open roleplay post.

[neveryourmask]

open roleplay post; consult active cast list (pending update). shipping and nc-17 content is fine. i also like action, genre aus, canon compliant and canon divergent things, and pretend tdms. feel free to plurk me if you want to bounce an idea. leave me prompts, starters, blank comments, whatever your dark heart desires. current links to meme starters/blank comments can be found here. i am periodically slow to tag due to prioritising games and life things.

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meme & character-specific post links.

[neveryourmask]

[lie]

[ Italy. Obviously.

It's the middle of the day, but it's raining out. Grey skies, light downpours. Natasha tracks in little puddles of water as she kicks off her shoes, her socks. She lives above a florist's in a modest apartment with a real shower, with real water pressure, and room for things like books and a couch and a good mattress. Wanda and Vision aren't far -- they've been renting a room for the last day, and it's Natasha's turn to be port of call for when Wanda comes back later. Technically, Wanda's supposed to be living here too. She clearly isn't.

Natasha puts the plastic bag she's carrying down on the kitchen counter. Water beads off it. Inside are things like hair dye and a new pair of scissors. A pocket book of sudoku. Brand new chapstick. The life of an international criminal. She opens the fridge to put in a new bottle of milk.

Pauses.

Natasha sighs, then closes the fridge. Flips on the dinky kitchen radio, background noise of some local news station. She fills up her hot water kettle and takes down two mugs. Again. ]

I'm out of chamomile, [ she says, instead of hello. ]

[superpatriot]

[FYI future Rhodey is incorrect. The fugitive life suits Steve Rogers very well, at least insofar as that his appearance doesn't suffer. That jawline! The hair. He finds some way to maintain it. Natasha does know her way around a blade and a set of aesthetics, and he has been recently introduced to peroxide. Because friends reciprocate. You can blame him for her blonde hair in a couple of movies!!

Anyway, he heard there was trouble. Fortunately, not the kind that ends worlds or timelines (yet), but trouble of its own shocking magnitude. Awkwardly, he heard about it first over the tabloids. That shouldn't make the situation more embarrassing than it already is, he thinks. After all, Tony Stark famously ended up on the news the one time for directing a terrorist's missiles directly toward his personal home address.

Incidentally, Pepper was leaving that time, too.]

Hey, Tony. Wanna get a drink? [He's standing in front of Tony's car. The sleek two-door and its noisy, V-three-billion-something engine, which is only noisy because Tony wants it to be and not because it actually requires pollutant gasoline mixtures to run.

The parking lot valet, still holding Tony's key fob, had obviously believed that the big handsome tourist in his FIFA cap had taken a genuine interest in his opinions on the post-Chitauri changes to the city, rather than this being some kind of manipulative ploy to corner Earth's most notorious playboy superhero billionaire. The poor kid looks very guilty. (Plot twist: Steve was interested. He can multitask.)]

not here;

[beachland]

[europe, prompt: video/photo]

Finally, Teodoro comes over to Williamsburg for the first time. He chooses to do so a few days after Thanksgiving, which feels potentially like some passive-aggressive bullshit, but he texts beforehand, providing some variety of reasonable-sounding excuses about state-level licensure examinations, and then he brings over a box of tools, so. Maybe not passive-aggressive. Maybe, maybe.

Mostly, they talk in English, which feels squarely like they're being careful. Less nuance to be found, in this one.

(Or, if you're ignoring the spectacular odds of miscommunication demonstrated by their past year and trying to be optimistic: less to be lost.)

Optimistically (or trying to be), Francois shows his husband around the apartment, still clearly a fixer-upper, mostly bald and impersonal apart from Francois' books. Their books. Bathroom, bedroom, walls and the patchy bit at the bottoms of some of the walls where the baseboards came off at some point and new ones need to go on. He experiences a flutter of chagrin when Teo compliments his realtor's judgment of the solid construction, and the flutter really guns its wings when Teo seems to realize his mistake and tries to reverse the compliment into a mumbly acknowledgement that Francois is good at judging and hiring realtors? or something? It takes less effort than you might think, for Francois to let it go.

At around five PM, it starts to snow.

By then, Teodoro has pulled several remaining baseboards off. This is a process punctuated by splitting, splintery sound-effects, and Francois spends most of it standing there and staring at him, accepting cast-off pieces. It feels kind of bad, despite needing to be done. It feels worse, that the dimming of daylight and inclement weather seem to be converging toward a super awkward conversation about how Francois totally has linens, and he can make up the couch.

But Teo says he is leaving and packs up the stained and discolored pieces of MDF to take with him. Teo is avoiding eye contact and seems to be hesitating fractionally; discernible only to someone well-versed in his gift for gab. Though this wilful retreat is not less awkward than the unvoiced invitation, overall, Francois considers this a win. It does seem like objectively, empirically measurable progress, according to the visibly exposed glue blotches in several of Francois' rooms. Francois insists Teo need not do any sweeping, and gamely proposes another project day, soon, which Teo agrees to, so there's definitely a positive trend occurring even before Teo says:

"And I'll bring a tree."

"Que?" Accidental/reflexive French.

Teo gestures at the flurries outside the window, or maybe the Christmas lights across the street, or maybe -- if you are being optimistic, you might say -- at the home they are renovating together, and he says, "You should have a tree."

"Okay," Francois says quickly, hoping it won't be hard to take care of, that it won't die, that, that, that. He takes a breath.

Five days later, Francois has a seasonally appropriate tree. It is a Norfolk Island Pine Tree, bushy and growing green from a square pot, very much alive, about which Teo does about fifteen solid minutes of profoundly boring technical farmer person captioning, before he gives the tree's age and expected growth. Translated to laymen's terms in French slang. Un ado. 'A teenager.' It's a rescue, in absence of any kind of nursery industry in post-war America, not bound to get bigger than eight feet. And Francois should not, apparently, worry if it initially sheds a few leaves or scales from climate shock. Norfolk Island Pine Trees are allegedly very resilient.

Not knowing what to expect, Francois had purchased what he thought was a no-pressure, if slightly clueless quantity of tinsel. They garland their foundling in gold and take a picture of it. Neither of them are in the frame, and they chat cooperatively about how no one sends custom holiday cards anymore, since the war. But the picture looks good and Teo wants him to send it to him so he can text it around, and that is enough to veer Francois' mind around whatever Teo is plainly not telling him. (What will Teo write with the texts? 'Merry Christmas from...') ('From...')

Francois has always been good at hope. And besides, he saw Teo looking at the book he'd left marked on his nightstand on the first tour through. A novel in which Frances Hodgson Burnett had lovingly described the hope one might imbue in a bit of earth.