One thing that I always headcanoned and this movie confirms is Clint is more calm, more settled, than Natasha. She is still finding her way.

I also love Daddy-Clint. I always saw him as a dad (although I always pictured older kids). I didn't picture a living wife though.

What is different... Ok my Clint has more personality. I was a bit disappointed in AoU Clint. Im very very curious to see him in Cap 3.

I love Clint's family. I love Laura. I love Clint and Laura's relationship. But in my head I don't see Laura living. I still see Clint/Nat endgame.

One thing that I am seeing popping up and I just don't agree with (not saying that it's wrong, just that I don't headcanon it) is Nat/Clint/Laura. I think Clint and Laura are great friends and mentors to Nat. But I don't see the 3 of them in a relationship together. I think Clint and Laura love each other so much and love their kids so much and can love others but at the end of the day it's the 2 of them and their kids and it's amazing (well, you know, until she passes away).

Having said that I will prop peek in at some OT3 fics bc why the hell not ;)

One thing I was confused about in the film is just how good friends Nat and Clint really are. She says he is her best friend and they obviously love each other a lot (in a big brother/lil sister sort of way) but he doesn't notice or care about her and Bruce (although I like to headcanon that he doesn't notice bc nothing is really there... The fact that he doesn't seem to care gave me pause though)... And also Clint never told her Laura was having a boy? Nat never asked him?

I saw the not noticing Bruce thing as a literal dumb boy thing ;) Heh.

As for the boy thing, well...who knows. Maybe Laura just found out and Clint hadn't had a chance to sit down. OR! Maybe Laura wanted to be the one to tell Nat, since she seems to be over there every other weekend. ;)

Which is fine... But even after Laura told him his response was basically "huh? I don't care anyway." Which is understandable bc he has other things to think about.. But still. It just seemed off to me. Like maybe he is her FIRST friend, rather than actual best friend. Which is fine but just a bit disappointing.

Usually the latest you find out about gender these days is at 20 weeks where they do a 3d (or is it 4D) anatomy scan. I know we aren't supposed to concern ourselves with details like this but it just stood out to me.

Well, I think the not noticing the Bruce thing is partly an "oblivious male" thing, but partly because there really wasn't much to see -- at least not at that point. All we had seen was a convo in the bar, and next thing ... "I considered getting in the shower with you."

But, eh.

I think the baby gender thing would be new. Laura looks about 5 months on, and may just have found out. Many pregnant women don't actually want to know, but then sometimes there's that ultrasound that's Bloody Obvious (usually with boys...) and they can't help it. This is my head canon for how she found out!

Well as long as that relationship is never acknowledged again I am good ;)

I'm still kinda hmm on the baby's gender thing. Like Clint obviously knows. I guess she could have JUST found out like a couple of days before. Yeah I guess I'll go with that.

(I think basically I didn't like the way am certain parts of this movie were written ;) )

Unfortunately while I love the character of Laura....I am not big on Clint's wife's plot only because I fear this is going to be another story where the woman dies to better the man (and considering this is what happened in Ultimate's I don't like it).

But I did read a headcanon that Laura is part of Clint's family but as Barney's wife and when Barney died Clint offered to play husband for her and take care of the kids because he loved his brother. I mean it could be me in denial but Its kinda a cute headcanon? I don't know lol XD.

But Clintasha isn't over till it's confirmed it's over so Ill continue my headcanons.

One of my biggest headcanons is that Clint and Natasha have differing views on Marriage and children. While Natasha loves Children as much as Clint does....she DESPISES the idea of marriage. She sees no point of signing a paper to prove she is in love and bound to the person for the rest of her life (which stems off of my personal opinions on marriage due to having two very terrible models of it). Clint loves the idea of marriage but if it ever comes up Clint will respect her. If Natasha doesn't want to be married its okay as long as he spends the rest of his life with her.

Another headcanon I have is Clint and Natasha are littlerally like the yong married Friends of Philinda (Phil Coulson and Melinda May) and they all hang out alot.

You know it's funny , if these were "real" people, I would tell Natasha to go after Sam.
He would probably be the best for her above anyone else (including Bucky who I'm still suspecting may be paired off with her in the future.).

But yes about Barney! That would have been a good story. But then I would take anything regarding Barney,I just want a mention. As far as we know, Clint has no past whatsoever lol.

Headcanons are fun and crazy things. Sometimes, say after something happens in a movie that breaks my heart, they tend to consume me until I find just the right combination. So, for the past two weeks, I've trying out a few. Here are the two that have floated to the top:

1. AoU happened in a parallel universe. When Thor was sent back to Earth at the end of The Dark World, he went with "Odin's" blessing. Unknown to Thor, however, "Odin" instructed Heimdall to send Thor back to a parallel universe of Earth. In this version, Clint has a family and Natasha was enamored of Dr. Banner. When he goes back to Asgard he will find out a lot of things the reason why those things seemed "off" and what became of the original universe he frequented. (I can't write an accompanying fic for this -- time travel/parallel universes/space-time continuum -- all that theoretical stuff hurts my head. I don't know how it works, I just know it was actually an easier explanation than some other options. ;)

2. Laura has been a part of Clint's life for about as long as he can remember. It's just always been Laura. She was the first person Clint (and Barney) met at the orphanage after his parents died. All the kids immediately started sizing up the two young boys as they walked into the common room. Only one, a young girl, smiled at them. She got up and walked over to Clint. "Hey, new kid. My name's Laura. What's yours?" were the first words she spoke to him. They always kept in touch and worked the system to see each other as much as possible through various foster homes, the Barton boys' stint in the circus, Clint's life of petty crime, and military service. Before Clint accepted recruitment by SHIELD, he negotiated a deal for the absolute secrecy and safety of his future wife and family. When that was granted, Clint asked Laura to marry him. "After all the years you spent taking care of my sorry ass, please let me take care of you," was his proposal. (I'm actually about half way done with a fic about this. It's told in a three-way conversation among Clint, Tony, and Natasha out in the barn while Tony "fixes" the tractor.)

There are more, but they're not formed well enough to be shared yet.

Oh! The Alternate timeline idea is interesting! :D I love that!

Love the Alternate Universe. Like a Star Trek reboot! Sign me up...

Ah, head canons.

The Old

Well, the one about Clint living in a mid-town Manhattan apartment over a Chinese take-out has been resoundingly blown to bits. (Unless he has a city apartment for when he doesn't have time to go to the farm....?)

The one about Clint being ferociously protective of children (enunciated most clearly in chapter 3 of "In the Service (http://archiveofourown.org/works/543070)"), I'm happy to say, has been borne out -- albeit with a twist I wasn't quite ready for. But that final scene in AoU, where he goes after the little boy? Straight out of the inside of my head.

A Natasha one that I saw spring to glorious life in Cap 2 was "Natasha puts her feet on the dashboard when someone else drives." I wrote that into "Going to Ground (http://archiveofourown.org/works/520261)," and when I saw it in the movie I was convinced (for about 5 seconds) that the writers must have read my story...

The New

Laura is a former SHIELD analyst, later executive assistant to Nick Fury. The latter role she still fulfils, which is why Clint is thinking of building her a workstation out of the dining room. Basically, she runs Fury's affairs for him from the Farm.

She got interested in Hawkeye and made Maria Hill check with his various exes to see if he was a jerk, or someone worth having a go at (I'm currently working on a story to that effect based on a prompt tielan left me at one point...

Natasha came to stay on the farm for quite a while after those congressional hearings, to decompress and avoid the attentions of the press.





Edited 2015-05-15 09:27 pm (UTC)

I think it's possible he has an apartment. Barney is staying in it at the moment ;).

Oh, but of course. After HYDRA tossed it looking for intel on how Clint kept finding (and eliminating) their surviving agents, Natasha told him he couldn't possibly move in again. At least not for a while. Barney makes the perfect subtenant (except Clint figures that his bourbon collection will be toast by the time he gets back.)

And he doesn't always pay the rent. But that's ok, he keeps the place safe from thugs, at least that's what he tells Clint and Laura.

YES! THANK YOU, I <3 the idea of Laura also being employed by SHIELD - that popped up independently in my headcanon for her, too. (Not being Fury's EA, but that's a fantastic twist, yes. love it.)

Sooo... what the hell, jumping back in with both feet, why not, it's great fifth chakra practice, right?

Err... how much detail do you want me to go into? ;)

What were your headcanons prior to Age of Ultron? How’d they fare? How do you feel about that?

They are lengthy and numerous. ALL THE HEADCANONS. There are reams and reams of fic not yet posted about my headcanon universe, which I was originally trying to keep at least loosely canon compliant, but it took a sharp left after Cap 2.

- Natasha got herself out of the Red Room. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, how important this is to me and her background. By the time Clint brings her in, she's been working on her own for awhile. (She is also much older than her file indicates, and is enhanced per comics canon with the Russian version of the serum taken from Bucky's system.)
- They've been partners for 10-15 years by the time the Battle of New York rolls around (SHIELD tried other partners, other teams for them, it was an unmitigated disaster all around)
- She has had issues off and on with triggers and programming cropping up at terrible times - including once killing a room full of people in Berlin which led to the two of them going off-mission and into hiding from SHIELD until they could figure out a. what the trigger was and how to "undo" it, and b. how to explain it to SHIELD or cover it up, depending. It was before they were a couple and kind of shocked Natasha that he chose her over SHIELD.
- She ran into Bucky before the events of Cap 2, and the thing about the Iranian scientist was probably a lie. What came out of that mission nearly fractured their partnership, until Coulson decided to throw the two of them out into the Mexican jungle for several weeks on a stupid stake-out that was boring as hell so they would either talk to one another or beat the crap out of one another "sparring" - he didn't so much care which so long as they got their heads back on straight and started working together again.
- Clint knows several languages (things like German, Russian, Romani, Yiddish, and so on) because the circus he grew up in was populated by quite a few old timers that came over after WWII. Natasha knows a LOT more, from all over the world.
- Clint is still in a SHIELD facility in "custody" (ostensibly psychiatric of a sort) post-Avengers, and Nat really Does Not Like This, but it was his choice to go because he didn't trust that he was entirely in control anymore and also kind of felt like he deserved it, because he kept having flashbacks of what Loki wanted him to do (or had him do).
- Clint is the only one that can really give Natasha a run for her money at hand-to-hand, and it's because both of them approach it not from the perspective of either a codified system of martial arts, or down-to-basics no-rules street fighting, but from the angle of dance and gymnastics. (Watch the two of them when they fight on the carrier - they work in completely three-dimensional space, and it's glorious.) He figured out that's what she was doing right off the bat and his almost preternatural sense of where he and everything else is in space (that lets him target things so damn accurately) lets him anticipate her moves just as easily.
- when they need to talk without other people knowing what they're saying, they tend to use Romani, because they both know it and most other people don't.

Wait a sec! You can't say the thing about nearly fracturing their partnership and not tell us what happened dammit ;)

There's fic about that, actually. Unposted, still in pieces in my Scrivener file(s), but it's going to be a thing eventually in "The Weight of Us". But here's the basic story (warnings for RR evilness and non-graphic mentions of sociopathic children ala The Bad Seed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Seed), which I had to read in college and is terrifying).

So, this one time, in Bulgaria, Clint nearly got himself killed (http://archiveofourown.org/works/498628/chapters/988526). And that left him laid up in the hospital for weeks, and more recovery after that, so SHIELD sent Natasha out on an undercover mission by herself. She was supposed to be looking into a mid-level weapons dealer named Draykov, who as it happened needed a new nanny for his daughter. He was specifically looking for someone with self-defense training, and SHIELD and Natasha figured that's what you did when you did business with people like warlords and other assorted bad guys.

When Natasha got there, and charmed him into giving her the job, she found out that he wasn't trying to find someone who could protect his daughter from other people.

He wanted someone who could protect other people from his daughter.

The last nanny had met an uncertain end, and from what Natasha could glean there might've been some other household staff that also "left" under mysterious circumstances. Draykov knew exactly what his daughter was, mind you, and was horrified by it, but he also loved her and wanted to protect her, and he was trying to do what he thought was best for her. He sold weapons to terrible people, but on a personal level, he actually wasn't that bad a guy.

He did make some poor choices, however, one of which turned out to be getting into bed with the Red Room (or what was left of it) on a weapons deal that didn't work out. And they showed up to deal with the situation when Natasha had been undercover there for a couple months or so, and this didn't end at all well for Draykov, but it also put Natasha into a tail spin and face-to-face with one of her former trainers, the Winter Soldier.

At this point, she'd called SHIELD and they'd sent in the backup, which included Clint, who was technically "better" but who probably still should've been at home on the couch or something. He gets hurt, again, and this all ends up with Natasha and Clint and the girl in a standoff with the Winter Soldier, who offers to make Natasha a deal. He'll spare Clint's life, and let her go, if she gives him the girl.

Now, here are the key things to point out about this situation. First, TWS makes some compelling (not necessarily right or accurate, but compelling) points about the Red Room being the best place for someone like Rudmilla, that they'll have the best chance of directing her impulses and giving her a life, versus a life spent in institutions or prisons otherwise. Second, there may or may not be some residual triggers and/or conditioning going on in Natasha's head in regards to listening to him. Third, they're in a position where TWS really could - and would - kill Clint before she could stop him. She's already - literally - got Clint's blood on her hands right then and she remembers what it was like thinking he was going to die in Bulgaria.

So she lets him take the girl.

Now, all Clint knows or sees of this, having just gotten to the party (as it were) is that Natasha trades this kid for their lives. And he is infuriated by it. Natasha sort of tries to explain what's going on, and that the girl isn't just an innocent child, but he's not really listening, and she's too angry to push it. And so they go back and let it sit.

It's the first real fight they've ever had. Natasha is turning a lot of her anger about what's happening inward, because she hates herself for that moment of weakness (she sees it that way) and what she did, and maybe a little bit for letting herself get to where she cares enough about someone else (Clint) that she's got a weak spot. And the overwhelming feeling of being back in the Room even for an instant, she's furious about that. And Clint is mad because there was a child involved and also because he can't help but wonder if he actually knows what he thought he did about the type of person Natasha is and if he made the right decision when he brought her in, and he'd always thought that he was the person who could see through her covers, and who knew her inside and out (and he is, and he does) but he can't help but worry that maybe he really doesn't and that she's been playing him this whole time, too, that she's really that good of an actress and spy (she is, of course, but not with him).

They still work together, and get the job done, and in the process they're driving Coulson absolutely insane because there's so much tension he feels like he's about to break, let alone them. And it's not the fun kind of "will they or won't they" tension that legendary SHIELD betting pools are born from, no, this is the kind that he knows from past experience will lead to someone making a potentially fatal mistake on an op someday. He's not going to let that happen to his best team, dammit.

So he hands them packs and shoves them onto a transport and dumps them out in the middle of the Mexican jungle and basically leaves them there on trumped up stake-out duty until they either work it out or kill one another. He's really not sure which is more likely when he drops them off.

It takes them a solid month before they start talking again.

He leaves them there another three weeks just to be on the safe side.

(The end(ish) of the Mexican op is here (http://archiveofourown.org/works/498628/chapters/988531).)

Meaning to respond to this!!! This is amazing!!! I am entralled. I can't wait to read the entire fic.

The psychology of Natasha during their first fight is insanely fascinating to me.

Thank you!

The Romani thing is cool. it could seriously backfire when they run into the Maximoffs, though...

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO... why yes, yes it could! I hadn't put two and two together yet to get four, oh that is excellent, thank you! :D

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO... why yes, yes it could! I hadn't put two and two together yet to get four, oh that is excellent, thank you! :D

Did Age of Ultron give you new headcanons?
- So.. AoU is a completely different verse for me. But yes, I have new ones! Because Laura is awesome (and decided to take up residence in my head, so what'm I supposed to do?)
- Laura and Clint grew up in the circus together. Her father trained the horses. She was never interested in performing, but once she got her hands on a computer, she started doing more and more of the administrative stuff, and mostly taught herself computers and some programming and hacking (such as it was at the time, anyway, since they would've teens in the 80s) - basically she liked them and kept learning about them, and when Clint ended up on SHIELDs radar they hired her as a tech and discovered she was great at analysis Bonus, she could do that from home, because Cooper came along pretty soon after that.
- Clint brought Natasha home because she needed a home. I'm honestly not sure yet how romantic/sexual vs. platonic the relationship between the three of them is yet - but if it's not overtly sexual it is still extremely close and intimate with quite a bit of physical affection there - most of this is from how easily Laura lets Nat into her personal space, particularly while pregnant.
- Natasha has her own room there, she does not use the guest room, it is Natasha's room, and Laura spent several years drilling this fact into Natasha's head when she would call it a guest room. She finally started bringing and leaving stuff and clothes and things in it, and when Lila was about three or four she let her "help" pick out the paint and wallpaper when they finally convinced her to redo it to her own tastes.
- Cooper was a baby when Natasha showed up, but she's been there for all of Lila's life. (I am in no small way letting this be colored by my experiences with my best friend's kids, here). In some ways, they all know this is the closest she will ever get to having children of her own, and she is really involved in their lives as much as she can be. She's the third parent when she's home with them.


What, in your opinion, is the best headcanon you’ve seen somebody else post? Did you decide to adopt it?
- In general? The characterization of Clint (though not all the details necessarily) in SciFiGrl47's Toasterverse, and her entire Tony backstory from "The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation" excepting the Tony/Steve bits (because I mostly 'ship Tony/Pepper and Steve/Bucky in my headcanon).
- My Clint and Natasha headcanons developed in the crucible of the first Prompt-a-Thon, so I'm not entirely sure where or how they all came about now, though many of y'all were absolutely instrumental in creating them! I just can't point to one particular fic or time for most things, though now that I'm thinking about it, QueenRiley's "Of Languages" is the origin for both of them being polyglots.

mine is short and sweet - I stole the idea from alphaflyer:

Laura was an analyst in Shield. Natasha and Clint are best friends, two halves of one whole. Nat also knows how desperately Clint wants and needs a family - coming from his abusive home, then the sorta-family in the circus and the sorta-family of the military, he desperately desperately wants to have a family. To be the man his father and his mentors never were. Natasha, as we all know from Cap 2, is a matchmaker. One day, in the middle of a mission, as they fought back-to-back (as they do), Nat suddenly threw out "What about that analyst, Laura? Very pretty, long dark hair? You should ask her out. She's really nice and she won't put up with any of your shit."

Clint, be a wise man who has learned over the years to trust Nat's people-judging skills, did as he was told. And the rest is history

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