Here Be Dreamers

catrinasl:

kisleth:

typhoidmeri:

dopemixtape:

typhoidmeri:

dopemixtape:

Steve discovers Roll Rolling one night while working through the list of music recommendations Sam and Natasha had given him.  At first he thinks it’s a random ad popping up in the middle of the music video. Then he reads the comments. Nearly every one involves swearing and the term ‘Rick Roll’d.’ Google, as always, is unbelievably helpful and Steve laughs out loud to himself upon reading the Wiki page.  

Sam is first.

Steve:  Otis Redding is terrific - thanks for the recommendation. Found one you might like. Let me know what you think.

He pastes the link into the text before hitting send. He smirks and waits.

Sam:  Steve Rogers, you Rick Rollin’ sonofabitch! Dammit, man. Who knew Captain America was such a troll?

Steve’s sharp bark of laughter echoes off the walls.  

Steve: On your left

Sam:  You’re an asshole

Sam:  Fifty bucks says you can’t get everyone else

Steve:  I won’t feel bad taking your money, you know?

Sam:  That’s why you’re an asshole.

IDEK you guise.

Steve: Hey, Clint, thanks for the movie recommendations. Pretty in Pink was great. I liked this one too.

Steve carefully pastes the link in and presses send without a moment of regret. He tosses his phone on the counter and opens the fridge. Halfway through making a pile of sandwiches his phone vibrates on the counter. 

Clint: WTF?

Clint: U rick rolled me.

Steve: Sorry, pal.

Clint: UR an asshole. >:( 

Steve snorts and screencaps the texts. 

Steve: one down.

He attaches the picture and sends it to Sam, laughing to himself as he pulls a carton of milk from the fridge. 

Sam: Why am I friends with you?

Steve: My senior citizen’s discount. 

Natasha doesn’t reply. Steve hasn’t heard anything from her in three days, so he assumes she’s off somewhere on the other side of the world kicking ass and taking names.

He’s walking back to his place one night with a couple of large pizzas, listening to the 60s mix Sam made for him when a little blur of red and black lunges at him from the shadows. His attacker sweeps his legs out from under him and knocks him to the ground. He’s prepared to spring to the defense when he sees it’s Natasha. Steve’s laugh is cut short when she presses a pointed heel against his throat. “Dammit, Nat! You made me drop my pizzas. What the hell?” 

She presses her heel a fraction closer and breathing becomes difficult.

Natasha eyes him coolly with her arms crossed against her chest.  ”I’ve had motherfucking Rick Astley in my head for three days now, you little shithead.”

Steve snorts and immediately regrets it. 

Natasha kicks him in the ribs before offering a hand to help him off the ground.

“Share your pizza and let’s figure out how you’re going to get Stark.“ 

(Natasha is having exactly none of your shit, Steve.)

Despite what Tony thinks, Thor has no trouble with Midgardian technology. Humor, yes, but technology no. Steve sends Thor an email, swipes his iPod off the desk and goes out for a run, listening to the 70s mix Sam made him.

unknown number: I hate you.

Steve: Excuse me, I think you have the wrong number.

unknown number: I have the right number, Captain Rogers. Thor has not stopped singing all day.

Steve: I’m sorry, Dr. Foster.

Dr. Foster: No, you’re not. ヽ(ಠ_ಠ)ノ

No, he really wasn’t.

….

Steve finds an acoustic version, heavy on the sitar, of Rick Astley’s notorious hit and asks JARVIS to play it the next time Bruce plays his tea time music.

Two days later they learn that Hulk can’t sing but he can hum.  Rather soulfully, he thinks as he sends a video clip to Sam.

Sam: You fucker, Rogers.

Steve: Five down. One to go.

Sam: Good luck with that one, asshole.

Steve: Better have my money ready, Wilson.

            (Thor enjoys Midgardian folk tales sung in chanted verse)

Tony is the hardest by far. Steve brings pizza and vodka with him when he visits Natasha, and Clint is there too as a happy accident. He bounces ideas off them and everything he can think of just isn’t enough. They break for the night and he retires to his apartment.

He almost considers giving in to Sam when Tony gives him the answer unknowingly.

Steve is sitting on one of the stools in Tony’s workshop, drawing the Suit (which Tony was tickled over), when DUM-E beeps and nudges his arm. Steve grins and takes the washer they’d been using for ‘fetch’ while Tony mutters to himself and looks over the damage Steve’s body armor had sustained. 

(“It’s impossible!” He’d wailed, looking at the large gashes in the fabric.

“Tell that to my stomach,” Steve had replied from the hospital bed where his skin slowly stitched itself back together under the bandages.)

“Hey, Tony.” Steve lightly tosses the washer like an extra-small frisbee across the workshop. “Is DUM-E limited to just beeps?”

“No, he has proper speakers, he just refuses to use them for anything else. He doesn’t have the AI functionality of JARVIS. He’s like a baby. A really old baby. Or the mute eldest brother.”

Steve smiles brightly when DUM-E comes back with the washer.

—-

It’s really easy to get the song onto his iPod.

—-

It’s almost easier to get the iPod hooked up to DUM-E and get him to push the ‘play’ button once Tony had settled in.

—-

The entire team watches through the (thankfully soundproof) glass wall as Tony shouts and chases DUM-E around his workshop.

Steve: Did it.

Sam: Pics or it didn’t happen.

Steve steps into the workshop and records the song playing as DUM-E zips around, Tony chasing him. It sends it to Sam who doesn’t reply for ten minutes.

Sam: I’m paying you in beer. BECAUSE you can’t get drunk. Asshole.

Steve: That’s Captain Asshole to you.

Steve and Sam are out on a mission when T’Challa’s team alerts him of their breakthrough. He’s standing by when the cryo chamber reaches its final defrosting stage and Bucky Barnes opens his eyes.

“Sergeant Barnes,” he says as the man leans forward. “You’ll be happy to hear that we believe we are finally able to help with your brainwashing problem, as well as your arm.”

Bucky rubs his eyes. “How long was I out?” he asks.

“Not long,” T’Challa assures him. “Unfortunately your friend is not here; though we have alerted him of our decision to wake you. He asked that in the event of his absence, that you be shown a video he has recorded for you.”

He holds out a tablet for Bucky to see and plays the video.

The music washes over them both, and T’Challa spears a nearby attendant with a glare. “What is this?”

The attendant shrugs. “It is the message that the Captain left for his friend, my King,” she says respectfully.

After a quick explanation and some eye rolling, Bucky asks if he can send a short message to Steve, just three words:

You little shit

ink-splotch:

ink-splotch:

I think Yoda would still want to hide and separate the children. I think Padme would refuse, and I hope Obi Wan would help–

Because wouldn’t that be fun? Padme, who ruled a planet, who challenged a senate, who married a horror, who can pick her own locks while handcuffed in the middle of a gladiatorial arena– now on the run with her two infants and only a heartbroken Obi Wan to back her up. 

(And R2D2, of course.) 

Padme’s always been the practical sort, even when royal, so she knows how to change a diaper and feed a child. She also knows how to fly the stolen ships Obi Wan and R2D2 hack into, how to bargain in thirteen intergalactic languages,  how to spot a bounty hunter in a crowd, and how to shoot a blaster with deadly intent. 

Padme was in love with someone who maybe never even existed– maybe once, there had been a boy who wanted to help people, who risked his life and his pod racer for someone else’s story, who made a young girl laugh in a sand-worn mechanic’s shop. 

She had been chasing him for years, that once good heart, but now with these bruises purpling and fading around her neck, she stops waiting. She starts running. Every time Obi Wan force-moves something over the next few weeks, she has to bury a flinch. 

But Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. 

When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. 

Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs. 

Padme lost a husband, but Obi Wan lost a brother and his whole order– his world, his people, his family. 

(One day, Leia’s whole home planet will vaporize and die under Vader’s–Anakin’s–command, and Obi Wan will find himself in the wreckage of it, the place Alderaan used to be, and he will recognize the sorrow shrieking into the Force.) 

But for now– Padme watches Obi Wan win them funds in gambling halls, grin into the teeth of a good flyer chase, sleep with Leia strewn over his chest, and Padme wonders if he isn’t more heartbroken here over Anakin than she is. 

Luke learns to walk a whole few months after Leia, but he falls less. He moves around the rim on mechanic’s shops, freighter cargo holds, makeshift camps on green planets, holding onto stable things and frowning seriously. Leia tries to leap from walking to running with no lead up time at all. She is not without scraped knees and scabby heels of her palms for years. 

They manage to spend a whole eight months on a little Outer Rim planet in a sleepy agrarian settlement. Padme and Obi Wan repair farming droids while R2D2 plays nursemaid (both Leia and Luke will be fluent in droid by the time they’re six). Luke and Leia play rough-housing games in the dry dirt– this is the first time they’ve stayed anywhere long enough to learn other children’s names. On day two hundred and thirty six they hear reports of stormtroopers so they pack up and hop on a transport at the nearest spaceport, not even bothering to check where it’s going. 

When they fly their own ships, they strap Luke and Leia into the same passenger’s seat and Padme and Obi Wan narrate. “Here you’ve got to always turn off the compressor before you activate the initiator…” “See the flashy blue light? Gotta have all the blue lights flashing…”

They hear reports of the empire growing. They see it– stormtroopers in more and more distant outposts, imperial ships passing them in the skies. Obi Wan lost the Jedi cloak years ago. They plate R2D2 in matte grey paint. Padme cuts her hair short and dresses in many-varied-layers like any refugee– because that’s what she is now, she and her little family.

Obi Wan has two lightsabers. He thinks Padme doesn’t know– he has the one he fights with, holding back stormtroopers and reflecting bounty hunters’ blaster shots, but he also has another one, tucked into the bottom of his pack. 

“It’s Anakin’s, isn’t it?” Padme asks one late night, tucked in a stony sheltered hollow on a planet that storms warm rain thirty-eight hours out of the day’s forty-two. Obi Wan gives a soft laugh and puts his hand over his eyes as Padme goes on, “The saber you’re hiding from me.” 

He nods, slowly, lets his hand fall. “I took it from him, when I left him for dead.”

“Not dead enough,” says Padme. “You’re keeping it in case yours gets lost?”

“Yes,” he says slowly. “Or in case… we might need another light saber, some day.”

Luke is bouncing a X-wing fighter toy along the wet pebbles. Leia is beeping something at R2D2, giggling over the rainfall. 

“Hm,” says Padme. “We might need another two.” 

Alderaan still becomes Leia’s home. At almost sixteen, spit-fire furious, thoroughly educated by both a Jedi master and her ex-queen/ex-senator/always-a-rebel mother, Leia sits firmly down at the table in the junk smuggling ship they’ve been living on recently and announces, “I want to go into politics.”

“I don’t trust politicians,” says Obi Wan, and Padme kicks him under the table.

They fabricate educational records and essay-writing contests, relying on R2D2’s hacking skills as much as Obi Wan’s powers of persuasion. Padme contacts her old senatorial ally Bail Organa and gets Leia a junior internship on his staff.

The Organas had once been willing to take in a girl-child and call her their own. They welcome this older, taller Leia with arms just as wide-open and she boards in their spare bedroom. Over breakfasts where Leia enthusiastically grills Bail about policies, bills, and negotiations, they never mention they were almost her parents. Their adopted daughter Isabel, who is a few months younger than Leia, giggles into her oatmeal while Leia leans forward and waves a spoon as she tries to make a point.

Leia has never lived more than nine and half months in one place, and never on a planet with a shorter than nine standard-month solar orbit– so she has never seen a season leave and then return.

She files papers and learns bureaucrat-speak and sits through meetings and helps plant saplings in a local park in a bit of community outreach PR for the senator’s campaign. A wet spring rolls into a muggy, ugly summer; then the fall cold cracks the air and thick purple and orange leaves cascade to the ground. All the climbing vines turn red and brown to prepare for hibernation.

Winter wreathes the place in frost and the occasional dusting of snow. Leia and her family once spent two closeted weeks on Hoth, laying low, so she scoffs at the layers and layers all her fellow interns are draping themselves with. She gets some waterproof boots, some good gloves, and forgets her hat with a stubborn, prideful constancy.

Then the spring comes in. The frost melts and the grass shoots up. Irises unfurl purple, and geryblums come in vibrant yellow. Leia walks to the senatorial offices in a vague drizzle, having forgotten her hat again, and gets there sopping wet and feeling like something is overflowing in her chest.

When she first stepped on this planet, the irises were uncurling, purple, white, frilled. They withered, browned, the seasons rolling on, but then the irises came in– came back.

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