Otter's Rock

Hard to Say (17259 words) by betty days
Fandom: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Laura Barton, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Natasha Romanov, Pepper Potts
Additional Tags: Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, POV Second Person, Aphasia, Humor, Hand Jobs, Clint Barton's Farm, A lot of kissing, like a lot of kissing
Summary:

“What worked for me was a nice, solid punch in the face. I’m not sure that’ll do much for you, though. Looks like you’ve been through enough already,” Hawkeye said.

***

The Winter Soldier is overdue for a reboot. His friends disagree.

What I really like about this one is that it's more about the Winter Soldier's agency and less about people doing things for his own good than a lot of Bucky recovery fics I've seen.

Title: hey good looking, what's cooking
Author: beatrice_otter
Fandom: Agent Carter
Rating: PG
Characters: Peggy Carter, Angie Martinelli
Word Count: 12,360
Betaed by: lilacsigil 
Summary: Dottie Underwood has been spotted again. Now they just have to find her.

AN: This fic attempts to bridge the gap between the show (which ends with Thompson as chief of the New York office of the SSR) and the Agent Carter one-shot (in which Thompson is not the chief of the New York office as the SSR becomes SHIELD). It will undoubtedly be jossed, but there you have it.

At AO3     FF.net     tumblr link post

( For one awful, drawn-out, smoke-filled moment, Angie missed the Griffith. )

I am writing an Agent Carter fic.  The show usually had some badass fight scenes between Peggy and the villain du jour, and I was planning on doing that.  But she’s an espionage agent, and so for her fighting often means she’s failed because she’s been spotted.  The most important thing, in most counter-espionage (which is what she’s doing) is to spot the enemy without being spotted in return, so you can tail them and find out their contacts and keep the enemy you know from being replaced by agents you don’t know (and hopefully feeding them false information while you do it).

It has just occurred to me that maybe instead of a fight scene, I should end this fic by the target being positively identified and put under surveillance.  But it seems so anticlimactic.   (On the other hand, it means I don’t have to figure out what the villain’s plot is, because that’s part of what the surveillance is meant to find out.)  (On the third hand, it also means I don’t have to write a fight scene, which is good because I suck at action.)  (On the fourth hand, given the time constraints, I think I’m going to write the surveillance ending so I can post it today before the deadline, then send it out to beta and see what they say–I’ve got a week until it goes live.)

Thoughts, opinions?

Hands by which we take hold (2758 words) by argyleam
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Avengers: Age of Ultron - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanov, Background Laura/Clint, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Laura Barton & Natasha Romanov
Characters: Bruce Banner, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Laura Barton, Lila Barton, Cooper Barton
Additional Tags: Childhood Trauma, Red Room, Child Abuse, Childbirth, Recovery, Family, Friendship, the Barton Farm, Parenthood
Summary:

Lila Barton is the same age that Natasha was when the Red Room took her.

A fix-it for Natasha.

halfamoon  stories have been revealed! I wrote a Peggy & Angie fic set in the last episode, after Jarvis shows them their new digs.

In the Apartment After the War (2778 words) by Beatrice_Otter
Fandom: Agent Carter (TV)
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Rated: Teen
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Angie Martinelli
Betaed by: lilacsigil 
Summary: When Jarvis showed them in to the swank "apartment" he's letting them use on Howard Stark's dime, Angie was incredulous. Awestruck. But not so incredulous that she lost sight of the important things.

 

( In the Apartment After the War )

 

The MCU Ladies exchange is open, with lots of good fic.  Go check it out!  Here's the one I got, which is a lovely series of interconnected character studies:

A Cavalry of Women (5794 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Agent Carter (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Captain America (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Peggy Carter, Melinda May, Maria Hill, Natasha Romanov, Sharon Carter (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Betaed, Food, Conditioning, Triggers, SHIELD, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, SHIELD Academy, Additional Warnings Apply, Red Room, Training, POV Peggy Carter, POV Natasha Romanov, Natasha Feels, POV Maria Hill, POV Melinda May, POV Sharon Carter, Women Being Awesome, BAMF Women, Women In Power, Women in the Military
Summary:

Peggy has done everything she could, through all avenues--ladies magazines, soap operas, dance halls, tossing a coin and a word to known gossip-mongers, hell, even bribing someone to place slips in the damn sanitary napkin boxes--to get the word out that if you were a woman of age with certain qualities, apply for work.

Peggy wants them. She wants all of them.

---
A look on the through-line from Peggy, at the very beginning of SHIELD, to Sharon, at the end. A look at how Melinda, Maria, Natasha, and Sharon came to join SHIELD, and how each of them inspired and motivated the others to succeed. A look at the women of SHIELD and how each of them (though very different) are ultimately the best at what they do.

If you mean “a short fic of less than 1000 words” you can say “ficlet” or “vignette,” but a drabble, properly speaking, is 100 words.  Anyone who doesn’t think you can do anything worthwhile with 100 words should go read “By the Water Cooler" by tielan .  It is hilarious and true to the characters and 100 words is exactly the right length.  (Captain America, post-TWS, Maria Hill, Pepper Potts, Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers)

laurajv asks: What's your favorite character, from any media, and why?

And the problem with this is the same problem I have with any "what's your favorite?" question, and that is that I've never had any one book or character or movie or anything that I could point to and go "this one is my favorite."  Even if you narrow it down, so it's "what's your favorite character on a particular show?" I almost always go, "well, that depends on my mood."  My fannish affections are extremely poly; I've never had anything resembling an OTP or OTC.  I mean, I have pairings that I like (I'd never choose to pair Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade with anyone else, nor Han and Leia with anyone but each other), but it's not a strong enough thing to go THEY CAN'T EVER BE WITH ANYONE ELSE.  Like, if someone wrote an interesting, well-written story with no character bashing where one of those two pairs broke up or never got together in the first place, I'd read it and enjoy it.  (Well.  Let me clarify that.  If you were going to pair Luke with Callista, you would have to re-write the end of Children of the Jedi so that she didn't end up in Cray's body, because that really, really weirds me out.  Like, ew, and then after that she went off the rails in the other two books she appeared in, but if she weren't in Cray's body to begin with those other books would be different, so.)  But my favorite Star Wars characters are probably Corran Horn and Mara Jade, if you take all things together.  (But then there's Thrawn!  Pelleon!  Padme!  Winter!)

Star Trek characters, well, Saavik and Spock for classic trek, everyone on DS9, B'Elanna Torres and Tuvok on Voyager, Trip and T'Pol on Enterprise, TNG I can't pick favorites, and TOS everyone but Kirk.  (He's too much of a fratboy.  They took out all the character's good points and exaggerated his bad ones.)

Babylon 5, um.  HOW CAN ONE PICK FAVORITES?  They're all awesome!  I start off with Delenn and Lennier, but then would I put them as more beloved than Londo and G'Kar?  And Vir and Na'Toth and Susan and Marcus?  Er.  Well, no.  I mean, my favorite culture to do worldbuilding with is definitely the Minbari which would normally dictate what characters I want to write about.  (Boy, howdy, does that happen with Star Trek.)  But I love Londo and G'Kar and Vir and Na'toth and all the rest so much I love to write them too even if their culture is less interesting to poke around in ...

Battlestar Galactica, I love me some Cylons.  Love 'em, love to hate 'em.  Particularly the Final Five.  And then there's Bill and Laura, love them!  Billy!  Felix!  Lee and Kara annoy me separately and together, but mostly because the show focused on them.  Like, Kara was not the only screwed up person in that fleet.  Neither was Lee.  And the last season and a half there were so many stretches that were all about their issues when I wanted to know what was happening to all the other characters that I love, but we didn't get it because we had to get Yet Another Go-Around on the Lee and Kara show.  (Or the Lee's Daddy Issues show.  Or the Kara is Messed Up Because Life Done Her Wrong show.  And I appreciated in the abstract how rare it is for a heroine to be allowed the kind of damage that Kara was while still being a hero, and it's rare for a heroine to have a Traumatic Backstory not involving rape (I mean, the messed up stalker guy who may/may not have raped her in that creepy New Caprica apartment came long after Kara was screwed up by her mother's abuse, it was a complicating factor not THE REASON FOR EVERYTHING), but still, it was too much for my taste.)

Once Upon a Time.  I ship Belle/Rumple but I'm glad she kicked him out--that's what I like about that pairing, that she's the kind of person who would do that if she had to, they love one another but Twu Wuv doesn't conquer all, and I have been so worried since the beginning that they would try to paper over the ethical issues inherent in that relationship and go "it doesn't matter that he's evil because she loves him!"  So I can't read much fic in that pairing because most of the fic tends to be in that vein.  I hate, loathe, and despise Hook with the passion of a thousand burning suns.  I love Emma, Regina, Neal (I miss Neal!) ...those three are actually probably my favorites on the show, and my favorite character that doesn't get enough love is definitely Neal.  (I mean, I prefer Emma with Neal than anybody else, but like I said I'm not really an OTP type person, and there's a lot of gen Emma and Swan Queen both, and lots of Outlaw Queen as well, to give my my Emma and Regina fixes.  Not much Neal at all.)  Other than that, Mulan and Aurora had so much potential, sigh.

MCU, my favorites are (in no particular order) Peggy, Sam, and Steve.  My favorite character there that fandom that fandom doesn't much care about is Maria Hill.  I believe in Jasper Sitwell.

Doctor Who!  Eleven is my favorite doctor, but Martha and Donna are my favorite companions.  I loved early!River, before she was ruined by making EVERY SINGLE THING IN HER ENTIRE LIFE EVER ABOUT THE DOCTOR AND SHE'LL DO INCREDIBLY SELF-DESTRUCTIVE THINGS BECAUSE OF HIM AND HIDE IT FROM HIM SO HE DOESN'T FEEL BAD.  Gah.  I don't have enough time watching Classic Who to have informed opinions there.  I like Rose as seen on the show, but get really annoyed by Rose as seen by fandom, where SHE IS THE ONE TRUE COMPANION AND EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS ABOUT HER AND THE DOCTOR GETTING TOGETHER AND/OR STAYING TOGETHER AND HE COULD NEVER CARE ABOUT ANY OTHER COMPANION THE WAY HE CARES FOR HER.  Because of this I rarely read any fanfic in which Rose occurs.

Stargate: Sam and Teal'c and Sha're and Hammond are probably my favorites, but I love them all.  And I was never into SGA enough to really have favorites, as such.  It was okay, and I think I saw every ep at least once, but eh.  I read a lot of McShep because there was a lot of it, but the two of them, separately and together, are my least favorite characters on the show.  It's not that I dislike them, but, look, they were the most formulaic and least interesting.

Terminator, I love Sarah Connor and Catherine Weaver and James Ellison and John Henry and Cameron and Jesse and ... look, the Sarah Connor Chronicles are definitely my favorite part of that franchise, and I love almost everything about that show except that it wasn't longer.

Vorkosiverse, again, there's nobody that I don't absolutely love.  Ivan, Simon, Alys, and Elli are the only major characters that I don't think I would ever say is my favorite.  All the rest, yeah, at different times and in different moods I would choose different ones from among them as my favorite.

I have a problem with always-a-girl genderswap AUs of Captain America.  Not because I dislike genderswap--in fact, I love a good genderswap.  Because of the name.  I know the genderswap convention is to just feminize the name (Tony becomes Toni, Steven becomes Stephanie, James becomes Jamie, etc.).  And there's a reason to do it that way; it's immediately obvious who the character is a genderswap of.

But the thing is, when people name babies, they generally don't have one name and then choose the female form or male form when they find out if it's a boy or a girl.  With some names, such as Anthony (Tony) vs. Antonia (Toni), they're both relatively popular names, and at that point I don't mind it.  But for Steven/Stephanie, well, let's take a look at some hard numbers, shall we?

I get my numbers from SSA.gov, which has name frequency rates for the top thousand names used for American babies since 1896 available on its website.  Pulling up "Top Names of the 1910s," which includes Steve Rogers' year of birth, we find that Steve is 116 on the list, with 9,639 boys born in that decade named Steve.  Not the most common name, but not terribly unusual, either.  (James, by the way, was number three, with 275,079 boys in that decade named James, which may be why he went by "Bucky" instead.)  If we go over to the girl's side of the list, the name in the 116th slot is "Cora."  "Stephen" (spelled differently, but basically the same name) is 89 on the list, with 13,502 boys in that decade born with the name of Stephen.  (The corresponding girls' name is "Ellen").  If we take Steve and Stephen as basically the same name and add the numbers of boys with those names together, we get 23,141 boys born in that decade with a name variant of Steve's name, which would put us up in the mid-50s on the list, between Chester and Herman (corresponding girls' names being Bessie and Pearl).

Where is Stephanie on this list of common American names in the decade of Steve's birth? It's not even on the list.  See, the bottom names on the list are the 200th most common names, and those are Bert and Lela, respectively.  Where was Stephanie?  Well, if we pull up the popularity of the name "Stephanie" from the same site, (here's the search page but I can't find a way to link the specific search) we find out that in 1918, Stephanie was the 333rd most popular girls' name.  In that decade, it varied between 423 and 302--hardly a name one would expect to see very often.  In the mid-40s, it began creeping up, until from 1960-2007 it was always higher-up than 100 on the list.  It peaked from 84-87, when it hovered at 6th most popular name.  People my age are named Stephanie, not people my grandparents age.

Now we should consider Steve's family background (after all, in his day, children were a lot more likely to be named unusual names if they were family/ethnic names.  It's not like today where couples get baby name books looking for exotic names they like.  There had to be a reason to name a child something unusual).  Well, Steve was a working-class Irish Catholic.  Stephanie is not a working-class Irish Catholic name; it's French.  The only reason I can think of for an Irish Catholic working-class family in 1918 naming their daughter "Stephanie" is if they were naming her after St. Stephen, but usually you do that if the child was born or baptized on the feast day of that saint, and St. Stephen's feast-day is December 26th.  And he's the patron saint of martyrs and stone-masons, so not necessarily the guy you'd choose to set up as the patron saint of your baby girl.  If Steve's father were named Steve, I can see "Stephanie" in honor of him after his death, but his name was Joseph.

So what can we call always-a-girl!Steve that would be more period appropriate than Stephanie?  Well, you could go with Cora, Ellen, Bessie, or Pearl (which were as popular as the variations of "Steve"), or you could go with something that sounds similar and is on the list of popular names.  Stella, for example, is at #64 out of 200 on the "Popular Names of the 1910s" page, and Estelle is at #125.  Those sound similar to Steve's name so it would be easy for the audience to remember, and they are actual period names that she might realistically have been called.

(Also, both Stella and Estelle mean "star."  Which makes me chortle gleefully, to have a Captain America whose actual honest-to-God name means "star".)

(xposted to cap_chronism )