Title: Rascals, Scoundrels, Villains, and Knaves, Part IIb
Author: frea_o
A Gift For: icecream_junkie
Rating/Warning/Pairings: Please see the first post for these.
Summary/Prompt Used: Tortuga, 1745. It’s been three years since they last sailed together, but when an old enemy resurfaces and takes one of their own, it’s up to the crew of the Avenging Angel to assemble and take to the high seas once more. Or: the one where everybody is a pirate except the two canonical characters with eyepatches. Drink up me ’earties, yo-ho.
Part: I | IIa | IIb | III | IV | V



6. The Black Widow

The clergyman was drunk.

Clint wondered if any of the officers noticed. Surely they must have. The man was slurring the ends of his words, trailing off in sentences as though he had no idea how he had arrived at the verbal conclusion he had come to. It made Clint distinctly uncomfortable. The clergyman was supposed to be a Man of God.

“God has no place in this business,” Loki said from where he was leaning indolently against the mastpole next to Clint. “He turned a blind eye on this ship long ago, Barton.”

Because they were once more in his memory and none of the others could hear him, Clint turned to look at his captor. There was something boiling under the surface in his chest, something dark and dangerous. Part of him understood what that feeling meant, but that part wasn’t inclined to share with the rest of him. So he looked at the Loki next to him, and then at the Loki across the deck, standing close to the bride and the groom with the rest of the civilians. They wore the same outfit, though the Loki-to-his-left’s was tattered and bloodied from the fight Clint knew was about to erupt. The Loki of Clint’s memory looked on, likely bored out of his skull but showing a politely interested face for the sake of the wedding ceremony going on in front of him.

Clint shrugged at the current Loki. “Seems to me I was never much good at being a religious man. It matters little one way or the other.”

“Do you find it ironic?” Loki’s eyes rested on the pair up by the bowsprit, who were facing each other with their hands clasped. The clergyman stood behind them, facing the crowd.

“Find what ironic?”

“Such a godless woman, married by your so-called Man of God.”

Natalia Petrovna, as she had been then, looked so shining and happy in that moment as she gazed up at her groom. It was a look Clint had seen only twice on her face after that night.

The boiling feeling in his chest intensified so much that for a moment, he felt the rage like a taste in the back of his throat.

“Calm yourself, archer,” Loki said, and the feeling ebbed away.

“Wouldn’t call her godless,” Clint said at length. “She has more reason than most to fear the wrath of an angry God.”

“Do you think so? Hm.” Loki folded his arms over his chest. In these memories, the ones he picked apart like a man sorting through a pile of brass in search for an elusive gold piece, he never carried his scepter. Nor did he shimmer in sunlight or moonlight, like he did in his shade form.

“We’ve all of us debts, Count,” Clint said. “Hers just happen to be heavier.”

He fell quiet. It gave him an opportunity to get a look at all of those gathered on the deck for the wedding of one James “Bucky” Barnes, valet to none other than Sir Anthony Stark, and Natasha Romanova, lady’s maid. The civilians were all wearing what finery they had. Duke Thor, resplendent in a silver topcoat with a red cape fluttering in the breeze from his shoulder, Loki in the same green topcoat he wore now, the gold waistcoat perfectly whole. Dr. Erik Selvig, whom Clint had never seen without an oblong black case under his arm, wore a suit that would not be amiss at the Royal Academy of Science. Lady Pepper Potts wore the finest fashions of 1740, or Clint assumed she did. The hoop in her skirt certainly seemed wide enough. Stark, next to her, still had two working arms and both of his legs. His topcoat, a darker red than Thor’s cape, was pristine, the top hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head despite the wind. Next to him, Dr. Bruce Banner looked shabby in his black topcoat and trousers. Steve in his Naval uniform stood next to the groom. Miss Margaret Carter, Steve’s beloved, stood up for Natasha.

Part of Clint acknowledged that it was bizarre to see them in the same place, so well put together and so happy.

Finally, he dared to look at the bride for more than a glimpse from under his eyelashes. She wore a blue dress, more modestly cut than Pepper’s, and perhaps it was the moonlight that peeked through the clouds, but she looked radiant. Clint hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from her at the time. He had a good view of the procession because he’d sneaked up the mast pole and onto one of the crossbeams. Some of the crew were able to attend, but for the most part, they’d all been shuffled off below.

Clint was supposed to be in the crow’s nest. He’d scrambled up there once, for the watch captain had been doing his rounds, but it was much more interesting to watch the wedding take place on the deck than it was to watch the sea.

James Barnes was a lucky man, he’d thought at the time.

He’d been wrong.

The clergyman slurred something Clint couldn’t decipher and turned to Barnes, who turned to Steve to collect the ring that Natasha pretended the others did not know she wore around her neck even now. In the weddings Clint had attended for fellow sailors, the brides usually cried, but Natasha was dry-eyed and smiling as Barnes slid the ring onto her finger.

“It’s all very touching, isn’t it?” Loki asked. “This memory bores me, Barton.”

“It’s about to change,” Clint said. That wasn’t enough for the Norwegian standing next to him, though. Loki snapped his fingers and Clint felt a tug in the core of his body, like he had become a live Punch with no Judy around, and then he was standing on the crow’s nest.

There was a ship in the water next to the Ferrous, its decks black with tar and the Jolly Roger flying freely from its mast. Clint hadn’t seen it coming. To this day, he didn’t know if he would have spotted it had he been at his post, but the way the fog rolled so thick around the Ferrous, it would have surely been improbable.

Not impossible. Impossible was a word that meant nothing to him anymore.

“Ah, yes, here is where it gets interesting,” Loki said.

“Is there a particular reason you wanted to see this memory?” Clint asked. He couldn’t hear what was being said on the deck, not with the wind snatching the words from the lips of Captain Phillips. But he could see tension. The new bridegroom had the new bride’s hand in his. The marines stood between the civilians and those on the other ship, their guns lowered but ready.

Lady Pepper Potts looked alarmed, Clint noticed. Next to her, Miss Margaret Carter had a flintlock pistol—she must have gotten that from Steve, Clint realized now—raised and leveled at the other ship. Natasha was still under her guise as the lady’s maid, so she was clinging to Barnes’s arm, eyes wide and face frightened. It was such an absurd contrast to how Clint was used to seeing her—fierce, unflappable, unruffled—that he nearly did a double-take. Natasha was not one to show fear.

She had once, though, Clint remembered. Her eyes had been gigantic, glittering with the candlelight as she looked at him frankly, the mask that made her the Black Widow completely gone.

“Ho, what’s this?” Loki’s voice cut through his subconscious. In a panicked moment of clarity, Clint tried to push the memory away, but Loki was there in his mind, poking about. With deft fingers, the Norwegian count plucked the memory from Clint and suddenly, instead of standing atop the crow’s nest on the HMS Ferrous, Clint sat in the back of Fury’s pub in Tortuga. He’d traded his sailor threads for the lightweight cotton fabric, again sleeveless, that he wore in the service of Fury. The bow was no longer hidden beneath his shirt but propped up along the wall by his shoulder. The quiver rested against his boot.

There was a bottle of rum on the table. It was for him: Natasha didn’t drink.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Loki said, and Clint looked over to see him seated at their table, looking big and ugly with his elbows nudging against them and his presence all wrong. “This is a much, much cozier little interlude. Do continue.”

“Va au diable,” Clint said.

Loki reared back slightly, clearly startled. After a second where Clint’s words hung on the air, echoing strangely as though they were above a canyon and not in a pub, Loki leaned in, a smile twisting at the corners of his lips. “Ah, it seems the archer has found the sharp points to his arrows at long last.”

“Are you not hungry?” Natasha asked Clint. She gave no sign that Loki was there at all. For her, Clint knew, he wasn’t, but Clint could feel him, as intrusive as a blade to the side.

This was not a memory that he could have.

Still, the words came tumbling from his lips. “I do hate eating alone, Red.”

“Don’t you start.”

“You know, if you used that silver tongue of yours, I’ve no doubt Volstagg would prepare a much finer feast than this gruel.” Clint picked up the tin bowl of barley and oats. “It doesn’t always have to be a chore.”

“Fill your face, Barton, so that your mouth will be too full for me to hear your prattle.” Natasha rolled her eyes at him, but Clint knew the look: she was amused rather than annoyed. Always one to oblige, Clint took a giant spoonful and stuffed it in his gob, grinning so that the porridge oozed out of the corners of his mouth. Natasha laughed.

“Just what is it you find so precious about this memory, Barton?” Loki asked, clearly bored.

Anger stirred, making his vision hazy. No, he realized after a second. His vision was fine. The potency of his rage, however, had frozen the memory in his mind, stilling it to nothing more than an unskilled artist’s rendering of the scene. Natasha was trapped mid-laugh, her head thrown slightly back, a light in her eyes that the torchlight caught. Clint took a deep breath and pushed harder on that barrier between his thoughts and his rationalization. The memory began to fade away completely, safe from the reach of Loki’s fingers.

Until, suddenly, Loki was standing before him, crowding his vision and smirking. “You should not play cards, archer,” he said. “Your emotions give you away.”

He snapped his fingers and the memory came back to its full luminescence, so bright that it hurt Clint’s eyes. Everything felt hazy and numb inside, though anger licked at the edges of his psyche.

“You are foolish to think you can resist my will. Now, let us see what you do not want me to know about this love of yours.”

Natasha finished laughing. “You’re not nearly as bird-witted as you pretend to be, Clint.”

“Oh, like as not, I have my charms.” Though he felt hollow, the contours on his face shifted enough to tell him that he was smiling at Natasha. She let out a huff of breath and wiped at the corner of his mouth with her thumb, removing the excess porridge. He pretended to fend her off, though he knew that in a hand-to-hand fight, she likely had the edge. “I might have been saving that for later, you know. Governor Fury keeps sending us on these errands where there is little time to eat, and not everybody has your advantage.”

“Dried porridge is the worst thing I could wish upon a man.” Natasha shook her head at him.

“Spoilsport.” The bang of the door opening and slamming into the wall had both of them looking over. Natasha reached idly for a knife, but it was only Maria Hill leading in a brute. He was clapped in irons, but he was still rather larger than the petite slip of a woman.

“Do you require assistance?” Clint called across the pub.

Hill shook her head. “This lily-livered piss maker will heel like a cur, won’t you, sweets?” She patted her prisoner on the cheek, only grinning a little dementedly when he jerked away and spit at her.

“To having the intestinal fortitude to deal with the piss-makers, Hill,” Clint said, raising the bottle of rum in tribute. When the prisoner and Maria had moved into the brig, he turned back to Natasha with a smile. “I wouldn’t trade this for anything, I don’t think. No place quite like home, is there?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Natasha said, and Clint felt a pressure building in his chest. Loki wasn’t supposed to be there, studying them like ants under a scientist’s glass. “I can’t quite rightly say I’ve ever really had a home.”

“The sea always felt like a home.”

Natasha watched him, contemplating him in that way she had of measuring every part of him, all at once. “More so than when you lived with the Romani?” she asked.

“Wasn’t with them long enough to consider it much of a home. They let me stay only until my outsider blood became a threat to their daughters.” Clint’s grin was quick and cocksure. “I always knew I wasn’t wanted, the entire time, but I can’t hold that against them. ’Leastways, they were honest. After that, the only constant became the sea. It was my home.”

“How lovely to have that sort of reassurance.” Natasha eyed the bottle of rum and, with a small shrug, took a swig. She did not pull a face at the taste; it wasn’t anything close to Fury’s best, but it did the trick, in Clint’s opinion. Of course, with Natasha’s curse, the finest vintage would taste like the worst swill. “I had a home once.”

At the time, it had been such a startling statement from the Black Widow that Clint had gone still, like prey in the sights of a predator. Natasha Romanova was not the type to share things about herself with others, not even Clint Barton. They had served together on the Angel under the command of Captain Rogers, living in such close quarters that they knew each other’s reactions before the other had fully given them. They had served under the command of Nicholas Fury and anything he required for Tortuga, which often meant days, weeks, and sometimes even months with nobody else for company but themselves. In that time, Natasha had shared only small things—which foods she found less distasteful, her favorite method of killing, that she preferred clouds to sunlight—and nothing about her past. She had never explained why she went by Natasha Romanova now and not Natalia Petrovna.

Clint had made his peace with the fact that he would probably never know.

He’d realized that night in the pub that he was on dangerous, broken ice, walking over water that could turn capricious and drown him at any second. So he casually reached for the rum bottle, feeling a struggle he could not understand deep inside him, feeling Loki’s eyes on them both. He asked, “Aye?”

“I do not remember much of it.”

“Oh, interesting indeed,” Loki said, and Clint nearly told him to go to the devil once more.

“Small pieces, nothing more,” Natasha said, frowning a little. “The walls were blue, which I find strange, as most walls that I remember from my childhood were the same red that stains my blade in battle.”

“But you called it home?”

“Aye. I knew nothing else, so I have to believe that it was home.” Natasha quirked a brow. “I did not realize until much, much later how strange it was to call such a place home, and for how few such a possibility it is.”

Clint was by no means unintelligent, but he wasn’t entirely certain that Natasha’s statement had been in English proper. “Beg pardon, mum?”

Natasha surprised him by smiling. “Oh, Barton, now is not the time to be so formal.”

“Heavens above,” Loki said, rolling his eyes. “You are a nocky boy, Barton, truly. She means to say that wherever she grew up, it’s not usual for children to live in such a place.”

Clint broke free of the memory. “I know that now,” he said, wanting to roll his eyes right back at the Norwegian count. “If you are so bound and determined to view this memory, perhaps it would be seen more clearly without your constant interruptions.”

For a second, rage, frightening in its depths, glinted in the shade’s eyes. The scepter appeared in his hand, its sinuous lines completely at odds with the rough-hewn look of Fury’s pub all around them. The very tip glowed a bright, unnatural blue.

“Oh, look, you’ve got your stick back,” Clint said, and had time to tense before Loki had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. He was thrown clear across the pub, landing indelicately on an empty table. He fell to the ground, rolling out of the way of the blast of blue light he knew surely had to follow. He ducked behind the bar. If this was truly his memory, he would have arrows stashed in the rafters. It was just a matter of getting to them.

He never had a chance. Loki suddenly stood above him, smiling coldly. Clint was stuck in a crouch, staring directly into the tip of the scepter. A shard of something that looked like glass glowed there.

“Impertinent, unlicked cub,” Loki said. “Is your skull so stuffed with paper and fluff that you have forgotten? I own you, body, mind, and soul, Barton. You think your rebellion cute? I understand you better than even you know yourself, and I know a tactic with which to stall one’s enemy. It hurts me that you think me so narrow-minded and small.”

Clint opened his mouth. “Fu—” was as far as he got before he was once more seated at the table, Loki’s scepter pressed to his temple and the memory of Natasha staring into his eyes.

“Here is how it is to be, archer,” Loki said, his voice very close to Clint’s ear. “She is about to tell you some news of vital import, I can feel it in my bones. So you will sit quietly and you will continue to reenact this memory for me, or I shall strike you dead and you will never see your love again.”

“You intend me to kill her,” Clint said, his voice flat.

“Should we meet again, yes. I find there is some poetry in your arrow being the thing to end her when it was that very same arrow that spared her five years ago aboard the Ferrous. And I am not such a buffoon as to deny a man his right to poetry.” Loki paused. “Oh, what do you know of poetry, sailor? You likely don’t even know how to read.”

Clint remained silent. Natasha had taught him to read.

“But let’s not be bogged down in civilities. Proceed with the memory, Barton.”

“I would never dream of being informal in your presence, milady,” Clint said to Natasha. At the time, he’d been teasing her, but now he felt a weight in his chest, like the stone he figured would eventually drag him to the bottom of the sea.

Natasha went oddly quiet, though. “Please, do not call me that,” she said. “I am no longer ‘milady.’”

“But you were, once?”

“A lifetime ago.” Natasha took another swig of the rum. She wasn’t anywhere near drunk, Clint knew. The woman had the ability to drink until most of the men in her life were under the table with soft heads and swollen bellies. “A lifetime I would never have had, at any rate, not properly. Had I lived as…that girl, my life would be very different. They took me when I was too young to understand how different.”

Clint stole the rum bottle and took a companionable swig. “I was a respectable sailor once,” he said. “I prefer this life to that.”

He could see amusement in the way Natasha looked about the pub, which smelled of supper and the stale ale. There was a bloodstain on the wall from when Maria Hill had taken exception to one of their visitors the week before and Natasha had decided to solve the problem for her. “Me too,” she said, and Clint took another swig. “Imagine that, a duchess preferring this sort of life to one of ease and ruling.”

Clint spat rum out all over table. “Wh-what?” he asked, coughing, even as Loki’s eyes widened. “Did I hear you a’right? D-duchess? Like Thor?”

“If we are to be exact, Thor is a duke, not a duchess.”

“But you…”

“Oh, I like this,” Loki said, leaning forward a little. His eyes were positively gleaming. “So the lady’s maid who cut down forty men is not only an enigma, but an aristocratic one as well? I can see why you look at her with stars in your eyes, Barton. Oh, this is quite fascinating. Is there more?”

“And I am told my official title is Tsesarevna, though I’ve no memory being granted such an honor.”

Clint tried to parse the Russian.

“Princess,” Natasha said.

“There is more!” Loki looked as though his name day had come early.

“Princess of…Russia?” Clint asked, shaking his head as though he’d somehow filled it with seawater. “You’re the princess of Russia?”

“Tsesarevna,” Natasha said. “And if you ever do something so addle-brained as try to bow in my presence or treat me like anything but the Natasha Romanova you have come to know and work with, I will pound you silly, Clint Barton.”

Clint shook his head again. “Why tell me this?” He sounded desperate. Some of it was the memory—the announcement of Natasha’s roots, so freely given, had floored him at the time—but mostly he could feel his actual emotions leaking into his voice.

Natasha went silent for a long moment. It was odd to see her there, so contemplative and torn, while Loki sat next to her at the table, his smile practically screaming in smug satisfaction. When the redhead looked at Clint, her eyes were solemn and thoughtful. “Bucky never knew. And I might never have told him. I was a different woman when I was with him, but this curse, everything that we survived upon the Angel and in our service to Fury, it has taught me that I am only who I am. And Natalia, though she is long buried, is a part of that. I would like you to know of it.”

This time, Clint didn’t ask why. He knew why.

“Ah,” he said instead.

“Truly, you are an eloquent monkey,” Loki said, rolling his eyes.

It seemed Natasha was in agreement with Loki in part, though instead of annoyance, a smile spread slowly over her face. She looked for the first time since her wedding, truly happy. “That is all you have to say?”

Clint had had to think about it. “Can I call you princess?”

“No, you may not.”

“Are you going to refer to me as peasant?”

“Yes, but I always have, so I fail to see how any of this could be considered new.”

“Does this mean you have a long and royal name?”

Natasha rattled off something Russian.

“And in English?”

“Grand Duchess Natalia Petrovna of Russia.”

“Do you outrank Thor?”

“Natalia Petrovna is believed to have died of the measles at a young age, so no. However, Russia is bigger than Norway. Make of that what you will.”

“And you are absolutely certain I can’t call you princess?”

“Call me princess and you shall wake up without a liver.”

Clint tilted his head, pretending to give the matter some thought. “It might be worth the risk, princess.”

“Oh, dear God,” Loki moaned, putting his forehead on the table and making Clint look over. “Are you always this inane, archer? I know enough. I tire of this; I cannot handle your prattle any longer. Please, I shall put us both out of your misery.”

The familiar sensation in Clint’s stomach pulled at him once more. He had time for only a satisfied smirk—Loki had cut the memory short before his favorite moment—before everything was once again numb and emotionless. He opened his eyes once more to find himself on the deck of the Trickster with Loki’s scepter pressed to his forehead. All feelings of satisfaction faded into nothingness, just like the rest of everything that made him Clint Barton faded away. He was only a loyal servant of his master, once more.

But in his head, as he began to ascend to the fighting top on the main mastpole, he heard Natasha’s voice say, “I told you this because you are important to me. I want you to understand that.”

It meant little to him, but it still warmed his chest as he climbed—and then it was forgotten.