Greetings, oh Best Of All Bars!  This is my first time hosting All Things Friday and it would be an epic understatement to say that I’m not known for my LJ savvy, so thanks in advance for bearing with me!  :-)

It is a well-known fact that our favourite assassins do a ridiculous amount of travelling for … emmm … work.  Fanfiction is rife with throwaway lines like “ever since Bishkek …”; “… during that casino job in Nice…” or “after that clusterfuck in Rome …”.  Not to mention the Mother of them all, “You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

With all that gallivanting about the globe, I’m pretty sure Clint and Natasha will have certain places they’ve come to shudder at the mere mention of; others they may actually like, or have had memorable sex in onderful memories of; and some that they have completely opposing views on.  And remember that time when American Airways wouldn't let Clint take his bow in the hand luggage?

So.  Here's today's challenge:  Let’s have your recs for the best “on location” fics (not just Budapest, although that too!); non-sequitur snippets from your own head canon, old or newly made up; postcards to Doreen from the cafeteria (she likes them, and Clint knows that she'll let him have extra dessert whenever he sends one:  "Hey Doreen. New Mexico is boring as hel …"); icons of one or both of our assassins in front of the Great Landmarks Of the World ...  Here’s your chance to let Clint and Natasha wreak havoc in a place you've always loathed.  Just what was it about Cologne that made Natasha swear she’d never go near the place again?  Why is Clint persona non grata in the Kyoto shrine?  Exactly why does Cleveland suck, and Chicago rock

As we say in currently rather snow-bound Canada, I’m sure you catch my drift.  To start you off, under cut below is an (abridged) blip from my own repertoire (story "In the Service", at http://archiveofourown.org/works/543070):  Georgia as seen through the eyes of Clint Barton; the place where he and Natasha will meet moments after this snippet ends.  It’s also my own personal love letter to a place that, for some reason I have yet to figure out, captured my heart.

Tbilisi/Georgia

In the three or four weeks he’s been there to set up the mission, Clint has taken a reluctant liking to Georgia.  It kind of reminds him of himself:  Pretty thoroughly fucked up -- thanks to a mixture of catastrophic circumstances, malevolent outside machinations and innate pigheadedness -- but trying to make a go of it against the odds.  

The country shows off its thousand-plus-year old cathedrals, fortresses and religious icons with as much pride as it does the tacky Stalin rugs you can find in the markets (Georgia's most infamous son just won't go away).  Add to that a people capable of heart-stopping warmth and hospitality on one hand and instant, brutal violence on the other, and you get a place that simply refuses to fit into any kind of template.  Thanks to simmering conflicts with two separatist republics – both essentially run by Russian organized crime – Georgia is full of guns and people without qualms about using them; add to that the Chechen terrorists and Al Qaeda fighters hiding in the Pankisi Gorge and what you get is a toxic stew, in which three or four diverse interest groups are liable to butt heads with each other in never-ending variations.  For a professional assassin, the place is a veritable smorgasbord, one-stop-shopping and trick-or-treat all rolled into one.  His target has been busy harvesting opportunities for weeks.

It’s a mild evening in May, and the archer is sitting in the shadows on a crumbling balcony on the second floor of an old abandoned house, rendered uninhabitable by the last earthquake.  Despite the ominous cracks in the walls and the dusty rubble piled up in front of the house, someone has installed a satellite dish on the balcony; the wire leads into a ground floor apartment across the street. The dish makes a perfect screen.  Clint would like to be higher up, but here in Tbilisi’s Old Town two or three stories is about as high as you get.  Many of the top floors are rickety and barely level; building higher would be lunacy in a place where the earth shakes as often and as violently as the political landscape

Clint sits on a pile of loose bricks from what used to be a wall, his flak jacket tossed beside him.  His bow sits on top of the jacket – wouldn’t want to get that dusty, now.  He is absently chewing on a hunk of khachapuri, oblivious to the bits of crumbly cheese filling that dots the black leather of his vest.  (The Hawk has decided that next to the alabaster-skinned women with their angelically arched black eyebrows, the food is definitely the best thing about Georgia.)

He knows he’s in for the long haul and doesn’t expect anything to happen until after dark, if the chatter Coulson has picked up on the internet and the wires is on the level; and so he sits in his nest and watches as dusk falls.  He represses his longing after the best grilled meat on the planet -- the smells wafting up from the restaurant down the street are torture -- and focuses on the sights and sounds below.  An enthusiastic soccer game has been ranging up and down the street for hours now, with stubby-kneed kids rotating in and out as they get hauled off for a dinner break.  There’s electricity tonight; the streetlights allow the game to continue past dark as the haunting melody of an ancient song falls from an open window down the block.

Clint wonders briefly what it’s like for the people who live here, carving moments like this out of a world too often shattered by men for whom peace means business lost

His target, according to information picked up by an informant on the Black Sea coast, has apparently been hired by one of the Abkhaz crime bosses to off a local contact.  Probably a deal gone sour, or the guy’s gotten too close to a rival – who knows.  The Black Widow is presently entertaining her mark in one of the restaurants down the street …

Have fun!