Your name is Steve Rogers. You are not afraid to die.
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When you dream, there is a tower. Sometimes a mansion; sometimes nothing at all, just a winding, open road and the endless thrum of a bike between your thighs, more power than you thought possible.
Mostly, when you dream, it's like this:
The curve of a smile, the left corner lifted a little higher than the right. Muffled laughter, buried in the crook of your neck, and the scratching of facial hair against your throat. An arm wrapped around your waist, your own slung around a shoulder. A line of heat down your side. Sleek laboratories filled with gizmos you don't have words for, shiny enough that your dream-eyes just glance over them, always hunting out the one living thing in the room, dark circles under blue eyes and a tired smile and a metallic thud when you tap at his chest.
Sometimes there are gods, and monsters, and things you never thought you would see—never thought you could even dream—but at the heart of all of them is the same story. People will always do things they didn't think possible when something they want is on the line. Sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's power, sometimes it's a thing so vast and unbelievable you will never understand. But someone will.
You'll say, but all those people, and someone else will say, she doesn't care about that. You'll say, we have to help them, and someone else will say, that's not up to us anymore. You'll say, please, and he'll look at you, exhausted, and say, I don't know how to do this with you.
He will look up at you, that self-deprecating half-smile on his face, and your heart will burn with it. You will burn with it, and you will say, I had no-one. Nothing. You gave me a purpose, somewhere to belong. You gave me a home.
Sometimes the world is ending in your dreams, fire and fury and something violent coursing through your bloodstream, and you see his face and you want to put your fist right through it. Sometimes the world is quiet, and it's that early hour when the morning blue is starting to fade to a pale gold, and he smiles at you, and you ache with the desire for something different.
It feels -- like something slipping through your fingers. Dreams that could be memories, except you don't have names for anything in them. Things that feel real, but you can't catch long enough to hold onto.
Maybe the war has taken more from you than you realised. You gave it your body, your beliefs, your fists and your spirit. You knew it would take your peace. You did not realise it you gave it your dreams too.
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Your name is Steve Rogers, and one day, you will wake up.
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Ramattra had once hoped that omnics and humans could live in harmony with one another. Too, he had once convinced himself that he'd seen enough brutality and death to last him several lifetimes, and shed his cloak of war.
He now understood how foolish his ideals were. As long as humanity scorned omnics, as long as his kind were slaughtered and decimated, Ramattra would see to it that omnics would prevail, even if it meant the only solution was the annihilation of humanity.
Even then.
...However, there existed one glowing spark on the blight that was humanity, one such human that made him, if just for a moment, almost hopeful again.
The electronic door of his quarters whooshed shut as he stepped inside. Your sleepy expression emerged from the bundle of cushions and blankets he kept on the floor for his meditations, lips curving into a soft, warm smile as he approached.
These days, there weren't many aspects of humanity he found worthy of salvation. Very little about humans appealed to him, and yet he made exceptions for you. How could he feel anything else but fondness when he cupped your face and you nuzzled into his palm? How could he think that you were deserving of anything else but his protection when you sought him out after battles, worried hands finding every nick in his metal and fault in his wiring? You possessed a uniquely caring and compassionate heart for your kind, and were one of the few humans he knew to be sympathetic to his cause.
Even now as he knelt beside you in the bed of blankets, you reached for him, fingertips mapping and re-mapping the ridges and angles of his body you knew so well. You were so sweet to fret over him when it was you with the vulnerable, fleshy body. It would take no effort at all for him to crush every bone in your hand, and yet you held his with infinite tenderness, flexing each silicone tendon as if checking for damage.
Ramattra soothed away your concerns and instead welcomed you into his embrace, guiding you to sit between his folded legs. Back-to-chest, he faintly sensed your heartbeat as it pulsed regularly beneath your skin. Such an odd, unfamiliar thing to an omnic whose body thrummed with constant energy, but he found it a comfort. It meant you were alive, after all.
You stretched to press your lips against the edge of his faceplate in a 'kiss' as you settled against him. There was little he could do to reciprocate your affections except to rest his head atop yours, curving himself around you to cocoon you against his front. He had neither the need for a heart nor a pair of lungs. Even still, he focused on the rhythm of your breathing as each exhale warmed the metal of his chassis, drawing his world smaller and smaller until it was the only sensation he registered.
He had always wanted a brighter future for his people. As Ramattra sunk into his meditations, he understood with a startling realization that he wanted the future to include you at his side.
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please say more about jilypad + diverging parenting styles... perhaps even a possible scenario >:) i imagine harry has very cunning tactics for using this to his advantage
helloooooo <3 thank u for this ask bc i love talking about these three and harry. i went looking thru the archives to find this post; my first foray into this side, and really, i’ve never looked back after that.
so i’ve talked ab this a bit before but i fully think that james was a very overprotective ‘mother hen’ type parent. i tend to read his behaviour in lily’s bday letter to sirius as being scared of his child on a broomstick and i fully, fully think he’ll never be able to let go of that as harry grows up. he’ll be anxious and suspicious and paranoid, and his first instant will always be to wrap harry up in cotton wool and hide him away. (i low-key connect this to his childhood as well; going from being spoiled and sheltered to dropped in the middle of a war, black & white thinking, living in extremes etc etc makes it v hard for him to be Normal about his child. as he shouldn’t be, really, but yeah) that’s why he thrives during the initial years; he never minds the hard parts of being a new parent, loves it in fact, and it makes it better that he can keep harry close to him at all times w/o coming off as a helicopter parent (not that the notion bothers him ofc).
it’s good, then, that he has two partners to even the scales, no? i think lily was the most…balanced out of the three. she had a relatively normal childhood, grew up in a working class family/neighbourhood and had to deal w adversity from a young age so she’s developed a nice, thick skin. she also has a sibling with whom she has a v rocky relationship so she knows that kids are, ykno, a bit unhinged. and a little bit of hardship is not a problem. i hc her as needing time to get used to parenthood, unlike james who stepped into it natural as breathing, or even sirius who loved harry on much on first sight that it made up for everything else. ofc lily loved her son, but it didn’t come w the same blinding intensity of her partners and made her feel really shitty in the beginning. but, i think she’d shine during his teen years actually, because she’s not overbearing or intense and becomes the quiet, calm strength that a hormonal, spotty teen boy would probably need.
and sirius <3 our poor baby falls in love with harry, perhaps even more quickly than james, with such startling speed that it shakes his entire foundation. he doesn’t regret it but he’s constantly discombobulated. i also imagine that…it takes him longer to settle into the role of parent, esp bc he’s not biologically one ykno? not like it matters to anyone, ofc, but it takes him a long time to truly accept his authority and place, to believe that he has just as much right as j&l to be there, to parent harry. this has the consequence of him always being more indulgent than the other two; after all, he considered himself a godfather before a parent and a lot of that thinking stayed. he lets harry get away with stuff the others might not (and the little mf figures this out later); some of it also comes from sirius seeing so much shit, and facing so much shit himself, that he rationalises a lot of stuff as ‘well, this isn’t the worst it can be, so what’s the harm’ (because his life has been such a roller coaster that he’s forgotten that not everyone’s like that, if that makes sense?)
its obviously not this clear cut but i imagine harry looks at it like this: if he needs unconditional love, he goes to james; rationality and logic, lily; acceptance and calm, sirius. when someone has to be beat up for hurting harry, james steps in. if he needs help burying a body, it’s sirius. dealing with some asshole boss/teacher/classmate’s mother who’s making harry’s life hell? lily. i can keep going but,,,u get the idea, right? this makes sense, i hope lol
i actually think harry’s first birthday is a great example. sirius pushes the boundaries by gifting lil harry a broom; james loses his mind running after him; lily places an industrial sticking charm on harry’s butt, leans back with a glass of wine, and enjoys the show. even as he grows up, lily and james act as the disciplinarian, and sirius is the emotional outlet. all of them fill in each other’s cracks so well, and it’s only when harry grows up that he realises how effortlessly they worked off each other to parent him.
also oh man o man. harry being cunning is,,,,,see, i’ve not considered it this far but it makes perfect sense. i think canon harry actually had so much manipulative energy and it’s often overlooked for his goofier traits but! this is the same dude who used his dead parents to trick slughorn into revealing sensitive info! imagine if that could be channelled into his jilypad interactions 😈
it’s like, it takes him a bit, because his three parents r so smooth, but once he realises that all of them have certain weak spots, he does NOT hesitate to exploit them. (it has the unintended consequence of truly strengthening the jilypad relationship into an unbreakable one bc one thing their kid taught them is to have ironclad communication going at all times so nothing they’ve said, or not said, is used against them). so like, he knows if he wants to sneak out to a party, it has to be sirius and in a specific way—‘i’ll be totally safe, papa, plus i really wanna see what it’s like and idk when it’ll get a chance to again’. if he widens his eyes to pitiful levels, pouts a little, and blinks faster than usual, then james is putty in his arms as long as he’s separated from the other two. divide and conquer becomes the main tool in harry’s arsenal, actually. lily’s the toughest nut to crack, purely bc she doesn’t run on emotions or irreverence, but harry soon learns that if he comes up with a solid, logical case that proves his argument has unbiased merit then he has a good chance of getting her to say yes. (this is good, bc u can arrange words in the correct order, but u can’t always control emotions)
so overall yeah, you’d think one kid + 3 parents would be an easy bet, but harry keeps them on their toes all the fkn time.
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