From the Fangirl's Journal

So here’s the full scene that my most recent Six Sentence Sunday post came from. I don’t know if it will actually find its way into the fic or not, but I do know exactly how to fit it into the story if I do decide to put it in to the actual fic. I have nothing to say for myself except that y’all are enablers:

 “Leave the door open,” Oliver said. “The light in here doesn’t work.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Felicity muttered, but did as he said. 

“What exactly are we looking for?” she asked, following Oliver into the mess of a linen closet.

“The sheets for the bed in the main floor guest bedroom,” he replied. He described them to her quickly, adding, “We’ll get this done faster if we each look in different spots.” Felicity nodded. She couldn’t argue with that logic.

After they’d been looking for a while, they heard footsteps coming down the hall. Oliver tensed, listening, then said, “Raisa.”

“You can identify people by the pattern of their footsteps?” Felicity asked, awed.

“It’s a survival skill you learn pretty quickly when you’re held prisoner by multiple people,” Oliver answered bluntly. Thrown as she was by that admission, Felicity didn’t notice Raisa closing the closet door as she passed until she and Oliver were suddenly plunged in darkness. Felicity ran toward the door, stumbling in the pitch black, calling after Raisa that they were in there, but she was already gone. She tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Frack,” she mumbled. The only other sound in the cramped, pitch dark space was Oliver’s breathing, which she quickly noticed was much more rapid and ragged than it should have been. 

“Oliver?” she asked. “Are you okay?” There was a long silence before Oliver said, “No,” in a strained voice.

“Okay, just...don’t have a panic attack on me, alright?” Felicity asked. Oliver’s response was a strangled, desperate laugh.

“Too late,” he managed. Felicity chewed her bottom lip anxiously.

“Oliver,” she said. “Just listen to my voice, okay? I’m going to try to get over to you. Keep listening to my voice. Focus on that, and try to take deep breaths.” She felt her way along the shelved toward where she’d heard Oliver’s voice. She waved a hand through the air until she found Oliver’s and laced her fingers through his.

“I’m here,” she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “I’m going to sit down. Can you move right now? Can you try and sit down with me?” 

“I can try,” Oliver said, still gasping for breath. Felicity slid down the shelf at her back, tugging Oliver down with her. For the next few minutes, Felicity continued to talk softly and soothingly to Oliver, telling him to take deep breaths, until finally his breathing evened out and became less ragged. She froze when she felt his touch trace the line of her cheekbone and jaw, and in the next moment his lips were on hers in the pitch dark. Conscious thought failed her, but her body reacted, her hands reaching up to curl around the back of his neck and pull him closer to her. She felt warmth at her sides that could only be Oliver’s hands, holding her gently but firmly. Felicity didn’t quite know how this was happening, but she didn’t want to stop to think about it. All she wanted to do was get lost in this moment and never come back. But all too soon, it was over. She felt Oliver pull back, his breathing rapid again, but this time for a much different reason.

“What was that?” Felicity whispered.

“A thank you,” Oliver replied in a soft voice. 

“You should say thank you like that more often,” Felicity said. Oliver huffed out a laugh, and Felicity felt him press a kiss against the top of her head.

They shifted until Felicity was leaning back against Oliver,her head on his chest, his arms curled loosely around her waist. Their hands found each other in the dark and intertwined. Felicity could feel how her hand fit perfectly in Oliver’s, like they’d always been meant to fit together.

“Why didn’t either of us make a move like this sooner?” she murmured. 

“If you’re the sort of person who would conspire to have us get accidentally on purpose locked in a closet together, then I really don’t know you at all,” Oliver teased.

“You know what I mean,” Felicity retorted. It was a long time before Oliver answered.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I guess I was just afraid. I thought there was no chance in hell that someone as good as you are could ever love as broken as I am.”

“You’re not broken, Oliver,” Felicity said solemnly. “And it’s funny that you mention being afraid, because here I was thinking that someone like you would never even so much as look twice at someone like me. I’ve been in love with you since I met you, but I kept it to myself this whole time because I thought you were out of my league.”

“I could never be out of your league,” Oliver said. Felicity somehow knew that he was shaking his head. “If anything, you’re out of mine.”

“I guess we’re just a couple of clueless idiots,” Felicity said. Oliver laughed.

“I guess we are,” he said, and kissed her again. Light suddenly flooded into the closet, breaking them apart. Thea, standing framed in the closet doorway, let out a low whistle.

“If I’d known this is what it’d take for you two idiots to admit your feelings for each other,” she said, “I’d have locked you in a closet together a long time ago.” Neither of them had a response to that. Felicity felt a blush warming her cheeks.

“Anyway, I’m going to go before I start imagining what you two would have done in here if I hadn’t come along just now,” Thea said. She walked away with an overexaggerated shudder.

“So where do we go from here?” Felicity asked when Thea had gone. Oliver shrugged.

“I suppose there’s really only one place we can go,” he said.

“Trying out this whole dating thing?” Felicity asked with a smile.

“Yes,” Oliver replied. “That.” After a pause, he asked “Felicity, would you like to go to dinner with me?” Try though she might, Felicity couldn’t stop an exultant grin from spreading across her face.

Oliver's shoulders rose, slightly, almost imperceptibly. Almost. Felicity laid a hand on his arm, gesture of comfort. Moira's gaze honed in on the movement.

"Miss Smoak," she said, a steely edge to her voice. "I ordered you to bring my son back to me, not to fall in love with him." Moira's words cut into Felicity like daggers. She knew. How could she possibly have known? She resisted the urge to back away from her. She may not have been a mage, but she could turn words into weapons as effectively as Felicity could.

"Felicity," Oliver murmured, saying her name in that way that could make it mean any one of a hundred things, depending on the situation. This time it meant "It's okay. I'm here", and that alone was enough to give her resolve. Moira Queen arched an eyebrow at her son.

I wrote this because I’ve been watching Arrow with my best friend and I remembered how mad I was that there were never any emotional repercussions for Oliver from what he did as Al Sah-Him(regardless of whether he was doing it for the right reasons, there still should have been some). This is basically a giant angsty dumpster fire, but bear with me.

The first few weeks were hard. Oliver’s guilt over what he had done to John, to her, to everyone he cared about, weighed on him so much as to make starting a new life in Ivy Town next to impossible. They went through the motions, sure, but that was all. He was in a downward spiral, and Felicity didn’t know how to pull him out of it. Not this time. One night she was awoken by Oliver tossing and turning in the bed beside her, and muttering in his sleep.

“Oliver,” she whispered urgently, shaking his shoulder. “Oliver!” He sat bolt upright, eyes wild, hand clenched as if around the handle of a sword.

“Felicity…” he murmured in a brittle voice, the wild look fading from his eyes. He grabbed her and pulled her against his chest, making her gasp in surprise.

“So what do you think that says about your soulmate?” Bucky asked, gesturing to Steve’s newest- and first- tattoo, thorny vines and roses, twining their way around his wrist. English roses, specifically, according to Bucky’s mother.

“I think it means that she’s really pretty, but she can kick my ass,” Steve offered eagerly, perhaps a little too eagerly.

“Well, that ain’t saying much,” Bucky pointed out, “but how d'you figure?”

“The whole thing with roses is that they’re really pretty, but they can hurt you if you don’t handle them carefully,” Steve explained. Lifting his bony shoulders in a shrug, he added, “It just makes sense.”

“Well, okay,” Bucky said, nodding. “It’s not like I can argue with that. But what happens if when you meet her your theories turn out to be wrong?”

Apparently a lot of you guys wanted a continuation of this, so here it is:

Peggy slowed to a walk, exhausted. After Steve had left, she had chased after him-in heels, as she hadn’t had time to change-down innumerable city blocks to his apartment building. He’d seemed so distraught after…what had happened, and she wanted to make sure he was okay. When she entered the building, too tired and sore to bother with the stairs, she stepped into the rickety elevator that she normally wouldn’t have trusted with her life and listened to it creak and groan laboriously as it hauled her up to the fourth floor. Reaching Steve’s apartment, she was surprised to find his door ajar.

“Steve?” she called, pushing the door farther open and slipping inside. She received no reply, but heard a noise from the kitchen. Entering the room, she found Steve sitting at his kitchen table, a vacant expression on his face, staring off into nothing. Peggy felt her chest constrict. Sitting there like that, he looked almost exactly as he had when she’d found him in that bar after his friend James had died, only this time, instead of a bottle, it was a piece of paper he clutched in his hand, gripping it so tightly that it had creased and folded in on itself.

“Steve,” she said. Her voice was gentle, but he still flinched as though she had shouted at him. She edged herself carefully into the empty chair next to him and took the paper gingerly from his hand. As she started to smooth it out, Steve said, “Peggy, don’t-” in a faint, distracted voice, as if he were coming out of a daze. Instead of finishing his sentence, he snatched the paper away from her before she could get a good look at it.

“What happened back there, Steve?” Peggy asked. “Why did you run off like a spooked horse?”

“We almost lost control of ourselves,” Steve said, his voice still faint and distracted, “and I…didn’t…want to take liberties with you.”

“You wouldn’t have been,” Peggy said gently, smiling in spite of herself at his use of such an old fashioned turn of phrase. “What we were about to do…trust me. I wanted it.”

“And now that you’ve had the chance to recover from whatever it was that happened to you, do you still want it?” Steve asked.

“No,” Peggy admitted after a pregnant pause. The desire she felt for Steve, the need to have him close to her in every sense of the word, was still there, was always there, but the desperate hunger from earlier was gone.

“Exactly,” Steve replied, though he didn’t sound particularly happy to have been proven right. “If we do that, when we do that, I want it to mean something, Peggy. I want it to happen at the right time, because we love each other, not be borne out of desperation and be something we both end up regretting.”

“Alright,” Peggy said, carefully but emphatically. “I understand.”

“You do?” Steve asked, sounding surprised, as if he hadn’t been expecting her to.

“Yes,” Peggy assured him, getting up from her chair, “I do. Some day, when the time is right.” Steve nodded his agreement, a relieved smile spreading across his face. Peggy leaned down and pressed a chaste kiss to his lips, bracing herself with a hand on his shoulder. He responded, reaching up to cup one hand around the back of her neck, pulling her closer, but this time their kiss remained slow and gentle, with none of the frantic, desperate hunger of before. When at last they pulled apart, it was a long time before either of them spoke.

“Peggy,” Steve finally said, her name coming out whispered like a prayer.

“Steve,” Peggy teased in reply.

“I love you, Peggy,” Steve said, his voice soft.

“Tell me everything you’re aware of right at this moment,” Peggy said, her voice calm and gentle, though she was boiling with rage at the fact that everyone had been so concerned with how they could use Steve and his transformation to their advantage that they hadn’t even considered how it affected him, hadn’t bothered to teach him how to filter the suddenly massive amounts of information he was getting from his senses, until, eventually, he’d been driven to the state in which she found him now. “Talking about it might make it easier to deal with.” Steve stared at her for a long moment, then took a deep breath and spoke. “I can hear Phillips dictating to his secretary three hallways over,” he said. “I can hear my own pulse pounding in my ears. I can smell the bricks in the pillars that hold up the ceiling, and the dust on the boxes in the file room down the hall, and the rose oil in your perfume. I can feel the movement of the air, and how for the first time I can take a deep breath without feeling like there’s iron bands around my chest. I know that something just blew up in Howard Stark’s lab, and that Phillips’ secretary is a really slow typer, and that you’re angry about something but don’t want me to know that you’re angry. I can see the patterns in your irises, and how brilliantly red your lipstick is, God it’s so red, it’s even brighter than the red stripes on my uniform, and those are so red you could go blind if you looked at them too long-“

“Steve,” Peggy said, not unkindly, cutting him off before he could spiral back into another panic attack. “You’re getting dangerously close to panicking again. You need to focus.” “I can’t,” Steve replied. “I don’t know how.” “Just pick one thing and focus on that, to the exclusion of all else. Here, I’ll help you.” Remembering how easily the sound of her shoes on the concrete floor had drawn his attention earlier, she lifted one heel off the ground and slammed it back down again, producing a loud and oddly satisfying clack. “There,” she said, making the sound again. “Focus on that. Focus on that until it drowns everything else out.“ For the next several minutes Peggy continued clacking her heel against the floor until gradually the panic faded from Steve’s eyes.

“I’m guessing that worked,” Peggy said, amusement coloring her tone.

“Not exactly,” Steve admitted. “It wasn’t so much the noise you were making that I was focusing on so much as it was you yourself.” “Well, that’s alright,” Peggy replied with the smallest of smiles. “As long as it helped.”

Peggy wanted to still be angry at Steve. She really did. But, now that he was standing in front of her, pleading with his eyes for her forgiveness, all she could think of was how utterly, infuriatingly earnest he was. How distractingly handsome. They stared at each other in silence for a few more minutes. Steve’s stance was slightly more confident than it usually was when he was around her, but she could see that there was still that slight defensive curl to his shoulders, a barely noticeable questioning tilt to his head.

“Look Peggy,” Steve finally said, his tone cautious. “I’m really sorry. I know I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, but Phillips’ secretary-”

“Lorraine,” Peggy interjected, though she was sure why it mattered that Steve knew what her name was.

“Lorraine,” Steve amended. “Lorraine…caught me off guard. She just…hurled herself at me, and I didn’t know how to react. But I was about to push her away when you came around the corner, I swear. Please, Peg, Please forgive me.” Peggy sighed. A pregnant silence stretched out between them.

“All right, yes!” Peggy finally shouted, throwing her hands up in defeat. “Fine! I forgive you!” The smile that spread across Steve’s face as a result was like sunshine on a cloudy day. Peggy glared at him.

Okay let’s be honest- this is more like an entire chapter, but I don’t know where it will fit in the story yet, so I’m just going to call it a segment:

Peggy stood in the middle of her apartment and shuddered. A desperate sob escaped her. She felt…violated. Unclean. She supposed it was her fault- she had a date with Steve that night, and was wearing her red dress, the one that left very little of her curves to the imagination. Still, when those men had shouted vulgar comments at her as she passed by…she still had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

A knock at her door made her jump, a startled cry slipping free before she could stop it.

“Peggy?” Steve’s voice asked, full of concern.

“Be right there!” Peggy called, fighting to keep her voice from trembling. She went to her door and pulled it open with a shaking hand.

“Peggy,” Steve said from where he stood in the hallway, worry written in every plane of his face. “What-” Peggy silenced him by yanking him downwards by his tie and covering his mouth with hers, cutting off his words. He froze in surprise for a moment, lifting his hands like he wasn’t sure what to do with them, but before long he had place them on her hips and was kissing her back. Needing more leverage, Peggy fisted her hands in the lapels of Steve’s suit jacket, pulling him forward and deepening the kiss. Momentum sent her stumbling back, into the apartment itself, taking Steve with her. He pushed the door shut with his foot on his way past, and for a second Peggy had the presence of mind to be grateful that Coleen wasn’t home. After that second though, she found herself incapable of any kind of rational thought.

Peggy had been the one to instigate the kiss, but it had quickly gotten out of her control. She didn’t care. This is what she wanted. She wanted to kiss Steve until she was silly, to lose herself in him. She wanted his scent of petrichor to wash her clean.

Steve pulled away suddenly, far sooner than she wanted him to. She made a noise of disappointment low in her throat.

“Peggy,” he said, his voice a near breathless whisper. She shook her head, still clutching fistfuls of his lapels.

“No,” she said, fierce and weak at the same time. “Just kiss me, Steve. I don’t want to talk right now. I don’t want to think.” Steve looked bewildered, just for a moment, but he straightened, pulling Peggy toward him again, and did as she asked. Unlike their first kiss, which had been frantic and hungry, this one was slow and gentle- or at least it started that way. The passion they kept so carefully controlled in public had a tendency to get away from them in private, burning hot and wild like a forest fire. Before long the hunger returned, stronger than before. Their kisses became rough, almost violent. Their heads moved together, first one way, then the other, searching for the perfect angle. They got so close together that there was no space between them, but it still wasn’t close enough. Peggy let go of Steve’s lapels to wrap her arms around his waist. Steve did the same to her, lifting his hands from her hips, his arms twining around her like snakes. They broke apart suddenly, their breathing rapid and ragged, echoing in the space between them. Peggy had to lean back to properly look into Steve’s eyes, his beautiful blue-grey eyes, which were stormier than she’d ever seen them.

“Steve,” she said, his name coming out sounding like a sigh, whispered like a prayer. Steve kissed her again then, a hard, bruising kiss. The force of it made her gasp against his mouth. She pushed his suit jacket off his shoulders, and he moved his arms from her waist to let it slide the rest of the way off, falling in a heap on the floor. He kicked it aside, and their shared momentum sent them backwards, and farther backwards still, until they fell onto Peggy’s bed, still kissing, their legs tangling together, Steve lifting himself up on his elbows so as not to crush her beneath his weight. He pulled back for a moment to look deep into her eyes, his tie dangling in the sudden space between them, and she grabbed it and pulled him down to kiss him again. She tugged on it until the knot came loose, but didn’t take it off, instead leaving it to hang loose around his collar. She started to undo the top button of his shirt when he suddenly jerked away as if he’d been stung, scrambling backwards off the bed, shaking his head and muttering, “I cant. I can’t. I can’t.”

He stood across the room from her, his eyes wild, his hair disheveled, his chest heaving. Peggy leaned back on her elbows and watched his shoulders rise and fall in time with his rapid breathing for a moment, trying to ignore the feeling of disappointment that was settling in her chest. Finally, she spoke.

“You can’t what?” she asked.

Here’s a little Steve and Peggy post wedding night fluff for you lovely people:

Laying across her husband’s naked chest, feeling it move in time with his slow, even breathing, Peggy thought, I could get used to this.

She felt the rhythm of Steve’s breathing change, and then he was smiling down at her, his blue-grey eyes half open and misty with sleep and love.

“Hey Peg,” he murmured. “Is it morning yet?”

“Not yet,” Peggy replied with a quick glance out the window to make sure. “We don’t have to go anywhere for a while longer.”

“Good,” Steve said, his voice a contented hum low in his throat. He started to roll over, making Peggy slide down to lay beside him. The moment she did he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. She sighed contentedly.

“I love you Peg,” Steve mumbled sleepily, kissing the scars on her shoulder.

A 737 word fic I wrote based on this post, because once that plot bunny was in my head it wouldn’t leave me alone:

Peter stopped in front of his door, hefting his backpack to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. As he reached into his pocket for his key, Mrs. Proctor yelled “What the fuck?” from next door, loudly enough for Peter to hear even over his music, and he flinched involuntarily. Whatever had just happened, it must have been really upsetting- Mrs. Proctor’s Brooklyn accent was pronounced in a way it only was when she was angry.

What the hell? Peter thought as he opened his door.

“Hey honey,” his aunt said when he entered the apartment. “How was school?”

“Good,” Peter replied, setting his backpack down by the door. “It was good.” He wondered why his aunt seemed so distracted, and that’s when he realized that the news was on. He pulled out his earbuds to listen to it.

“Anyone with information on Barnes’ whereabouts is urged to contact their local authorities,” the newscaster was saying. Peter’s eyes flicked down to the news banner at the bottom of the screen. James Barnes suspect in UN terrorist bombing, it proclaimed in bold black capital letters.

“Oh shit,” he said, his eyes widening, the words slipping out before he could stop them. His aunt shot a glare in his direction.

“I’m-uh…I’m gonna go check on Mrs. Proctor,” he stammered, gesturing awkwardly toward the door. His aunt nodded. He raced out into the hallway, swinging the door shut behind him harder than he meant to and ending up slamming it.

“Mrs. Proctor?” he asked timidly, rapping gently on her door. No answer. He tried again. “Mrs. Proctor?” Her door jerked open suddenly and they were face to face. Her expression was angry, but there were tears glistening wetly in the wrinkles on her face.

“What do you want?” she snapped. If the tears hadn’t been a clear indication that she was still upset, her voice certainly was- her accent hadn’t modulated back to its usual barely noticeable purr.

“I just saw the news,” Peter said carefully. “Are you okay?” He felt stupid even as he asked the question- obviously she wasn’t okay- but it still needed to be asked.

“It’s a mistake,” Mrs. Proctor said desperately. “It has to be a mistake. Jimmy wouldn’t-he couldn’t-” She didn’t finish her thought. She suddenly looked much younger than her ninety-seven years. Peter didn’t have any siblings, but she looked the way he imagined a scared little sister would. A moment later he remembered that a scared little sister was exactly what she was at that moment.

“I…don’t think it’s a mistake, Mrs. Proctor,” he said gently.

“It has to be!” Mrs. Proctor snapped, her voice hitching. “Jimmy’s not capable of something like that any more than-than Steve is!” Her fingers played nervously with the pendant around her neck. Peter had never asked about it, but he assumed it had some connection with her brother- she always played with it like that when she talked about him.

“I don’t think it’s possible to ever truly know what someone is capable of,” he offered carefully, trying to calm her down a little bit.

“I’m telling you, it has to be a mistake!” she said again, her voice rising in volume, as if repeating it enough times would make it true. “My brother is not a terrorist.”

“Maybe he didn’t use to be,” Peter said, “but I’m not sure what he is now.” Mrs. Proctor glared at him for a moment, dumbstruck, then slammed her door in his face.

“Mrs. Proctor!” Peter cried, realizing his mistake. “Mrs. Proctor, please! I was trying to play devil’s advocate, and I’m sorry. I should have realized that that would upset you.” Mrs. Proctor’s door opened, but just a crack.

“Alright, so you’re sorry,” she said, a steely edge to her tone. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Is there…is there anything I can do for you?” Peter asked hesitantly. “Any way I can help?”

Bucky remembered. He remembered so much, so suddenly-it was like a flood, a rushing, tumbling torrent of information. He remembered the letter he’d received from Steve a few days after his arrival in London, the one telling him that he had, by some miracle, been accepted into the army and would be heading out for basic training soon, the letter that Bucky could tell he had been excited while writing because it had been done in a nearly unintelligible scrawl that implied it had been written quickly, and Bucky had been able to picture him in that moment, the cuffs of his sleeves ink stained, his face flushed with the particular type of pride he felt when he’d done something that the world had told him he couldn’t do.

He remembered the little corner store where Steve would go to buy groceries because it was the only place he could afford them, and how he would always accompany him because odds were good that he would get in a fight if he went out by himself, and he remembered that the girl manning the register always had stray hairs sticking out of her long brown ponytail, and the flustered, distracted air of someone who’s mind was elsewhere, and that whenever Steve would ask her how she was doing that day she would blush and say very quietly “Fine Mr. Rogers, sir, how are you?” and be suddenly unable to meet Steve’s eyes, and Steve would answer her as politely as he answered anyone who asked him that question that he was doing just fine, thank you for asking, and insist that she call him Steve or at the very least Steven, and Bucky remembered thinking how odd it was that Steve kept insisting upon that considering that he had never learned the girl’s name. The girl would always shake her head at this, and insist upon her “Mr. Rogers” nonsense, and Bucky would laugh quietly to himself because it was obvious that she had a crush on Steve, and he couldn’t understand how Steve couldn’t see it and-there was pain, and the memories were gone. Bucky grasped at them, tried to hold on to them, but they slipped away and all he had left was pain. He screamed in agony and found himself praying for a new mission because once the whitewash released him he felt no pain…in fact he didn’t feel anything at all, because it was no longer him in control.