Bruce - and I can’t believe I’m even bothering to write this - is not a party person.

For a man named Bruce he’s peculiarly averse to macho chest beating and status reveling. For a guy who blows up into a ten foot tall bright green ball of muscle, rage and short-shorts, he’s really not an exhibitionist. His mind’s all full of wit and sarcasm and kindness and intelligence and ideas, and he has so much to contribute to polite society, yet he doesn’t. Keeps it all bottled up, mouth shut, head down. He knows how to mingle, how to schmooze and woo, theoretically, he just doesn’t care for it. He can’t risk the sips of champagne, the wafts of perfume, the bared shoulders and the big crowds. He treats himself like a suspicious looking package that shouldn’t be unaccompanied in public spaces, but this particularly package rates so damn high on the suspicio-metre that he’s not overly keen on being accompanied either, even by the most accomplished socialite of them all. 

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It’s pulsing through the back of her head like a jackhammer. She’s put up with it for five hours. Five hours of having her skull rattled, and her brain feels pulped like a kiwi in a blender. “Will you turn that shit off?” Natasha finally snaps, her voices rising sharp and authoritative above the blare of the radio, and Clint has the fucking bare-faced audacity to pout at road ahead.

“Fine,” he says, twisting the nob on the old fashioned car radio, the very curve of his wrist passive aggressive as he fixes his eyes on the headlights blaring uselessly into the infinite blackness stretching before them.

“Fine,” she replies, mouth set in a stony line. Five hours of AC/DC occasionally split by spits and snarls and ‘where-the-hell-are-we-anyway’s, and they didn’t seem any closer to the target, nor any closer to recovering from Budapest. Natasha glares out the window and curses S.H.I.E.L.D, and Coulson, and Fury, and their refusal to shy away from using their top secret intelligence for meddling. Clint was the last person she wanted to see after Budapest, and when she didn’t want to see someone she generally made herself pretty damn invisible. But she was also a professional, the best agent shield had to offer, and, unfortunately, he was the second best, and when it came to the gritty, possible-world-destruction cases, he was the only man she wanted watching her back. Yet when she agreed to this mission, their first together after returning from Hungary, she imagined more private jets, cold civility and the efficient brevity S.H.I.E.L.D was famed for - not a company car and a drive across the country. It was all too intimate, too low-key. “A jet’s too high-risk,” Fury had spat, straight-faced but with a nuance to his voice that suggested his covered eye was winking at her, “The less people that know about this the better. This is top priority, Romanoff. We’re keeping it small.”

And small meant nothing but her, Clint, and a world of lip-biting silences. The quiet was oppressive, punctuated by the steady beat of Clint’s rough fingertips against the steering wheel and the arrhythmic patter of rain against the roof. It shot down like slender bullets before the headlights, making the road glossy as an oil slick. Natasha stared resolutely out of the passenger window, and wished she was driving. For one, she was better at it - Barton could hit a bullseye at a hundred feet but couldn’t manoeuvre into a parking space for love nor money - for two, it was something to do with her hands. She felt claustrophobic in this car, with its expensive leather seats and stifling air conditioning. Her fingers were itching, and his every breath seemed to crawl down the back of her tshirt. She just wanted this job done. But first she’d settle for getting to the damn base, preferably with the merest wisp of camaraderie alive between them. She needed to say something without edges, ask anything without barbs. She didn’t believe that a social bond was necessary to work together, she wasn’t about to invite Clint for a sleepover and read him her diary while he plaited her hair, but they needed something, the tiniest degree of softness to make the next couple of weeks liveable. She opened her mouth to make an observation on the weather, a topic she felt could be appropriately void of malice or agenda, only to be flung violently against the dashboard, her hands slamming against the walnut and her neck snapping forward as her belt snapped tight against her chest, yanking her back as the car popped through the air only to land on its tyres with a bounce. She heard Clint curse, loudly, slapping the steering wheel and cutting the engine.

“Sounds like a puncture,” she says blandly, blowing her hair from her eyes where it had fallen across her face, clicking herself free from her belt and tossing the door open.

“Woah, wait, it’s pouring down out the -“

Clint’s voice is sweetly and mercilessly cut off as she hops out of the car and slams the door shut, and is immediately drenched to the bone. The rain slaps over her like a wet sheet, wrapping around her, ice cold and merciless, and she fights not to notice it as she slides a pocket torch from her jeans, squatting beside the steaming car to check tyre after tyre. She discovers the two front tyres are not just blown, but shredded, the rubber hanging limply from the hubs before Clint’s by her side, his face rumpled in a frown.

“We only have one spare,” he shouts over the roar of the storm, his tshirt already heavy with rain water. She clenches her jaw, “Of course we do. Because this is the mission of my life,” she replies, shoving her torch back in her pocket and shielding her eyes from the weather as she scouts the area, squinting against the bleak horizon. “We need somewhere to camp. No one’s going to get out to us out here.”

“There’s a woodland back half a mile, could provide some cover -” he replies, only to have her hand halt him, clamping on his slippery bicep.

“Is that —” she urges, raising her voice, “is that a fucking castle?”

He raises his eyebrow and follows her finger as she points high through the darkness, to a structure rising darker against the sky than everything else, jagged and sharp against the blur of the world. A pinprick of light shines through the panels of rain, minute and golden - a window.  A castle.

“Oh come on,” he murmurs, “Since when did we turn onto a B Movie?”

“Junction three. Didn’t you see the sign post?” she replies, pausing for a moment before storming around the car.

“Nat! Natasha, you can’t be serious? You know the chick in the wet tshirt always dies first, right?” he calls out after her, hoping the slight will redirect her focus on killing him rather than the inhabitants of the creepy-ass castle, but it’s too late, she’s already shouting “Good luck with that, sweetheart,” over her shoulder and making her way to the side of the road, to the bank that climbs up towards the mountainous building. With every step she’s even more serious, mud caking to her ankles as she climbs the slippery path upwards. Clint’s by her side in moments, his shoulders steaming. “This is some Stoker-esque shit,” he sighs miserably, and she can’t help but smile.

“A bitten neck sounds a whole lot better than another five hours of Back in Black.”

“If it’s a bitten neck you want we don’t have —”

“I recommend you stop talking, Clint,” she says, and after that the silence is a whole lot easier.

The doctors at St Mungo’s didn’t know whether James and Lily would ever wake up.

“But they’re alive,” Dumbledore said, his voice a distant blur, soft against the hard lines of the waiting room. “They survived Voldemort. I need not express how miraculous that is, Sirius.”

Sirius didn’t think it was a miracle at all. In fact he’d say it was the furthest you could bloody well get.

“And Harry?” he choked, his tongue thick as a two-by-four in his mouth, just as wooden and dry, full of maggots and mites.

Dumbledore held up one long spindly finger, then shuffled off through a doorway into a side room. He returned moments later with a still, silent bundle held carefully in his arms. Sirius’s heart plummeted through the floor like an anchor thrown overboard. The silence in the ward seemed to ring, a pounding against his eardrums, a throb in the very fabric of the atmosphere, and when it was pierced, suddenly, by a tiny, strangled cry from tiny little lungs, he felt the Earth warm up a bit for the first time since he found Lily and James lying mangled on their brand new carpet.

“Harry!” he breathed, stumbling uneasily to his feet, reaching blindly for the lump squirming noisily against Dumbledore’s robes. Dumbledore shouldn’t have settled the infant into the arms of a man so clearly dysfunctional, so utterly broken, but he did, and Sirius clutched the baby to his chest a little too tightly, his fuzzy little peach head smaller than Sirius’s clammy, trembling hand.

“It’s going to be all right, Harry,” he whispered, because that was the sort of thing you said to children.

“It is going to be all right, Sirius,” Dumbledore said, because that was the sort of thing that worked.

—-

Remus was a very interesting shade of red that Sirius hadn’t seen since he accidentally filibustered his homework five years ago.

He was silently performing a sterling impersonation of a boiled beetroot for a full five minutes before he finally let out a long breath, much like a whistling kettle, and murmured “I’m going to put the kettle on.”

“Good call!” Sirius commended chirpily, as Harry smeared peach mush all over his face, and their tablecloth, and Sirius’s original ‘79 Levi jeans, the ones he’d spent three days sitting in a freezing cold bath in just to vacuum-pack them to his arse. “Grab a bottle from the fridge while you’re at it.”

Remus froze on the way to the kettle. “Oh, Merlin. This is our life now, isn’t it? Grabbing bottles. Scraping crystalised peach mush from everything we own. Nappies. Our life is nappies.”

Sirius grinned at the back of the werewolf’s messy head. There was a flat bit on the side where he’d been sleeping under Sirius’s armpit.

“Pretty much. Two sugars, please.”

Remus just tutted at him. “Of course.” It had been ten years, of course he knew how Sirius took his bloody tea. Now he just needed to learn how a tiny person took their bottle.

If you donate $5 (£3.23!) I’ll write you a thousand word fic on the pairing of your choice. There’s an archive of my writing here. For $10 you’ll get the fic AND see your name in the credits, officially becoming a part of independent British filmmaking! And for $50 (£32.34) you’ll get a DVD of the film YOU helped to make, with a bound, hand-illustrated copy of your fanfic. Heck, if you donate ANYTHING drop me a message and we can work out a fic for you, and I’ll throw in a poster of the production signed by the cast and crew. Just hit my ask and get donating!

P.S. Signal boosts will be hugely appreciated and paid for in hugs <3

“You have a visitor, Clarence.”

Meg’s smile is lipsticky. All the other nurses are bleached and clean and transparent, but Meg’s demonic rebellion has been reduced to MAC Russian Red. Sometimes it’s Cockney, or Ladybug. Sometimes she leaves big sticky prints on his cheek, like bloody butterflies. He leaves them there. Another nurse comes along and wipes them off hours later, looking a little perturbed. He vaguely wonders why no one gets her to stop.

It’s Hang Up today. Purple and glossy. She smacks her lips as she looks up at Dean, and Dean just rolls his eyes. “Thanks, Nurse,” he drawls, like the whole fancy-dress facade pains him. She sashays out, and Dean shoots him a meaningful look. “She picked up everything she knows about nursing from porn, huh?”

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Weird shit’s been going down at William McKinley High School. Sam and Dean don’t realise just how weird until a tiny Jewish girl’s sashaying around their ankles, belting out a Streisand medley.

They barely make it out of the music room alive. Sam’s hands are shaking, and Dean’s fondling the stake in his inside pocket like it’s a big pointy security blanket. They can still hear her high notes from behind the closed door - they barricaded it shut.

“Dude,” Sam breathes, looking around the hallway like a demon’s gonna crawl out of the ceiling - or worse, a chorus line, “This is - Dad never wrote about this, Dean. Dean?”

Dean’s still staring into space as the Yentl soundtrack closes mercilessly around his cerebral cortex like a catchy iron fist. His eyes are wide and glassy and he doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

“Dean!” Sam grabs both his shoulders, shaking him hard, panic flushing through his chest. When Dean doesn’t respond he cracks the back of his knuckles over his ashen, sunken cheek, and with a full-body shudder Dean comes to. Colour drains back into his face and he blinks gooily, like he’s been sleeping for a week. It’s only Sam’s hands shooting under his arms that stop him collapsing on watery knees.

“Jesus,” Dean breathes, stumbling to his feet and leaning heavily against the wall. He scrubs a hand through his hair, breathing hard, “We need to find out what the hell’s going on in this nuthouse.”

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The post-coital dialogue, right at the end, has had me sobbing for the last ten minutes. Beautifully written. Absolutely gut-wrenching.

Castiel doesn’t write like normal people.

The notes Dean finds tucked into his jacket pockets every morning are impossible to read, because Cas writes like a code. Some words are written correctly, Dean thinks the letters are meant to be in English, but half are upside down, or backwards, or…

jenny-cockles:

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This winded me like a punch to the gut. It’s gentle and hazy and muted and delicate and comfortable and searing and delicious and there aren’t enough words to describe how much I just want to drink it in and hold it close and keep it buried under my skin she is a goddess.

(via jennycockles-deactivated2012062)

GIVE, TAKE AND PONCHOS: Castiel has a new trick, one Dean’s never seen, and when he starts using it on the Doctor Dean’s jealousy drives Sam around the bend.

PG-13

Castiel and the Doctor have been gone for three hours by the time they both suddenly appear in the middle of Bobby’s living room, pink-faced and crazy-haired and sending a stack of papers sky high. The sheets flutter through the air like confetti and the Doctor’s still giggling by the time they touch the floor. 

“Look what the Cas dragged in!” Amy catcalls from her place sprawled on the sofa, long limbs everywhere, fanning herself with a tomb on ancient Aztec mythology. It’s a hot summer’s day in South Dakota and she’s wearing as few clothes as are logically possible around a handsy Dean and a husband with a sword. “How were Adam and Eve?” 

The Doctor sashays over to her, hands clasped and eyes bright, “I think you mean Adam and Steve.”

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