Title: The Miskatonic Project Rating: PG-13 for horror themes, death Summary: Abraham Erskine may have invented something new with the Serum – or maybe he re-created something very old. Something…Elder. Notes: I should be working on like three other fanfics but I had a TERRIBLE DREAM this afternoon and anyway this only took about half an hour to write.
***
Steve came out of the Vita-Ray machine…different.
Of course he looked different – taller, thickly muscled, skin gleaming. But it wasn’t the change in his appearance so much as the…sensation people felt around him. Howard claimed not to feel it, and Erskine died before he could weigh in. Peggy felt it, but not in the way others did. To her, he seemed otherworldly, but like an angel or a religious vision – comforting under a layer of unreality. She even liked the strange black pupils he’d developed, so big and dark you could hardly see the whites of his eyes at all.
Others, however….
She didn’t see him pull the Hydra agent out of the submarine after Erskine’s assassination. Only three people did – a cab driver, a little boy, and the boy’s mother. The cab driver wouldn’t say a word, and the boy’s mother stuttered and stammered so badly they finally gave up. The little boy just said, “Well, he got him,” and looked admiringly at Steve.
Steve wasn’t wet, but the submarine lay on the deck of the pier, and the man next to it was dead, a rictus of horror on his face.
Short, I said. Easy, I said. Definitely won’t take long, I said….
Aaaand here we go with part two…
***
On the first night they made camp, Peggy found herself surrounded by men – not in the sense that she was the only women, but in the sense that they actively, intently surrounded her. They weren’t impolite, exactly, but they had just come from a place of desperation and fear, and were happy to be alive, and all that…entailed. Their presence, their willingness to bring her tins of food or start a fire for her, the warring exhaustion and relief and want, pressed in on her insistently.
And then suddenly it was like the sun rose and the air cleared – and she saw why.
“Gentlemen,” Steve Rogers said, appearing from the darkness, lit by the fire and with Sergeant Barnes at one elbow, Sergeant Dugan at the other. The men all took a sort of spiritual step back. “How about you tired soldiers find places to bed down for the night.”
They cleared out fast. Steve looked at her, a question in his bright face, and she nodded. He settled in, others joining him – Dugan, Jones, Morita, Dernier and Falsworth, names she’d learn later. Steve sat on a fallen log one of the men had dragged over earlier; James Barnes sat at his feet. These men were calmer, and she sensed that they, like her, saw angels rather than devils when they looked at Steve and Barnes. They were here with her, not because of her.
“I was capable of looking after myself,” Peggy felt obliged to point out.
“Sure, but why should you have to?” Barnes said. Steve’s eyes still looked, at least in some lights, mostly normal. Barnes, you couldn’t see the whites at all.
No but the history behind this picture is really interesting
The reason that everyone always looked miserable in old photos wasn’t that they took too long to take. Once photography became widespread it took only seconds to take a picture.
It was because getting your photo taken was treated the same as getting your portrait painted. A very serious occasion meant so thst your descendants would know that ypu existed and what you looked like.
But one time some British dudes went to china to go on an anthropological expedition, and they met some rural Chinese farmers and decided to take their pictures. Now, these people weren’t exposed to the weird culture of the time around getting your photo taken, so this guy just flashed a big grin during the photo because he was told to strike a pose and that’s the pose he wanted to strike.
I think painted portraits and old photos give us the idea that in general people were just really unhappy because those are the visuals we have. This is so refreshing.
Hey, look; “Man Laughing Alone With Rice” is back on my dash.
always reblog Happy Rice Guy. once upon a time, he really enjoyed his lunch, and that’s beautiful.
if you don’t know about unpaywall and are researching something or studing or just want to have access to knowledge but don’t go to uni or whatever, it might be pretty helpful. it’s a free, legal browser extension widget thing that unlocks open access academia. it can unlock something like 17 million articles so it’s pretty useful if you want to keep up with academia but don’t have access to institutional repositories or subscription databases.
(sci-hub has more access afaik but yknow. illegally. and unpaywall is still pretty great, especially at pushing subscription databases to make more stuff open access by being a legit example of what pirate repositories have been pushing for so long)
las vegas is a terrible and satanic place, whose embracement of leisure, and rejection of an obvious & fetishistic love of work offends my midwestern sensibility, and whose mountains make me go ??? every time I look out the window
but also
I have been drunk only 50% on my own dime and and it’s kind of amazing to watch the unreality of the city clash against the hyper-reality of the desert so there’s that I guess
just moving along like everyone else 