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Good afternoon happy pride your queer headcanon of the day is ace nonbinary Natasha Romanov and her QPP Clint Barton and his wife Laura all retiring* happily on their farm. Nat takes up weaving and makes gorgeous fabrics and terrible spider jokes.

*(mostly)

❤🧡💛💚💙💜

I have realized that Steve Rogers would have gone into the ice after The Hobbit was printed but before The Lord of the Rings was released and now all I want is him finding out about The Lord of the Rings and being so excited because “Wait, you mean there’s a sequel?!”

please please please just imagine the following:

But please also imagine Steve reading, specifically, The Return of the King.

Steve reading about Frodo and Sam nearly dying on the slopes of Mount Doom, saving the world by the skin of their teeth, and it’s exactly the epic fantasy ending he was expecting. Aragorn marries Arwen, and the hobbits are heroes, and everything is right in the world.

And then they go back to the Shire.

They go through literal war, and they try to go home… but it’s not home. It’s been ravaged by the war, by technology, and “in your heart you begin to understand: there is no going back.”

And Frodo sails. Frodo sails, and even though you know that Sam still has Merry and Pippin, look at what he’s lost. He lost Frodo, he lost Gandalf, he lost the innocence of the Shire. And Sam is left behind, left to return home to his wife and family alone, and its an awful, terrible moment, that moment when you’re confronted with the reality that “We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved, but not for me,” that winning the war can mean losing in other ways, that sometimes you don’t get your happy ending-

But that’s not the ending you’re left with. Because the last line of the book is “Well, I’m back.” and Steve, sitting in his apartment, surrounding by a future that never expected to see, that he understands and embraces but still sometimes doesn’t feel like his own world- Steve sits back, and sets the book down, and innately understands Sam’s feeling of pushing forward and finding happiness even in the light of a great personal loss. Steve has literally lived through his own Scouring of the Shire, has tried to go home only to realize that there is no going back, Steve would have every reason in the world to be Frodo and to decide to step back and find his own peace because damnit, he deserves that.

But Steve isn’t Frodo, Steve is Sam, Steve is the stouthearted and steadfast and he keeps moving forward, because he gets home and doesn’t just see the broken edges of the world- he also sees the pieces that got put back together. He sees everything he survived, and everything that the people around him survived, and when he finishes reading that book and sets it down he looks around his apartment and realizes for the first time that he’s finally managed to come home again.

One of the things I love about Avengers fic writers is that we all still write the everybody-lives-in-the-Tower stories, even though canon’s pretty well established that that didn’t really happen. And for some reason it just makes me really happy that nobody has the same Tower. Sometimes everyone has their own floor, sometimes everyone has their own wing on the same floor, and sometimes they all share a bathroom they fight over in the mornings. Sometimes explosions from Tony’s lab down the hall from the kitchen set off the fire alarm in the living room, and sometimes Tony has so many labs spread across the building that they could go for weeks without seeing him. Is the gym down in the basement? Does it have a view of the city skyline? Is the building laid out in a straight line inside, or do the hallways loop so Clint can run in circles when he’s had too much caffeine? Are there Stark Industries chefs who make all their food, and housekeeping staff to keep the place nice, or does Steve make scrambled eggs in the morning and Thor vacuums the living room? We have no idea how the place works, but that doesn’t stop us and I love it.