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medeafive · 6 years

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Smutathon prompt: Reunion sex (any type of reunion - big reunions after being brainwashed, little reunions after completely a mission, anything)

A year late, but inspiration finally struck. IW spoilers. Heavily inspired by @blessedharlot‘s speculations about IW 4.

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“What the fuck,” Bucky states. “Steve, why are you staring at me like that?”

“Seriously, man,” Sam chimes in. “I know you’re basically like a super large puppy, but are you really going to cry?”

“Shut up.” Steve tries to hold it together. “It’s just- We’ve been here- I’ve been here before. So many times.”

“Like, in Wakanda?” Sam asks. “Duh. Also, not that often.”

Steve takes Bucky’s hand and stares at it. Bucky gets more weirded out by the second. “No, look, we’ve been- we’ve been at this point before,” Rhodey explains. “We reversed time- infinity stone, really complicated, long story- basically we tried and tried again until it all worked out.”

“What?” Bucky asks uncomfortably. “What usually happens?”

“You turn to dust,” Steve whispers, still staring at Bucky’s hand, which is doing exactly nothing. “You walk onto this clearing and you say my name and then you turn to dust.”

“You’re in the bushes,” Rhodey says to Sam. “I call for you, but when I arrive, all that’s left is ashes.”

“Wow,” Sam says. “That sucks.”

Steve snorts, lets go of Bucky’s hand and wipes at his eyes. “Yeah. Sucks. Especially if you see it a gazillion times.”

“Cap, that’s almost a swear word,” Rhodey replies, tongue in cheek.

“So, you watched us die over and over again?” Bucky asks.

“Boy, it was more complicated than that,” Rhodey says. “But that’s what it felt like.”

“Wait, so- who survived? Originally?” Sam asks.

“Rhodes and me”, Steve replies. “Thor. Natasha. Bruce. General Okoye. Rocket. Some others, but not here.”

“Who’s Rocket?” Bucky repeats dumbfounded.

“The talking raccoon,” Rhodey explains. “You know, that one. There’s only one, really.”

“Natasha seems to take it all in stride,” Sam remarks.

Natasha is standing around, rubbing her ribs absent-mindedly. Steve snorts. “Yeah, just let her pretend she cares about none of you at all. And don’t talk about the fact that she moved heaven and earth to reverse it.”

“How rude.” Sam grins.

“That’s all some crazy shit, man,” Bucky adds.

“I still can’t believe it actually worked out,” Rhodey agrees. “I mean, we were desperate.”

“Let’s just- let’s just go back,” Steve mutters. “Find T’Challa.”

“Wait,” Bucky interrupts. “So T’Challa- T’Challa also died? Who ruled Wakanda then?”

“Who do you think?” Okoye replies out of nowhere.

Steve sighs. “Let’s just- let’s just get back.”

She’s in the kitchen.

It’s the middle of the night and everyone fell into bed a long time ago. They’re probably not all sleeping. Especially Steve. Too much happened.

But Natasha is up, making tea. Her hair is blonde. He wonders about that. She looks over briefly and goes back to rummaging through the cupboards.

He’s not sure whether he wanted to find her or not. He only knows how it turned out. Now he can just wait and see what happens next.

He crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe. “So. I died.”

Natasha snorts. “Couple of times, yes.” She pulls a mug out of the cupboard and, after a moment of hesitation, a second one. “Nothing new for you.”

“I guess it’s different,” he says. “Turning to dust.”

She overplays a slight tremor in her hand by grabbing onto the counter. “Do you- remember?”

That could mean so goddamn many things. He decides not to push it. “Turning to dust? Kind of. It never happened, though, right?”

She shakes her head. “Not in this timeline.”

“But I remember it,” he insists. “You remember it.”

She turns her head to look away. “I do. Clear as day.”

“It seems like a dream to me.” He shakes his head. “A nightmare, maybe. It all seems like a dream.”

She turns back to him and whispers: “Better than this world?”

He sighs. “There is this place. It’s… not from this world. It’s orange, shallow water everywhere, like an oasis. Incredibly calm.”

She nods. “The Soul World.”

“That part really feels like a dream.” He approaches the counter where she’s leaning. “I was… happy. It felt weird, like I had forgotten how to… but I was happy. I remember that much.”

She looks up at him. He always forgets how short she is. “What made you happy?”

There’s a point where he can’t talk around it anymore, if he even wanted to. He sighs. “You were there.”

“Hm.” Her hands slide a little closer to him. The water starts boiling, somewhere, maybe in a different universe, in a parallel timeline. “Younger me?”

He looks at her stomach, her shoulder, her neck. “Before I ever hurt you.”

She nods, like everything makes sense. Or like she understands. “Simpler times?”

He snorts. “When was it ever simple?” He startles when the kettle turns itself off. “I guess- I knew it wasn’t real. In the back of my head. Like- just trying to hold on to something ephemeral, I guess.”

“Oh, do I know that feeling,” she mutters and pours the water into the mugs.

“It wouldn’t be the same,” he says. “We were different people, in a very different situation.”

“No,” she agrees. “It wouldn’t.”

“You were over ten years younger,” he continues. “You were so young, and so broken. And I- I’m not even sure I know who I am now.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she says. “Soon enough. It’s hard, but you will make it.”

“I didn’t know who I was back then either,” he states. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter who we are or who we were,” Natasha says, putting the mugs away and stepping right in front of him. “Not right now, at least. Not here.”

His hand touches her hip so easily. Her blue eyes stay focused on his. There is no discomfort in her body, none at all. Her fingers reach around his forearm, the right one. “Just now?” he whispers.

“Just now,” she promises, and her left hand goes to the back of his neck and the next moment they’re a pulling mess of crashing lips, interwoven limbs and shared breath. No thinking. No comparisons. He lifts her onto the counter and she pulls him back to her, like a rubber band, crashing her body against his. There’s no past, no future. Just now. Just them.

Her hands are in his hair, while his grab her hips and pull her forward, without ever leaving an inch between their lips. She’s warm. He nestles at her shirt, but without enough dedication to pull it off. Instead he rips himself away from her lips and starts kissing down her neck. She groans and tugs him even further down. “Gosh, your hair is long.”

He grins, biting her neck. “Like it?”

“It’s longer than mine,” Natasha replies, sounding almost complaining. “Yes. Don’t stop.”

He pulls at the neckline of her shirt but it won’t go far enough, so he just licks over her collarbone. She snorts and pushes him away to pull the whole shirt over her head, and he uses the opportunity to do the same. Of course she grabs his hair to pull him back, and the rubber band snaps again.

He grabs her ass to pull her off the counter so he can fiddle with the button of her pants. She slaps his hand away and does it herself, kissing him passionately, hand wrapped around his neck. One leg off and she’s back on the counter, not even bothering with the second one. Fine with him. He pushes her panties to the side and slides a human finger into her, crooking it immediately. She drops her chin against her neck, leaving his lips but keeping her forehead pressed against his. He can’t tear his eyes away from her face and the cracks of bliss when he pushes against a certain sweet spot.

The noises are something else entirely. She is getting tighter and her right hand is patting aimlessly around his crotch. His eyes fall closed, listening to her whimpering. He presses the flat of his hand against her and she starts moving her hips. All he can do is push and pull with his finger, and judging by her breathless moaning, he better do it hard and fast.

Her fingers dig into his thigh. Her wetness starts running from his finger down the rest of his hand. He opens his eyes to her biting her lip, eyes pressed shut. She clenches around his finger, once. Her back arches, sending her chest flying against his body. He keeps going.

A gasp rips her lips apart and then she clenches again, much harder, and suddenly she buckles all over, her whole upper body falling against him, face buried in his shoulder, his neck. He hooks his finger inside of her and pulls hard, making her tense and gasp again, and then he lets go.

She’s panting against his neck and he hesitantly wraps his left arm around her, pulling her even closer. She doesn’t do anything except breathe. He wishes it could always be like that. She is warm, even warmer than before. She feels boneless. Her legs are loose around his hips, but she holds up just fine when he takes a step back.

She’s just sitting there, eyes closed, half undressed, breathing. He rinses his hand, watching her. He wonders where she’s been, all those years. What she was doing, how she was coping. He wonders who she is now and what made her be that way.

She opens her eyes and all thoughts about the past fade away. The rubber band pulls him back. She studies his face while opening his pants. He can’t tell what she is thinking, if anything. He doesn’t ask and she doesn’t tell. He pushes his pants down and she raises her hip to slip her panties off on one side. He pulls her hips towards the edge of the counter and presses against her and then he’s already inside of her.

She sighs and he remembers that noise, distinctly, and he waits until she pulls at his right shoulder to start moving. His balls uncomfortably hit the counter, making him groan, and she pushes her left hand between them to take care of that. Her right arm drags him halfway onto her so she can bite his earlobe. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something else, anything else, but there is nothing but her.

She utters a breathless moan and pushes her hips a little more forward, resting mostly on her right elbow, and he fucks into her harder. She grins for a moment, fondling his balls, until another moan rips through. Her eyes are pressed shut. His right hand clenches into a fist, right next to her face. He leans forward, downward to devour everything her lips have to give.

The sound of skin hitting skin gets louder but he mostly hears her muffled mewling. He puts all his weight on his left arm, freeing the right one. He grabs her ass, first, then he somehow snakes his hand between them. Just holding it there, because the movement of his hips does the rest. Her head drops on the counter and her chest arches up.

Her hands both scramble to grab onto the edge of the counter, anchoring herself, and he barely has time to wish for her raking them all over his back before she seems to remember, digging the nails of her left hand into the skin over his shoulder blade, moaning, pulling. He tries to breathe, but it doesn’t matter, her chest is pressed against him, the fabric of her sports bra rubbing against his bare skin, her nails scratching over his back. Her right hand grips his metal shoulder, his waist, his ass, as if to assure herself that he is solid, that he is here.

He can barely hold it together anymore, moving just a little bit faster, and he’s not sure whether the sobbing noise comes from him or her or both of them. Doesn’t matter, he only feels her warm, wet tightness and the painful sensation of her nails drawing red lines over his back, and when she clenches, he loses it, coming while she pulses around him, barely hearing her moaning over the blood rushing through his ears. He collapses onto her before she is even fully through it, and that’s it.

He doesn’t move for several minutes, just listening to their slowing heartbeats, and when he does and sees her opening her eyes, he knows it was a mistake. She’s closing herself off again, already, before he is even off of her, and he sees it and knows that nothing he could say or do will make a difference. Just shutting everything, everyone out, as she knows how to do, as she was taught. He can only accept it and move on.

She cards her fingers through his hair, expression unreadable, but when she leans up and kisses him, it’s at least partly sincere. She studies his face, his eyes with a curious expression, and he wonders what she sees. Then she grabs the hair at the back of his neck and stares at the ceiling. “This never happened.”

It’s cold, even for her, but he nods anyway. It seems fair, given how much he has hurt her over the years, how much pain he caused her at every opportunity. He never expected more. Less, in fact.

He’s just moving to pull out of her, which seems like the only appropriate course of action, when someone on the other end of the room clears their throat, and he looks up and it’s Steve, standing just behind the open door, eyes directed pointedly at the ceiling. He steps back, plucking their clothing from the floor and wordlessly hands Natasha her shirt. She slips her other leg back into her panties and pants first before she pulls her shirt over her head while he’s still dealing with his belt. “It’s fine,” she says, carefully neutral. “Just go. Don’t worry.”

He looks over at Steve, who’s still pretending he doesn’t notice them at all, except for one quick side glance that hitches on his scarred metal shoulder. Natasha, fully dressed, hair perfectly back in place, throws tea bags into the mugs, with all the calm in the world. He pulls his shirt on, shrugs and decides to talk to Steve sometime else. He takes a mug of lukewarm tea and leaves.

Natasha puts sugar in her tea, which she never does, and stirs carefully before putting the spoon in the sink and moving around the counter, mug in hand. Steve snorts. “Ross was right. The nerve on you.”

“Look who’s talking,” Natasha returns coolly, sipping from her mug. “Been standing there for long?”

“No,” Steve replies sourly. “Long enough, though.”

Natasha drags the tea bag carefully around. “Don’t tell anyone about this.”

“Are you kidding?” Steve asks incredulously. “That’s what’s most important to you right now?”

Natasha sighs. “Just… don’t.”

Steve snorts again. “What, you think I never noticed? All this time? I just didn’t know you were… that intimate.”

“That’s over,” Natasha declares coldly. “That’s not me anymore.”

“Yeah, that certainly looked like you,” Steve returns sourly.

“We’re not picking up where we left off.” Natasha shakes her head. “I just… I wanted to go back. Just this once.”

“Sure, fine, whatever.” Steve rolls his eyes. “But did you have to do it in the kitchen, without even closing the door?”

“That’s your problem?” Natasha deadpans. “Decency?”

“I don’t know,” Steve answers honestly. “I don’t know if I even have a problem. You tell me.”

Natasha rubs at her eyes, sighing. “We’re different people now. I’ve changed so much and I don’t even know him anymore. And there is no way we can go back.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “And who said you had to?”

“Me,” Natasha answers honestly. “I wanted to go back. I wanted everything to be as it was, before all the pain and hurt came in between. But I know that’s impossible. So I just… grabbed onto what I could get.”

Steve sighs and leans next to her against the counter, arms crossed. “I mean, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand that. I’d have loved for Bucky and me to just continue our friendship like before the war. But I always knew that was delusional. We could never, even for a second, ignore the past 70 years. And I guess he was afraid that I expected him to be the same, and it took time and work to convince him otherwise and to build something new, and we’re probably not even there yet, but… I mean, you don’t have to throw out everything and start from scratch.”

Natasha snorts. “Yeah, I don’t know. That sounds exhausting.”

“Oh, come on,” Steve returns. “We just saved the world. Have you got anything else to do?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “I just don’t know how it would turn out. And I hate uncertainty.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says. “You don’t have to decide right away. In fact, you can take as long as you want to figure that out. And if you decided against it… I’m sure Bucky would understand that.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees slowly. “He probably would.”

“As for me,” Steve adds. “I’d be glad if you two could figure something out that does not consist of constantly avoiding each other.”

Natasha grins. “But, Steve, who the hell cares about you?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Thanks. And next time, for the love of God, close the door.”

Read the next chapter on Ao3

#iw spoilers #buckynat #bucky barnes #winter soldier #natasha romanoff #black widow #steve rogers #captain america #my writing #fanfic

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playfulcorp · 7 years

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Our bold vision for the future of Creativerse

Yesterday we announced that Creativerse will launch on May 8, 2017. Today our game director shares our vision for what comes next...

In Creativerse, we have a blueprint system for building. When you place a block, hints for the adjacent blocks are revealed.

At first it doesn’t look like much, but the more progress you make, the more it takes shape until eventually you end up with something amazing. With our bigger blueprints, you might be surprised by hidden depths and unexpected twists.

In some ways, it’s an apt metaphor for developing Creativerse. We set out more than 4 years ago to build the ultimate sandbox game. It didn’t look like much at first. Seriously, the early version of our mobs were spooky, and not in a good way. But each day we made progress, and as we did, more steps along that path revealed themselves.

One of the best decisions we made was to open up our development process by participating in Early Access on Steam.

Again, there are parallels to blueprints, especially ones you build with friends. People start working near each other and branch out. Eventually you look up and see someone in a completely unexpected location, but then it clicks and a whole new perspective for what you’re building takes shape.

Without your feedback, the game would be a shadow of what it is today

While we had a basic plan for what we wanted Creativerse to become, I can’t state enough how important our players have been in helping us expand on that plan, in revealing to us the nuances of the game’s destiny, in teaching us just what it means to be the ultimate sandbox game. By far, the biggest twists in our journey have come from players helping us continually see the game in new, fresh ways — players veering off in unexpected directions that helped us define and refine the "blueprint" of Creativerse. It’s safe to say that without your feedback, the game would be merely a shadow of what it is today.

Not an end, but a new beginning

Next week, Creativerse will officially launch on Steam.

The game has come so far since it first launched, with forty-one updates, more than 2.6 million players, and a great many features and content added, including player-published adventures, blueprints, machines and wireless circuitry, public worlds, land claims, the arc glider, a world map, block rotation, world simulation systems, new biomes and mobs, farming, taming, block phasers and mob spawners, a steady stream of blocks and items. The list goes on and on.

But for every feature we shipped, there are at least 10 we still want to add. We’ve barely scratched the surface of realizing our vision for the game. So why launch now?

A lot of reasons went into picking this specific time (and here’s a fun fact — we initially planned to launch a year ago!), but they all boil down to one overarching theme: vision. In recent months,

We’ve barely scratched the surface of realizing our vision for the game

we’ve taken a good look at the blueprint of the game, including all the essential nooks and crannies our players helped us see more clearly, and we feel like we’re finally starting to see its “shape”. We think we know what Creativerse wants to be when it grows up.

And yet, at the same time, the game feels polished enough, fun enough, and, in many ways, complete enough that we are ready to shine a bigger light on it. We’re ready to invite the world to join our journey and become Creatifriends with the rest of us.

What Creativerse wants to be when it grows up

Creativerse was not the original title of the game. In fact, for a long time leading up to our Early Access debut, the game was called “Thereafter.” We had a logo and everything. The change to Creativerse happened at the last minute and was somewhat controversial among the team.

More on that in a minute. But first, let me tease some of the ideas we’ve been talking about recently...

Creativerse is not our story. It’s your story.

Imagine joining a multiplayer adventure where the goal could be anything from being the last person alive to scoring the winning goal in a round of Pigsy Soccer. Imagine finally getting your hands on creative tools that allow you to build something almost as fast as you can think of it. Imagine one day joining someone's customized world and having no idea what kind of creatures you’ll meet, what recipes you’ll find, how long the days will last or even what color the sky will be. Imagine not just being able to share your creations with the world, but having the option to publish them to a marketplace where your hard work and creativity could be rewarded with real money.

While it’s too early for us to elaborate further on the specifics of these ideas, they all point to one universal theme: Creativerse is not our story. It’s your story.

Because if there’s one thing we’ve had reinforced again and again, it’s that the imaginations and creativity of our players are as vast as the universe. The best thing our small, scrappy team at Playful can do is continue giving you more and more tools to unleash and empower your creativity.

And this is why I’m so glad we ended up choosing the name Creativerse. Whether or not we were fully aware of it at the time, the choice was prescient. It contained the seedling of the idea that the collective creativity of our community would always far exceed our own, and that no creation or lore or adventure we came up with would ever be more compelling than what our players can dream up.

Final thoughts

At a high level, here are the major milestones on our long term roadmap...

Improved (and multiplayer) published adventures.

Tools to help you build faster and better.

Entirely new ways to customize your world and even the gameplay.

More ways to share your creations with the world, including some kind of revenue-sharing marketplace.

Thank you for teaming up with us on this thrilling journey!

There will be lots of additional stuff mixed in along the way. For example, we'll continue regularly adding new blocks and cool content. We also plan to keep polishing the overall game and furiously squash bugs along the way. And we'll always leave room to refine our plans based on your feedback.

This is the next frontier for Creativerse. It’s our chance to welcome a new wave of enthusiastic Creativerse players into our wonderful community with open arms. It’s our plan to build and grow Creativerse into a household name. And it’s your opportunity to continue to shape the “blueprint” of Creativerse for years to come. Thank you for teaming up with us on this thrilling journey!

— Daniel Havens (aka Thor)

P.S. We might just have a little something up our sleeves for you guys on launch day...

#creativerse

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