it's a living

percy:

The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. I’d killed nineteen people… I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didn’t just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.

It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. “Who… who is this?” he asked, frowning. “Some victim of the usurper?”

People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers don’t change as easily as kings. The same man who’d been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. “No, yer majesty,” he said humbly. “That be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.”

“Special? Special how?” He frowned, moving closer to my cell. “The old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to - “

“Don’t get too close, yer majesty,” the old man said sharply. “That’s the Monster of Sentan… an’ she bites.”

That was true. I do bite.

stevetony | instead of steve pulling tony out of his workshop, it's tony pulling steve out of the gym.

Tony finds Steve in the gym after hours, and he would find the tight white shirt and sweat-soaked blond hair sexy if he didn't know why Steve was here, tearing through punching bags like they pissed him off. Not that Steve doesn't look sexy anyway.

"Hey there, hot stuff," Tony says.

Steve steps back from his punching bag and looks at Tony, chest heaving, and the vulnerable look in his eyes is nearly impossible to reconcile with the set of muscles on him, rippling with superhuman strength.

"I was just—" Steve waves at the punching bags lined up on the floor. "Letting off some steam."

Tony closes in on him and takes one of Steve's hands in his, unwrapping the gauze slowly, and Steve lets him see the fresh bruising and seeping blood on his knuckles.

"Adrenaline junkie," Tony calls him. "You've been down here for hours. There are better ways to let off steam after a bad mission, Cap."

"Are you trying to get me into a street fight?" Steve cracks a dry joke, watching as Tony unwraps his other hand. "It's okay, you don't—these heal fast."

"Yeah, I know you've got your super-soldier hack," Tony says, flashing him a smile. "Can't sleep until you've got all this out of your system?"

Steve shakes his head with a little smile back. "Don't think so."

"Well," Tony says, brown eyes warm and alluring. He rests one hand on Steve's waist and leans in to lick the sweat from his neck. "There are other ways to tire you out."

Steve's breath hitches. "Tony."

"Come on, soldier," Tony laughs as he takes his hand, leading him out of the gym. His expression turns soft and serious when he says, "You're not on your own anymore, alright? Get that through your pretty head. You need anything, you've got me."

a continuation of my comic + ficlet (here) where tony and nat meet up in a strange, dream-like place after the endgame. nat is pretty sure this is it for them, but tony is determined to pull off one last escape. (what on earth is a pocket dimension?!)

Canon Compliant: “This fic goes along with canon.” (Because I like it? Because I’m too tired to disagree by writing my own fic? Who knows? The author may or may not tell us.)

Canon Compatible: “Listen, I know it ISN’T canon, but think of it as Microsoft Office for Mac, it’s COMPATIBLE with canon, and that counts.”