Could you define cliche? Some use it to mean trope and some use it as linguistic cliches and some use it to mean same old same old.

Edited 2014-09-12 11:48 pm (UTC)

Open to your interpretation. ;) I'm certainly not going to tell anyone their prompts aren't cliche enough.

Oooh, this is interested. I'd like to see the cliche that Clint had trouble after being brainwashed subverted.

oh lemme discuss this. It seems like a lot of fics talk about all the mental stress he goes through but Kevin Feige said he didn't really have much issue since he is such a trained agent. I just find this interesting. Although I suppose it would be difficult writing a story about it unless everyone is trying to make him feel better and he is like "am I supposed to feel bad?" And then he might just seem like a sociopath lol

I like the story idea, but I use it as just that. My headcanon is based on behind-the-scenes chatter, that he put it aside, dealt with it, and stayed an active agent. I think it affected him yeah, but in much the same way all the stuff in his life and work did/do, kind of like a torture experience. He's in a work where it wasn't something he was "trained for" but it is something he can find a parallel he was.

That said, I'd love to tackle this fic, but give me a couple days to post. ( :shushes all the promptathon fics waiting to be finished: )

Ah Feige, always spoiling our fun. XD

/unqualified comment from the third row

Oh man I love this and I'd LOVE to tackle it if I can get my head around it. For myself, I tend to write a lot more angst, which is why I personally like exploring the idea of Clint's psyche post Avengers. Because I do think that there was definitely something lingering there, and it's liberating to explore those emotions with Natasha. But, I also love the idea that Clint is, you know, actually mostly fine - with some emotional damage, but not as much as people think - and I think it would be an interesting challenge for a fic.

(not entirely the same thing, but! irnan just did a really long and awesome post Cap2 team!fic that included Clint, and it was basically competent!Clint after all these big events of Avengers/Cap2 and I really enjoyed seeing Clint written like that.)

Maybe not quite what you had in mind, but the best I could come up with on short notice ...



" Are you okay?"

"Whaddya mean, am I okay."

Natasha carefully brushes a handful of rubble off Clint's torn and filthy tac vest. He almost recoils at her touch.

"And you can cut the mother hen routine, too. It's a bit scary, actually."

Her hand pauses over his chest.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm more comfortable when you try to kill me."

She scans his face, trying to find a lie, but all she sees is Clint.

“Still wallowing? Want someone to hit you to make you feel better?”

He frowns, and it’s clear that he’s actually thinking about the answer. Coming from Mr. In-the-Moment, that’s almost evolutionary; in what direction remains to be seen.

"Nah. Remember that time in Medellin?"

How could she not? She'd found him two hours after he'd been taken by the cartel, and the goons hadn't wasted a minute. Seeing what had been done to him, not knowing whether there was still life under all that blood, had been the first time she'd realized that ...

"Yes. I wish I didn't."

"Well, this ... Loki ... this wasn’t like that. No cigarette burns and bike chains, for starters. No time to think about what'd be coming next, whether I’d break, whether I’d see you again, hoping I wouldn’t because that might mean they had you, too. Took me months to get that shit out of my head.“

He shakes his head as if to clear out the memory before it gets the chance to take root.

“And this time?”

Maybe she shouldn’t press, but if there’s another thing she remembers from Medellin, it’s this: That he didn’t stop being silent and withdrawn one moment, exploding the next … not Clint … until he’d started talking.

“This time ... There weren’t any thoughts. None that were mine, anyway. Everything was his. My brain was a fucking blank, with just bits of me trying to fight a way out, like a hamster trying to run out from under a wet blanket."

For all his protest at being coddled, he doesn’t seem to mind being helped out of his tac vest. His back is one large bruise, still pale but bound to be a spectacular purple tomorrow. He could sure use a shower (as can she) but seeing him like this, dirt, scars and all, she can’t help but bury her face in the crook of his neck and breathing him in. Clint responds by pulling her close and putting his chin on top of her head, no doubt to stare off into the distance somewhere.

“You were right when you said that wasn’t me who did all that shit. That was someone else and he’s fading. Not my memories. Yes, I feel like crap about the things he made me do. But the thoughts themselves? They don’t burn.”

He repays the favour and starts pulling down the zippers of her suit, peeling it off her shoulders with sure, strong fingers. (No one who thinks leather cat suits are cool has ever tried to take one off when it’s damp with sweat and blood, and every muscle in your body screams for a hot jacuzzi.)

“Holy shit, Tash. That’s one hell of bruise on your hip. Where’d you get that?”

She scrunches her lips a little as she tries to remember – the fight with him on that catwalk? jump off that Chitauri sled? The memory comes back in a roar of green, and she shudders involuntarily. Clint must have felt something, and circles her waist with his arms, pulling her closer again. The feeling of skin on skin is oddly calming, and Natasha puts her cheek on his chest, feeling for the beat of his heart.

“The Hulk,” she whispers. “On the carrier. Before Banner managed to … sort of control him.” Saying the names out loud almost is a bit like shining a light into a dark corner – maybe there was a ghost there, but now there’s nothing. And so she adds, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. I even forgot the first rule of running, don’t look back.”

She steps back out of his embrace as he starts to chuckle.

“It’s really been a shit few days, hasn’t it?”

It has, it absolutely has. She grins back at him.

“Yeah. But, like Cap said, we won.”

“That we did.”

Clint seems to be becoming aware of something else, something … He lifts his shooting arm, inhales, and grimaces.

“Race you to the shower.”


Edited 2014-09-13 08:33 pm (UTC)

They talk about guilt, like they know a single thing about him, and Clint hears them. Oh, how does he hear them. He knows if the Council had their way, they would put him in their scope as easily as they'd ordered him to put Natasha in his once upon a time.

Clint never had much time for self-recrimination. It's a nasty business. Blood happens.

Psych clears him, though he hasn't been precisely 'cooperating,' and if Coulson could see the circles under his eyes he's been hiding behind sunglasses, his handler would bench him in a hot minute, but it's not from denied guilt eating away at his undersides any more than the Black Widow had looked up at him through that perfect sightline with any guilt for the blood on her hands of killing a man who needed killing.

---

"How many?" he'd asked Natasha.

"Don't do that to yourself."

She knew he didn't need the sudden shock of grief to carry into battle, knew she didn't need to focus on the men down, the friends lost, or Coulson bleeding out in that Hulk-proof holding cell because he went and got reckless without Clint to do it for him. It wasn't grief he needed; it was that tight, hard coil of anger he wore after he'd been tortured or used, that battle-ready fury focused into killing what needed killing, not mourning who needed mourning.

---

"If you ever need to talk," Steve offers once, hand gripping the railing tightly at the Avengers Tower.

Clint nods, soldier to soldier. He's been in the trenches; he's fought in wars. Unlike Natasha, being a spy never really was his thing. He respects the Captain enough to silently acknowledge the offer without telling him that blood was on Loki's gloating fingertips and gushing from the Jotunn's ledger and there were people like Clint and Natasha and Fury to hold it against him.

He doesn't tell the Captain that this isn't the war they fought seventy years ago and that SHIELD doesn't deal in black and white. He doesn't explain that this is nothing compared to staring at your own brother's life bleeding out from a killshot arrow when you're in your right mind and he needed killing.

It's not exactly the kind of thing he figures Steve wants to hear.

---

"Now you sound like yourself," Natasha had said, that slight smile in her voice.

He did sleep better knowing that Loki's desire to break his mind, his will, and torture him with that same pain over again had been slapped back in a retort shaped like an arrow. Clint felt cold, hard satisfaction knowing that his hands held none of the blood or regrets Loki had tried to inflict and that Loki knew it. He knew he'd failed. He knew that if he tried it again, Clint's arrow would not miss.

---

Natasha being busy as a bee

I'd love to see Natasha being the socially totally put together one for a change. I don't mind her learning to be human/emotional and love fics about it, but I'd like to see it subverted with the opposite, because to do what she does, she seems extremely emotionally self-aware to me.

I read meta just getting into this fandom that put the nail on the coffin actually, that suggested her emotions with Hulk and Loki were real, but she used her emotions as a tool same as she used her body or her weapons.

See, I think that'd make perfect sense, even, if you use comics backstory. That Clint is very weirdly socialized and really does not know how to deal with people *or* his own emotions. And I do agree that MCU Nat seems, in contrast, very emotionally self-aware.

Which is a rather wordy way of me saying, YES SECONDED. XD

idk if this is a cliche but for some reason I'd love to see Nat afraid of spiders. Wait, that's irony, isn't it?

A sequel (of sorts) to "Big Game" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1132231)



"Clint."

Natasha's voice is ominous. Hell, it's practically quavering. Didn't Banner say he'd taken out the last of those raptors? Clint hopes vehemently that one of them didn't follow them home. (Can you hope vehemently? The day's been pretty crappy, so yeah, Clint does.)

"Yes?"

"Emmm ... can you kill that please?"

Shit. Really? Funny thing, he can't hear anything. Then again, in Jurassic Park those kids had no clue that two of those fucking things were in the cafeteria, and that was full of dishes and plastic chairs.

Clint grabs his bow, hoping he won't need one of his explosive arrows. (Stark will have to make him some new ones, like, yesterday.) Natasha's lucky he restocked his quiver with the regular ones as soon as they'd gotten home; that T-rex had cleaned him straight out.

Clint's bare feet allow him to sneak up to the living room without a sound. The sight that greets him is one he'd thought he'd never see: The Black Widow, rooted to the ground, white as a sheet, staring at ... nothing.

Clint lowers his bow.

"Where is it?" he asks, not unreasonably, sincee her line of sight leads straight to the TV credenza and their shiny new 65" 3D beaut. Not much room for a raptor there, unless you turn it on.

"Right in front of my face," Natasha grinds out, between teeth clamped shut in what appears to be -- well, for lack of a better word, pure, unadulterated terror.

Now, there's that episode of Star Trek:Voyager, where the crew (except Janeway of course, she never gets affected by the shit everyone else succumbs to) all freeze up because of some vision-thingy that only they can see. Given the way their afternoon had gone, Clint is prepared to give Natasha the benefit of the doubt, and advances cautiously.

And then he sees it, in the light of the late afternoon sun that streams in through the window: The slightest silvery thread, suspended from the ceiling, quivering a little with Natasha's breath. And at the bottom of the thread, dangling at eye height -- a spider, minding its own business.

"You're kidding me, right?" he blurts out, realizing as the words leave his mouth that he might as well be writing his own death warrant. "That's a spider."

"I know what it is, Barton. Kill it. Now."

"But ..." Clint, it may be hard to believe, actually has real-life issues around killing things that don't really need to be dead. "You've been complaining about the mosquitoes. This thing ..."

"Just do it!"

Her tone brooks no argument -- it's one of those What the Lady wants, the Lady gets moments. Clint lifts his bow in a fluid motion and lets fly; of course, the spider isn't quite capable of stopping the arrow and it lands in the curtains.

"Did you get it?"

Coming from the woman who just a couple of hours ago relied on him to drive three successive arrows into the eye of a moving T Rex, that's a bit rich, but Clint decides not to take offence. He strides over to the curtain and pulls out the arrow; the tip has a couple of tiny legs stuck to it.

"Looks like. I s'pose you want me to sweep up the string, too, or can that wait for Dum-E when he comes tomorrow?"

"Please."

The voice is small, and almost melts his heart. How, exactly, did the Black Widow get her name? Hawkeye sure as hell didn't get his taking a broom to the ceiling, but maybe Clint Barton can do that for his partner. On one condition.

"Pizza tonight. And none of that vegetarian shit. Double ham, double pepperoni."

Natasha revives a little.

"Thin crust."

"Fine. And I get to pick the movie."

Natasha sighs, but the Barton family tree contains a long line of snake oil salesmen, and he knows when he's got a live one. Sure enough, she nods and he gets the broom.

Well-fed and suitably mellow (he'd graciously let her pick the wine) Clint zaps through Netflix, a much calmer Natasha curled in his lap. He's still on the A's when he sees a title marked Horror!, which by definition is worth a shot.

"You ever hear of something called Arachnophobia?"




Edited 2014-09-14 01:51 am (UTC)

Clint is the cook. NOT!

*Actually, the last time brought that up, I did a mini-thing that ended up in one of my stories ....)

oh, I have something started for this somewhere (I probably got the idea from an earlier round of this subvert-the-cliche post... ) I should dig it up and see how far I got before something else new and shiny distracted me. I do tend to write Clint as knowing his way around a kitchen, but I feel like Natasha's attention to detail makes her good at anything she wants to be good at.

"You like my cooking!" Clint protested from his spot on the couch.

Natasha looked up from the Avengers surrounding her near the kitchen counter where she'd been regaling them with tales of just how bad his cooking was and coolly raised one eyebrow.

"I like you cooking, Clint," she corrected, "not your cooking."

He blinked at that for a moment before narrowing his eyes suspciously. "And why do you like me cooking?"

The reply was prompt and unexpected. "You don't wear a shirt and I can get your shirts folded before you crumple them into a drawer."

Darcy's jaw dropped. Jane perked up with interest. Pepper covered her laugh with a tiny cough.

Maria spoke for all of them when she grumbled, "And you never once mentioned this when inviting me over to dinner. I would have made time to come."

Clint's expression was a strange mix of flattered and offended. He settled back into the cushions with his popcorn and turned on the tv. "Just for that, I'm picking the movie."

Natasha just smiled and picked up on the pickles and jalapenos story where she'd left off.

One of my favorites to see subverted is the "Clint fell for Natasha first" cliche. Give me all the fic where Natasha falls first, has to deal with the emotional repercussions, and then pursues Clint. :)

Edited 2014-09-13 03:40 pm (UTC)

YESSSSSSS...this is my favorite as well!!

Ohh, yes please. :D

"Back in the day," Steve reminisced over his third round of Asgardian mead, "men courted women, not the other way around."

"Yes," Natasha hissed with what sounded like personal affront. She'd been buried in the stuff since Thor brought it back, but this was the first Steve cast a truly disturbed eye at his friend's dark glower. "Back in the day," she growled before a slew of low cuss words in Russian.

Steve had fielded his third request for a date from an altogether modern female unconcerned with his chivalric tales of 'back in the day' within the last twenty-four hours, and the whole thing got wearying, but Natasha looked as though she were attempting to exorcise a decade perhaps, not a bad week.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Steve asked. He pulled over the mead to refill his glass.

Natasha spat something else out in Russian before shaking her head violently. "Barton wouldn't know how to court if I ordered him to with a bulleted list."

Steve hadn't realized he needed to stop drinking before he asked such a loaded question (Natasha sometimes would talk about her feelings when prodded), and the table wore most of the mead Steve had been swallowing. "Uh..."

"I swear, I have been beautiful and beguiling and all but dragged him off in the night," she ranted feelingly, "and he has never once asked me out. I gave him the hypothetical and he thought I wanted to get you to ask me out. As if." She snorted.

Steve felt a little dazed.

"You'd be easy." She patted his arm. "That's a good thing." Her eyes narrowed. She sipped her mead. "I'll drag him away in the night."

"Why not ask him out?" Steve fell back on the hated modernism, feeling it safer than what Natasha was proposing.

She glared at him. "It is beneath me."

"Let me talk to him then."

She glared at him, then looked thoughtful, then downed some more mead and nodded. "All right, Steve. One week to civilize Hawkeye." Then she shot him that rare, genuine smile of amusement that told him he was doomed.

Fake!married.

GO!

"So, when you guys do that undercover spy thing -- do you ever have to, like, pretend you're married?"

Natasha rolls her eyes.

"Why is our work of such interest to you, Stark? Especially outside your regular consulting hours?"

Tony isn't in the least defensive.

"I'm just asking because of those rings. They just kind of appeared. Can't blame a guy for noticing."

Natasha sighs, and makes a face as if he'd just pulled out a wisdom tooth by hand.

"Fine. Since you seem to care so much -- the rings are real. Clint and I got hitched yesterday. I'll scan and e-mail you the papers, if you'd like."

There aren't many people on this planet who have seen Tony Stark speechless. In fact, there is only one -- Pepper Potts. So when he stares at Natasha, his mouth open, the number has effectively doubled. Satisfied that her work here is done, Natasha turns on her heel and heads upstairs to join Clint, who is putting the final gloss on his mission prep.

She is still grinning when she walks into the JARVIS-proof room in her quarters that they use as an office.

"Guess what? I just made Stark believe that those rings were real. Nosy sonofabitch. Like I would disclose mission details to him just like that."

Something in Clint's face is off. For starters, he doesn't seem to be as amused as she had thought he would be.

"What? Something the matter?"

He stops staring at his smartphone screen.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"We do?"

Clint puts down the phone, leans back in his chair and runs both hands across his face.

"We do. Just had a note from Coulson. That guy, the one who did the fake wedding?"

Natasha frowns.

"Someone shoot him? Did he rat us out to Hydra?"

"Worse."

Clint gets up and heads over to the liquor cabinet. He comes back with two glasses and a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya, and pours two sizeable portions.

"He was actually licensed to perform weddings."

He raises his glass.

"Have a drink, Mrs. Barton."



Edited 2014-09-14 07:43 pm (UTC)

So late, but I'm gonna drop it into the hat anyway.

Two assassins with tragic backstory, the job they're doing... Their relationship has got to be angsty and complicated, right? Except, no. It's actually not. Maybe the start was a tiny bit bumpy, but rather quickly it evolves into a love that's based on trust and silent understanding, something stable and balanced and healthy.

Edited 2014-09-16 08:51 pm (UTC)

YES.