Hi All, this thread is for any questions you'd like to ask, comments not related to any specific prompt, and a general space to chat :)

whips out the 90 page prompt doc... LET'S GO!

"Why do you have a subscription service for underwear?"
"Because my partner has no patience. But he is the one who pays for it so I don't really care. "

Damn dude, are you a fitted sheet? Cuz you’re complicated as fuck and really hard to figure out, but I desperately need you on this fucking mattress.

Just because I love you doesn’t mean I’ll let you win in Mario Kart. Fuck off

Building Tensions
Pg
Warnings: swearing


“Fuck you,” she hisses.

“Fuck me?” Clint is astounded at her language.

“Well fuck you too,” he laughs.

“The fucking green shell,” she gestures to the screen.

“Better than the fucking blue shell,” he goads.

“Why are we swearing?” Natasha laughs, the tension disappearing.

He rounds on Toad and she growls.

“Don’t,” she warns.

“I have to,” he tells her, the end in sight as he urges Bowser to go just a little bit quicker.

“Don’t,” she warns again, the tension in the room building.

“Just because I love you,” he smiles; Bowser overtaking Toad, “doesn’t mean I’ll let you win Mario Kart,” he smiles condescendingly.

“Fuck off,” he laughs, as she launches herself at him, trying to wrestle the controller off him as Bowser crosses the finish line, Toad closely behind.

“Fuck you,” she hisses again.

there was only one bed - with a twist!

character a and b forced to share a bed and fighting for the comforters, tugging back and forth until one decides to give up.

“I was so stupid to make the mistake of falling in love with my best friend.”

OH and oooo!

“I broke my rules for you.”

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing. Mostly.”

Bwahaha!

“you can take your ‘im okay’ hat off now. it’s just me. fall apart. i’m not going anywhere” - erin van vuren

“we invited an eccentric billionaire to our fake wedding in the hopes of getting a free present, but then they said they would come and now we have to have an actual fake wedding for them to attend.”

I WILL READ THIS!

Edited 2023-08-01 06:02 pm (UTC)

it IS a gun in my pocket and no I’m not pleased to see you

Yes and yes! because I can already imagine both of them saying this

An accidental brush of lips followed by a pause and going back for another, on purpose.

Title: Kiss Me
Rating: PG/K+
Warnings: none
Notes: AU scenelet, set in 'The Avengers' aka 'Avengers Assemble', which assumes that Clint does not have a wife and family (which is pretty much what I think we were all assuming back then, right?)

When finally he recovered from the ‘cognitive recalibration’, when she was sure he was Clint and no longer Loki’s flying monkey, Natasha was quick to unfasten the straps holding him down to the table. Good as she was with such things most of the time, the whole ordeal of almost losing him had taken a real toll, not to mention the relief at getting him back at last. Her fingers fumbled with one of the fastenings and she growled in frustration, fighting the urge to let tears fill her eyes.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Clint assured her, reaching out to either help of comfort her, Natasha wasn’t sure which.

She didn’t need either, or rather, she didn’t want to. Moving to evade, she only ended up leaning in closer, her face mere inches from his own. When the strap she had been fighting with finally gave way, she tripped a little with sudden momentum, her mouth making contact with Clint’s own.

It wasn’t much, just an accidental brush of lips, but it did something to her. From the look in his now-clear eyes, she could tell a similar feeling had gone through him too, a similar thought had come to mind. She opened her mouth to say something smart or sensible. Something about how it would make more sense not to give in, but the words wouldn’t come.

Instead, she did what Natasha always swore she would never do. She gave in to sweet temptation, her hand behind Clint’s head as she dragged him forward, crushing her lips against his own, a deliberate, passionate act this time around. If she had worried, even for a moment, about his reaction, she stopped the second she felt his hands on her back, when he deepened their kiss, when she ended up half on top of him as the moment spun on and on.

Before things got really crazy, Natasha pulled back, met his eyes, caught her breath.

“You really had to wait for me to be brainwashed to realise that was something we needed to do?” he asked her, smirking some.

She returned the look without pause, giddy as a girl half her age and without the red ledger she could boast.

“Shut up and kiss me again,” she said, pulling him forward by his shirt.

Clint didn’t even try to resist.

i’m spilling wine in the bathtub / you kiss my face & we’re both drunk / everyone thinks that they know us / but they know nothing about all of this silence & patience, pining & desperately waiting / my hands are shaking from holding back from you / say my name & everything just stops / i don’t want you like a best friend / only bought this dress so you could take it off

call my bluff, call you babe / have my back every day / feels like home, stay in bed the whole weekend / it’s nice to have a friend

‘I’m intrigued; the last three attempts on my life were much better funded and prepared.’

DAMN, you are on a roll! Loving these :D

"Is it weird to play as yourself in a video game?"

Title: playing yourself
Ships: Clint/Natasha/Bucky, Kate Bishop/America Chavez
Rating: PG
Warnings: none needed
Length: 416 words
Notes: mostly comicsverse based.


"Who's idea was it to play this game again?" Natasha nudged Clint and he moved over.

"Kate's." - Clint said, laying the blame squarely on his protege - sidekick - er - partner's shoulders. She thought it would be funny for them all to play the new Avengers video game together. He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to pick himself to play as.

Bucky walked in carrying a big bowl of freshly popped popcorn that smelled absolutely amazing. "Are she and Chavez still bringing the pizza?" He asked and sat down on the other side of Natasha.

Clint grabbed a fistful of popcorn, ignoring both Buck’s scowl and Nat’s amused look. He shrugged and stuffed the popcorn in his mouth, he’d skipped breakfast and he was starving. "Yeah, Kate texted a few minutes ago, they're on their way." Luckily they only lived a few apartments over in his old place. He'd let her have it when he upgraded to a bigger place down the hall. Natasha had put her foot down and said if she was going share a place with him and Bucky, they needed more space - and a bigger bed.

“You’re not playing as yourself?” Clint asked Bucky as he leaned over to grab some more popcorn.

Bucky moved the bowl out of reach. “The Winter Soldier isn’t a playable character.”

Ouch. Clint made a face that he hoped looked somewhat sympathetic, leaned back, and gave up on trying to grab more popcorn. “So, you’re playing as who then?”

“He can play as me if he wants.” Kate strode into the room carrying a stack of pizza boxes. “I’m playing Black Widow.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” Clint said. Kate stuck her tongue out at him. She and Chavez sat down on the other sofa together. Maybe he should’ve picked Iron Man or Thor. He leaned over and kissed Nat’s shoulder. “And who are you gonna be?” Clint asked.

Natasha smiled. “Spider-Woman.”

“You’re playing as my ex?” Clint asked.

“Who exactly would there be left to play as, if I have to eliminate people you once dated?” Natasha asked. Bucky scoffed.

Clint chose not to dignify that question with an answer. In the end, Bucky chose to play Cap and America picked Captain Marvel. It was a ridiculously silly game and they ended up having a ton of fun playing it. They even made plans to get together and play again soon. But next time he was playing as Thor.

"Didn't you hear? You're dead."

Argh, so many possibilities! Love it!

"Inflamable is just Spanish for flammable."

"Careful! That duplicator is still under constr..."

Tony's voice sputters out as he takes in the two identical Bartons now standing on the platform, glaring at each other resentfully.

The rain is speaking quietly, you can sleep now

Well that's a beautiful turn of phrase

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath
(Pls no character death???)

DAMN

We are defined by what we do, not nice words.

Holiday for spies.

Ha, I think I wrote that one a few years ago... :) (Not that this should stop anyone from using this delicious prompt!)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1492090/chapters/3666941

Edited 2023-08-01 06:01 pm (UTC)

When they told me what you were doing, I wanted to stay in bed. And now that I’m here, I’m thinking that maybe I should have. 

She sat in the plastic chair by the window, skimming absentmindedly through some lifestyle magazine while she waited for him to wake up.

By the time he did, she knew everything there was to know about how to make the perfect cup of coffee and all about the latest fashion trends for the season.

He stirred and opened his eyes, squinting in the bright fluorescent light. She thought that served him right; this time she felt much less pity than usual.

Pushing away her reading material, she drug the seat across the room to where he lay and took considerable pleasure in seeing him cringe as the chair legs screeched loudly across tile.

Was her anger justified? Maybe not, but it surely didn't come close to making up for his idiocy.

"Good morning, cowboy," she said cheerfully as she sat back down where he could see her.

"Ugh," Clint mumbled in response, not at his most articulate. He tried to move a little, but the wave of pain that came along with it made him give up and revert to moaning. Natasha waited.

"I... where... you?" he asked weakly.

She gave him a stern look. "Are you coherent enough for me to lecture you, or do you need me to tie off your morphine drip first?"

Clint managed a cross between a laugh and another groan. "What are you even doing here?"

"Well, I was in bed when they told me what you were doing. Now that I’m here, I’m thinking that maybe I should have stayed there."

"I should have," Clint conceded. "That was a really bad idea."

"At least we agree on something. What on earth made you do it?"

There was a short pause, and Natasha couldn't tell if it was due to his concussion or just straight-out embarrassment. "Sitwell dared me."

"Ah," she said sarcastically. No news to her; the video had spread through HQ like wildfire.

"You seriously thought you could pull it off?"

Clint rolled his eyes. "Obviously."

"Have you ever even ridden a horse before?" she asked, her voice laced with a mix of humor and frustration. Mostly the latter.

"I've tamed wilder beasts," came his confident reply.

Natasha gave him an incredulous look. "If you weren't drugged to the gills right now, I'd take major offense at that statement." She picked up the patient file from where it was clipped to his bed and glanced over his medical chart. "Well, this wild beast did quite a number on you. Broke some ribs, sprained your ankle, and gave you a hell of a concussion. Congratulations."

"How did it look?"

"What?"

"My ride. Did I make the 8 seconds?"

At this, Natasha sighed and tenderly took Clint's bruised hand in hers, patting it gently.

"That bronc threw you off faster than a jackrabbit on a hot tin roof, Clint," she said affectionately. "But you know what? You looked pretty damn good getting your ass kicked. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were a natural."

Clint smiled and closed his eyes. "Thanks, Nat. You always know how to make me feel better."

Or, A Story About How Clint Barton Takes The Worst Dares.

Edited 2023-08-09 04:56 pm (UTC)

"come home and shout at me. come home and fight with me. come home and break my heart, if you must. just come home." - cruel prince

Title: Just Come Home
Author: poppypickle
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
Word Count: 1880
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing, slight mentions of past violence
Author’s Note: First time writing Clint/Natasha and my knowledge of the latest Marvel canon is limited, at best, so please forgive any canon inaccuracies. This ignores the Hawkeye series.


Clint is doing great. Terrific. Fan-fucking-tastic, thank you very much.

He helps clean up the mess in upstate New York (there’s no civilian collateral damage this time — it’s a relief but also somehow makes the whole thing seem even more unreal). He attends all the necessary funerals. Tony’s, of course, but there’s also a solemn ceremony for the lost Wakandan soldiers and the raccoon insists on giving Gamora a formal send-off that mostly involves everyone drinking their weight in hard liquor.

He goes home to the farm. The whole place is overgrown (five years of neglect will do that) and the porch railing is crumbling (Clint wonders if the snap somehow missed half the termite population). Some of the pipes burst during a freeze and there’s a thick layer of dust covering everything, but it feels good to have something to do with his hands. The to-do list seems endless — a never-ending rotation of mowing and scrubbing and fixing — but Clint likes these problems. At least they’re solvable.

Once they're all settled into some facsimile of normalcy, Clint tells Laura and the kids about what happened. Well, the version of things he wants to tell. How he and Aunt Nat went all the way to the edge of space. How she did what needed to be done to save the whole goddamn world and bring them all back. Clint knows Natasha would hate being painted as the noble savior, but it’s what the kids need to hear. They plant an apple tree in her honor near the front of the house, where no one can miss it. The tiny sapling will take years to grow and bear fruit, but isn’t that what she sacrificed to give them back? More time together.

So yeah, all things considered, Clint thinks he’s handling things pretty damn well.

That is, until Fury calls him early one evening. He does that sometimes, calls to check in about the kids or ask him about an old S.H.I.E.L.D. case. Clint sometimes wonders if the old man (he'd put an arrow through his own eye before he ever called him that to his face) is lonely without the familiar crew around. Clint is usually happy enough to take the calls, and this time Fury catches him out on the front porch applying a final coat of paint to the newly-repaired railing.

Clint's chuckling at some petty complaint about Danvers brewing the office coffee too strong when Fury shifts to a story about Peter Parker and some mess with a bunch of Spider-Mans and a multiverse.

"Goddamn parallel universes," Fury says. "Same people, same shit, just a little bit different."

And suddenly, without warning, Clint feels his chest tighten as his mouth goes dry and his vision funnels into a tiny, black pinprick. He barely manages to slide his thumb over the red end call button before he vomits over the side of the freshly painted porch railing, then heaves in an unsteady breath as he feels his body crumple down onto the floor.

Monsters and magic and multiverses…

And somehow he’s ended up living in a version of life where Natasha Romanoff is dead.

Truly dead.

Gone.

Clint isn’t sure how long he sits out on the front porch, his knees folded up under him as he rests his head against the railing. He can’t move, can’t speak. All he can do is stare up into the sky and wait for the stars to come out.

—

Clint finds there aren’t enough chores around the house to keep his hands busy — to quiet the dull, aching torment of his thoughts.

So he makes up projects. He builds a small coop for the chickens Lily has been asking for. He hauls heavy rocks from around the property into a circle, surrounds it with stumps, and calls it a fire pit. He chops down a few trees from the far edge of the land and starts cutting them, then sanding them, and before he knows it he’s built a whole fucking gazebo. It looks utterly ridiculous, this beautiful but completely purposeless thing sitting right next to their weathered house and battered barn.

But he doesn’t stop — can’t stop — until one afternoon when Laura comes outside, a dirty dishcloth in one hand as she rests her other hand gently against his shoulder.

“Whatcha making?” she asks, her voice soft, like she doesn’t want to spook him.

“Not sure yet.” Clint’s arms ache and he can feel a bead of sweat dripping down the side of his neck, but he doesn’t stop sawing.

Laura hums, surveying the different piles stacked in front of him.

“Far be it for me to put a damper on your muse,” she says after a while. “But it looks like you might be building another gazebo. And while I love what you did with the first, I’m not sure we need a matching set.”

Clint pauses, the saw teeth still trapped in the log, and surveys the heaps of timber in front of him, like he’s suddenly seeing them for the very first time.

After a while, he lets out a long sigh. “Godammit.”

Laura turns him gently to face her. She has let him do this for weeks — let him hack his way through DIY projects they didn’t need with a single-mindedness that bordered on obsession — without saying a word. And now all she says is, “Do you want to talk about it?”

And he does. Or at least part of him does. But words have never been his strong suit.

“When you and the kids disappeared…” he says after a long time. “I couldn’t stay here, so I left. And I did things.” Clint swallows harshly. “Bad things.”

Laura nods. But Clint can feel the way her fingers flex against his shoulder, like maybe she’s thinking about pulling her hand away. She keeps it where it is, though, and just says, “You did what you had to to survive.”

It’s a fine thing to say. A perfectly good thing. There’s no reproach in her voice. No judgment.

But she doesn’t say anything else — doesn’t ask him to explain exactly what he did.

Natasha knew every side of him. Knew him here on the farm and out in the field. Knew his darkness and his light — accepted both. And standing here staring at sweet Laura, who wants to understand but doesn’t truly want all the gory details, Clint feels suddenly exhausted. Not physically, exactly. More like hollowed out. Empty.

There’s no one left on this planet who really knows him — every part of him, even the stuff he tried to hide.

Clint turns away from Laura, his calloused fingers finding their grip on the saw once again.

“I don’t know what else to do but this,” he murmurs after a moment.

It’s not a lie.

But it’s not quite the truth either.

—

He starts dreaming of Natasha.

Clint has always been a dreamless sleeper, so this is new.

The dreams start off familiar — his first encounter with her in Budapest. That fateful decision to lower his bow. The Dreykov mission.

Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, things start to shift. It takes Clint a while to notice that they never go to the farm. Or mention it. It’s like the patch of land in Iowa doesn’t even exist.

There are more obvious things too. The way Tasha slides into the Quinjet bunk with him after a particularly tough mission, her hand curling around his bicep as she presses her face against his back. He times his breaths with hers and waits to fall asleep until he’s sure she’s out first. Or, dream him does, at least. Real-life Clint wakes up with a start, the smell of Natasha’s shampoo still lingering in his nose. He sucks in a sharp breath, his mind frantically scanning through his past as he tries to recollect this specific memory.

(He already knows it never happened.)

Later, he dreams of that first battle in New York City. Leaving the shawarma place together and walking in the dark through the rubble-filled streets back to headquarters. He is bone-tired and his mind still feels tender, like it hasn’t even come close to truly healing after being forcibly invaded, but Clint feels wired too. Like something is finally clear to him. He grabs Natasha’s hand and pulls her into a deserted alley before he can stop himself.

They just stare at each other for a moment, suddenly standing right on the precipice of everything unspoken between them.

“Even when I didn’t know myself, I knew you would come for me,” he says after a long time.

Natasha’s lips curve into a hint of a smile. “Don’t get sentimental on me, Barton,” she teases, but it’s soft and laced with something he never let himself place. Until now.

Clint leans in slowly until he’s pressed against her, his mouth hovering a fraction of an inch above hers. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” he whispers.

“You’re an idiot,” she sighs, then grabs his vest and pulls him in, crushing her mouth against his.

Clint wakes up slowly this time. The sun is pouring in through the bedroom window, but he keeps his eyes closed. He can hear the kids chattering downstairs, and Laura’s laugh as she chides Nate for trying to convince her (yet again) that cookies are a perfectly reasonable breakfast option. Memories of the dream weave slowly through his mind, fusing with the smells and sounds wafting up from downstairs. For a moment, he’s not sure where one thing stops and the other begins.

For the first time since Vormir, the heavy ache in Clint’s chest loosens ever so slightly.

—

Clint wonders if he should do something, sometimes. He could call Strange or Parker — could press them to explain this whole multiverse thing. Did everyone have one? Did they always have the same people? Could you go visit another version of your life, just for a moment? Just because you needed to see someone and tell them things you never said in this version?

He doesn’t call them, though.

Growing up, Clint was never a believer in the mystical. But he’s seen enough by now to know that life doesn’t always fit neatly into black and white categories.

Real or imagined.

Life or death.

Some things are unexplainable.

So he finds a way to live both lives. In the here and now, he holds Laura’s hand as they sit together on the porch in the matching rocking chairs he built, laughing as they watch Cooper teach Nate how to properly hold a bow while Lila tries to catch the hen that always escapes from the coop.

And in his dreams…Clint carves out something new with Natasha. Something for just the two of them. Something no one else can touch. It’s not enough, but Clint figures life always leaves most people wanting more.

He’s traveled through time and space, lost his mind, lost his family, sacrificed a soul for a soul without realizing it was his soul he was losing. And somehow, a piece of him still gets to stand in the streets of Budapest and watch Natasha laugh as snowflakes dapple her flame-red hair.

He’ll take what he can get.


Edited 2023-08-08 02:48 am (UTC)