comment_fic | Tuesday

Good Morning! I am

momma_66 as your guest host for the week. To get our Tuesday going the theme today is

angst

While I prefer mine with a Happy Ending, we all enjoy a good cry from time to time...oh wait, hopefully that's not just me. Anyways… today's prompts should cover any of those sad, terrible times when we feel (maybe) things aren't going to turn out okay.

Just a few rules:
No more than five prompts in a row.
No more than three prompts in the same fandom.
Use the character's full names and fandom's full name for ease adding to the Lonely Prompts spreadsheet.
No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing, or use the spoiler cut option found here.
If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the above mentioned spoiler cut.

Prompts should be formatted as follows: [Use the character's full names and fandom's full name]
Fandom, Character +/ Character, Prompt

Some examples to get the ball rolling…

Any, Any, failing a major test

Any, Any (+/Any), aftermath of a pivotal family member's death

Any, Any, drowning in their own thoughts

We are now using AO3 to bookmark filled prompts. If you fill a prompt and post it to AO3 please add it to the Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2021 collection. See further notes on this new option here.

Not feeling any of today’s prompts? Check out the just created Lonely Prompts Spreadsheet. For more recent prompts to write, you can also use LJ’s advanced search options to limit keyword results to only comments in this community.

While the Lonely Prompts Spreadsheet and LJ's advanced search options are available, bookmarking the links of prompts you like might work better for searching for in the future.

tag="angst"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

Any, any, homesickness

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

MCU, Natasha Romanoff, intrusive thoughts

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

Have you seen Black Widow?

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

Yes — hit me with your worst!

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

I JUST saw it, wowwww. (The reason my Sam & Riley piece is so full of extra mistakes is I was rushing to finish it before running out to see Black Widow.) bookmarking this prompt for sure.

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

MCU, Sam Wilson, remembering Riley

Edited Date: 2021-07-13 01:21 pm (UTC)

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

He’ll see it coming a mile off, doesn’t matter; when the day comes, he’s never ready.

He’s helping Sarah with some paperwork and he’s written the date out on about half a dozen forms before she tsks in her throat and asks him where his head’s at. “You time traveling? The 14th’s still tomorrow.”

He hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t made a sound. Sam’ll never know what prompted him to turn just at that moment. Lock eyes with Riley just at that moment. Just in time to see it happen, not in time to do anything about it. He’d looked so surprised. For the split second that Sam could see his face, the only thing he’d seen there was surprise. Smoke and unforgiving darkness kept the sight of anything else away from him, diving before he even knew what he’d seen, screaming into headset, a litany of denial, his own voice captured and preserved and played back on loop every July the fucking thirteenth, of course it was the thirteenth. No one screaming but him, no one falling but Riley, no one—

“Sam. Sam.”

“Sam – what – sorry?”
“Jesus, bro. Where’d you go?” Her hand is on his arm, then his cheek, and he looks away, tasting metal and ash. When her voice comes again it’s quiet and tinged with understanding. “Oh.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, flood of adrenaline coating on his tongue making him breathe through his nose.

“You wanna talk about it?” She asks. Has asked every year since it happened. Well, except those five years when she couldn’t.

He’s never said yes before. But today he’s looking out the kitchen window, watching Bucky play some made-up game with his nephews out in the yard, their happy shouts floating in on the twilight breeze, wholesome and real. Today, he nods.

“You want a beer?” she asks, crossing to the fridge. He shakes his head.

“I don’t think I want to put any more chemicals in me til I’ve let the adrenaline run its course,” he says and knocks his first two fingers against the side of his head.

“Fair enough.” She gets out the jug of peppermint iced tea and pours them each a glass and they settle in at the kitchen table.

He drags his fingers through the condensation and tries the starts of a couple sentences before he gets out, “I fucking loved the guy. Not like that, but close enough. It messed me up so bad, losing him, it made me wonder for a long time if it was like that and I was just in denial.”

“And now?” She prompts, after he’s left that hang in silence for awhile.

“Now...” he picks up his glass and half-drains it. “Now I... I guess I’ll never know for sure but hell... and I know it ain’t a competition but that guy out there,” he stretches out his arm, points in the direction of where they hear Bucky’s voice, calling out, Go left! Okay now jump! No, higher…higher — climb the tree! And Sarah smiles along with him, nodding in perfect understanding. Loving Bucky doesn’t mean he hadn’t loved Riley, but these feelings are not the same, not at all.

“But Riley...man, what a guy. He was so easy to be around, felt like I’d known him my whole life by the end of a week. Big heart, too, never got it beat out of him not by drill sergeants or by what we saw over there, nothing. He gave great hugs, too. Seriously, I’d look at him sometimes and think ‘man, where’d you come from? People like you just ain’t in the military.’”

Sarah snorts loud, and when he looks at her she raises her eyebrows. “You need me to get you a mirror, bro?”

“Shut up,” but he’s smiling right back.

“Go on.”

Sam sighs, eyes drifting towards the window. “He was the best you could ask for, up in the sky. I trusted him with my life and he saved my ass more than once... but on the ground...” he snorts a laugh and shakes his head. “Worst damn wingman you can imagine. I came out to him completely by accident, he caught me checking out some dude when I was just drunk enough I couldn’t remember why I shouldn’t. After that anytime we had leave he’d drag me off base and find somewhere that seemed like a safe distance away or an actual gay bar if he could find one, and make a complete ass of himself trying to set me up. He was so clueless... if he hadn’t been such a sweet guy he’d have got himself in a lot of trouble but half the time he was the one getting numbers.”

Edited Date: 2021-07-13 10:48 pm (UTC)

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

Sarah laughs when he does and he shakes his head, resting his chin on his hand to look at her.

“I wish I’d met him,” she says after a minute. “Seems like this big question mark in your past, someone so important but I never knew him.”

“Yeah...” Sam looks away, then back at her, sheepish.

“Out with it,” she says when he hesitates. “This is gonna be good, I can tell.”

Sam hides his eyes behind his hand for a moment, then takes a swig of his iced tea and says in a quiet rush, “I was afraid to bring him home to visit cuz I didn’t want to hear what you’d say.”

Her eyes go wide. “Excuse me? I’m always nice to your boyfriends!”

He spreads his hands. “Thank you so much for proving my point to me.”

“Aw come on, I wouldn’t have—”

“Patrick?”

She cuts herself off and bites her lip.

“Johnny?”

“Well if you didn’t have such a thing for big beefy white guys, maybe I wouldn’t have such a hard time keeping my remarks to myself.”

Sam scoffs, but there’s really not much he can say to that. Except... “Riley wasn’t actually beefy, not really. He was kinda...huh. He was actually built kinda like Buck.”

“Um. Sam? I don’t know where you been looking but there is a picture of Bucky in the damn dictionary next to the word ‘beefcake’.”

He almost snorts tea out of his nose. She pats him on the back while he laughs with his head hung between his shoulders. When he gets his breath back he grins at her, says, “thanks for that,” and then shakes his head. “I mean Buck the way he’s supposed to be, his natural build. Kind of lanky. Strong, but lean not big.”

Sam rubs the back of his neck and leans his chair back, craning to look out the window but all he can see is sky. The voices outside have quieted down, a comforting auditory backdrop from which he can’t make out any individual words.

“When Steve and I went to see him in Wakanda that time, I couldn’t believe it. He looked like a different guy from the one I’d met in...well, he was a different guy. He was himself.”

“I’ve seen the pictures from the war, too. And earlier. That one you got from Steve?” Sarah’s voice is soft, almost melancholy, like when she talks about her babies the way they were before they got so big. “What are you grinning at?”

“Nothin’.” Sam keeps on smiling.

“Sure, I’ll bet it’s ‘nothin’,” she says, looking at him with the squinty eyes of deep suspicion. After a minute though, her expression shifts and changes and she’s still looking at him but it’s like she’s seeing all of him, seeing more than just exists right here in this moment, that way she’s got of seeing it all laid out from a bird’s-eye view only she’s got no need for actual wings. She says, “Sometimes I think about how much we’ve been through, you and me, and kept on going. Sometimes it hits me like a punch to the stomach and I could cry about how unfair it all is. And some days I still hear Daddy’s voice in my head, saying that struggle is the only way we know we deserve the good stuff we got.”

Sam’s already shaking his head before she finishes and almost knocks his glass over reaching across the table to take her hand. “Hey, listen, and I ain’t trying to get into it with you about him, but—”

“Let me finish, Sam.” She cuts him off, gripping his hand right back. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That I still get myself caught up thinking in terms of one extreme or the other, but most days, I’ve found my own sort of peace somewhere in the middle.” Her lips twist a little and she squeezes his hand. “So can we skip the ‘suffering don’t make us righteous and we deserve every good thing we got’ speech or what?”

“Oh my god,” he groans and rolls his eyes. “That is not the speech.”

“Sure it isn’t. Come here.”

He scoots his chair around the side of the table and wraps his arms around her. She leans her head on his shoulder. They breath quietly together and then she says softly, “I’m sorry about Riley.”

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Me too.”

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

Bucky comes in a minute later with Cass slung over his shoulder. “Woah-oh,” he stops short in the doorway, then swings Cass down to the floor and turns both boys back around with a hand on each shoulder. “Avert your eyes, kids, grownups being emotional in here.”

The boys shriek like they’re gonna catch the plague or something and run pell-mell towards the stairs.

Bucky’s flesh and blood hand falls to Sam’s shoulder, squeezes gently, but it’s Sarah who’s gaze he seeks. “You okay?”

“We’re okay.” She slips her hand into his vibranium one like it’s nothing, something Sam wonders if he’ll ever stop marveling at. Bucky stoops briefly to kiss her cheek.

“All right, all right,” Sam stands up, makes a show of shooing Bucky away. “What’d I tell you about flirting?”

“Hang on, I know this one.” Bucky scrunches up his face, as though thinking very hard. “That it was…cute and a surefire way to get your attention?”

“Wow,” Sam mutters under his breath while Sarah laughs, grumbling as Bucky slips an arm around his waist.

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

Any, any, misty-eyed

From:

templefugate.livejournal.com

Any, any, feeling worthless

From:

schweinsty.livejournal.com

Republic of Doyle, Jake Doyle + any, hospital waiting rooms (please no actual character death tho please <3)

Edited Date: 2021-07-13 07:17 pm (UTC)

From:

cornerofmadness.livejournal.com

Prodigal Son, Malcolm Bright + any, the day after the Season 2 finale

From:

cornerofmadness.livejournal.com

Picard, Jean-Luc Picard, Elnor plus any, remembering Hugh

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

Lost girl, Bo Dennis, Missing Kenzi terribly in the aftermath of the S4 finale

From:

canonisrelative.livejournal.com

Supernatural, Sam Winchester, Flashbacks to the first time he lost Dean, the depths of his despair and rage and how far off the rails he went to try and get him back.