Work Text:
Day twelve
Characters: Loki, Thor
6. keys
Father tells them of Yggdrasil, but Mother sings them to sleep with the lullaby of a lock and its key, the universe’s ancient tumblers unseen, crafted by an unknowable smith, but always and forever waiting, waiting, waiting for the advancing key, the biting teeth that will slip into the right place at the right moment and break Creation wide open; Frigga shudders to look upon her slumbering boys, silver and gold, sharp and strong, perfectly struck and waiting.
Day twenty-four
Characters: Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers
11. moose
“Well,” Bucky says contemplatively, settling on a higher branch, “At least we can tell the brass we missed the rendezvous because we pissed off an enemy moose, and not one of our Canadian allies.”
Day two
Ship: Steve/Bucky
26. ice
Bucky feels his grip shudder a second before the metal gives, fuck, and then he’s falling out of the sky- the words no don't just hold on Steve this time you can’t follow race through his head, the clouds sprawling colossal above him as he plummets; and he’s grateful, he’s so damn furious and terrified but grateful, that with eyes turned to the sky for the last time, he sees nothing but white clouds, stark grey rivers, white-capped mountains, there’s no brilliant, heart-rending rush of red and blue in the terrible white sky; Steve will never know what it is to die, cold and colorless in the ice, and Bucky closes his eyes and falls into black.
Day one
Ship: Maria Carbonell/Howard Stark
2. monument
When the Equal Pay Act finally passes, that stiflingly hot summer, Maria keeps the carefully lettered plaque (Equal Pay for Equal Work – SI Must Support S. 1409!) on her desk where she bolted it back in April, when they’d taken her scowling photo to document “insubordinate attitude when asked to remove the offensive material, followed by damage to company property”; on July 11th, they take a new photo, because Mr. Stark himself comes down to hand her the paycheck that’s finally identical to that of every other drafting artist on the floor, and she laughs in this one, wild and careless and just twenty-four, as he asks, “Still spoilin’ for a fight, Carbonell?”
Day eight
Character: Clint Barton
19. bear
Jonah’s been in the circus a quarter of a century, five times as long as Clint, and he wonders if another twenty years will leave him, too, smelling constantly of dust and piss, hollow-eyed, slumped behind bars so familiar he can’t see the cage any longer; he doesn’t know how many years it takes to break the soul of a wild thing, but somewhere secret inside, Clint feels his hourglass turn over.
Day twenty
Character: Howard Stark
15. chemistry
He searches, with the same fervency and futility he gives the corpse of a good man, for the formula that will transform him from the weak failure his own father was, into someone great, someone strong, someone worthy; but Howard knows he comes from the strange, wild territory of men whose fathers left them without a map, a land where no code, even the sacrosanct law of science, applies, and eventually he learns to chase only after the thing he knows is real.
Day three
Character: Natasha Romanov
30. Disney
Natasha is five when glasnost first lets Western propaganda into Red Room Compound - and her hand-to-hand instructor always says ‘Know the enemy’ - so she crouches silent in the dark rafters of the Officer’s Club (there is no punishment for being out of bed, only for being caught) and watches transfixed as a girl with hair red as her own takes a first, stumbling step on dry land; but this is evil, this is capitalism, this is why Natasha’s whole world collapses a short month later, and in twenty years she will snarl “I’m not part of your world” at Clint Barton before breaking down in furious sobs.
Day five
Character: Tony Stark
5. autumn
Cambridge blazes in the fall of 1990 – the pear-yellow and orange leaves that scud across red brick paths, the spill of a Harvard girl’s auburn hair on Tony’s pillow, the violet-gold-coral streak of every sunset – and Tony blazes with it, roaring through senior year, flourishing brilliant in the hothouse computer labs, the spark of his welding torch wringing genius from rough metal; his phone lights up and Obie is warm and gentle in his ear (he remembers his mother’s voice, from a childhood in amber, Tyger, Tyger, burning bright-); then autumn flickers, splutters, dies into winter around him.
Day twenty-seven
Characters: Harold ‘Happy’ Hogan, Tony Stark
9. blood
Harry’s never been too happy to teach the dumbass college kids that drunk brawling is no kind of training for real boxing (“I’ll whallop you myself ‘fore I let my son grow up to be a bully,” she’d said, and three years gone he still can’t let Ma down) but something specially ugly twists in his gut when his next opponent stumbles into the ring, the slight boy reeking of Jack and desperation, shedding the remains of a black mourning suit and raising his fists like he wants to take on the world and die trying- and Harry feels his blood stir for the fight, but for the first time in a long time, he wants to fight for someone.
Day eleven
Character: Pepper Potts
16. hammertime
She goes for the free beer and the tall, somber-eyed boy from her Contemporary Art class, but she stays for this: the moment when the new M.C. Hammer begins to blast, when she spins away from the off-beat drag of his thin hands on her ass to shake and shimmy to her beating heart, to find that she can dance like wildfire when she stops worrying about who they see – “Can’t touch this”, she breathes six years later, and walks through the imposing doors of Stark Industries to the beat of her song.
Day twenty-nine
Character: Clint/Coulson
20. lasagna
He’s crawling through the air ducts, trying to find the safe spots and listening spots and vantage points that will keep him alive and sane until training ends and he finally gets out of this claustrophobic pressure cooker of a base, when he runs across the vent into Agent Coulson’s office, and a warm Styrofoam box of the commissary lasagna he’d missed hours ago.
Day thirteen
Character: Bruce Banner
7. guitar
He fades into parts of the world where the words are unfamiliar but he recognizes the tunes of suffering, sickness, desperation and tries to quiet them- then on a hot, windy rooftop in Tirana he faintly hears someone pick out a lonely melody, and with a sudden wave of homesickness, he sings back “Oh, I believe, in yesterday-”
Day fifteen
Ship: Clint/Natasha
8. Thanksgiving
It’s two days late, but she’s alive and unbroken and home, and they don’t even take his painstakingly prepared dinner out of the Tupperware to re-heat it, just devour, and then fuck desperately on the kitchen floor and slowly in his bed and wildly against the counter until she cracks up and tells him there’s pumpkin pie all over his ass, and for years to come, they give their thanks on the fourth Saturday of November.
Day twenty-three
Ship: Rhodey/Tony
10. Las Vegas
“Maybe I just don’t like the goddamn city any more, okay-” Rhodey finally shouts, trembling, and it takes Tony a second too long to remember the last time the soldier shared a friendly dinner with the man who would rip Tony’s heart out, but then he’s shuddering, too, and he doesn’t know or care whose arms scrabble around who first.
Day twenty-eight
Ship: Jane/Darcy
22. underwear
They ran out of grant money and clean underwear three days ago, skin gone dusky with desert grit and bruises from the rough dirt roads, and they hurtle through the night anyway, chasing down their stars and Jane’s answers; but Darcy finds hers closer to the ground, tasting salt and earth when she mouths at a perfect breast, bucking hard against the small, strong hands that coax supernovas from her body, as her wide eyes stare up into the sparking, spinning universe and one of them whispers “Beautiful.”
Day eighteen
Character: Steve Rogers
24. Google
Search history: “Most important events past 100 years”, “who is Neil Armstrong”, “image search: photos on the moon”, “Sea of Tranquility”, “lunar lander”, “YouTube search: moon landing”, “what are ‘The Silence’”, “who is The Doctor”, “where can I watch Doctor Who”, “what are weeping angels”, “how to fix television if you threw something at the screen and it cracked”
Day sixteen
Character: Agent ‘Target Angry’
27. Elton John
Travis comes down hard a few hundred yards off the Jersey Turnpike, and within an hour of triggering his retrieval beacon the traffic’s rushing the wrong direction for this time of day – so, naturally, he commandeers an SUV and speeds downtown blasting the driver’s collection of Elton’s Greatest Hits, belting “HOLD ME CLOSER, TINY DANCER-” at what are clearly some alien motherfucking hostiles as he gleefully does 90 up Fifth Avenue and finally gets to run down a target.
Day twenty-six
Character: J.A.R.V.I.S.
21. autocorrect
The dropped connection when the Iron Man suit disappears through the portal is like a line of looping code, like a fried logic board, like the only power outage he’s ever experienced, huddled alone and mute in an emergency backup server waiting for the dark to end- only this time he knows the hands that have always come to fix him, to tend him and teach him and take pride in his mere existence, to ask too much of him and rely on him and trust that he will always be there, those clever hands are gone forever- he envies the inane little pieces of StarkTech the world over whose functions are no more complex than autocorrect or voice recognition, envies those who will never know how it feels to let your father die.
Day nineteen
Ship: Jane/Thor
4. post-it
“Hey, he’s gotta take his whackjob brother back to Asgard tomorrow
and this is crazy
but here’s the Helicarrier number
So call him maybe?
-T. Stark”
Day twenty-five
Character: Loki
12. gala
High above his cell they celebrate with ale and song and booming stories of Thor’s greatness, of Loki’s wretchedness - but when he shuts his eyes he can dream himself a magnificent gala, an elegant dance of sharp knives and spilling blood, deep droughts of heady winter wine, tales of the god who could trick day into night, songs of Loki Lie-Smith whose might shone like a terrible black star, gleaming wicked and clever in the darkness - and then he sleeps, with their gag to hide his smile.
Day seven
Ship: Phil Coulson/The Cellist
1. cheesecake
You wrap yourself around the firm body and bow down, trembling in the deep melancholy notes of his voice whispering gentle lies (shh, go back to sleep, they need me at work, I’ll be back soon) before soaring, caressing the rich melody of his laugh (cappuccino cheesecake is not a food group, I’m making you a sandwich too), hovering in high clear harmonies that seemed to carry their own sustain, wincing at the discord when your grip slips and falters (move to Portland?); the red-haired woman who came to tell you murmurs “That was beautiful”, and you can only choke, “So was he.”
Day seventeen
Ship: Steve/Peggy
23. shawarma
“Have you ever had shawarma?” he finally breaks the silence, looking up at her with eyes bluer and more hopeful than she could have remembered, and the weight of every well-earned wrinkle can’t weigh down her mischievous smile, “You know, I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”
Day fourteen
Characters: Maria Hill, Nick Fury
14. coffee
She sifts through his wallet until she finds the Frequent Customer rewards card, then early the next Saturday she re-fills the generic cans with Colombian Roast; all of SHIELD agrees even coffee tasted terrible for a whole two weeks after Phil Coulson’s memorial service, but only Fury looks up at her over the rim of his mug and gently smiles.
Day six
Characters: Nick Fury, Steve Rogers
28. unicorn
“Ma’am- Miss Alvarez- Julia, please,” the huge dude with the eyepatch whispers as he leans conspiratorially close over her pollbook, “just give him a paper ballot – his Social Security number’s gonna get it invalidated anyway - but I swear, if you don’t let the guy at least feel like he’s voted, he will cry, and just- just look at the puppy eyes you’re getting right now, multiply that by a particularly patriotic episode of The West Wing and the sound of a little girl sobbing What do you mean unicorns aren’t real, and that is the situation you’ll be dealing with right here in this middle school cafeteria, so for the love of God, take the kid’s fuckin’ 1938 voter ID card and give him the sticker, okay?”
Day ten
Ship: Bruce/Tony
13. boots
He ebbs in and out of Stark Tower according to the pull of some unseen moon, a distant planetoid coalesced from guilt and fear by an inferno of rage, its orbit a wobbling, incessant presence in Bruce’s mind; but when Tony trips over a pair of musty, dirt-caked boots dropped like meteors in his doorway, when he hears the Knicks blaring on his TV and smells curry billowing from the kitchen, he makes himself forget the rhythms of waxing and waning, ignores the low-tide marks left behind, and just basks in the full, warm glow of Bruce and home.
Day three (penitent bonus sentence because my Day 3 was submitted late)
Character: Maria Hill
30. Disney
“Yes, Director, I- I understand that it’s unacceptable, but before you fire anyone – sir, please let me just make four points; one, protocol for telepathic incidents was never intended for an entire team; two, Agent Valanos had no option but to distract them before Doctor Banner was triggered; three, we were all unaware empathic feedback loops could occur; and four, while it is a children’s film, I think you’ll agree, the Carl and Ellie montage is very intense, and once we get them to the balloon part– yes, sir, absolutely no ‘Toy Story’, got it.”
Day four
Ship: Steve/Tony
17. cufflinks
Want burns an aching hole in him, but loneliness has always been a far deeper and darker well to fill, so for the hundredth time Tony swallows his sharp and stinging heart back down, traps it behind a cocky smile, and says “Cufflinks, yeah, sure, I can show you how to – here, just gimme your hand, Cap.”
Day nine
Character: Thor
29. poodle
“The woman keeps company with a beast of great evil and cunning,” Thor proclaims as a swearing Pepper drags him out, his tux disheveled by the climactic struggle between Mitzy, Thor, Mitzy’s celebutante Mommy, and his plate of honey-barbecue wings; over Tony’s barely-stifled giggles he ominously adds, “and only the All-Father knows what treachery yet lurks in the sinister orbs of that unnatural pelt!”
Day twenty-one
Character: Hulk
18. vampire
“There weren’t a hell of a lot of books printed in both English and Hindi-” Bruce yells indignantly as Clint hits ‘repeat’ on YouTube’s #1 video and the Hulk begins to methodically punch out every Times Square billboard with Robert Pattinson’s face on it, drowning out the Avengers’ laughter with “TEAM JACOB SMASH!”
Day twenty-two
Character: Steve Rogers
25. Christmas
The Ave rings high and pure in a tiny Catholic church that has survived the turning of the Earth and the death of everyone Steve has ever known, and he remembers ragged voices raised in the same hymn in a dark forest, in a leveled city, in a dusty school auditorium, at his hospital bed, in German, in Latin, in Irish; then he hears Natasha’s clear alto at his side, Tony’s surprising tenor to his right, his team rising suddenly around him, and the echoes of everything he’s lost are soaring up, up, up, into the dark night with all its burning stars and all its silent grace.
Day thirty
Characters: Everybody
3. kitchen
Here, they learn to make Cajun chili and how to remove barbed arrow tips, how to work the fancy coffee machine and quiet nightmares, how to say ‘Pass the salt’ in Russian and ‘I love you’ without saying anything at all; here they become a team, and a family, and someday, in this unassuming kitchen full of music and Indian spices and old copies of the Times, something more - and also Tony builds a waffle iron that looks like Mjolnir, which even Jarvis agrees is pretty cool.