"There were fewer aliens in Budapest."

Love it! :)

Thanks! The more times I watched the movie, the more that seemed like the natural segue-way from Clint's line about remembering Budapest differently. ;-) I know it's not the 'shippiest interpretation of the scene, but it amuses the hell out of me anyway. :D

I always approve of less shippy fics/interpretations because master assassins are awesome, and because not everything has to revolve around their relationship. Sometimes it's easy to get sucked into the shipping and forget that. :)

:-) I get that.

I love the look he gives her there, it's all like "I just put an arrow through a cyborg alien, and you think this is like *Budapest*? Are you high!? Have you seen that gaping hole in the universe? Budapest, my ass. All they had were guns and C-4!"

I officially love your direct line into his head. Also, his face when he sees her on the glider may break my heart just a little. Cliiiiint.

Hee! Thanks!

I keep saying things like "Clint thinks _____" or "Clint does _____" and my husband is like "that isn't in the movie? What?" and I'm like "Well, the one is my head is/did."

He really doesn't get it. He's kind of a slave to direct canon, sadly. ;-)

(Also, yes, the glider scene - his reaction and Steve's both are just waaaaaaahhhh!)

:)

For some reason, I have a hard time getting into his head. I don't know if it's that he spends most of the movie heartwashed, or if I just naturally gravitated to Natasha, but often he's not so much a breathing character as a flat one in my head. :/ And it's frustrating. (Do I need a reason to watch it for the fourth time? Is that even a question?)

Canon? I laugh in the face of canon! Ha ha ha! ;)

On the flip side, I have more trouble with her than I do him. Though it could be the heartwashing, like you say. I know that the one I ended up with is as much or more a product of fic I've read than the movie itself. With Tasha I have to kind of work through a combination of seeing her through Clint's eyes and trying to sift through her cover identities, so I'm always asking myself "is this actually Natasha?" when I'm writing.

And then every so often she'll suddenly throw me a bone and I'll get this one glimpse or scene or line or feel and scramble to get it down into workable form before it goes away again.

There's a fic I'm working on where I have almost the whole thing from Clint's POV, only *he* isn't even sure what's actually going on with her most of the time, and it took me twelve forevers to get anything at all from her about it so I could finish it. Because of course, with Clint I only have half the story, and the follow-up can't be done without her half, too.

Oooh, that's a good point about pulling on fic too; I do tend to revert to canon if I haven't developed a strong headcanon, and at the beginning I didn't know what I wanted to pull into my interpretation of Clint so I just read and passed by everything. Now, though... hmm.

I can imagine how hard that would be! It sounds interesting to write without having that over-arching author's perspective, though, to be just as lost as Clint because he's lost too.

What helps with Natasha, for me, is that you can always come at her from a different angle, a different background, a different viewpoint. And yet for whatever reason, Clint isn't that malleable for me. I know what he does, just not why, and he doesn't let me but every in once and a while.

One thing I've noticed in fandom over the years is that certain ideas or fill-ins tend to turn viral - fanon results, and you have people picking up things that make leaps and connections not explicitly addressed in the main text and going "well, of course it's like that." I kind of love the "group mind" we create around fandoms, it's a huge part of what makes it fun for me.

(The best example of this for me isn't actually a fanon thing, but rather the first Harry Potter movie's soundtrack. The books don't literally have music, of course - there was nothing in any of that text to indicate or suggest a certain chord or piece of music in any explicit way, but as soon as I heard John William's score, my thought was "yes, this is *exactly* the music, of *course* it is, this is RIGHT." I will have that same reaction reading a fic or a comment or meta sometimes. I just get this sense in my head of "yep, that's exactly how that works.")