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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Some Nat/Steve friend fluff for @littlestartopaz, in
that soulmate AU from earlier, reading it probably isn’t necessary but I’m always in search of approbation. This is
probably just a few months after the Avengers were formed, in my bastardized
movies-comics-wishful-thinking-verse where they all live in Avengers Tower.
Steve and Natasha are sparring, because Steve gets nervous about
sparring with fragile normal humans and Natasha is willing to bully him into
it. Tony isn’t generally one to spar,
given the suit, and Clint’s still recovering from the cracked rib he sustained
on their last mission, and Thor, who could take Steve’s full strength punch
without batting an eye, is still off-planet handling his psychopath
brother. (No one asks Bruce to spar,
because they all like being un-splatted.)
So Natasha drags Steve’s protesting ass into the ring and punches him in
the face until he fights back. Unless he
manages to actually grab her, it’s a pretty fair match.
It’s a system, okay, and if Natasha thinks it’s funny that he’s afraid
he’ll hurt her, that’s between her and the inside of her own skull.
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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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