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superblizzardfire · 4 years

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The Surprise Gift (Bruce & Kamala)

(AO3 Link)

Kamala wasn’t expecting any presents for her seventeenth birthday. But the universe gave her a surprise one anyway…

‘Food poisoning,’ she gasped, shaking as she knelt over the toilet. ‘Figures.’

‘I suspect the pre-packaged egg mayonnaise sandwiches were to blame, Miss Khan,’ said JARVIS.

‘Yeah, I thought they tasted funny.’ She’d woken up feeling nauseous, taken one sip of water and immediately dashed to the bathroom to throw up. Now she gripped the cold metal of the bowl and unleashed a second wave, the burning in her throat bringing tears to her eyes. It was her own fault. But supply runs were inconsistent, and they had to eat when they could.

On the plus side, at least she was throwing up in a bathroom on the Chimera, the iconic helicarrier that was once home to the Avengers (and now housed only one).

‘Shall I inform Doctor Banner?’ asked JARVIS.

‘No! God no, I don’t want him to see me like this!’ Sweat-soaked hair and vomit-stained Captain America pyjamas. Not a good look, and she’d already embarrassed herself in front of one of her childhood heroes this week. She’d been singing along to Cheap Thrills in her room, not realising that she was broadcasting herself through the whole ship. She hadn’t been able to meet Bruce's eye for the rest of the day.

For the last three weeks, they’d been searching for Tony Stark. JARVIS kept bringing up false leads, so they travelled from country to country, flying out in the Quinjet for supply runs and reconnaissance missions. It sounded like something from Kamala’s most self-indulgent fanfics: a secret mission where she and Doctor Banner set out to reassemble the Avengers, five years after they were split apart. It was literally the coolest thing that had ever happened to her… except it wasn’t turning out to be as fun as she’d hoped.

When she’d vomited up what felt like everything she had, Kamala clambered up and flushed away the eggy mess before rinsing out her mouth. The Chimera wasn’t fully operational yet: no hot water, and everything was filmed with dust. She stared at herself in the mirror, panting. Yup, she looked like an absolute mess. On her birthday. This sucked.

‘Uh, hey Kamala? Are you up?’ Bruce's voice echoed through the room.

Crap. ‘Morning, Bruce!’ she said brightly, then shut her eyes tightly as the room seemed to spin around her. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m just running a few tests on those energy weapons we found. I could use a hand, if you’ve got a minute?’ Bruce always seemed to think he was being a bother. He could make “pass the salt” sound like he was asking a huge favour. ‘Only if you’re not busy.’

‘Sure thing,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be right – oh god – ‘ She lurched back to the toilet as another wave of nausea swept over her. With nothing left to bring up, her stomach clenched painfully.

‘Are you okay? Kamala?’

But she couldn’t reply. Her breath came in harsh sobs through gritted teeth. She was trying so hard to do her job here, to help Bruce find the Avengers and to hold her own in the fighting. But she didn’t feel like an adult. She felt like a scared kid in disguise. And now she felt like death, it was difficult to maintain that charade.

The beep of the door unlocking was the only warning she got before Bruce ran into the room. ‘What happened? Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, it’s just food poisoning. I’ll be down in a minute, I promise.’ She squinted up at him. Bruce wore his usual purple shirt and pants (Hulk had ruined at least five of those shirts, how many did he have?) with his glasses perched on the end of his nose. His arms were folded as he stared down at her in concern.

He sighed. ‘I told you not to eat the egg sandwiches.’

‘You ate them just fine.’

‘Well, I’m immune to food poisoning. You’re not. And you’re not coming down to the lab, okay? You need to rest.’ He spoke gently, but she still felt she’d let him down somehow. ‘Take the day off.’

They couldn’t afford to take days off. They needed to find Tony. Now because of her they’d be behind. Black Widow would have been stronger than this. Anyone other than Kamala would be stronger than this. But she felt so awful that she just said in a small voice, ‘Okay.’

‘Okay,’ Bruce echoed. Then he started backing out of the door. ‘I’m just gonna go… do some things. Can I um, get you anything? Bring you anything?’

Kamala burst into tears.

‘Hey, it’s gonna be okay.’ Bruce crossed the room and knelt beside her, all awkwardness momentarily forgotten.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just – so hard sometimes,’ she sobbed. ‘I want to go home and see my family and just have a normal life, and I know I can’t because we have a job to do and – ‘

‘You’re allowed to want those things. You’re only human.’

Except she wasn’t, was she? Not quite. She was a human with superpowers, and that meant she had a responsibility to protect others. But right now she wasn’t sure she could even protect herself. The tears kept coming, and her chest shuddered with uneven breaths. She wanted to curl up on the cold bathroom floor and pass out.

She swayed, and Bruce held her shoulder to steady her. ‘You’re going to burn yourself out. No one can be on top form all the time. I’m pretty useless for days after Hulking out, and you don’t judge me for it. I think you’re allowed to have a bad day.’

Kamala leaned forward and hid her face in his shoulder. He stiffened in surprise, then hesitantly wrapped his arms around her in a hug. ‘It’s my birthday,’ she sniffled.

‘Today? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Didn’t want it to be a big deal. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.’ She closed her eyes, knowing that her forehead would feel hot against his shoulder.

Bruce's low, gentle voice rumbled in her ear. ‘Okay. You’re going to stay here and get some rest, doctor’s orders. JARVIS can keep an eye on you. Can you stand?’

She could, but leaned heavily on him as he helped her walk back to bed. ‘Sorry I got sick on your shirt,’ she mumbled.

‘I’ve got plenty of spares, don’t worry.’ He brought her a cup of water and an empty bucket from the pile in the corner of the room. ‘Call me if you need anything, okay?’

‘Thanks, Bruce.’ She lay down and drew the blankets over herself. Bruce lingered a few moments longer, clearly searching for something else to say, then awkwardly edged out of the room. Kamala gazed out of the window until she fell asleep.

When she woke up, it was afternoon. Her head hurt and her mouth tasted awful, but the nausea seemed to have passed. She checked her phone and found birthday messages from family and friends, which raised her spirits a little. When she reached for the water beside the bed, there was a packet of plain crackers and some ibuprofen there too. Bruce must have returned to check on her.

Then Kamala spotted the parcel at the foot of the bed.

A slow smile grew on her face as she picked it up. It was thick and rectangular, and wrapped in thin graph paper from the lab. An effort had been made to liven it up with stars drawn in blue and red ballpoint pen.

She unwrapped it slowly. It was a thick, spiralbound notebook. The edges of the paper had been coloured neon blue (presumably using a salvaged highlighter), and the front cover had been replaced with a homemade one: a printed photograph from five years ago. A smiling Kamala posed with the Avengers whilst coloured streamers fell around them. It was one of the best memories of her life, and despite the events that had occurred after it, the sight still made her smile. ‘Thanks, Bruce,’ she whispered.

When she turned to the first page, there was a message written in small, neat script:

Happy Birthday Kamala! I hope this comes in useful. You’re an amazing writer, don’t forget how far you’ve come.

Bruce

Writing had always been Kamala’s passion, although since they’d embarked on their Avengers quest she hadn’t given it much thought. She certainly hadn’t entertained any fanfiction ideas; it felt weirder to write it when you knew the characters you were writing about. Maybe she could try something new, though.

She dug out a pen from her bag. Even the simple weight of a notebook in her lap brought her a comforting familiarity. That even aboard the Chimera, far from home, she could slip away into a world of her choosing. No bad guys to fight or buildings to destroy. Just the simple act of creating something for the fun of it.

Kamala clicked her pen, snuggled down under the covers, and began to write.

#Bruce Banner #Kamala Khan #Marvel's Avengers #Avengers Game #my fic #Blizzard plays Avengers #first in the fandom tag on AO3!

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lucyreviewcy · 4 years

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6 Underground (2019) Dir. Michael Bay

Billionaire Ryan Reynolds fakes his own death and pulls together a team of agents in order to organise a coup in an imaginary country (which is not imaginary in the context of the film.)

I love Ryan Reynolds. I love that I have never once come out of a movie knowing his character’s name unless it was a plot point (big shout out for Drew Paxton in The Proposal, a name I only remember because there’s a whole scene where all the shops have the Paxton name on them.) I love that if I had a tan coloured pencil I could colour in a portrait of him because his hair, skin, and eyes are somehow the same colour. I love that his movies all sit on a scale from 1 to Deadpool, a scale that combines levels of sarcasm, pop-culture references and falsetto singing and divides them by three to indicate the overall Deadpool quotient (Detective Pikachu = 8/10 Deadpools, Safe House = 2/10 Deadpools).

However, even my love for Ryan Reynolds, which was born in 2009 and has flourished over the last ten years, was not enough to make 6 Underground a good movie.

For reference, in this movie Reynolds is at a comfortable 5/10 Deadpools. Unfortunately his persona, acting style and everything else about him grates with the earnest, serious nature of his dialogue. The tone of 6 Underground is equal parts inspirational speeches about family spoken over swelling string music and unwatchably long action sequences. There is also the inevitable awkward quipping thrown in like fresh coriander on a curry (it doesn’t need to be there, it adds nothing, and it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.)

Let me start at the beginning.

The opening action sequence is a car chase in which all the characters are introduced with numbered titles instead of names. They’re introduced in the wrong numerical order, which is confusing, and then later they’re introduced again with flashbacks. Dear Mr. Bay, please pick a way of introducing your characters and run with it. Perhaps, Mr. Bay, you were scared by the overlong introduction sequence that was the first three hundred hours of Suicide Squad. Don’t worry! You can just introduce the characters once, in a snappy way. The audience will get it. Really. We will understand.

This action sequence has Bay’s trademark chaotic style and goes on for what feels like a decade. Despite an evident fear of introducing the characters in one way and ending up with a movie that feels like Suicide Squad, Bay has managed to create an action sequence that is less interesting than the opening sequence of Suicide Squad. That’s really hard to do.

Bay then absolutely dunks the Suicide Squad comparison by having the characters describe themselves as “a family” at a point that is much too early in the film for any of the audience to care. We’ve spent fifteen nauseous minutes with these people in a car shouting at each other, interspersed with powerpoint slides telling us their number and silly nickname. We don’t think they’re a family, and we aren’t interested in their relationships.

The story actually begins at this point, with a passable scene introducing the character of Seven. This sequence makes sense and introduces the character in a compelling way that allows the audience to understand his personality, background and motivation. Once this is established, Reynolds appears and asks Seven to join the team. So the first fifteen minutes were really kind of unnecessary. If you’re watching at home, maybe just skip that bit.

The film continues in a messy, uneven way, trying to be Ocean’s Eleven, The A-Team and Smokin’ Aces and continuing to land back in the Suicide Squad bucket. The characters, with the exception of Seven, are poorly developed and never stray beyond stereotype territory. One of the team nearly dies, Reynolds’ character insists he’s left behind, he isn’t. This happens twice. To the same character. That’s not a character arc, that’s a circle.

The female characters have basically no input into the story, and the only time that one of them has a significant amount of dialogue she’s only wearing her underwear. She’s also posed awkwardly to conceal the non-existent bullet wound that she sustained earlier in the story and the director evidently forgot about until the day of shooting.

There is a lot wrong with this movie. I have a deep love for adrenaline-fuelled-thrill-ride movies like The Fast and the Furious franchise. There is room in my heart for a movie that has the aesthetic of 6 Underground, but I didn’t enjoy a single second of this particular instance. The one scene that could have won me over, where Reynolds does a terrible Scottish accent, falls flat when it ends in unnecessary crude humour that is inconsistent with the rest of the film. Crude humour has its place, (I’ll never forget the night I decided to show Out Cold to my boyfriend’s parents and looked on in horror as I remembered how much of the movie is about different things happening to Zach Galifianakis’ penis. To clarify, the movie is fun but showing it to my boyfriend’s parents was inadvisable.), but this film didn’t make any room for crude humor or the many sarcastic self-referential jokes in the script.

I hate to say it but the core issue with this film is that it’s not a Ryan Reynolds movie. Reynolds has backed himself into a corner with his trademark delivery, which renders anything he says in a “genuine” tone of voice immediately sarcastic and laugh-worthy. The moralising, preachiness of his character in 6 Underground butts up against his established star persona throughout the film, resulting in an uncomfortable watch. There are actors out there who could have carried this off. With Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the lead, 6 Underground might have worked. As it is, they tried to fit a Deadpool shaped peg into a D”TR”J shaped hole, and the result is an almost unwatchable mess.

#ryan reynolds #6 underground #michael bay #movie #review #movie review

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