Anonymous asked: Sooooo, for the sake of pain, can I have a Nat/Clint fic for the OTP song thing for "Castle of Glass" by Linkin Park
*cackling* All right, let’s play. Trigger warning for…Red Room shit. There’s more of this story, of course, after the events of the last scene, but I felt like this was a good place to end it.
Bring me home in a blinding dream,
Through the secrets that I have seen
Wash the sorrow from off my skin
And show me how to be whole again
‘Cause I’m only a crack in this castle of glass
Hardly anything there for you to see
She is very small when she learns what they mean, the words inscribed over the curve of her hipbone. Not the words themselves—they’re not Russian, not even the right alphabet, her parents say they’re French and she wonders what it means. But they are her soulmate, her parents say. Someday, somewhere, someone will say them to her, and that will be the person the universe has created just for her.
She smiled and traces her fingers over the words, over and over, and wonders who it will be.
And then her life catches fire and burns to ash, and she is taken away by a tall man with a solemn face, and given a new name.
Natalia grows up, and learns, and fights, and bleeds.
She is four when she comes to the Red Room, five when all twenty-eight girls are arrived and training begins in earnest. She can lie and dance and speak five languages with any accent and flay a man alive by the time she is twelve. She is the favored student of all their trainers and even of the Soldier, whose eyes are blank and whose skin is clean of black ink—perhaps his soulmate was on his arm, the one that was lost.
It’s rare that she and her twenty-seven sister-competitors are allowed to even think of the lines of black ink marking their skin, and she doesn’t know what the Room is doing to them, but as they get older, there is something horrible about the words. Asking another girl about their words earns a swift and punishing burst of violence, and God help anyone fool enough to read them out. Asya, sweet and round-faced, reads out Natalia’s words when they are ten, and spends two weeks in the medical wing, recovering from the knife Natalia drove into her chest just below her collarbone.
Natalia does not remember attacking Asya. She only remembers hearing the words, and seeing red and black, and the slick heat of blood on her hands. Thinking about the words makes her feel sick, and she wishes that she could cut them out of her body, but Vasilisa tried that and Natalia can learn by observation.
(This is something else that Natalia does not remember, because the Red Room knows how to tamper with memory. About twice a year, unpredictably, each of the twenty-eight girls are taken to a room and given a knife. Inside the room is a stranger. The stranger has been told to say only one thing, one string of words. At first the stranger is given a knife, too, and the girls fight for their lives. Later, the stranger simply says their piece, crying and afraid, and is given the mercy of a swift death by the girl with the knife.)
She is sixteen when the command comes down like a guillotine.
Twenty-eight Black Widows is too many. They have to earn their place in service to their great country, prove their worth. Those who succeed will finally be allowed to put their training to work.
Natalia kills eight of her sisters. Not all of them are intentional, but most are. The blood is still dripping from her fingers when she is taken away by her handlers and pressed onto a stretcher, taken away to a room that hurts. The words are finally taken away, sanded from her skin, and she runs her fingertips over the tender new flesh, over and over.
She counts her life not in years, now, but in missions and in this. Every six months, she is pressed down onto the stretcher and taken away to have the words stripped from her skin again. Yelena tries to resist, once, complains that the pain and tender flesh make her inefficient for the time immediately after. Natalia never does find out what happens—Yelena won’t speak about it, about her three days locked in the combat ring—but none of them make the same mistake.
Natalia has been on one hundred and ninety-six missions, and has had the words at the curve of her hip stripped away twenty times. She knows that this means that she is twenty-six, when she is handed the name of a powerful French politician and a kill order.
The mission should be easy. It isn’t.
There is someone else in this city. She hasn’t seen her competition in her three weeks of tailing her target, but she knows they’re close. Their gaze makes her skin itch. She doesn’t know how she’s been tagged—she’s better than that—but she knows that her competition is after the target because of her, specifically.
Natalia doesn’t like not knowing things. It makes her reckless. So when her target is tied to a chair and unconscious, she points a gun at his head and holds another at her side, stares out the window in challenge, and waits.
She’s braced for a lot of things, including an explosion. The arrow flying through the window still manages to come as something of a shock, though. It’s that moment of surprise, bafflement at the strange weapon, that almost costs her life. She dives into a roll and the head of the arrow draws a thin line over her cheek rather than plunging into her eye.
Another arrow hits the wall above the window outside, trailing a heavy cord, and a stocky man dressed in tactical gear slides across from the building across the street. He’s already talking when he swings through the window, his French technically good, but layered with an American accent.
“Put down the gun, or the next arrow goes right through your throat,” he threatens, raising his bow, and Natalia’s vision washes with red and black.
She comes back to herself screaming her throat raw, another arrow through her shoulder and pinning her to the wall behind her, her hands bleeding with all her weapons scattered on the ground. The man in front of her wears the distinct marks of having had someone try for his throat with her bare hands. There’s blood in her mouth when she manages to stop screaming.
“What the fuck was that?” the man half-shouts at her, and she jerks against the arrow. “I thought the Black Widow was the best fighter in the world!” He seems like he’s almost offended by her failure to kill him. Natalia bares her teeth at him, spitting blood at his feet, and this time the sound that fights out of her throat is a desperate whine, like a child. “Hey,” he says, and this time his voice is serious. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“I have to kill you,” Natalia says, and the words bring the compulsion roaring back, her vision edging black and red. “I—I have to, I have to, let me go!” She yanks at the arrow with her blood-slicked hands, and it doesn’t budge. The man’s eyes flare wide and she waits for him to nock another arrow and put it through her throat. “Kill me,” she says, a whisper.
He stares at her like he’s seeing a ghost, and slowly, his hand rises. Not to an arrow, or a gun, or even a knife, but to touch his ear, where she sees a comm.
“This is Hawkeye,” he says, and winces, the unmistakable expression of a subordinate being chewed out by a superior. “Yes, sir, I have her. Um. No, sir, I won’t take the shot.” He meets Natalia’s eyes and says, slow and careful, “I’m making a different call. We’re bringing the Black Widow in alive.”
