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(no subject)

who: Sam & others
what: late April/early May catch-all
when: see above
where: around the city
warnings: none yet, will edit if applicable

Getting superpowers is the last thing Sam expects, but early one morning, he's woken up not by a noise, but by a feeling in his mind. (And, okay, by the sound of wings beating against his window.) Outside is the largest damn bird he's ever seen, a white gyrfalcon easily the size of a hawk. It cocks its head, looking quizzically at him before hopping in through the open window.

:You.:

Yep, Sam definitely hears that in his head. And while he knows the other Sam has a psychic bird, he's never shown the first sign of any sort of a rapport with his feathered friends. "Me?"

:Everything else, quiet. I hear you, come find bondmate. Strange place, not-home, need mind-friend to hunt with.: Images come along with the words, images and feelings - the confusion of being in a city, a familiarity with wilds and deep forests, the desire for someone to share his mind with.

(Does everything talk around here? Sam wonders for a moment.)

"Do you have a name?"

:Name? Hatched outside the Vale, never had a name.:

He thinks about calling him Redwing, but that would just be confusing, not to mention inaccurate. "Right. Well, we'll have to think about that, then." Not that he has any idea what to name a talking bird. Or how to feed him - although he's probably capable of hunting for himself. Sam's seen enough wildlife here, not to mention past the Perimeter, that it's pretty safe to assume there's plenty of food for a bird. (Maybe he can ask Bucky to bring in some smaller game.)

Right now, Sam just sinks back in bed with a sigh. He really doesn't know how to cope with this kind of thing.

--

open prompts:

i
It's early in the morning, and instead of jogging, Sam finds himself at one of the city's open markets. The bird (still unnamed) can hunt for himself, but he likes to have meat around for him, just in case. And he knows damn well he can't just go to a butcher's and buy it; it's got to be fresh. Which is why he's got a couple of packages under one arm; one of them happens to be leaking animal blood through the white paper and onto the sidewalk as he heads back home.

Sam pauses at a stall with fresh baked goods - he's not passing up the opportunity for cooking ingredients, either - and leans in to look at some pastries. "What do you think?" He asks the opinion of a fellow shopper; maybe they've tried the food before, or maybe they've got a thing for pastries. It never hurts to get a second opinion.

ii
Sam's alone in the gym - or so he thinks - when he tugs off his tank top and lets a pair of wings slide out of his back. There's a metal frame at the top of the wings, made from a light alloy; the wings themselves appear to be made of light, a rich, transparent ruby red. Sam's not flying with them at the moment; instead, he continues his sparring routine. It's important to get a feel for them even on the ground, to know how having them extended affects his combat - same way he'd practiced with the jetpack. (Which he hasn't abandoned completely; the harness is in a corner, and the discarded tank top appears to be sweaty enough that it should be obvious that he's worked out with the extra weight on his back, too.)

He hears a noise and swivels on the balls of his feet mid-strike, and the wings fold into his back again. "Sorry, I thought I was alone in here."

[ooc: Character-specific closed starters to come in the comments! In case you're curious, Sam has acquired a Tayledras bondbird (basically a psychic bird) and bird telepathy, plus a nifty new pair of bionic wings.

I'm also totally open to firefly prompts, but would like to discuss them first! Drop me a pm or a plurk if you're interested.]

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"Well, bribery or not it's appreciated." Question is if anyone will convince him to stop long enough to stop and relax for a nice soak instead of a quick shower. He's a stubborn over-achieving disaster after all, the knots and tension Sam's feeling under his hands are testament to that.

"Some oil would really help with this, too," Sam mused aloud, his hands slipping up under Stephen's shirt, kneading his bare skin. "It'd make a mess of the bed, though." Stephen probably knew some sort of spell to clean up - or he could summon magic dancing broomsticks to do it - but that seemed like a waste of magic to Sam. (Plus he didn't actually have oil.)

Stephen knew all sorts of ways to magically get a growing number of messy things out of fabric, it was true. But at the moment his attention was more on Sam's hands working over skin, just letting out a low huffed noise of enjoyment in response.

"True, but that would mean you'd have to stop and go get said oil in the first place."

"What, you can't just summon some?" he joked. Touching him was a bad idea, because right now, it just made Sam want to rub up against him like a cat. While he was normally a tactile sort of person, he wasn't always this easily distracted. Probably.

"C'mon, let's get this shirt off," Sam urged him, tugging at the hem of the garment and pulling it up around Stephen's arms.

"I can, if asked nicely." Said more in a teasing tone than anything. At the moment he didn't notice anything off- Sam struck him as a more 'touchy-feely' sort in general, and this just served to match up to that initial observation.

"Or if I want to show off. Which is ninety percent of the time at least." Commented with a chuckle as he pushed himself up enough to help Sam get the shirt off of him.

"Only ninety? You must be slipping." Sam hummed appreciatively at Stephen's bare back - although it was scarred from the life he'd lived, that didn't bother him at all. He let his fingers trace some of the scar tissue before he went back to work, digging the heels of his hands into a particularly troublesome knot in his left shoulder.

"Maybe you oughta spend more time around Stark to get that percentage back up."

"Any higher and I'd be right back where I started, in the mindset that got me these. An egocentric asshole who basically flipped the most intense bird to any patient who was too poor to pay my hourly rate." A slight lift of his hands in illustration before settling back again with a soft sigh. The feel of hands pressing into that knot earned a low groan from him, able to feel the pain of the thing, but at the same time he could feel the good the pressure was doing.

"I mean, arguing with Stark is always a fun time, but I don't think that helps with the whole 'relaxing' idea you're trying to encourage here."

"Looks like karma made you her bitch, huh?" It's spoken in a mild tone, one that doesn't sound like he's judging Stephen for his past life. And he's not; he's more interested in finding out about the man than telling him what he did wrong. Stephen already knows the mistakes he made and the price he'd paid for them, he doesn't need Sam to reiterate it.

"Let's put it this way, I told cancer patients and several charities 'tough titties' in almost those exact words on a variety of occasions. I'm fairly certain karma's never gonna be done bending me over for that." He did... feel a bit better that Sam wasn't instantly judging or denouncing him, even if he really did deserve it for how much of a heinously horrible person he'd been. "And if we're being real I have a long, long life ahead of me for that pattern to continue."

"At least you're making amends now," Sam pointed out. "I don't do the whole religion thing anymore, but repenting your sins is a real important part of atonement, and I think that's true whether you're looking for some higher power to forgive you, or just trying to live with yourself and what you've done." And Stephen probably knew that already, but at least hearing someone else say it might reinforce it.

"You gonna pull some Gandalf kind of thing and get reborn as Stephen the White?" Sam kept working on his back as he talked, easing out another knot. "I don't know if you could pull the color scheme off. White doesn't seem like your color."

"You're not wrong there. It's... a process, and who even knows if I even will be okay in the end."

The joking question earned a low chuckle, brows lifting slightly as he peered over his shoulder at Sam.

"Oh lord no, I've already done the 'dying and reborn' thing. It's not nearly as dramatic and awe-inspiring as one might think- Death just might be more of an asshole than I am. Spent the whole chase through the cosmos mocking me, really rude as hell." Said in a light tone sure, but something about it also made it being a weird joke... unlikely.

"Sounds like Emily Dickinson needs to rewrite her poem. 'Because I could not stop for Death, he was kind of an asshole to me.' Probably not gonna be a huge bestseller, doesn't scan very well." Given the level of weirdness he'd experienced in every other conversation with Stephen, Sam was assuming he meant some actual personification of Death - most likely not one that spoke in all caps.

"I've half a mind to send a strongly worded letter of complaint about that poem. Death was a complete dick. I mean, not that I didn't deserve it being a spiteful little bastard who wasn't willing to sit still and just let him take me, but could you imagine if he's like that for everyone?" And not even a single solitary glimpse of a love of cats either.

"I'm also pretty certain that he didn't have to make killing me hurt as much as he did."

"I don't think everyone gets to hang out with Death," Sam ventured cautiously. "Although Loki did say that coming back to life is a lot more common in your universe than it is where I'm from." In that it didn't happen in his universe at all - not literally, anyway. Figuratively, but that was a different story. "And who wouldn't run from Death, anyway? Seems like a natural kinda reaction to me."

"Loki's not wrong. Death... doesn't always stick back home." Fake deaths, doubles, plain old just being brought back, the ways were endless.

"That little game of tag was rigged anyways, there was no way to beat him or escape. Instinct says to run, but I didn't 'win' until I stopped." And yes, he did lift hands slightly to do air quotes as he spoke. "If you can call being killed winning. My teacher showed up after, went very zen about the whole thing being a test I didn't even know was happening, that 'death will never again come from within, only from without.' Which given my track record isn't giving me a very good prognosis between enemies and pissed-off exes."

"He's not a half-bad source of information, long as you take everything he says with a grain of salt." So Sam had found, anyway.

"Oh, so it was a lesson about accepting fate or that death is a natural part of life or some such shit like that?" Kind of like the ending of Harry Potter, really. Shitty lesson to learn, if you asked Sam, which nobody did. "Man, you got a cryptic teacher and everything. Is he like Yoda?"

"I'm sure if you spun it that way, but really it was about making sure that something like old age wouldn't kill me." He shrugged lightly, before letting himself settle again under Sam's hands. "The Ancient One was... weird. And I really thought he was a bastard of the highest order for the longest time because of the cryptic woo-woo explanations for everything, but at the same time? He was really goddamn good at what he did."

"Well, that's...convenient." Maybe the fact that his best friend was almost a hundred years old made it easier to accept Stephen's apparent immortality without blinking an eyelash. "Gonna be a bitch eventually, if you live long enough, but you probably don't need me to tell you that." Pop culture was full of stories about the perils of immortality.

"So basically Dumbledore?" Yeah, okay, Sam couldn't really stop with the Harry Potter comparisons.

"Pretty much like Dumbledore, just minus the questionable manipulation of impressionable kids." Sam's seeming ability to roll with whatever oddities he was talking about definitely seemed to help him feel comfortable with the odd urge he had to share with the man.

"...But yeah, it's... already kind of one." He chuckled faintly, but there was little humor in the sound. "I'm already... fuck I don't even know how old. Going by basic timeline birth to current day I should be in my eighties. But there's been so many timeline tangles and other dimensions, that I could be older. Memories that have been taken. I know they're gone, but I don't know how much time it was. To say nothing of getting to outlive everyone I give a shit about, that's a whole new layer of fucked up."

"At least you look damn good for your age." Sam stopped rubbing his back for a moment to card fingers through his hair, humming lightly at the sensation of the strands against his fingers. "What brand of moisturizer do you use? Is it something like unicorn blood? Dragon tears?" He tried to keep his tone light and reassuring, to let Stephen know it was okay to keep talking.

"There's got to be an upside somewhere right?" He let out a low faint sort of chuckle, head tilting into that feel of hands in his hair with a soft hum of enjoyment. Unable to help the nip of unease that still rattled around his thoughts, and Sam, with his understanding and reassurances was not making keeping mum on it any easier.

"It's just... I wouldn't trade what I do for anything, don't get me wrong. But there's just things that... I don't know, there's no real answers on that I can't help but worry about." He shrugged slightly, mouth pulling to an uncertain frown. "Magic has already changed me as it is. How much more will I change in another fifty years? Another hundred or two? At what point will I not even be human anymore, how much do I lose before I stop being Stephen Strange and if that happens what the hell will I even be?"

"That's a combination of science and philosophy, I think." Sam chuckled lightly, bending down to press a kiss to the back of Stephen's neck. "Which isn't to say that your concerns aren't valid, 'cause they are. But we're all changing, all the time. We have to change, to adapt. And all those changes don't make us any less us. What you go through is on a larger scale, and sometimes the changes are more literal - so, yeah, maybe you won't be human anymore, from a biological perspective. The rest of it is from a mental perspective; maybe you don't have to be human to be Stephen Strange. I mean, what defines us isn't necessarily our physical form or our species, it's something that isn't quantifiable - unless you're a sorcerer, maybe.

"So you choose to be who you are. I know I'm running the Harry Potter metaphor into the ground here, but you gotta choose to be Voldemort instead of just Tom Riddle. Maybe not that extreme, but- hell, isn't there even a quote about our choices defining us or something? It sounds like some shit Dumbledore would say."

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