? Yeah, the one who was Steve's friend. Say, he lost his arm, can you make me a new one? But he could trick Stark into it. And if the science were cool enough, Stark would probably look the other way even if he knew.
Until, he stops looking the other way. And that's when the Winter Soldier comes for him.