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No Good Men

Hill handed the failure-in-the-making off to Rhodes, washed her hands of the entire affair, and boarded a jet back to Washington. With any luck, there would be better news waiting for her there.

Clint Barton was expected back from Europe today. And, reportedly, he’d made contact with Romanoff.

Hill reserved the right to question on how literal that contact had been. Based on her own unfortunately vivid secondhand exposure, she knew two things: one, Clint Barton had a thing for oral. And two, he had an even bigger thing for Natasha Romanoff.

Frequently in tandem.

Workplace affairs weren’t uncommon at SHIELD. They were officially discouraged, vaguely condemned, but ordinarily—they were ignored. People needed outlets, and most coped how they could. 

But when she’d walked in on Barton and Romanoff in that locker room, it hadn’t been just another workplace indiscretion. It had been personal. Laura Hayes—now Barton—was Hill’s friend. Not in the weekend-wine-and-texting kind of way, but in the quiet, mutual-respect-under-fire sort of way. Laura had been a sharp analyst with the kind of gut instincts Hill actually trusted.

Shame she couldn’t apply them to her own marriage.

Hill’s hand had been on the phone that day, halfway through dialing, walking—no, practically running—out of Barton and Romanoff’s impromptu love nest. Thankfully, she’d managed to hold off on the impulse long enough for Natasha to seek her out.

That had surprised her. She’d expected Barton to make the effort to defend his marriage, if not his honor. But instead he’d sent the affair to clean up after him. That also stirred something she didn’t want to name—an old, uninvited (and probably entirely inappropriate) echo of her own parents.

But anyway, Romanoff had come to bargain.

Hill had kept her cards close during that first conversation. She listened, but offered nothing in return. She said she’d think about it. Then Romanoff walked, and Hill did think.

She thought about Laura, who’d given up a promising career to play homemaker in the woods with a man whose loyalty couldn’t survive a mission rotation. She thought about Romanoff, a woman who specialized in dismantling men and had now apparently also taken up doing it recreationally.

And she thought about Barton.

Barton, who, in every way that mattered, reminded Hill of her father. She didn’t hate him. That would have required the energy. She simply saw him for what he was—a man, doing what men did. Why did every woman have to learn that truth for herself? Some later, some the hard way, but all eventually. Her mother had. Now Laura would, too.

And Hill—caught, as ever, in the middle—wondered if maybe, just this once, she could do something about it.

She thought longer. More deliberately.

And slowly, carefully, the answer came. Yes, she realized. She could do something. She could do the thing she’d wished someone had done for her when she was a teenager listening to her parents scream in the kitchen. She could intervene.

So she did not tell Laura.

Instead, she decided to teach Barton and Romanoff a lesson.

First order of business: disband their notorious little STRIKE Team. Coulson made his usual polite objections, but Hill didn’t waste time entertaining them. Phil Coulson belonged to the second category of men: well-meaning, but completely declawed. He posed no threat.

Barton, on the other hand, got the message directly.

Hill pulled him into her office and laid it out in terms he couldn’t misread. One twitch in the wrong direction—figurative or otherwise—and she’d be on the phone to Laura before he could zip up. She didn’t have much more than that single locker room encounter, but the guilt was written all over him, uppercase and underlined. He knew what he’d done, and at his core, he was a spineless coward.

Romanoff was more complicated.

Hill hadn’t known what to do with her at first. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to deal with her at all. Romanoff reminded her of all the women her father had cycled through, and she’d grown up resenting those women. But eventually, Hill reached a decision. Flawed as she was, even Natasha Romanoff deserved a chance at redemption.

She would be kept close, under direct supervision. There would be no more freelancing, no informal favors, no mysterious side ops. Hill would assign every mission personally, and she would know exactly where Black Widow was, and what she was doing, at any given time.

If Romanoff was going to chase men, then men it would be. Let her perfect the thing she was so eager to use.

Again. And again. And again.

And—would you believe it?—it actually worked.

Barton fell back in line, Romanoff kept her hands (and other parts) occupied elsewhere, and about a year later, Hill received a breathless phone call from Laura. She was glowing, thrilled, talking a mile a minute about how good things had been lately between her and Clint.

What could it be, Maria? Do they serve different food in the canteen these days?

Hill had laughed, made some non-answer. Then Laura had said she was pregnant again. Clint didn’t know yet, but she just had to tell someone.

Hill sincerely congratulated her. After the call, she also congratulated herself. Sometimes people had to be forced into their happy endings, it was as simple as that.

Bolstered by this rare and quiet success, she even thought (for the first time in years) about calling her mother. She would say something meaningful. Maybe she could still make a difference there too.

But she never made that call, because by then, the Stark situation was starting to unfold, and Hill didn’t have time for personal resolutions anymore.

She just hoped to God that Barton brought good news. She could use the lift, and caffeine had stopped working on her years ago.

But Clint Barton did not bring good news. 

“You let her go,” Hill said, and it wasn’t even a question. The truth clung to him like a bad smell. He looked like a man awaiting execution.

“Tell me how badly you screwed it up,” she said, then caught herself before saying how badly you screwed her. But that part was implied. They’d probably done it like animals.

Ao3

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Nothing beats the feeling when you start getting comments on every fic in a fandom or ship from one person, and it’s clear that they’re going on a fic-binge. 

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Love, Lies And Other Weapons

She’d expected him to show up eventually, JARVIS' digital invisibility cloak be damned. Clint knew how to reroute his searches through channels Tony’s AI couldn’t control and truth be told, she would’ve been a little disappointed if he hadn’t at least tried.

And therein lay the problem.

She needed to get the idea of him out of her head before it landed her in real trouble. This kind of sentimentality was what got people killed. Clint was a former colleague she’d slept with a few times—nothing more. Empires fell; people changed. If she managed to walk away, then that’s what they could stay: just two former colleagues who ended up on different sides of the negotiating table.

Tony Stark was on the winning side. Her defection made perfect sense from a purely self-preservation standpoint. But the reality was that she’d left because of Clint, and she would have stayed if he’d given her a reason to.

But had he really not seen it? How she was being sidelined, tossed from one humiliating honeytrap to the next, all while he played happy families on a goddamn farm? Did he really think everything was okay as long as he dropped back in for the occasional fuck in a motel, like she'd just be there, waiting for the scraps to fall from his table?

Natasha wasn't the jealous type. She didn't want what he had with Laura—the Midwestern fantasy, the white picket fence delusion, the little miniature nightmares running around screaming like wild animals. That life would have been a mausoleum for her. But that didn’t mean she was fine being treated like some kind of emotional pressure valve whenever Clint Barton decided he needed to remember he still had blood in his veins.

And yet, she’d slept with him again.

She could tell herself it had been strategic, just a way to keep Clint looking at her instead of digging into places she didn’t want him to go. And maybe, on some level, that had been part of it. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

Natasha exhaled sharply, a headache blooming behind her eyes. Anger was good fuel, but only if properly refined. This wasn’t even righteous anger. It was tangled and bitter and turned inward, and most of it wasn’t even for Clint.

She was furious with herself.

Because she knew better. She’d been better. And still, she’d folded like paper the second he reached for her. This had to stop.

She didn’t want to be angry with Clint. She’d already ended up the idiot running around after a married man like she hadn’t been trained to see disaster coming. She wasn’t about to add insult to injury by turning into the bitter ex-mistress now that it had all come apart. Continue here.

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the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish you guys could see this

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Love, Lies And Other Weapons

She’d expected him to show up eventually, JARVIS' digital invisibility cloak be damned. Clint knew how to reroute his searches through channels Tony’s AI couldn’t control and truth be told, she would’ve been a little disappointed if he hadn’t at least tried.

And therein lay the problem.

She needed to get the idea of him out of her head before it landed her in real trouble. This kind of sentimentality was what got people killed. Clint was a former colleague she’d slept with a few times—nothing more. Empires fell; people changed. If she managed to walk away, then that’s what they could stay: just two former colleagues who ended up on different sides of the negotiating table.

Tony Stark was on the winning side. Her defection made perfect sense from a purely self-preservation standpoint. But the reality was that she’d left because of Clint, and she would have stayed if he’d given her a reason to.

But had he really not seen it? How she was being sidelined, tossed from one humiliating honeytrap to the next, all while he played happy families on a goddamn farm? Did he really think everything was okay as long as he dropped back in for the occasional fuck in a motel, like she'd just be there, waiting for the scraps to fall from his table?

Natasha wasn't the jealous type. She didn't want what he had with Laura—the Midwestern fantasy, the white picket fence delusion, the little miniature nightmares running around screaming like wild animals. That life would have been a mausoleum for her. But that didn’t mean she was fine being treated like some kind of emotional pressure valve whenever Clint Barton decided he needed to remember he still had blood in his veins.

And yet, she’d slept with him again.

She could tell herself it had been strategic, just a way to keep Clint looking at her instead of digging into places she didn’t want him to go. And maybe, on some level, that had been part of it. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

Natasha exhaled sharply, a headache blooming behind her eyes. Anger was good fuel, but only if properly refined. This wasn’t even righteous anger. It was tangled and bitter and turned inward, and most of it wasn’t even for Clint.

She was furious with herself.

Because she knew better. She’d been better. And still, she’d folded like paper the second he reached for her. This had to stop.

She didn’t want to be angry with Clint. She’d already ended up the idiot running around after a married man like she hadn’t been trained to see disaster coming. She wasn’t about to add insult to injury by turning into the bitter ex-mistress now that it had all come apart. Continue here.

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The Only Way Out Is Through

“I was sick of being benched by Hill,” Natasha said. “A better offer came along. I took it. Don't make this harder than it has to be.”

Then her gaze dropped to his fingers still wrapped tight around her forearm. “For old times’ sake I'll give you one last opportunity to take your hands off me.”

Clint let go. Not because she told him to, not out of compliance or defeat, but because they were standing on the edge of something volatile, and he didn't want to be the one to light the match.

He didn’t step back, though. He stayed close, right in her space. If she wanted to pretend none of this mattered, she could damn well do it while looking him in the eye.

“So we’re just dumping this on Maria Hill now? Why stick it out for so long, only to jump ship the second I’m—”

His voice caught, and he hated that it showed.

“—the second I’m not even there. Christ, Nat. You didn’t say a word to me. Not one. Goddamn word. What the fuck is really going on? And spare me the bullshit. I know you better than that.”

He stared at her, daring her to say it. To own it.

What she did instead was yank her arm free.

“I told you,” she said, anger now biting into her voice. “The same thing I told Fury and Hill and Coulson when I defected. The deal-breaker that you all seem to have so conveniently forgotten.”

When confusion passed over his face, she clarified.

“I'm not a prostitute.”

Clint flinched, just a little. Not physically, but somewhere deep where it counted.

“I never said you were,” he shot back, defensive before he could stop himself. Because, Jesus , did she really think that little of him?

“You’re my best friend, Natasha. There is no one, no one else I trust as much as you.”

And that included his wife. That included the mother of his children, the woman he’d built a life with. That was the part he couldn’t say out loud, but fuck, he’d thought she knew. Ao3

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“Natasha, Barton has been compromised”

Wheh I am stuck in the middle of an art block I usually try to look at my favourite movies and draw what I love; so here’s a quick Avengers (2012) study - done with procreate - from the Clintasha fight scene

>> VIDEO PROCESS HERE

Enjoy!

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Avengers AU: Wild West Clintasha

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"Write for yourself"

Brother, I literally have more than 2 million words sitting in my drafts folder instead of posted on AO3.

I write for myself. I post for community interaction.

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Frontline

He’d started all this firmly on Tony’s side. How could he not? Even setting aside their friendship—and that was no small thing—he’d been there. He’d been the one on that C-17, boots in the sand, hauling Tony out of that godforsaken desert. He’d stood by for the intake forms, for the debrief, for the first round of medical evaluations that laid out, in sterile language, exactly what had been done to his friend.

The media had always tried to clean up the narrative, gloss over the ugliness, turn it into some blockbuster origin story, something with explosions and a redemption arc set to a rock soundtrack. But Rhodey had held the real reports in his own hands and had seen the marks on Tony’s body with his own eyes. That wasn’t rebirth. It was three months of documented torture.

“So what? Let them think it was just a set piece in the Hollywood Hills,” Tony had once said, remote in hand, watching one of those overproduced exposés from the couch, back when he still needed help getting up from it. “Let them think whatever they want. If people see wine in the water, it’s probably because they’ve never had to bleed in it.”

He’d said it with a shrug, like the joke made it sting less. Rhodey had laughed back then. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Because Tony had come back from Afghanistan with a crapload of baggage, and it wasn’t the kind you could unpack, label, and move on from. He’d seen this sort of thing hollow men out from the inside. And he wasn’t thinking about the quiet ones, the guys who sat with thousand-yard stares and ghosts behind their eyes. He was thinking about the ones who came back angry, who, sooner or later went full wazoo with a gun, convinced they were still in the sandbox, drawing hard lines between Ali Baba and the boogeyman.

Tony had come home from that cave changed—driven, relentless, and burning with a sense of moral purpose that looked good in a headline but left a body count in the margins. Rhodey had spent years cleaning up after him; some of those messes were public, some had been buried so deep they’d never get to see the light of day. He’d done it out of loyalty, out of friendship, out of belief that maybe Tony could change the system from the inside.

But this time, he had gone too far. There were lines you didn’t cross, not even if you wore the suit. Especially not then.

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Residual Radiation

In Bruce's estimation, Iron Man was rapidly transitioning from strategic asset to unacceptable liability. Tony was loose end with a drinking problem and a god complex, playing defense contractor in open airspace with all the subtlety of a meteor strike.

And they wouldn’t let that stand. Not for much longer.

There was a personal sting in it, too. Tony, for all his reckless brilliance, had (so far) somehow managed to evade the more intimately upsetting layers of institutional vendetta. Maybe it was the charm, or the PR team, or the money (likely a bit of all three). Tony didn’t seem to need to operate within the system—he was a system, complete with its own rules of engagement.

Bruce hadn’t even been offered legal representation when he’d first come to, groggy and concussed, in a reinforced containment cell. No statement, no rights, no Miranda, just a battery of tests, a dozen loaded rifles, and enough surveillance to make Orwell choke. But they’d fucked that one up spectacularly. They hadn’t understood the underlying biology. Back then, they’d still thought the Other Guy was a switch you could simply flip off.

Well, they knew better now.

The same public that cheered for Iron Man wouldn’t cross the street to stop Bruce Banner from bleeding out. To them, Tony was a libertarian fever dream with a glowing reactor core. Bruce was the monster under the bed, a thing that could be used to scare kids into behaving.

At the end of the day, Tony could take off the suit, hang it up, pour himself a scotch, and be a genius billionaire philanthropist again by morning. Iron Man was a costume—a brilliant, terrifying, technological marvel of a costume—but a costume nonetheless.

What Bruce had was a disease. Ao3

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“WRITE IT BADLY. Write it badly, write it badly, write it badly, write it badly. Stop what you’re doing, open a Word document, put a pencil on some paper, just get the idea out of your head. Let it be good later. Write it down now. Otherwise it will die in there.”

— Brandon Sanderson on overcoming writer’s block to create a first draft as a professional author

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Clintasha (AU) | I owe him a debt ↳Clint will do anything for Natasha... Anything.

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black widow vol 6 #3

written by mark waid and chris samnee, art by chris samnee, colour by matthew wilson.

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someone here asked if i could draw more black widow and the answer is yes i can

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Tony Stark turns his back on SHIELD during the events of Iron Man 2, no longer interested in playing by anyone’s rules but his own.

How far can he push it?

And how far will anyone go to stop the rise of Superior Iron Man?

Ao3