stardust

I love wrapping up favorites at the end of the year, and this is the first time I can do this kind of thing, so I wanted to share some of my favorites fics of the year, in case anyone else is interested, or you’re looking for something new to read over the holidays!

don’t let me break this (let me hold it lightly) by autumn _storms _and_coffee_rings

It’s one thing to know he’s wrecked, to know he’s been lost to the weight. It’s another to say it out loud. Verbalizing it makes it real. And to make it real to the man he loves, the man who epitomizes good - the one thing Tony knows he will never be and will never deserve to have.

It’s Only Sex by madeitsimple

Sure, he’s a little out of practice, but casual sex is like riding a bike as far as Tony’s concerned. Once you get good at it, it never really leaves you.

Drive You Home by CapnShellhead

Steve has been making extra money as an Uber driver. One night, a very, very sleep deprived dad gets in the back of his car.

One Day Like This by diskarte

“fake dating au where the one who asks does it *expressly* because they have a huge crush and they want to show the other person how awesome it’d be to date them. Instead of being sad and pining the whole time, they spend the fake dating period (wedding or whatever) doing their damnest to get a real date out of it. 

Swan Song by windfighter

In a world full of people, meeting your soulmate isn’t a guarantee. Steve had hope when he was young, but as the years went by the hope disappeared.

Enter Tony Stark.

Gentle is the Night by erde

Tony Stark, a former CEO turned farmer, doesn’t have any plans for the weekend other than hanging out at the local bar. Then, veteran Steve Rogers makes a stop in town.

With Skin So Soft by KandiSheek

Tony has never felt comfortable receiving compliments when people honestly meant them. Steve is determined to change that.

The Blind Date Dinner Auction by betheflame

In which Steve and Tony go on a blind date.

Take My Heart Clean Apart by Mistymountainking 

Tony comes home exhausted after an SI event. Steve acts as welcoming committee. It’s an old, careworn routine they’ve perfected over the years, but tonight ends up going in a very different direction.

(i will never stop yelling about this, sry not sry)

We Must Love One Another and Die by theapplepielifestyle

There’s not much to do in sickbeds but read.

Steve figures this out pretty early on.

(Or, Tony and Steve bond over Lord of the Rings, among other things.)

Everybody Loves Steve (but Tony Loved Him First) by ashes0909

“So, what? I’m just supposed to get used to you being a bit taller, a bit bulkier, and that guy I met freshman year, what? He’s gone forever now?”

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

or a superhero

or a gunslinger

or a gunslinger and a queen

Or Captain America

The Spiderling

“If that’s rape, then I would be a rapist,” whisper the men to themselves.