![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
alphaflyer.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
be_compromised2012-12-28 07:59 am
ALL THINGS FRIDAY: Postcards From The Edge (Or: Clint and Natasha Trot the Globe)
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!
no subject
San Diego is Clint's home after he
was kicked out medically dischargedleft the army, divorced his first wife, joined SHIELD - nearly twenty years in one place, and it's home.São Paulo is where Barton caught up with Romanova, just after she assassinated two higher-ups in two seperate cartels, and accidentally started an underworld battle that lasted for days. It's where Romanova stopped to defend a child, and then other civilians, and it's where Barton decided that she might be someone who could change. He was ultimately wrong about that, but that's where he made his call.
Tokyo is a fic that
Budapest was dinosaurs. There is a fic about it. It's not finished yet as it's giving me issues and every time I try and write it I want to scream, but that was Budapest - dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had feathers. And teeth. And claws. HYDRA's fault.
There is a town in Bavaria they don't talk about. Not a mission, but family - even if they are Red Room family, especially if they are Red Room - is complicated and painful.
I think I'm a bit contrary in that Clint and Natasha in my headcanon don't often work together (different skillsets that don't, actually, blend together well unless it's a quick mission), so a lot of places that they share are also downtime; Chicago, San Diego, Las Vegas where they got married, Överkallix in Swedish Lapland which is the closet town to Nat's cabin in the forest that has a supermarket (her cabin is her true home, found post-RR and years before SHIELD). Helsinki is where their mission got completely fucked up and they ended up having to tread water in the gulf (at least it was summer).
But I need to write/develop more headcanon for them and missions with Strike Team Delta, or even just 'Clint, I need you to back me up when I go to Ciudad del Este to ask a former Red Roomer for some intel', 'Nat, you speak Romanian, right?'
(An AU/Alternate Backstory version of Natasha that I'm sloooowly developing - child of a Russian criminal family (although that sounds grander than they are), ex-mafia and agnostic Jew - has a particular fondness for Brooklyn and Brighton Beach as home. Her parents still live there. She and Steve can bond over being working-class kids from Brooklyn, when/if I ever write things about it. The fic I'm mostly writing in that 'verse has six different cities as settings as it's a 'Five Times' fic, but I still need to work on it.
Story of my writing life)And re: your ficlet, I do enjoy a sharp Clint who is well aware of the political landscape of the places he's sent to. Yay professional secret agent actually doing his homework.
no subject
no subject
(And also, your comment is doubly hilarious as I own a Rhodesian Ridgeback)
no subject
I would love to read about Tokyo, I can totally see Clint being a geek about the windcurrents ;)
Also, your AU/Alternate Backstory sounds really intriguing!
no subject
(Wish fulfillment, man. There's a reason he lives in easy walking distance from Balboa. *laughing*)
no subject
no subject
Tokyo is waiting for me to find my action brain <.< but it's just...it's how we view Clint and Nat and their relationship, so I should really get on that. It entertains me (oh, Natasha. Poor, angry, lost, 'I got fired! so I'm going to hack into SHIELD' Natasha *facepalms at her*). And Clint is totally a geek - sniper! He spends a lot of his career thinking about things like wind-currents! It's a challenge and pleases his obsessive soul (because really, that's what geekdom is)
*beams!* Exceeeeellent. I'm developing it because I read some comics!snob being all "MCU!Natasha has to share comics!backstory, she cannot possibly have living parents or siblings, and being a criminal is too mundane" (because, you know, Natasha's words to Loki could never imply that she was a mercenary before Clint spared her, and organized crime never does anything interesting...) so I went "...Challenge accepted!" in my head.
So, aside from her full Russian name and comics!birthplace, I'm trying to work out a backstory using only what she says in canon as things I have to include. The full name is mostly because 'Alian' is (as far as I can tell from google) a highly obscure Hebrew name, so I've always quietly suspected he was Jewish, and so in this 'verse I'm running with it. Everything else, I'm just seeing what else fits and having lots of fun with with it. But all the research required, so it's a side-project.
no subject
EVERYONE WRITE A FIC IN THEIR HOMETOWN.
no subject
no subject
Mine would be either rural Wisconsin or metropolitan Arizona. I will have to think about this!
no subject
Speaking of bars, there are some awesome ones in Düsseldorf, including a brew pub that is THE best, with waiters trained to be rude. Clint would love it...
no subject
no subject
eta: That bar sounds awesome. And to clarify above -- yes, Phoenix is the sixth largest city in the country, and has a very strong art presence and diverse cultural dynamics. It just takes up a lot more space than most cities, so people like to pretend it isn't really one. (I know you were just kidding, but it is a stresspoint for me -- people like to imply that Arizonans are backwater and uneducated, and don't really deserve to be seen as having anything of worth to say or contribute. And it... bothers me.)
no subject
Oh, and I feel like you do, about Canadian culture. People in the US scrunch up their noses and say "huh?" -- notwithstanding that a disproportionate number of artists in the US are actually Canadian (including a whole lot of the top comedians). Oh well.
The pub is called "De Uerige" (which means "the grumpy one" in the local dialect, hence the rude waiters. ;-) I
no subject
(So: Clint to Natasha, or Natasha to Clint...? Or Coulson to both of them?)
Yeah, people are weird about Canada! I feel like especially amongst actors (and comedians definitely, goodness) a huge percentage are imported from there. My sister-to-be is from a town that's Ontario-adjacent (I... don't know which one /awesome future in-law) and she gets asked if she knows people's cousins in Quebec. No, no she doesn't. XD
re: Phoenix; I gotta say, if you visit, visit in earlier spring or later fall! Most non-natives find our summers pretty rough. (But our winters are very... they aren't cold, they're just all dark and wintery. Which I guess happens everywhere.)
no subject
no subject
(That is the best .gif ever, seriously.)
no subject
(And I totally agree, best .gif ever, and I can't even remember where I picked it up ;))
no subject
no subject
no subject
Ha, I guess this is because I'm Sydney born and raised, but I never found the fruit bats scary. I think they're rather cute, actually. I do like seeing the reactions of my European friends and family when they visit and see them for the first time though, it's hilarious.
no subject
no subject
I keep making squeaky noises that people like the idea :3
no subject
no subject