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

Reply in a comment to this one to start a new sub-thread with any subject line you like.

I'm also going to be posting a number of comments here with 'Q' in the subject line, which will be answers to questions asked in previous promptathons, and asked on other platforms, in case those come in useful and to keep answers in one helpful place for everyone.

A top tip on html for image sizes is if you add the following inside your (triangle) brackets and make x and y a percentage such as '75%' or '100%' it'll keep the image within the space rather than making it very huge or small:

img src="http://www.example.com/image.jpg" height="y" width="x" /

As explained here.

“We’re quite literally fugitives of the state.”
“…. So, no pizza?”

HUGE fan of multiple fills (more cake!) and love this prompt and am all about the prompt what you love (which reminds me - I need to prompt some circus...) But just to say if you'd like to read an prev fill for this prompt while you're waiting for this year's fills to open, I wrote a little Sam POV fill for this one a few years back 😊

our mutual friend has been talking us up to the other and when we finally meet, we have to tell them that we’ve been in a feud for the last six years

Bwahaha, I love this!

Clint learns Natasha can shoot a bow

When they got pinned down, if it was him that was incapacitated, he always had great faith in her to get them out of a jam, just as he knew she believed the same thing. Unlike some others Clint could name, he and Natasha were actually as good as they seemed on paper, perhaps even better than the rumours suggested. Of course, he probably ought to have realised that, as well as he had come to know the Black Widow, she would always, always have one more trick up her sleeve that he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Her guns were out of ammo, no way to get to any more, at least not until they picked off the sniper on the next roof. Clint would have happily obliged, but his shoulder popped out of joint on the landing, meaning there was no way to launch his arrows successfully, maybe even at all.

When he saw Natasha with the bow in her hands, he probably shouldn’t have felt as shocked or nervous as he did...

(read more on AO3)


mayaa - more than happy to gift this to you, if you have an AO3 handle? :)

“He’s dead. Again.”

😂 (and in Tony Stark's voice)

The truth is, Clint Barton likes a trip to the spa as much as his partner does.

I keyed what I thought was my ex’s car only to be surprised when you come screaming towards me

OH MY GOSH, this is a perfect set up for shenanigans and I will read the hell out of this LOL

Inspired by: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-68779540

Volunteers, or volunteer and visitor/tourist, at a (small) museum/attraction that gets very few visitors or interest.

💘💘💘

Pop-tarts.

Imagine March Madness but with poptarts

Gentle Ways To Let Him Know You're Dating Each Other

(from archers_and_spies in the discord prompts channel; I instantly made a note of this when I saw it!)

Natasha storms into the room and throws a file onto Clint’s desk. The smack echoes around Delta’s shared office. “What is this?”

Clint sits reclined in his chair and stretches his arm out to take the file, a lethargic movement. He sighs before he opens it, scanning the contents as if he himself didn’t type every word himself. “This,” he replies tiredly, “is my formal letter of resignation from STRIKE Team: Delta.” He peeks at the paper again. “And my request to be reassigned.”

Natasha is not often stunned to the point of speechlessness, but she doesn’t know how to react to this. How he expects her to react. She had expected something: regret, sheepishness, or like, sorry Tash, I typed that out in my sleep and accidentally left it on Maria’s desk. Thanks for bringing it back, now we can put it in the shredder and forget about it forever.

Instead, this.

Read the rest on AO3

Character A's job is in HR or something like conducting security checks when people join their workplace (SHIELD?). They do this for Character B and, wow, B sounds like their kind of person, they would very much like to meet B! But company policy - and, y'know, morals and ethics - say nope, A can't use their security vetting powers for personal gain, stalking, etc. But THEN A bumps into B (at the work canteen or whatever) and that's allowed. So now A tries to get to know B, without being able to disclose that they already know, well, everything about them. (Or at least everything they disclosed.) If they manage to find out all the same info directly from B that'll cancel it out, right?

(Could be that B knows/finds out and is actually kinda flattered that after all that A still wanted to meet them.)

Meeting through following dracula daily

Inspired by gossip that Jeremy Renner has been cast in Knives Out 3 - Clint and/or Natasha cross paths with Benoit Blanc, either undercover or as themselves. Could be a brief encounter, trying to avoid him while a mess they're tangled up in also catches his interest, they encounter his partner…

Touch starved

I've been wanting this one too!!

Inspired by recent comics, which I haven't read but: POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR BLACK WIDOW & HAWKEYE 2024 COMIC AHEAD: Natasha living with (negotiating living with?) a venom type symbiote. Could be Gen, could be negotiating life with a symbiote AND a partner or two.

Highlight to read, or if text is too dark to read click on the following:

Click on the arrow to see what's written underneath

Natasha living with (negotiating living with?) a venom type symbiote. Could be Gen, could be negotiating life with a symbiote AND a partner or two.

Edited 2024-07-28 08:40 pm (UTC)

Sometimes never having an extraction plan goes sideways.

In which strike team delta are trying to get home after a mission but things keep going sideways. Bonus if its mundane problems, like the planes are grounded because of the weather, trains are delayed, a car they hotwire runs out of petrol…

yes!
grumpy Clint, and Nat having to put up with him but also trying to put him in a good mood.

‘Troubled’ young Natasha is sent to be a camp volunteer (or whatever they're called) as at a summer camp for kids from difficult backgrounds, to teach her responsibility and if she can help others she can help herself kind of thing. OR an adult Natasha signs up to work at a summer camp, as part of her own healing and to give back.

Enter Clint Barton, who's been a volunteer there already for a while (or may have similarly been originally ordered to work there like Nat). Everyone knows him, everyone gets on with him, he trains kids in archery and teaches them how to swim and grow in confidence, and he’s just. too. damn. nice.

Or role swap, and Clint is new here. He keeps stumbling and making mistakes, but Nat has been doing this for years and is super competent and Clint feels like an absolute fool around her.

Feel free to populate this AU with whatever other characters you like :)

ooooohh... that sounds like one for Franzi!!

Outsider POV or threesome: Woken up 3:45 by voices yelling outside my window. Turned out to be a couple in formal wear, literally standing in the road, who continued to yell back and forth at each other for quite some time, including [one] with, 'I love you!' and [the other] going back with, 'No, you don't!' Very sad that they can't make it work, but could they please have that conversation not outside our open windows at 4am?!

(From ultra_fic on discord!)

It is not unusual, Kate thinks, to be sound asleep at 3:45 am. She might be young and hot and all, but you know how you achieve that? Eight solid hours of sleep every night.

Thus, it’s more than a little irritating to be awoken not by the gentle waves of sunrise through her carefully arranged curtains, not by the special alarm clock that senses her REM cycles and plays dulcet twinkling music to peacefully rouse her, but by two absolute fucking idiots on the street. She rolls over, smashing the pillow over her head for a solid ten minutes, but to no avail. The window’s across the room, but they’re loud enough that it’s as if they’re yelling directly into her ear.

(And, fine—fine! Maybe the reason she can’t fall back asleep is because she’s deeply nosy and, regrettably, people yelling in the middle of the fucking night tend to have the juiciest stories. Like the time someone climbed into her downstairs neighbor’s window by mistake and then they fell in love. Or the time her upstairs neighbor pushed her ex out of the window in the middle of the night, naked, leading Kate to see way too much as he scurried down the fire escape.)

So, although she would much rather be asleep, it’s not that much of a hardship to roll out of bed, cross the room to the window facing the street, and lean against the window jamb. The air that drifts through smells of early morning: unfurling leaves, the East River, and yeast rising from the bakery around the corner. A thin orange line along the horizon hints at the sunrise still a few hours off.

It’s the picture of serenity—or, it would be, if not for the yelling.

“How could you say something like that?” Kate climbs out the window to her fire escape and identifies the speaker: a woman with a beautifully wrought pile of scarlet-bronze hair and a gorgeous periwinkle evening gown, which swirls around her in a chiffon cloud as she paces back and forth across the sidewalk. “What is wrong with you?”

She directs this at a man who stands on the other side of the empty street, his hands furiously fisted in his dark blond hair. He probably cut a flashier figure earlier in the evening, but now the cummerbund of his tux is askew and his bowtie hangs discarded around his neck. “What’s wrong with me?” he yells back, splaying a hand against his broad chest. “Nothing, Natasha! I’m fine!”

He is not, in Kate’s estimation; nor in Natasha’s, as she can surmise from the dramatic scoff that can probably be heard from Manhattan. “You’re drunk,” she points out, though her argument is undercut by the champagne bottle that dangles perilously from her accusatory hand.

This earns a laugh that pings in Kate’s brain. “At least that’s temporary,” he calls back. “In the morning, I won’t be drunk anymore, but you’ll still be the most stubborn fucking woman I’ve ever met in my life!”

Natasha emits an audible gulp of indignation. Kate, meanwhile, leans over the balcony to confirm—yep, the guy in the tux is totally the head of her co-op board. Clint is generally cool: he organizes the monthly rooftop barbecue and lets anyone use the archery target he’s got set up there, too. He’s usually the epitome of casual and easygoing; seeing him dressed up and frustrated in the middle of the night makes Kate feel like she’s walked onstage in the wrong scene of a play.

Naturally, while Kate’s been experiencing this revelation, Clint and Natasha have continued to argue, each drawing closer to the center of the street. (Whatever their deal is, they need to wrap it up before the buses start running.) Unfortunately, the proximity has not prompted them to turn the volume down. Natasha loudly refuses the label of stubborn, which doesn’t exactly help her case; Clint takes the opportunity to expound (at full volume) a laundry list of times wherein Natasha’s intractability has gotten them into trouble, “Including,” he finishes, “right now, since at this point I think you’ve woken up my whole damn building!”

Kate cranes her neck to see the floors above and below, but the fire escape is empty and the windows are dark, so everyone else must sleep with ear plugs. (Note to fucking self, she thinks.) She’s weighing the merits of announcing that yes, actually, at least one resident of the Quincy Street Co-op would really love them to shut up, when Natasha hollers, “Well, if I’m sooo stubborn, then I guess you didn’t mean it after all!”

From her vantage point, Kate has to squint to see Clint frown in confusion. His voice gets a bit closer to a normal volume. “What, that I love you?” In the shadows, Kate almost falls off the balcony in shock. Oblivious to this, Clint goes on, “Nat, of course I—”

“You don’t mean that,” Natasha insists. Her chignon gives up the ghost and unravels as she aggressively shakes her head. “You can’t—”

They’re within arm’s reach of each other now; in fact, Clint has gently removed Natasha’s champagne bottle and replaced it with his own hand. One would think this would be an ideal time to whisper, but fortunately for Kate, they haven’t quite gotten the memo. “I do and I can,” Clint vows, like he’s standing at an altar instead of in the middle of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I love everything about you, Natasha, up to and including this dress.” With surprising coordination, he spins her so her skirts flare like aster petals, then catches her in his arms. “I promise.”
This is, of course, where Natasha apparently remembers how to whisper, so Kate has to rely on lip reading. Considering that it initiates a pretty intense kiss, she assumes Natasha says I love you, too.

Applause filters down from windows on both sides of the street. “Thank god that’s over,” someone grumbles.

“Aw,” someone else coos, “but it was so sweet.”

“Not as sweet at sleep!”

Clint, finally realizing the show they’re putting on, has the grace to blush and wave. “Sorry, everyone,” he says, checking his watch and wincing. “Coffee and bagels on me today!”

Show over, Kate climbs back through her window and into bed. “Where’d you go?” her girlfriend mumbles, her movements and words blurred by sleep as she collects Kate into her arms. “Mm, you’re so cool.”

“Nowhere,” Kate says, curling into her warmth. She presses a kiss into the crook of America’s neck. “I love you,” she whispers, and drops back into the warm embrace of sleep.

Accidental marriage - through misunderstanding, for an Op, a paperwork mistake, living together for a certain length of time somewhere that then classes them as legally married… - and then deciding to stay married because it's convenient. (Can visit each other in hospital! Taxes! Medical insurance! Can't testify against each other!)

And eventually realising they wouldn't want to be married to anyone else anyway.

A classic - Familiar setting challenge: put the character(s) in a place you've worked, lived, or travelled to.

This post on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/be-compromised/757071228999778304

To summarise: you guys think Clint and Natasha ever got mocked for being called strike team delta? as in, STD?

I have wondered about that so many times😆

Natasha volunteers or works at events (conventions, award shows, event planning, whatever you fancy). She meets the disaster that is Clint Barton and is NOT impressed. (Could be good reasons - maybe she's having a bad day and stressed; he's nervous?)

She then discovers this AMAZING new book / film / music / whatever and recommends it to everyone. This writer / actor / musician / ? is THE BEST.

Some time later she's at another event and manages to book this person, or wrangle herself into looking after / escorting this amazing person so she can meet them. Only it’s Clint Barton. Because he works under a pseudonym. Natasha has to reconcile how someone who can create such amazing things is actually human, and recover from how they got off on the wrong foot. It may or may not be a problem that she also thinks he's hot.

(Inspired by the YA novel Unconventional by Maggie Harcourt, but really in general by 'the unfamous person meets famous person without knowing they're famous and it comes back to bite them' trope)

Edited 2024-07-28 09:21 pm (UTC)

One of them is de-aged. They can't be turned back, so they're going to have to grow up again the long way. (Your choice as to if they still have their memories or are completely de-aged as in they can’t remember any of their past.)

The other has to choose whether to also be de-aged and grow up with them, be their friend (and maybe more if history repeats), or stay an adult and protect them (which might have to be from a distance?). Because they both know all too well how vulnerable children are, and had shitty childhoods, and want better for the person they love this time around.

this is such a delicious prompt, I've already written almost 1k words in reply, and sketched out an idea to spin it into a series.

“You have heart.”

Something a bit dark (for me): Clint never actually broke entirely free from Loki's control / still had lingering issues until Loki died. Or until the stone that powered the tesseract was destroyed.

YES! so many opportunities with this one! I am all about a DarkClint and/or Loki and Clint fic