The Superhero's Significant Other Meme

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The Superhero's Significant Other Meme


You're just an average Joe (or Joanna, as the case may be). You live a normal, unassuming life and go on with your day-to-day business. There is, however, one thing about you that is a little unusual - beside your sparkling personality.

You're dating a superhero.

So, what's in this week's issue? Are you childhood friends come together? Do you actually know your love is that caped crusader? If you do, is it a thorn in your side that you will always come second to the cause? Of course, there's always going to be that annoying time where they try to "protect" you by breaking up with you. Oh joy. Well, at least, how's your sex life? Surely those super powers can make for some interesting bedroom trysts. Maybe after one of them, you can tell your beau that you're a superhero, too.

...but what if your significant other isn't the hero? What if they're the villain?

• Comment with your character, preferences, their position (superhero, significant other, either, etc), and comfort level (ie, no smut).
• Reply to others.

Comments

thank you, my heart is broken in a thousand pieces

[apprised]

His therapist is the best money can buy. That, at least, his father had insisted on. She has multiple PhDs, is known world-over, and Jackson can't stand her. He knows what will make him feel better and it isn't getting his leg back (he can't, he knows, and the metal substitute works enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s a burden on Morgan every moment of the day), and it isn’t new scenery (though the Malibu mansion does have a nice view of the ocean), and it certainly isn’t time away from projects or not dwelling on the past. The only thing that’s going to fix this, that’s going to make it any kind of better is figuring out who did it, figuring out why and figuring out how to make sure they can’t hurt anyone else. The only thing that’s going to fix this is old fashioned revenge.

He woke up from the wreck into a world that isn’t familiar. A world that doesn’t make sense. His mom is the best person he’s ever known. Not just the best family member, not just the best because she gave birth to him, but the best fucking person. She donates to charity, she curates art, she’s kind to a default (even as she doesn’t take any shit), she’s tough and strong and sweet and caring and she knows people and remembers the janitor’s name and the fact that he has two kids in school, and somehow she was able to be the CEO of the world’s largest company all while being there for him and seeing his soccer games when he was five and helping him out of the tabloids when he was fifteen. She isn’t the superhero. There is no reason she should have been at the other end of a targeted hit.

He woke up from the wreck into a world where he’s gone from being one of the most attractive young men in the United States to missing a leg and having enough scar tissue to write his own book about the subject. From being independent and strong-willed to being unable to use the bathroom without assistance. And Morgan, god Morgan--like he said, loving her, earning her love has been the highlight of his life and he’s entirely aware of how much he doesn’t deserve her.

She tries to touch him, tries to prove it doesn’t matter to her, that she finds him just as attractive like this. She settles a steady hand against his hip, tries to slide it down to his hip and he always, always shies away. She says it doesn’t matter, but it’s such a desperately glaring thing how can it not? She says it doesn’t change anything, but everything is different and she’s Morgan Coulson, it’s entirely possible she deserves something quite a bit more than a twenty-two year old one-legged famous son of Iron Man.

Hearing she’d dropped out of her summer semester (‘books that weigh more than I do, Jackson’ he remembers her enthusing, thrilled beyond belief, ‘I might make love to my statistics book while you’re gone’) hurt more than waking up damaged. Hearing she’d let someone else take the lease on her apartment (not the one they’d shared when he was at school with her, but one she’d picked out all on her own that was her to the core) broke his heart more than losing his leg. But she’d never complained, never looked at him like he was a burden and he nearly broke under the weight of making sure she didn’t regret the choice of being with him.

Except, well, even with her positive influence, he’s still Jackson Stark, isn’t he? He still tried to go to the bathroom without her and ended up on the floor, tried to go to the kitchen for a fucking drink of water and ended up winded and panting in so much pain it sent white spots dancing behind his eyes, tried to attach the prosthetic on his own the first time, sending them both to the hospital and if he could never see the look on her face when she saw the blood ever again—well, he’d die a happy man.

And he’s still Jackson Stark when it comes to promises, it seems. He didn’t mean to break the promise that he’d take care of himself in her absence, because he really had intended to do it properly; he always does. His plan was to come down here, find the plans for the suit, look through them, stop, eat, take medication and then return. He’d even set alarms in his phone. He just—then threw his phone against the wall when it became a distraction, forgetting why it was meant to be distracting him. He just didn’t notice how hungry he was, how much his leg ached because he’s working. He’s close. He’s almost there.

“Shit!” The word startles out of him as her arms wrap around him from behind (she wasn’t supposed to be here for two more days, he wasn’t going to be this much of a mess when she returned, he had a plan), but he doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t want to pull away, because even through all of it being in her arms is as close to feeling like himself that he’s been since he found himself staring at cheap ceiling tiles and the worried face of a nurse. Her skin is soft and he can’t help but rub his cheek – covered in two day stubble, a bit unwashed—against hers to enjoy it for a moment before turning a bit into that kiss before he catches her lips for another.

“You’re home early,” he murmurs against her lips, because yeah he can get behind not talking about the elephant in the room for a second. “And you already decided I was crazy years ago. It’s how you resisted my charms for as long as you did.” He courted her for years before he finally confessed anything. It was impressive. “Did you miss the sun too much?” Did you miss him? Are you just here to check in? Are you telling him New York is calling you back? He can’t help but wonder.

From somewhere behind him his phone beeps a plaintive cry from where it’s fallen against the chrome of a cabinet (it’s time for something) and he lets out a snort. “I should have made that thing less indestructible. Impossible to make it stop working by throwing it at the wall.” He’s not exactly staying on topic, he hasn’t slept in a while, and he’s trying (not very successfully) to avoid the fact that there is a pretty inescapable conversation to be had hanging right behind him. “How’s Clint?” Distract her with step-dad talk, that always works.

You're welcome!

[bonsens]

Sometimes, Morgan thinks maybe the therapist is more for her. It feels that way at least. When each week, they sit there together, listening to either Jackson's silence or self-deprecating jokes, deflecting every serious question. (It's one or the other. Either he's chatty and flighty, abandoning each subject of actual substance, or he sits there in sullen silence.) When he's quiet, she starts filling the silence, uncertain and halting, when the pressure of it wears down on her too much. Her fingers twist in his, squeezing them in support. Sometimes, he waits outside, and she spends half an hour crying on the sofa of a virtual stranger. It's not hard, helping him go to the bathroom. It's not what she imagined doing for her boyfriend, but it's not why she cries. It's hard to watch him come apart at the seams. It's hard not knowing how she can put him back together. (The therapist says that putting him back together isn't Morgan's job, but Morgan privately thinks they'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.)

It's surprisingly easy to get used to the lack of a leg. After a lifetime of knowing him, jumping and running around two-legged, it only takes her about a month to stop expecting a second leg every time she looks at him. The first time she sees him without the leg is in the hospital bed. He hasn't woken yet, and his skin is so pale. There are tubes and wires all running from machines around his bedside and converging on his body. The white blanket across his body dips and slopes oddly, lies flat where a leg should be, and Morgan's heart stops. She's not there when he wakes up, that's Tony's privilege and duty. He's the one who tells Jackson about the operation, and about his mother who might never wake up again. (Morgan stands inside a tiny restroom that smells worse of disinfectant than the rest of the hospital, her face buried against Clint's chest and she cries and she cries until she can't cry anymore.)

The thing she has a harder time getting used to is a life without sex. Oh, Jackson is oh so happy to eat her out or hold her vibrator for her until she's very, very satisfied. But whenever she tries to touch him, he shies away, which kills her. He's so much more than the damn leg he doesn't have anymore. She didn't fall in love with his right leg for fuck's sake. But, genius or not, he doesn't seem able to understand that.

The day she comes home and finds him bleeding in the kitchen -- he hobbled there from the living room, if the bloodstains are anything to go on -- she goes pale and drops the takeout she got for them on the floor. (While they're at the hospital, JARVIS sends someone up to clean away the spilled lo mein and the bloodstains from the floor.)

She doesn't say a word about it until they come home from the hospital. Just holds herself upright, quiet and stoic through the whole thing, until they get back to the Tower. She texts Clint and her dad that they are home, that Jackson is okay -- no one tells Tony, he has enough to deal with down in Atlanta -- and then she goes to sit down heavily on the sofa. She can hear the wheels of his wheelchair squeaking against the bare floorboards (they had to tear out all the carpets before they moved in, for the wheelchair, you know, but that was okay, Morgan preferred hardwood floors anyway, and could never understand Tony Stark's love affair with wall-to-wall carpeting), but she doesn't look at him. She stares down at her cellphone, clutched so tightly in her hands it's leaving white and purple lines on her fingers. That's when the tears come. Not quiet or polite. But loud, startling and bone-deep. Between sobs she tells him in no uncertain terms that he can never, ever do that to her again. Ever.

Two weeks later, his new leg is fitted and finished and it seemed almost silly that she'd broken down over a little blood.

Morgan listens patiently as Jackson speaks, but she doesn't offer him any answers. When he asks about Clint, she puts a finger against his mouth and gives him the look that she learned from his mom. The one that clearly says you're in so much trouble right now. She shakes her head. "You," she informs him as she brushes a kiss against his temple, "taste like the bottom of a coffee pot at a twenty-four hour diner." She doesn't bother asking when he last ate or slept; she won't like the answer.

The cellphone keeps beeping from over by the cabinet. With a sigh, Morgan unwinds her arms from around him, and follows the insistent beeping. She can understand why he threw it at the wall. "I managed to rearrange my schedule so I could do everything in two days instead of four. Professor Palmer was very gracious and agreed to meet for coffee between classes." As soon as she snapped on her seatbelt in the fancy little private jet, the supple yellow leather smooth beneath her fingers, Morgan felt a kind of pressure against her chest, a deep unease. It grew worse the further away from him she got. So. She made some calls, sent some emails, and managed to cut the time away from him in half. Professor Palmer was the last hold-out.

"Everyone says hello," she adds, as she bends down and fishes the phone up from where it's fallen to the floor. She turns it over in her fingers. Not a scratch. Even the screen is intact. There's an outline of a blue bell ringing on the screen, beneath it are the words EAT SOMETHING! She swipes it away and the workshop returns to the quiet hush of the air-conditioning. She puts the cellphone on the corner of the workbench. There are water bottles in a little fridge with a glass door beneath one of the workbenches, she snags one of those and holds it out to him. She digs a pill-bottle (she keeps extras) out of her purse, shakes one out in her palm and holds that out to him too. Don't think she didn't notice the groan of pain earlier. "You're an asshole, you know."

[apprised]

See, Jackson knows that look. He is incredibly familiar with that look. His mother perfected that look when he was three and he stole her Louboutin’s for a science experiment and she found them deconstructed with wires hanging out of the left one and the right glowing a strange shade of blue. The Look made appearances at thirteen when he borrowed one of his dad’s cars and made it out onto the street in New York before running into a parked police car, at fifteen when he threw a party in his parents absence (except they ended up coming back way earlier than planned) and accidentally served the few thousand dollars worth of caviar she was saving for a gallery opening later in the week, at sixteen when he was discovered on the front of a tabloid with a twenty-four year old supermodel on his lap, and at eighteen when a woman showed up in their lobby to claim she was pregnant with his child (she wasn’t, but they did have sex, she was married, oops). Thing is, he’s familiar with the look and the fact that his mother took the very first opportunity she had to teach it to Morgan is entirely unfair.

Oh yeah, he’s in a world of trouble. He’s pretty sure he should start apologizing now. Maybe with flowers. She likes flowers. Or tickets to a convention. Or maybe he could fly her friends in. Or maybe he could grovel, sometimes she likes it when he grovels.

“I don’t taste that bad,” He says morosely, because okay maybe he does, it’s sort of gross now that he thinks about it because despite the whole not eating for two days thing and despite the whole not really having much to drink for two days thing, he also hasn’t applied a toothbrush or a gum or a mint to his mouth in about the same amount of time. Coffee is, apparently, a pretty poor substitute.

“Professor Palmer is never gracious,” He protests, because he had a statistics class with that woman and he’s pretty sure that she’s never had a gracious thought in her life. No, Professor Palmer spends her time thinking about how murder kittens and torture co-eds. She seemed to take Jackson’s success at her notoriously hard class without much studying as a personal insult and they haven’t gotten along much since then. “You totally bribed her with lesbian sex, didn’t you?” Okay, ouch no, that’s an image he really doesn’t want in his head, he’s really sorry he ever said it. He takes it back, forgive him.

The phone stops beeping and he lets out a pleased sigh—some of the tension slipping out of his shoulders. Apparently there’s something in a repeated beeping that makes him nervous these days (it’s the monitors from the hospital, he thinks, they’d go off and it meant his nursing staff was going to come in and he’d be in significant pain pretty soon) and he’s going to have to change his alarms. Dammit. He keeps finding these little gems, and he hates it. As if taking his leg wasn’t enough, he has to have all these hidden emotional bits of baggage—he supposes that’s what the damn shrink is for, but hey—

--he takes the water with a sheepish smile (yeah, he’s so busted) and twists off the cap, plucking the pill from her hand and swallowing it with an easy swig. He set alarms for those too, and he really wishes they worked instantly because now that he’s been broken out of his zombie mode his leg is killing him.

“Mom’s stable,” he says, in response to the everyone-says-hi, and in avoidance of the asshole bit, if just for a second. “Nothing new, but they’re going to try something at the end of the week that might—I don’t know. Help figure out what’s keeping her from waking up.”

See, this is why he’s an asshole, Morgan, because he’s a month and a half out from the hospital (nearly two and a half from the wreck) and his mom is still there, healthy as she can be with a few broken bones and bruises come and gone, but she’s not waking up and no one really knows why. It’s slowly killing his dad too, and he’s not going to end up an orphan thank you very much and he’s going to get some damn payback from whoever did this to them. The people that made him break his girlfriend’s heart, that took his leg—they can’t get away with it.

He sighs and takes another swig of the water, rolling it between his hands absently before he looks up at her, expression more pleading than he means it to be. “I know I am,” The words are soft, an honest admittance of guilt, “But I—It wasn’t an accident, Morgs. I know the therapist keeps telling me it was, and that I can’t carry guilt and that I maybe made up the—the SUVs because of the trauma and the need to find a villain in all of this, but—it wasn’t an accident and she’s still there and you’re not taking your statistics class and I don’t have a fucking leg and I can’t just pretend it’s all going to be okay knowing they’re out there. I can’t.” Jackson abandons the water to rub at his good leg, trying to work out the painful kink in the muscle where it’s been forced to pick up some of the slack as he learns to trust the prosthetic.

“I didn’t mean to let you down.”