#these two would’ve grown up through the 80’s and they survived 20 years into the apocalypse and then got to die in each others arms | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

peterpcrkcr · 5 years

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new but familiar | p.b.p. imagine

Pairing: third person female readerxpeter (bc it’s clearly a self insert, i’ll say it)

Words: 1.6k

summery: peter is taking a walk, thinking to himself about the world around him, when karen alerts him to some trouble ahead.

ENDGAME SPOILERS INCLUDED BELOW THE CUT!

So this was the new normal, a phrase that had little meaning before the big snap. Well, the big snap and then several smaller, but equally significant snaps that came after. Whatever the case, whatever situation, the world was forever changed. People lost only to come back in this new normal. Their loved ones five years older, five years moved on.

The trees were taller. The wind had changed. With less people the air was cleaner, the water too. But everyone came back.

Peter walked down the street, headphones in his ears trying desperately to get lost in the old 80’s hits. Something about that time period felt familiar. Maybe it was just the good music that felt right. The rest of it was rough, if he was being honest. Not like he was there.

Peter was now 16 again. He hadn't not been 16 during those five years, he'd just been in a sort of deep sleep. A resting place until it was time to wake again. Now he had to adjust with the world that had aged around him. Luckily, most of his friends had also been sent to the resting place. He wasn't left to graduate as the new kid.

Liz Allen was now 21. So was Lincoln and Cindy. Sally was 20 because she was a year younger than everyone else. But the point is they'd grown up in the half a planet while Ned, and MJ, and Peter, and Flash, and Betty had rested.

He shook his head at the thought. To be paused. Life halted. If he had the choice would he have wanted to age? Would anyone want to live in the world where you couldn't hit the breaks and wait for someone else who would never catch up?

“I could just travel back and-” he shook his head again. And what? Grow up again? Going back before the snap wouldn't change the fact that he got snapped in the first place so that idea was stupid.

Maybe he could change when he was born. No, stupid. Then he'd never have met Ned, or MJ.

Maybe his parents would've survived. Maybe Uncle Ben, too.

“No.” He said out loud, gaining the attention of someone at the corner of the crosswalk he waited at. They went back to the attention of their newspaper. Peter peered over their shoulder, the headline:

Avengers Bring Everyone Home, but at What Cost?

Peter grinned, let out a puff of amused air from his nose. That headline was a bit too on the nose itself.

Of course he'd want to have gotten out of the resting place. Right? Yes. Can't be selfish and ask for more time away. The population returning to normal also meant the return of bad. Of evil. Whether he liked it or not, he had to come back. The world needed him, and he'd never admit that, but it was the truth.

Peter made his way across the street, nearly got run over by someone in a car so eager to turn the corner they didn't look out for him. He was quick to adjust, though.

Once across the street he scanned the faces of people. Noticing rather easily if they'd been snapped or not.

People who had been look relieved. Almost excited to be back in the game of Life. Those who hadn't? They looked tired. Still sad, but relieved underneath the exhaustion.

Aunt May looked that way when Peter came home. Smothered him for a week before letting him go to school. Called off of work for the first time in 16 years to care for him, even though he was fine. In all honesty she did it for herself. The one thing since loving Ben that she did only for herself. Her boy had returned. Her sun.

Her son.

A puddle he hadn't noticed soaked his shoe and sock inside. Nothing worse than walking around with a wet sock in a wet shoe. It wasn't like he had been doing anything in particular anyway, so changing into the old suit for the rest of the day wouldn’t be a big deal.

An alley or a porta potty, it didn't matter so long as no one saw him go in. He just figured since the world was so wrapped up in itself and getting by that he could basically get away with changing whenever. Just about wherever, too.

He shoved his clothes in his backpack. Ditched his socks in a dumpster, set his shoes on top of his clothes, like a dork. He didn't think about it at the time, but doing that was just going to make his clothes dirty and wet too. Classic 16 year old boy.

16.

He sighed. Always 16. It felt like he had been 15-16 for years even before the snap, and the snap really just cemented that he would forever be stuck a teenager. Whoever was writing his life really should've figured out how to make what was usually the most upsetting and confusing years in a person's life go by faster because this was getting old.

Thwip.

Out of the alleyway and through the streets where whoever looked up and caught the site of him cheered. It didn't matter if they'd been snapped or not, people cheered when they saw him. He didn't live for the fanfare. He lived because he was lucky enough to. Too many people he loved had been lost to not appreciate every second he was gifted.

Thwip.

Around a corner, another. This was much easier than waiting for the crossing signal. Less death defying, if one could believe it, than using a crosswalk.

The music played in the mask, kept him from focusing too much on his thoughts. The mask was a really a gift in more sense than the literal one. If he didn't have it the world would be too much around to function.

Blue sky, not a cloud in sight. Birds and New York rats and tourists and cabs. A bustling city waiting to burst again. Peter sighed. This was home.

“Trouble ahead.” Karen's voice sounded over the music she'd lowered for Peter to listen. He stayed quiet, followed the ping she'd put on the screens. “Looks like a robbery of an old Oscorp Laboratory.”

“Of course.” He landed near the open hole that'd been blasted or busted in by who he assumed was the bad guy. “Nothing like a universal genocide being reverted to bring out the bad guys.”

He took three confident steps toward the entrance before feeling a shiver course through his body. He spun slightly on his left foot to stand sideways as a body flew from the hole. He watched the man in classic black robber garb roll over on to his stomach to cough.

“There's still three people in there.” Karen alerted to Peter who was just finishing up wrapping the man in webs. When he stood back up again to make his way inside, two other men dressed in black, ski masks and everything, flew out of the open hole in the wall. “One person now.”

“Who is it?” He asked as he webbed up the other two men, head turning periodically to keep an eye on the hole in the wall.

“I don't know. They're not reading on any of my databases. Maybe they're not from this planet.” Karen said, sounding a little worried.

Peter felt that shiver once again and stood, hands at the ready to shoot preventative webs at whatever came from the old Oscorp Lab.

A couple bits of rubble adjusted as the figure came out of the darkness and into the light.

Peter's furrowed brow softened. His eyes widened. It was a girl. Broad shoulders, strong arms. A mask over her eyes a la The Incredibles style. Just a navy blue ribbon with two holes in them to reveal her eyes. She stood at the top of the mount of rubble, hands on her hips, taking in a breath to release it contently.

“Scanning.” Karen said as Peter stood there silently taking the mystery girl in. He started to sweat. Hands shook a little as he relaxed his battle stance. It almost looked like her hair was blowing in a little bit of a breeze. He got lost in it. “She's 17. Her DNA is a match for-”

“Hey, Spider-Man!” She shouted almost accusingly as she stepped down from the accidental stage. He looked around as if searching for who she was talking to, like there was more than one Spider-Man. When she was close enough to for him to notice she was a little bit taller than him he blushed. “What are you doing here?”

“Fighting bad guys?” He suggested, looking around and the three unconscious men webbed up around the two of them.

“No, I just did that. I meant what are you doing in Brooklyn?” She tilted her head, hands still on her hips triumphantly. He finally met her gaze and felt warmth in his heart. Her eyes. They were familiar. Not the color or the size or the shape, but the person behind them. The soul inside.

New, but familiar.

“Where should I be?” He asked relaxing his shoulders.

“Queens.” She said knowingly.

“I mean, Queens has it's crime, but I think I'm allowed to go outside every once in a while, and I do my best work outside of Queens anyway, and what makes you say that i should be in Queens anyway?” He talked a lot when he was worked up. And he was worked up because she knew something she probably shouldn't.

“My grandfather told me about you.” She admitted.

“What about me?” He asked, crossing his arms.

“Peter-” Karen said, but he shook his head to stop her.

“You were snapped.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“Does everyone know you're 16?” She asked.

“Wait a minute…”

“Peter, she’s-” Karen tried again, he spoke over her.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“I'm the daughter of Michael and Jean Rogers.” She said. His eyes widened even more. “Granddaughter of Margaret and Steven Rogers.”

#peter parker #imagine #endgame imagine #not a fix it a continuation #peter parker x reader #spiderman x reader #peter parker x female reader #spiderman x female reader #spiderman #endgame #avengers #karen mention #karen #my writing #lol!#spoilers

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coldtomyflash · 7 years

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Thinking about de-aged Len, do you reckon if he ever did act on his feelings for a guy, he would be totally against something like anal sex? or at least very careful about condoms etc? He's seen all this stuff in the media and he'd still have fear over it all i imagine. I saw a post before sort of exploring this because of the time period he grew up in and the risks of unsafe anal sex etc.

The post you’re referring to is probably this thread (there’s a few different versions of that threat, mind you), which was a strong influence for how I’m writing the de-aged AU :)

Long so under cut.

I have a bunch of headcanons about if/how/when Len would’ve explored his sexuality with men, and they weave into some of my fics, behind the scenes sort of. I actually go into a bit of detail for those headcanons in 73S, namely that Len started to explore his sexuality first through researching as much as he could privately and then by leaving town to places no one knew him in order to hire male sex workers to figure out if this was something he really was interested in (it was), in a pretty detached/cold/clinical way, at least to start out with.

I’ve mentioned that sort of tangentially in my headcanons of him having been with men, and my headcanons for him in a relationship.

But to go into depth on the fear side of it… I think fear is part of why he wasn’t experimenting as a teenager yet, both fear of getting caught and fear of what he was seeing on the news. I don’t see Len as at all religious, so the notion of “god smiting the gays” wouldn’t have flown with him in relation to the AIDS crisis, but note that they literally called AIDS a “gay cancer” around the time Len would’ve been a kid. He wouldn’t have known much about it then, but until he could learn enough to understand how it was transmitted and how not to get it, I think he would’ve been too careful (and internally terrified) to explore his own pansexuality.

There’s also the cultural aspect. Len grew up with his dad in prison, so probably struggling for money sometimes in a single-parent household, and then in an abusive situation with an underemployed father, a baby sister, and major ties to organized crime and criminality. That setting in the 80′s wouldn’t have been especially open and tolerant, and Len would’ve grown up with a lot of negative stereotypes about gay men in particular, with a distorted mental schema of gay men somehow different from other men, more soft and flamboyant and effeminate and all these things that men like him couldn’t be, couldn’t survive as.

And it’s not so much that he’d buy into that as he would use it to maladaptively cope with his own internalized bi/panphobia as a teen but also to hide behind (”i’m cold and controlled and no one will ever know so long as i don’t look soft and don’t act that way”). And he’d engage rationalization: sure he thinks about men, but he doesn’t think about getting fucked, right? “Gay men like up the ass” so he couldn’t be like them. He wasn’t about that. He wasn’t that. So he was okay, right?

Which I mention to get at your other point about him and anal sex: I think he wouldn’t have been comfortable being on the receiving end for a long time. Once he hit his mid to late 20′s, became more accepting within himself that this is who he is, even if he wasn’t out to anyone else yet, and became more comfortable in the knowledge that if he was safe and careful then any risk of HIV could be mitigated… then I think he’d want to give it a shot. Would have wanted to give it a shot for years but wasn’t ready to accept he could still be strong and “tough” and want to be in that position.

Because organized crime and the type of life he had could’ve made for a lot of internalized bullshit around bottoming, totally separate from just being attracted to men. He’d have been around long enough to realize he wasn’t the only queer man in his own circles, to spot other men like him, and closeted gay men, and it’s not like other people in those same circles wouldn’t also know about queer men in their midst. “Don’t ask / don’t tell” wasn’t just a military policy; it was a way of life in spaces where so long as you could prove your worth and your masculinity, then if you were willing to hide yourself, you could do what you had to do and people would pretend they didn’t know. I know that’s terrible, but it happens. And that’s the environment Len would’ve come to realize he was in.

So Len would’ve come to understand that he could do what he wanted to with men, so long as he kept it quiet and jumped through all the hoops of pretending he “wasn’t like that”. Prison, of course, would have its own implications and a separate set of rules, and he’d have been in and out more than once, and maybe taken advantage of prison culture to try out a thing or two (but again, only as a top, and probably not anal unless he could get condoms he could trust. There’s more than just HIV in prisons, as other infections and diseases are a realistic concern too, especially in populations with a lot of needle sharing).

Edit: I wanted to add, at some point Len would come across gay men who are ‘bears’ and gay men who are tough and just… so many people who break the stereotype. Gay men who like to fight. Men who are big and powerful and bold but very clearly like to bottom. And all of that would change and expand his own internalized fears and concerns about the things he wants to do, and help him come to terms with himself. Underexposure is part of his issue, really.

Somewhere in those years, he would’ve had time to do as much experimenting as he needed to to figure himself out and what he liked, realized he enjoyed it every which way. But it would have been a lot of caution and hiding to start out with, yeah, and research. It would have been… a sense of both nervousness and relief when he would happen upon a gay man who was comfortable being himself and was just a normal guy.

It would have been him eventually setting up his own crews and getting good enough that he had a reputation that allowed him to choose not to hide so much, and test people’s reactions, and be pleased to watch if they squirmed in discomfort but were too damn afraid of him to say anything. And slowly to see people care less as the years went on, because the world was changing.

#headcanons #leonard snart #idk people might disagree #and tbh a lot of this changes if i'm headcanoning him and mick together #as soon as i put that relationship in play then a lot of these dynamics accelerate #but just as a standard no-relationship headcanon #this is how i think he'd have gone on these fronts #homophobia tw #period-typical homophobia #aids crisis #etc #also as much as i've research the aids crisis and queer history #i didn't live through the 80's and i'm not in organized crime #so this is the best of my headcanons with my understanding of these things at present #mockingbird-22 #replies

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