@captn-sara-holmes and I were talking about Infinity War, and she mentioned how utterly fantastic the interviews have been with Sebastian Stan and Winston Duke, and how she wants to see Bucky and M’Baku interact. And then this happened. I’m not even sorry.
(no spoilers, because I haven’t seen the movie yet; this is rampant speculation on my part.)
the howlies were an unconventional unit. we moved faster than most other groups, and we were willing and able to take bigger, harder targets than most our size could. we also had the advantage of all being experts in our respective fields, and combined with steve’s conniving artist brain being in charge, we came at problems in unexpected ways.
all those things meant that we ran a lot of what phillips misleadingly called ‘precision ops,’ where our small team would covertly reach and then take out a target beyond our own lines, then exfiltrate back to safety. generally whatever our target was wound up as a massive heap of ash and rubble, because the howlies had a really unnecessary number of guys who wanted to demolitions. uh. ill admit to being guilty of that one myself.
man, you guys are bored today, because in ten minutes ive had ten requests for this. so i will briefly tell the story of the cat-raccoon incident.
in most of the camps we stayed at, there were cats. dogs, too, but the cats were everywhere. food stores and garbage that a good-size camp needs means there’s a high chance of rats or mice, and one of the best ways to deal with that problem was a good mousing cat. so most every camp had a couple hanging around. the officers mostly turned a blind eye to them.
there was one camp we were at for a few months, and the mouser there was this huge fluffy grey lump they called Kilroy. (it was not a very original name; i think i met six camp cats called kilroy) Kilroy was a remarkably lazy cat, when he wasnt hunting, but also pretty friendly. he was also an amazingly warm personal heater for whoever he decided to grace with his presence. that being the case, he was welcome in most barracks when the weather started to go cold.
mice are active at night, though, so often he would linger in the kitchen until a couple hours after sundown, then head to the nearest barracks and scratch at the door until somebody let him in.
one chilly night in february, there was a scratching at the door of our barracks at nearly two in the morning. we were all asleep and even when it got loud enough to wake us up, none of us wanted to move. but it persisted. so eventually falsworth got out of his bunk–he was closest to the door–let Kilroy in, and got back in bed.
Kilroy ambled a few steps in, then started heading for gabe’s bunk. which was when gabe and falsworth realized that what had been let in wasnt a Kilroy.
it was a raccoon.
i dont know if gabe had some sort of raccoon related trauma in his past or if he just hates them in general, but he screamed and bolted upright in his bed. which woke the rest of us up, quite startled, and, since we were in bunks, resulted in about half of us hitting our heads on the upper bunks. dumdum, who’d insisted on sleeping top bunk, lunged awake so hard it actually tipped the whole bunkbed over, and wound up spilling him and happy sam on the floor.
all the chaos caused the raccoon to be terrified, and it started running around, looking for an exit. all of us were tangled in blankets, and most of us had no idea what was happening, and the only two who did were gabe and falsworth. gabe was screaming like he was being attacked by a six foot spider, and falsworth had started chasing the raccoon around. the rest of us were yelling, trying to figure out what was going on, and there was this angry bright-eyed thing running around, scratching and biting anyone who came near. soon enough, it cornered itself behind steves footlocker, but it kept biting at anyone who tried to grab it.
at that point we’d made enough noise to wake half the camp. peggy, who’d been staying nearby in the ops center, stormed over to see what was happening. she burst through the door like an avenging angel and found a squad of battle hardened commandoes with bedhead, wrapped in blankets, two bunks overturned, gabe still yelling, and half of us bleeding from raccoon bites.
she marched in , stole steve’s blanket, tossed it over the raccoon, bundled it up, and carried the whole thing right back out of the barracks.
when she came and found us at the medic’s after she’d let the raccoon loose in the woods, she was not impressed to discover that every single howlie had somehow gotten injured, either from the raccoon itself, by blundering into each other in the dark, or by falling out of bed.
Chapter 20: Peggy is a Boss, Dum-Dum is Not, and Kilroy is a Cat has been updated on Ao3!
(As some of you may know, raccoons are not native to Europe! (which is something I forgot when I made the reference in the last story, and had to do some quick research.) However, they are there now, as an invasive species. Part of the reason for that is that during WWII, a german fur farm was hit by a bomb, releasing raccoons into the wild. So this would have been one of the first raccoons loose in Europe. Neat!)
well, us howlies were willing to do downright stupid stuff for even stupider reasons, so it never took much effort to talk everybody into doing something really really dumb. usually i was the one trying to keep everyone for getting their stupid selves killed, but im proud to say that this particular occasion was all my doing.
so its july 1944, and nazis are still occupying paris. we were sent in to pick up some crucial info from a resistance informer in the heart of the city. but at this point we were already starting to be recognizable, so we needed to disguise ourselves to get through the city. the higher-ups hadnt been specific on how exactly to conduct this particular op, so, left to our own devices, we naturally concluded that we should dress one of the most overmuscled commando squads in the allied forces as women.
we were good at special ops, not logic.
i think whoever suggested it was joking, but in typical howlies fashion, we took things waaay to far, and soon enough we were sourcing dresses and wigs. dum dum and pinky and gabe and jaques and falsworth and morita had to shave their mustaches off. dum dum cried.
morita managed to get his hands on some makeup–he refused to tell us where from–which was great, until we realized that none of us had any idea what to do with it. but then steve admitted what exactly he’d been up to with the ladies of the star spangled show. turns out that aside from hauling their luggage everwhere, he’d also been on hair-and-makeup duty nearly every night. i guess the ladies decided to put his artistic skills to use, because the man knew his way around a blush brush. (the rest of us were not sure what a blush brush was.) even in 2017, he can still do a contour like nobodys business, because he apparently decided that was something worth knowing. so steve did our makeup, and all of us learned how to do lipstick. more useful combat skills for the howlies dossiers.
falsworth had a friend who ran a really fantastic underground drag show, so he negotiated wigs in return for promising to send steve over to help with a show sometime. we did not tell steve about that promise until later. gabe found the dresses, and i dont know where he got them, because they were somehow big enough for us.
except for steve, who has the waist-to-shoulder proportions of a pizza slice. he got stuck halfway into a dress–caught with one arm in, his head and other arm out–with his fully-made-up face slowly turning redder and redder. all of us tried, but we could not wedge steve into that dress.
so instead we put him into a wheelbarrow full of garbage.
the rest of us–the worlds burliest but most well-made-up ladies–set off in groups of twos and threes through occupied paris. happy sam pulled the short straw and had to wheel along the stevebarrow, which not only stunk but was heavy as hell. the nazis working the checkpoints must have liked their ladies large and muscular, because we made it through to the drop point with no problems, aside from falsworth getting a little to in to the flirting. steve kept griping, but we kept telling him garbage is quiet steve, shut up.
we made it to the drop point, this big old house on rue des grands augustins, one of those huge mansions. but what we’d carefully avoided telling steve was who exactly the house belonged to, because his birthday was the next day, and this–aside from being a crucial intelligence mission–was his birthday present.
the house belonged to pablo picasso.
so we all slipped in through a side door, and when happy sam and the steve barrow finally caught up with the rest of us, happy sam turned it over sideways and out tumbled a very irate, still made-up steve in his captain america costume.
he was pissed as hell until he realized who exactly the weird little guy covered in paint was, and then he blushed so red i thought he’d cook the makeup right off his face, and he started stammering like that time in first grade suzy miller said he was cute.
anyway, he and picasso got along like a house on fire, and the rest of us enjoyed some proper french cooking while they babbled art at each other and scribbled in each other’s sketchbooks. picasso drew steve a portrait of himself, which is why one of steve’s battered stained sketchbooks is valued at 700 thousand dollars. it’s because halfway through theres a bunch of picasso sketches, and a little painting of captain america wearing makeup in a heap of garbage.
not that you can really tell, of course. cubism.
Chapter 13: Stealthy, Not Smart has been corrected for caps/punctuation on Ao3! (And I’m gonna send a second ask from that chapter around later)
I need to talk about the fact that Bucky’s still got his right hand 100% free and could be punching Spider Man into next Tuesday already. But he still stood frozen, looking shocked as all fucks and lemme tell you right now that that was not because someone’s managed to block his metal fist because lbr the metal arm was never unstoppable before, especially when super-enhanced/-equipped people are involved – so basically he doesn’t take that punch cus he’s actually just now able to hear the other guy’s voice and it clicks that this is just a fucking k i d
Bucky was sitting at the kitchen island when Steve wandered in, looking for a mid-afternoon snack. There was a heap of black leather on the granite surface in front of him, and he was working vigorously at the lining with a needle and thread. It was just a touch too glossy to be Nat’s catsuit, and too big to be one of Bucky’s motorcycle jackets, which left only…
“Is that Nick Fury’s trenchcoat?” Steve asked, with open horror. He’d thought the therapist was making headway on Bucky’s latent self-destructive tendencies.
“Yep.” Bucky replied, tying a knot and snipping the thread away. He stood and shook out the coat.
It jingled.
Like a Christmas stocking.
“And you say I’m the reckless one,” Steve shook his head. “Well, it’s been nice knowing you, Buck. I hope Fury kills you quickly.”
“You are the reckless one. I’ll be wearing a parachute when I jump off the helicarrier to escape.”
Steve couldn’t argue with that.
He wondered if Bucky had a plan to evade the Quinjets after he jumped.
kingofmemes posted:
i may spend the rest of my life in boat jail, but at least the pirate king cant sneak up on me anymore.
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