Carrizi

Sylvia Plath (via pavorst)

When you get right down to it, Steve’s missed a lot.

He’s missed skirts getting shorter, governments getting set on fire, poets breathing in torrid gas in their empty kitchens.

He’s missed Maria staring absently out the window, curling her hair around a finger while her son tugs at her dress.

He’s missed Howard- Howard, his friend, Howard, the inventor, Howard, the genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist, turn into something else, something that Tony sees when his eyes glass over.

He’s missed fathers slapping their sons, mothers holding their daughter’s bony hands, brothers, sisters, generations all being born and living and dying as he’s breathing in the ice under the Atlantic ocean.

He’s missed Tony at age nineteen, standing in the middle of an empty house after his parent’s funeral, after Jarvis’s funeral, after Peggy’s-

And Peggy, oh, Peggy. He’s missed (misses) the clench of her wrinkled fingers in the hospital bedsheets, how her eyes flutter closed on that last exhale.

He’s missed Elvis, and Martin Luther King, and Princess Diana.

He’s missed girls braving through piercings, husbands dying with a hand to their chests, soldiers tipping their heads back at the ash-grey sky and wondering if it’s even worth it.

He’s missed entire lives, but he’s still here, still fighting.

He’s here- 2012, the 21st century, and they still don’t have flying cars that Howard had promised, and he gets a morbid kick out of that.

He’s here when Stark turns into Tony, when he presses the arc reactor into place and avoids Tony’s scrabbling hands, when the blue light flickers back to life.

He’s here when he first sees Natasha grin- not a paper grin, like the practised ones he sees when she’s being Natalie, but a full, glowing grin while she’s caught off guard and Clint’s doing something stupid.

He’s here when he finds out why Tony gets that pinched expression whenever he tries to talk about Howard, why he had always had those bruises on his arms, his face, the imprint of an expensive shoe in his ribs.

He’s here when they’re all sprawled together in the lounge, while Tony and Bruce both try to explain Facebook to a demigod and end up breaking an i-pad.

He’s here when he wakes up to a white ceiling, and thinks for a second, I better get up, Bucky always barges in when-

He always catches himself before he can finish.

He’s here for galas, and meaningless parties and photoshoots that Fury makes them attend for publicity.

He’s here for the first taste of store-brought lemonade fizzing down his throat, for gritting his teeth through street-brought hotdogs that taste like cardboard.

He’s here for the walls coming down- for Bruce to trudge out in his pyjamas, for Clint to blurt out something about his dead brother and then not bring it up for eight weeks, for Natasha to fall asleep next to him with her cheek pressed into his jeans one night when everyone else is discussing battle tactics.

He’s here for Tony with a hand shoved against his forehead, laughing so hard he half-chokes.

He’s here for wanting him, for looking over the internet for the details into the changed laws, for sneaking glances during meetings.

He’s here when he first kisses him- Tony pulls away almost immediately, making some stupid excuse and tripping over his four-hundred-dollar shoes as he half-runs out of the room.

He’s here for Tony kissing him hurriedly the next day, tasting like engine fluid and burnt things and days of un-brushed teeth, and Steve still smiles into his mouth.

He’s here for the slip-up that everyone pretends not to notice- Tony waves his hand, irritated, and mutters, let’s just get the fuck home, I want to sleep for a week, and everyone sort of glances at each other, because they’ve all known it for a while now.

So, yes-

Utterly, absolutely, completely-

He’s here.

(via theappleppielifestyle)

(via beesarealiens)

Neil Gaiman (via larmoyante)

What most people don’t get is that Steve was in the ice for seventy years.

They get the dynamics of it- oh, so you missed 9/11, and the election of a black president, that sucks- 

But they don’t get the sheer enormity of it, how it feels to feel your tongue like a dead weight in your mouth as you try to say, but I only closed my eyes for a second.

Because it was just a second for him- a flicker of his eyelids, the sharp flush of ice under his legs, and it was just a second, one second and the next breath he takes is in the 21st century and someone is saying, oh, my god- this guy’s still alive.

How it feels to hold the case files, to flip through them- unactive, unactive, unactive, one after the other, and the red stamp bleeds through the paper, and the ones that aren’t dead are lost inside their own minds.

What it’s like to look up at the sky, and it’s still the same sky, the same pinpricks of light, and then looking sideways and there’s an advertisement for a 3D movie, and for a long time, it kills Steve a bit.

He gets used to it, don’t get him wrong- he adapts, he learns to live with it, to stop asking questions and look them up later, he learns cellphones and monuments to wars he’s missed entirely, to new world leaders and flimsy cars.

He starts learning the tilt of Tony’s head, how his mouth tips upwards, how to make the team- his team- grow around him, entwining into each other, around each other, to make them see that they’re all more than suits.

It takes a long time, but they end up rolling their eyes at each other at parties, muttering something as they pass, knowing exactly what to say to startle a laugh out of their teammates.

He learns how to get the paparazzi off of his back, how to wave correctly, how to channel-surf.

He learns how to stop needing to visit old graves.

He learns to stop thinking Howard whenever Tony catches him off-guard, before realizing that Tony’s a better man than he had thought, a great man, even though he tries to convince them otherwise.

He learns how to make Natasha go to sleep when she needs it, how to calm Bruce down, how to make Tony tune back in when he’s absorbed in his tablet.

And it gets easier, it does.

He learns to glance out the window and not to get stuck on how bright everything is, to not get the prickle in his throat, the pinch behind his eyes, whenever he sees someone with a telltale flash of brown hair and thinks Bucky, or Peggy.

He learns the tight bunch of Clint’s arms when he’s pissed off, the bark of Thor’s laugh at night, what the Avengers mansion looks like when the light hits it in the mornings.

And kissing Tony is sort of like breathing.

It’s been a while since any of them have had any sort of family, but they grow into it.

(via theappleppielifestyle)

(via beesarealiens)