Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: Natasha Romanoff B and D

I’m gonna do them all, I’m sorry, I am.  For this ask meme.

A: what I think realistically

Natasha didn’t just wake up one day clean and free to wander into the arms of SHIELD.  She doesn’t have the scar from it anymore–it was a long time ago, and a woman in her line of work has to get some laser treatments–but Clint shot her through the shoulder when he caught up with her, and it was her response that saved her life.

He couldn’t kill someone who stared him in the eye and said, plain as day, “Go ahead and do it then.  Save all those people from me.”  Pause.  Bitter laugh.  “Save me from me.”

Natasha beat him to a bloody pulp the first time they sparred, for disobeying.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Natasha, most of the Avengers believe at first, is effortlessly classy, humorless, and overall terrifying.

They are wildly unprepared for Natasha’s prankster streak–through a combination of dizzying logic and sweet-talking, she gets JARVIS on her side and convinces him to kill all the systems in the Avengers Tower.  While Tony is hammering away at his keyboard, trying to find the problem, JARVIS asks, totally deadpan, “Would you like to play a game?”  Tony shrieks.  Natasha gets it all on camera.

They are likewise unprepared for the first time Natasha and Clint actually stay there for an extended period of time, which includes Natasha, dressed in a shirt she stole from Clint and comfy leggings, sitting crosslegged on the floor and eating cereal at 2 AM while watching old Burn Notice reruns and critiquing the spy shenanigans out loud, regardless of who’s in the room.

It doesn’t come as a shock to them when Natasha goes through an entire week of addressing Clint by increasingly elaborately incorrect codenames.  At first it’s “Duck-guy” or “Crow-man” or “Goose-face,” but by day six she’s calling for “Ruby Throated Hummingbird” over the comms.  He walks into the debrief and sits down next to her and goes “Hey, Tarantula” and genuinely fears for his life for the next forty-eight hours.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

The Red Room recruiting nine or ten year olds?  Nah.  Natasha–Natalia–neither of those then, but Natasha-Natalia-Anja-Laurel-Cara-Kristen-Hana-Jessamine and a hundred other bloodstained girls all the same–was four years old when her family’s home burned to the ground.  She killed for the first time at five.  She was pitted against another child, then, and a knife was put in the room, and whoever lived, left.  She went on a mission for the first time at fourteen.  Failed.  Accidentally killed the target before extracting information.  Punished.  Another mission a year later.  Perfection.  

First wiped at sixteen.

Natasha believes she was wiped perhaps twelve times–not after every mission, like the teacher she barely remembers (blue eyes and hard jaw and numbness–Yakov? she doesn’t know), but often enough to keep her controlled.  Her last mission, before she was brought into SHIELD, was supposed to be a routine recon to a hospital in Sao Paolo which was thought to be funneling drugs.  A children’s hospital.  Competition for a major contributor to the Red Room.

It was far worse.  Natasha-Natalia-Mila couldn’t leave those children–some of them barely alive anymore, some of them twisted by experiments into…desperate things–to their fate.  She knew about desperate things.  She made sure they all died cleanly before she burned the building to the ground.

D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Natasha is in love with Clint Barton, her hypercompetent loser of a partner who lives in Bed-Stuy with a dog and his…trainee?  Sidekick?  Mini-me?  Don’t bring no AOU nonsense into my house.

In all seriousness, comic ‘canon’ is such a moving target that you can justify almost anything, and I basically abandon MCU canon whenever it suits me.  That being said, heADCANON THAT NATASHA BELIEVES SHE’S A MONSTER BECAUSE SHE FUCKING MURDERED A LOT OF PEOPLE AND NOT BECAUSE SHE’S INFERTILE WHAT THE F U C K.

Nope, nope, I swear to Christ, I’m going to come up with something that’s not about AOU, I am, I promise, oh my god, um.

Natasha and Vision are good buddies because Natasha had to fumble her way through how to have Genuine Human Emotions a little bit at first (not how to have them, just how to…deal?) and is happy to explain to Vision when he’s confused.

amusewithaview asked: LINK ME PLEASE

I’m publishing this publicly because I feel like everyone deserves to know that there is a Mr. & Mrs. Smith AU of Clint and Natasha and IT IS GLORIOUS.

Anyway everyone should read it and also???  Why is there not a Mr & Mrs (or Mr & Mr/Mrs & Mrs/etc as applicable) Smith AU of every ship????  I’m disappointed in you, fandom.

Clint’s perspective of meeting Natasha in that one soulmate AU, for @littlestartopaz.

Clint’s soulmark curves under the line of his collarbone, in tiny, precise handwriting.  And it’s…interesting.  It’s in Russian, he learns that real quick as a kid, and when he’s seven, still living at home with his parents and his brother, he finds out that one of his teachers speaks the language.  He rushes up to her the very next day and explains, hasty and stammered, and she smiles kindly, offering to translate it for him.

He pulls down the collar of his shirt—he sees her eyes drag on the hand-shaped bruise on his wrist, but she doesn’t say anything—and she leans down to read his words.

“Let’s see,” she says, and reads out the Russian words.  Clint tries to memorize the sound of it, so that he’ll know his soulmate when they meet him.  “Oh,” the teacher says quietly, and smooths his shirt back over his mark.  “Listen, baby, I don’t think it’s anything you need to worry about just yet, okay?”

“What does it say?”

She gives him a smile, sort of grim and sad and confused, and says, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m not going to tell you. You don’t need that on your conscience today.”

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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.  

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