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.

For @littlestartopaz : Steve catches Wanda sulking and invites her to Disney Night with Nat and Clint.  Wanda teases him, and Vision ends up there too.  Better yet, not MCU so we can also have her brother.  Or just ignore that part of the MCU.

GOOD. Also, Quicksilver is alive and healthy after a while in a healing coma, as speedsters do.  I read a wild AU once where he was shot and died, and the comments were full of complaints about how it didn’t make sense.  I am RIGHT THIS MOMENT deciding that this fic and this and this and possibly some others with small tweaks exist in the same universe as this one (I do not have a timeline to speak of) and also I’m disregarding that same wild AU’s belief that Clint lives?  On a farm?  Rather than a shitty apartment building in NYC and the Tower/Mansion?  And that Nat and Clint are not soulmates on a level that makes romance look downright petty, kay-thanks-bye.  AND also I’m so glad we all remember how Wanda and Pietro were kids who were pressganged and conned into service of HYDRA rather than being voluntary recruits.

It wasn’t like Wanda had expected her relationship with Pietro to be all roses after he came out of his coma, but her worry had also done a spectacular job of blurring out some of his less desirable qualities as a brother.  Like, just for example, his overwhelming, pointless, overprotective bullshit.  She muttered a bitter Sokovian curse under her breath and stripped off her jacket, dropping it on the bed without a care for the soot that would certainly stain her sheets.  The rest of her uniform was given the same careless treatment, abandoned on the floor as she yanked on a pair of leggings and a soft shirt two sizes too big.

She wasn’t even sure who she was more frustrated with—Pietro, for yanking her out of the way of a spider ‘bot that she could have taken care of, or herself, for losing focus for long enough to let him take the hit for her.  Someday, he was going to suddenly realize that his fragile twin sister had gone and turned into an adult while he was busy fending off the world.  She hoped it was sooner rather than later, or she might have to beat it into him.  Assuming he even lived that long, which was beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

“Stupid nervous bastard,” she muttered in English, and flopped down on her bed, flat on her back with her fingers laced over her face.  “Martyr.”

“Hazard of the profession,” Steve’s voice said, amused.  Wanda turned her head, untangling her fingers to look toward the door, where Steve was leaning against her doorjamb.  He was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, standard fare for any of them after showering upon returning from a mission.  His hair was a rumpled mess and he had a nasty purple and blue bruise marbling over one cheek, where Bruce had diagnosed a cracked zygomatic.  In combination with the blood that had been leaking from a split in his lip, Natasha had cheerfully commented that he was looking very patriotic indeed.

“Put ice on your face,” she said, frowning at him across the landscape of her comforter.  Steve grinned at her, and winced, raising the cold pack in his hand back to his cheek.  

“Like I said,” Steve said.  His voice was muffled, but his eyes were bright and wild with adrenaline, like blue fire.  “We’re all fucking martyrs, or so I’m told.  Your brother just wants to keep you safe.”

“Well, I just spent months at his bedside because he took eight bullets to the chest and severed his spine,” Wanda said, sitting up sharply.  “So he can get over it.”

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For @littlestartopaz: 34 - Vision/Wanda

When you’re around I don’t know how to hide my feelings.  I count in binary, in my head.  zero one one zero one one and you count clouds. (while you count clouds)

So it was going to be a stand-alone Vision/Wanda thing but then I started it after eight hours of researching WWI and???  Instead it’s an immediate prequel to the first Vision/Wanda fic I ever wrote, it’s mostly Natasha being smug, and Wanda doesn’t even appear, I don’t know what happened.

Natasha prided herself on being difficult to sneak up on.  It had served her well for their brief stint in Wakanda, but now they were in America again, scattered up the East Coast, and she was sitting on the roof of one of her less secret safehouses, watching the sun go down.  And any dense half-blind idiot could see a six-foot bright red robot in a cape descending onto a roof in Middle of Nowhere, Appalachia.  

The only reason she didn’t immediately yank out the gun she’d tucked away under the corner of her blanket was because Stark, Banner, and Rhodes were all about as subtle as…well, a six-foot bright red robot in a cape.  She was confident that she’d notice them coming, and if she didn’t they deserved to cuff her.

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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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labelleizzy:

hobbitkaiju:

shinelikethunder:

So the thing about that moment near the beginning of Cap 2 where Natasha pulls up in a fucking sweet Corvette–

–well, first of all, I love that Natasha likes driving ridiculous dick cars, because she is clearly having fun with it.

But anyway, I love that the running scene ends with Steve climbing into a totally overkill Corvette driven by a girl who is five foot three inches of pure don’t-underestimate-me badass, because that is Steve. That’s what Steve is. That’s why Steve repeatedly lapping Sam and lampshading it is hilarious instead of mean.

Steve Rogers is a scrappy, sickly little runt behind the wheel of the world’s most souped-up muscle car, and he’s having fun with it, but he’s always uncomfortably aware of the distinction between people complimenting him and people admiring his sweet ride.

I LOVE THE COMPARISON BETWEEN STEVE’S NEW BODY AND NAT’S CAR, THIS IS EVERYTHING I NEVER KNEW I WANTED IN CA:TWS ANALYSIS

Metatacular.

(via ifeelbetterer)

kyrianne:

greaserpaint:

thedetectiveunderthestairs:

roman-rory-fallen-angel:

mishakaleins:

When they make a black widow movie, the trailer needs to be all mysterious and the song playing needs to be Scarlett Johansson singing a lullaby cover of the itsy bitsy spider

I need this in my life

What if it was sung in Russian too??

why not a real Russian lullaby?

тили тили бом (Tili Tili Bom)

WHY IS TILI TILI BOM SO CREEPY

CHILDREN ARE MEANT TO FALL ASLEEP AFTER THIS???

Okay, but let me suggest to you a thing:

A trailer set to Tili Tili Bom, sung by Scarlett Johansson, and it opens with a little girl with red hair standing in front of a burning house (how Natasha’s parents died) with her hand in an older man’s.  The trailer is shots from the Red Room–not quite normal; for example, the little girl comfortably asleep in a bed and handcuffed to the frame, the little girl on a jungle gym and doing impossible moves, the little girl with other girls all dressed alike and emotionless, the little girl walking down a hallway past a man with a metal arm and blank blue eyes–interspersed with shots of the little girl in ballet school (Natasha’s fake memories).  As the trailer progresses, the shots of the ballet school become dimmer and the Red Room becomes brighter, until the last scene of the little girl doing ballet (performing a brise, meaning ‘broken’) fades completely to black and it cuts to her standing in a brightly lit training room, looking down at something and holding a bloody knife.  The camera pans down to show the hand of another little girl–the last contestant for the Black Widow, save Natalia Romanova standing over her.

Roll title card.

(Source: absolurltly, via thepainofthesass)