SELPA

SELPA

the avengers | harry potter au  (disclaimer: that has nothing to do with Harry Potter himself)

Steve is a Muggleborn wizard who left the wizarding world after finishing his NEWTs in order to fulfill a promise to his family. Bruce is a professor in Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts with a monstrous secret. Natasha, a Ministry spy, has a past, and it’s not a pretty one. Clint is an Auror who finds himself neck-deep in trouble when he uncovers a conspiracy against the Ministry. Tony is a rich and eccentric tinkerer who finds himself drawn to dabbling in the Dark Arts. Thor and his brother Loki are both descendants of a noble pureblooded family. The uneasy truce between the brothers is broken when Thor discovers that Loki has returned to his Death Eater ways.

Selpa, looksee here!

just a little southeast of Phoenix, AZ, this is how the Outback Steakhouse restaurants line up.

i’d hate to be staying at a hotel right in the middle of delicious steak pentagram OH WAIT

(Barely) Controlled Chaos is now on AO3!

So, I've done it.  Started the upload on AO3.  They'll be full chapters, rather than the smaller chunks posted here, and less often, but it's begun!

Now I need to start writing again, make sure I stay ahead of the posting...

Odd Things To Happen At Work #1

So, I work in a bar.  It's pretty busy most of the time, but today was pretty quiet, so I had time to talk to some of the customers.  There was only one guy at the bar at one point, so we were talking while I did his drinks, and he seemed ok, then he tried to get out of paying.  This isn't exactly unusual, but the way he did it made me very confused.

He proposed marriage - twice.

When I turned him down (with a heavy dose of WTF), he upped the ante and told me we could have lots and lots of children.  I made him pay the money and then walked away, but the award for creepiest and most inventive way to attempt non-payment goes to him.

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #1

So, this is part one of the first installment in the I Choose You 'verse.  (Barely) Controlled Chaos will be from Tony's pov, contains lots of angst, some humour, many many swear words and descriptions of torture and sexual scenes - nothing too explicit, and nothing worse than shown in the films, but if you don't like that, this may not be for you.  The Iron Man 1 and 2 films will come into this, as will The Avengers, so if you don't like spoilers, check the warnings at the top of each section before reading.

Warnings for part 1: mentions of physical and mental abuse, mentions of alcoholism

Disclaimer: I own nothing.  Please don't sue me.

***

Tony was not allowed Pokémon.  His father was very clear on that fact.

His mother had one, an old Persian that she’d helped to raise when she was a teenager.  Tony didn’t know if her luminous silver fur was like that because she was close to 40 years old, or if she had been born that way, but it didn’t matter; she was still the most beautiful thing the six-year-old had ever seen.  He loved the cat because his mother loved it; sometimes he thought that she favoured the Pokémon over him, but that was alright, because sometimes Tony did too.  Tony did bad things, and his father shouted at him; Persian only ever got petted and given treats.  His mother was right to like the Good Girl more than the Bad Boy.

Persian was his mother’s constant companion; that was one thing that didn’t change as he grew older.  Tony became a prodigy, which made his father behave as if he loved him, at least in front of the cameras.  At home, Howard was too busy trying to beat his son’s genius that Tony was mostly treated with indifference and sometimes he was outright ignored.  By both his parents.  Tony wasn’t a cute little boy any more, and his mother seemed to lose interest in him more and more as he grew towards his teenage years.

He’d overheard his parents argue on more than one occasion, but never about him.  They didn’t care enough to argue about their son.  No, Persian was usually the topic of their arguments; Howard Stark was of the opinion that the house was no place for pets.  Maria always countered that with ‘Pokémon weren’t pets, they were friends’.  You couldn’t just pick a Pokémon up and take it home with you; it had to choose to be with you.  These arguments were ultimately circular and ended up with both his parents drunk while Tony tried to get close enough to Persian to pet her.  The cat didn’t like Tony very much, and he was yet to get in stroking range, but he held out hope.  Pokémon have to like you to stay with you; Tony’s parents didn’t like him, but Tony thought that maybe, if he was very nice to Persian, she might like him one day.

Then the Pokémon died, and Tony’s stable-ish family life went to hell.

Without her companion, Maria became depressed, and more than once Tony had returned home from school to find her unconscious in her own vomit.  He took care to never mention these incidents to his father, who drank just as much, but handled it better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.  Locking himself in his garage or office and passing out on a desk was not Tony’s idea of a good time.  By the time Tony turned fifteen, the only member of his family he actually liked was Jarvis, the butler, and he was technically a servant.

All in all, when his school finally got sick of him and let him take his exams early, he was ecstatic for a chance to get out of the house.  MIT accepted him (who wouldn’t, with his grades?), he filled out all the paperwork himself – he put himself down for communal living arrangements, just because he knew Howard would hate it and he was feeling petty at the time – and then he was out of there.

He grew to regret his hasty decision.

Not about MIT – that was awesome, even if he did know more about his classes than most of the Professors – but about the dorm living.  His accommodation was a small room on a corridor, sharing a communal bathroom and kitchen.  At first, he thought it would be fun – sure, it was a step down from what he was used to, but he was paying for it with his trust fund and he knew that Howard wouldn’t shell out for these living arrangements, so he wanted to stretch his budget.  He was a few years younger than the other students, but that wouldn’t matter.

Except it did.

His dorm-mates were four other boys – men really, given their age – and they sneered at him when he tried to introduce himself.

“What do they think they’re doing, letting a kid in here?” was the nicest greeting he got.  Tony assumed they doubted his right to be there and promptly aced every test put before him, in one case getting a better mark than two of his dorm-mates put together.  They didn’t take it well.

As Tony was expecting, Howard threw a fit when he found out where his son was living (it took almost six weeks, and Tony thought that maybe his parents had only just noticed that he was no longer living in the mansion), but as Tony was paying himself there wasn’t much he could do about it.  He made vague comments about Tony learning his lesson and coming back for help before slamming the phone down.  Tony was almost vibrating with rage; when had his father ever given him anything, except a black eye that one time when he’d gotten very drunk and Tony had said something sarcastic?  Howard had apologised when he sobered up – the only ‘sorry’ he’d ever given anyone, Tony thought – and it had never happened again.  That didn’t mean that Tony forgave the old bastard.  Help, indeed.  Everything Tony had, he’d gotten on his own.  Sure, the money was Howard’s, but the brains and ambition were Tony’s, and he would not let his father belittle that.

That was when Tony decided that, no matter how bad his dorm-mates were, he was sticking it out.  He would not prove his father right.

Thinking back, that was probably where his stupid stubborn streak really kicked in.

Odd Things To Happen At Work #4

At work on Saturday night, a guy came up to the bar, and I had to do a double take.  He looked a lot like Jeremy Renner.  And he was standing on front of my till.

I was so ok with that.