Things We Lost in the Fire

[simplememes]

Mutual Healing Shipping Meme

Healing doesn't come quickly, whether the need comes from physical or mental wounds. But you're trying regain your strength - and yourself. People, as a general rule, are kind, or at least not outright inflammatory to you, it seems. Still, you just can't connect with them. No matter how nice, how caring, they don't understand. They've never experienced anything like what you've gone through, or they're not like you in a way that lets them see what you still go through; they have no frame of reference. Sure, they have sympathy, but it's not the same. So there's no real connection, despite any friendliness. It's so easy, then, to feel detached... ...until you meet them, in this place of both death and healing. They may not have been through the exact same struggles, they may not be exactly the same as you, but they know what darkness is light. How they handle this fact may be better or worse than how you do, yet you can see yourself in their actions. And for once? There's connection; more than that, too. Slowly, you can feel yourself opening up towards them, and then, falling for them. Is this something your used to? Will you fight your feelings, or will you jump at the opportunity to be with someone who can begin to get you? You may have little choice in the matter, as your instincts may just reach out to be with whatever compatible contact you can get. That's better, in the long run, though. Who else could have wounds like yours? Essentially, it's what it says: a "romance," in the loose definition, or "shipping" meme for characters who have been through the wringer or have hangups. Reply with your character, preferences, and any info you want to include. Remember, the more information, the more taggable you are. Respond to others. Thread.

Comments

Steve Rogers|MCU|OTA

[waypastasking]

[ He is stubborn but not stupid, so depending on who he may not fight too hard. ]

Re: Steve Rogers|MCU|OTA

[notonmyspace]

Tony winces as as takes the armors helmet off. Getting tag teamed by two super soldiers was not fun even with metal surrounding you. He glances over at Steve nervously. "Hey Captain," he says softly, "you doing okay over there?"

Re: Steve Rogers|MCU|OTA

[waypastasking]

Steve didn't move for a long time for two reasons: One, he didn't know if he could, and two he didn't know if he wanted to. "Fucking repulsors," He muttered as rolled over with a loud groan. He took a deep breath in, and glanced over at Tony.

"Are you okay?"

Re: Steve Rogers|MCU|OTA

[notonmyspace]

"I just got my ass handed to me by not one but two super soldiers," Tony says, "I'm amazed I'm even awake right now. Friday is running a check, but I think moving is out of the question." He winces as he tries said moving. "Dammit Steve did you have to let Barnes kick me."

Re: Steve Rogers|MCU|OTA

[not_a_commie]

Bucky is sitting in medical and feels like he's about to shake apart, they had fought Steve's friends, his new friends, or some of them anyway, all because of him.

Things where over and settling down, Ross was uncovered for the fuck wit that he is and always has been, though beating the crap out of Tony had been kind of hard...

They where trying to patch things up, but Barton and Steve's friend Phil wanted to make sure Bucky didn't have any traps in his mind, so here he is about the crawl out of his skin and start climbing walls in medical.

Bruce Banner l MCU l ota

[wearebothangry]

Oliver Queen l Arrow l ota

[hoodandarrow]

Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[notonmyspace]

Re: Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[coyote_walking]

Mercy sat down on the floor next to him and let herself lean against the wall too. "You're right," she said. "I don't know what you're going through. I'll never really be able to understand, but... I've lost things - people... my whole life... I've lost things too."

Re: Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[notonmyspace]

Tony was staring at his hands encased in armor. He feels like he can see blood on them even though he knows it isn't there. "He was my friend. I wanted to believe the best in him. He was Captain America...."

Re: Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[coyote_walking]

"Why don't you tell me about him?" she suggested gently. She really would have liked to get him out of the armor, too, but she sensed that he needed it's emotional protection, so she'd worry about that later.

"Tell me about Captain America. Tell me what happened."

Re: Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[notonmyspace]

Tony has to think for a while before he starts talking about Steve. It's like the details won't stick in his head "His real name was Steve Rogers..my dad met him first. In the 40's he was just this skinny kid...and he wanted so bad to fight that he kept trying to sign up even though no one would take him. Finally this scientist pulled him into a program to create super soldiers and it worked. Steve became the first and only one there was. Captain America."

Re: Tony Stark l MCU l ota

[coyote_walking]

Mercy nodded. "I think I read about him. He was some kind of hero, right? What happened?"

She reached for his hand, sure it was still in the glove, but that didn't matter. She'd be careful and he wouldn't hurt her.

Jacob Johnson | A Nightmare on Elm Street | OTA

[burnedchild]

Sonnet Barje | Blue Sonnet | OTA

[esper_cyborg]

Nina Sergeevna Krilova | The Americans

[utselet]

[bleak_midwinter]

The paper the letter comes on is the back of a work order, the ink on the backside pressing through the typed words on the front. It's why there are words crossed out instead of the paper being clean, the words decisive.

My dearest Dear Nina,

I write to you two months after we last saw each other. I left you in that cell, and I regret doing so every night: now, the last thing I remember is the hunch of your shoulders as you wept.

I should have done better. I should have done more. But the past is the past, and there’s no changing that.

I write you from Oldberg, an Officers’ camp. It’s a strange thing, being here after the labour camps we met each other in. The men complain of tedium, and I think of the fear we felt sneaking around the woods, working our hands to the bone when we weren’t doing that.

Truth be told, Nina, I miss you

I would like to hear how you fared. I hope this letter reaches you safely, and that you’ll want to write back.

Yours truly,

Thomas Shelby

[utselet]

They let her have the letter, although it takes a while, and by the time it comes to her there are more words blacked out; they don't want her knowing where he is. Once she gets past the initial shock, though -- once she's read the letter ten times already -- she uses the candle by her bed and a few other tricks she knows to see the rest. My dearest, she reads, and just when she thought her heart had started to beat again, it stops.

The reply takes a long time to come back to him, too; long enough that it might even seem like there isn't one coming at all. Hers is handwritten in neat copperplate lettering, and oddly enough comes on two sheets of paper, although the contents of the letter at first seem to be limited to one. It is, in fact, very short:

Sgt. Maj. Shelby,

I am glad to hear that you are alive and well. I remain at [previous camp] and am being treated very kindly. I hope this news brings you some comfort. However, I must request that you not write to me again. It is not appropriate in our current situations. I also ask that you burn this letter upon receipt. It is best for you to forget me.

Regards,
Nina Krilova

And she hopes, she prays, that Tommy is smart enough not to just toss the papers into the fire; that he'll see what becomes of the other sheet of paper when it gets close enough to the heat that the other message, written in lemon juice and water, starts to darken.

My dearest, dearest Tommy,

I promise I was not lying: they are treating me as well here as I could reasonably expect. I am earning my keep, though I ask that you not ask me how. They are carefully monitoring our correspondence, and so it is not safe for me to write to you, and it is certainly not safe for me to write you everything that is in my heart. I can only hope that you find this before they do.

You did nothing wrong, Tommy. There was nothing you could have done to prevented any of this. I confess to you, because I do not want to lie to you any more, that there are days I wish I had given them your notes; but there are many, many more days that I wish I had told you the truth from the start, and days that I miss you, and days that I love you.

If you write to me again, do it as my cousin Alexei Vasilovich, as I have permission to get letters from him. Use any code you like. I'll figure it out. I have no chess boards or card games to entertain me here, anyway.

If I do not hear from you again, please stay safe. Trust nobody but the men that came with you. Get home to your family. I wish that for you every day.

Love,
Nina

[bleak_midwinter]

He wilts in front of the candle's flame when he sees the words appear on paper. He catches words, first, as the color comes out: he picks out dearest, and hope, many more days, I love you.

He almost burns his fingers for the trembling that starts up then. The tense line of his shoulders warn the others off of him, and he is alone at the table while everyone eats in the dining hall they have set up in this place. He reads it twice, three times, before he feels able to even put a fold in the paper.

It takes him days to write back, because he has one goal: acquire something for her to do, even just something small. So he makes friends with a Russian captain, who has books to burn, and he gets one to use. Anna Karenina, a cheap print, but it's in Russian, and he looks at the Cyrillic as if he can somehow pull part of her from the pages, sink into her culture and her language.

Eventually he tears out the pages, neatly along the seam, and he writes her in the margins in the same solution she'd used to write him. Easier than code, and more credible besides: why would Nina Sergeevna Krilova's cousin write her in English?

His words are careful and easy to follow, even if they are written in the margins of Russian literature.

Nina, my Nina,

Last time, I had such trouble writing that you were dear to me. It felt like a betrayal of my principles, of who I have been raised to be, of being a soldier. But you have fought for your country and your life, just as much as I have. You deserve nothing but respect for that. And yes, you are dear to me.

Two months and half a country away it is much easier to understand what happened between us. Despite everything, all of it, I cannot bring myself to hate you any longer: believe me, there are nights when I wish I could.

I would like to get to know you again. The real you, one who does not have to lie to me in order to keep herself safe. I think we could come to like each other again, not just love each other.

(Please tell me if I can send you anything else. Cousin Alexei Vasilovich is very eager to provide his family with means of amusement.)

All my love,
Tommy

[utselet]

This is all foolish, she knows at heart. It was foolish to have written to him at all -- to have done anything but burnt his letter up on sight. It's foolish to do what she does when she gets the next one, which is to hide it under her mattress so that she can read it again and again when she finally crawls into bed each night. And deciding how best to reply becomes outright dangerous, but eventually, she manages.

This time, it's another Russian officer who slips Tommy the letter: a few paragraphs of what he assures Tommy are mundane, uninteresting details in Cyrillic, and under the candlelight the real letter printed across the back.

Dear Tommy,

I am sorry to keep you waiting so long. I have my wonderfully generous cousin now, but it took me a while to get a message out again. I was inspired by your clever plan. Thank you for the book. Thank you for remembering. It really is my favorite.

Most of what I told you (including that) was the truth, which I hope you can believe. My name is Nina Sergeevna Krilova; I was born in Vladivostok; I joined the war after my father disappeared. I really do not know where my mother is, but when I left, she was in Moscow. I love chess. I managed to hide a few of the pieces you made for me.

The first lie: I have never been a nurse. Every woman in my unit is a spy. The Germans know this, of course; that is why they gave us the work they did. They chose you for me, and for that, I curse them bitterly.

(The second lie: I am not a Bolshevik. In all honesty, I liked Freddie too much to say so. Maybe this will come as a relief to him.)

Ask me anything else you want to know and I promise I will tell you. I don't know what the future holds for either of us -- if I will ever see you again, if we will have enough time for you to come to like me -- but I owe you that much, and I want to give you what relief I can.

If Alexei Vasilovich could send the rest of Anna Karenina in his next letter, I would like that very much. Are you better entertained than I am? I will send you something next time in return, if not.

Love,
Nina

[bleak_midwinter]

He has kept the previous letter, and the new one joins it immediately. He keeps them over his heart, in an inside pocket. They are more free, here, even if Tommy is often under house arrest, not allowed to participate in the plays and games of sport they put on. An extra dimension of prison- but he's glad to suffer it.

He does send her the rest of Anna Karenina, and he's written along the upper marges of good number of the pages.

My dearest Nina,

It gives me some pleasure to write along these pages, not knowing what's written in them. Perhaps I am making serious declarations next to a scene that is supposed to be funny, or I am talking of love when the story talks of war. I'm not a literary man, but I'm sure it would be some kind of irony.

I am entertained. Your correspondence keeps me entertained most of all: I have read your letter so often that the paper already has creases in it that I can see through. Please, if you can: write my anything you like, poetry, anything. Let me reread those things as often as I can.

Tell me how you came to be a spy? Tell me how you managed to hide that you aren't a Bolshevik? I won't tell Freddie, because I have no way of talking to my men. They're all still in the same camp as you, because I took responsibility for it all.

Tell me what your life was like, before Bolsheviks and war and prison came into it. I'll tell you too, if you want, in return.

Be safe, Nina.

All my love,
Tommy

[kissthatgoodbye]

From the first time they meet, they know they're part of a joint operation. X5-494 doesn't have high enough clearance to know what that means beyond that she already knows he's working for someone gathering intelligence, and that she is as well; he doesn't know names, not even hers, but that's why they're the acting double blind. No resources on location except for each other and what they can amass between them, no contact except his regular reports to Sandoval, but that's par for the course now that he's loyal. Now that he's proven himself and he can be trusted out here in the world without a supervisor.

Which is exactly why he starts to feel himself relax, and exactly why he catches himself taking the chance to get to know another person, who looks at him and doesn't see a product because if that's part of the information she's been given on him, well, he hasn't seen evidence of it in how she speaks to him. That's the strangest and best part of deep cover operations: he gets to be a person to people he'll never see again and might have to betray. He'll take it, and worry about the consequences later, because that's what they trained him to do as well - although that particular lesson was unintentional, he's sure.

They're running surveillance on a target that is, apparently, important to both of their handlers; the name he's been given is Dimitri Maksimov, he works at a factory, he has an apartment with his new wife, he has no family in the area. Or, anyway, he did a week ago.

Now he's not going by anything, and he's well aware that he should probably try to dump the girl he's been working with, that she's probably the reason he's in danger now, except he also knows how much of that is just the paranoia, the conditioning. Be loyal, a part of his mind says, not weakly. Come back in. But he can't, not without losing everything he's fought as hard as he has to keep, and here halfway across the world he at least has a fighting chance. Here with someone who doesn't know anything about Manticore but does know about the society around them without having to allow for adaptation, he has a fighting chance.

Here with someone he actually likes, and that has more to do than he'd like to admit with why he's showing back up to a new apartment with the new set of identification papers she described for him, and he found the resources to forge. It's par for the course to expect to walk into a trap every time he opens the door, and today is no different, but he walks through it anyway. What other choice does he have?

[utselet]

Nina has not been loyal, not truly, for a very long time now. What she is, instead, is terrified. Ever since her reluctant successes with American intelligence, the missions she's been getting have been increasingly dangerous and complex -- but every time she's thought about turning one down in the past, or even just bolting, she's thought about the alternatives. Run forever? Get caught and thrown back to Moscow to rot in Lefortovo or some other hideous prison? Execution? So no, Nina hasn't been loyal, but her fear has been enough to keep her in line.

Until the day that one of her contacts takes pity on her and slips her word that the Centre has decided, for whatever reason or another, that she's officially outlived her usefulness. That there is no longer any bargaining, any begging, any help to be had, not on her side. She's long since burnt her bridges in the West, and so just like that, she goes from having the resources of an entire country behind her to having absolutely no one and nothing in the world but the partner she's been handed and whatever they can scramble together to survive.

She manages to hold it together just long enough to pass on the message, to find that he's heard something similar, and to put the bare bones of a plan together. She lets herself fall apart while he's gone, and by the time he comes back with papers, she's wrangled herself together again. She's still tense, her eyes still a little glassy, her face still a little pale, but she's calm and businesslike -- and, most importantly to him, seemingly safe. She sits down at the table and starts poring over the papers, clearly leaving no detail unseen, muttering to herself in Russian.

[kissthatgoodbye]

Dimitri - the new papers will include a new name, and it bothers him to keep using the one he was assigned by Manticore even in his own head, but if it helps him be that much more normal he'll take it; normal people, after all, have names and not designations - does not fall apart. It bothers him, the vagueness of the intelligence he has on why they've both been burned, doesn't allow for more specific planning than "be vigilant and survive," which could drive him to anxiety if he let it. He doesn't. This could be it, if they can just stay one step ahead of people who want them dead or worse.

So he walks through this door and, when all that the apartment contains is Nina and a faint buzz of tension, hands over the fruits of the past few hours; she'll find them exactly as she described, her standards met to the letter as he had it explained to him. Dimitri himself sits down across from her after a few moments, watching her without saying anything for several moments, both to observe and to let her concentrate.

He doesn't miss the faint differences. He even already knows what they mean, from a purely physical standpoint. It's the cause behind them that he has to be absolutely sure of, though, if they're going to manage to find something like trust in their current uncertain upheaval.

"Can you handle this?" he asks, also in the Russian it's likely easier for her to understand and doesn't make much difference to him. He doesn't bother masking the way his tone makes it clear that this is both a bare bones tactical question and a courtesy, although the latter is much less well represented.

[utselet]

"I'm fine," Nina replies brusquely in the same tongue, not looking up. Her face is a porcelain mask, her body tight as a wire, but she can't afford to let herself crack again. She knows that. Not for a very, very long time.

Not Nina anymore, she realizes with a pang, tracing her fingers over her new name. Nina Sergeevna Krilova dies in this room; she stares down at the identical face of Yelena Aleksandrovna Maksimova and wills her hands not to tremble. "You will call me Lena," she decides, folding the papers once she's satisfied and slipping them into her purse. "Lenotchka when you are feeling affectionate towards your wife."

She takes a deep breath, then leans across the table, looks him in the eye, and makes herself love him. It helps that he's handsome; it helps that she already knows he's smart and capable and, thus far, that he's kept his word to her. She softens despite the fear still in her, her gaze going gentle and liquid, a hint of a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. "My darling Mitya," she purrs.