#flipping legacies

[rubythecrimsonwriter]

Flipping Legacies, chapter 7 part 1

previous chapters can be found on ao3!

Natasha arrives back at the safehouse with Jason and fast food in hand. She hands out the variety pack of burgers and fries, plows through two burgers in under ten minutes, and makes her escape to change.

It has been a long day.

She changes back into the sweats, tank top, and silk robe that she’d been in last night and takes a moment to just breathe. Confronting Batman and Agent A, corralling the kid, running after Jason—it’s been a long day.

She stands in her doorway and listens to Drakov extolling the virtues of one of his knives to Damian, who she can’t see, but the fact that he’s being quiet means that he’s probably engaged. And Clint, very quietly: “I was never supposed to be a hero.”

Jason says nothing, but the air is charged.

“I’m a carnie, or an assassin, or a mercenary, or a government drone—not a hero. Was never supposed to be a hero. And then a portal opened up and Loki turned my heart to ice and my will to his, and Nat had to break me out again. And then another portal opened up over Manhattan and I said I could fly a plane, for some fucking reason, when Captain America shows up and says we need to go. And he just looked at Nat and she did her little chin lift that means so much and yet so little, you know the one?”

Jason croaks a laugh. Natasha smiles to herself a little. Nice to know she can still befuddle Clint sometimes.

“Yeah, and then Captain Fucking America nods and says let’s go. Like he just needs the word of a former KGB assassin to trust the word of the freshly un-brainwashed assassin. Like, what the fuck?”

“What the fuck,” Jason agrees, sounding like he’s sitting on a laugh.

“And then there was an alien invasion,” Clint says. “And I thought, ‘you know, I don’t think this week could get any weirder,’ and then I’m being called everything from stupid for being the only baseline human on a team of enhanced people—from technologically enhanced, to genetically enhanced, to being a fucking alien—thanks, Thor—and like. Fair. I also think I’m stupid for, uh, accidentally signing onto this circus—shut it—“

Jason’s laughing.

“I’m a carnie, I know exactly what a circus is like, and the Avengers have it all!” Clint sounds indignant. “But I’m being called stupid and badass in the same breath and then there’s the word ‘hero’ and I’m busy looking around for Captain America. I can’t say a damn thing, because it’s ‘bad for image’ and ‘we have enough issues, Hawkass, stop making my job harder’ and—well, you get the picture. So I kept my opinions to myself and thought that those people calling me a hero were stupid. And then I met Kate.”

Kate, Natasha knows, is a damn good hero. If a little rough around the edges. Which is why the callsign Hawkeye suits her down to the ground. She also takes great glee in yanking on Clint’s worldview, which is always hilarious to watch.

“And I realized that you can’t call yourself a hero. Maybe you can’t see it. Apparently I saved someone and did something badass during the Battle of Manhattan and Kate idolized me. She’d already been in archery and martial arts and after the Battle, she took it up to ten, and then I found this idiot teenage girl with a bow and arrow and a thousand dollar jacket wandering around Bronx and doing a good job almost getting herself killed. And of course I pulled her ass out of the fire, and told her to stop being stupid, and this girl had so many stars in her eyes she might as well have had a couple of galaxies hanging out in there, but she tried so hard to play it cool.”

Kate did not play it cool. Natasha remembers meeting Kate the day after. Kate was cool like a raging bonfire. Kate was not cool. Funny as hell, but not cool.

“And she followed me home and showed up on my doorstep and demanded training because she was going right back out there whether I trained her or not,” Clint says.

And now she’s the most dangerous seventeen year old girl on the eastern seaboard, Natasha thinks, grinning.

“And she knows me now. She knows that I’m not a hero, I’m just a guy that’s going to sit there and say, ‘I have this skillset. This is what needs to be done. I’m the guy that can do it. No one else around can, so let’s do it.’ And apparently that’s how that works.”

There’s a long silence, and Jason finally asks, “Was there a point to this, or is today Therapy Day and I’m the mannequin everyone’s talking to?”

“I knew I was forgetting something,” Clint says to himself, and Natasha giggles quietly. Jason snorts. “The point is that there’s a shitton of fuckups like me that get seen as heroes for some fucking reason. You have a special skillset, you see a need, you’re going to do it, damn the consequences. That’s why heroes are so controversial, because we’re needed, but we don’t work within limits as defined by laws or morals or whatever. I work with the Hulk, I’ve been brainwashed, I’ve been every bad guy in the books. Natasha’s KGB, her job was seduction and assassination and gathering information and toppling regimes, and she’s damn good at that. Tony was called the Merchant of Death. He’s a damn good weapons inventor. Batman might not call you a hero, but Crime Alley does. Natasha sees an Avenger in you. We all did, frankly, when she showed us the baby she tripped over.”

“Hey,” Jason says mildly.

“Nat’s a hundred and three, you’re a baby,” Clint says blithely.

Jason chokes. “A hundred—“

“And three,” she agrees, stepping back into the dining nook. “Can’t wait to be a hundred and thirteen, I’m going to start claiming I’m a teenager and watch all the double takes go in the opposite direction.”

Clint guffaws.

“Did you think I was joking about immortal assassins?” Natasha asks, curious.

Jason shakes his head. “I mean—Bucky Barnes. That was proof enough. I thought, maybe you were in your fifties and got recruited in the 70s. Twenty years is plenty for needing the kind of bloody revenge you talked about, not—“

“Almost eighty,” Natasha says, not unkindly. She grabs her tea and some blackberry jam and starts preparing it. “Did you want some?”

“I—yes, please.”

Drakov, in the living room, also requests tea. Natasha goes through the motions of making tea for three fairly quickly, snagging a jar of honey and some milk and bringing it all back to the table. “In the nook, Drakov,” she says. Clint gives her a puzzled look, and then realizes as Drakov comes back into the nook, Damian in tow.

“Your sneaky Russian brainwaves,” he accuses cheerfully, passing the honey.

“Clint,” Natasha says, very fondly, “you’re deaf.”

Jason hides his giggles in his teacup.

[choccy-milky]

modern AU seb and clora's first interaction 📘📗 (and by modern AU i actually mean super trope-filled high school romance set in the 80's/90's LOL)

[peachducy]

Harmony

[boxdstars]

indomitable human spirit versus indomitable hater aura

i love clora a whole lot that’s my daughter in law from my mutuals side @choccy-milky

[welldressedvillain]

SHE'S GONNA BE A PILOT

TECH WOULD BE SO PROUD

[noelles-legacy]

A little context…

During one of the main quests with Sebastian, him and Ominis argue about something in the undercroft. While they were doing that I figured out that I could use Transformation on the boxes and benches in the area and turn them into random things. So while they were having a heated little argument I was messing around, chasing rabbits🐇 and toads🐸, and overall making a huge mess of the place, completely entranced by the fact that this was possible.

It was a moment that was so stupid I had to draw it, it’s been on the back burner of my projects for a bit and I finally had the motivation to finish it, so here it is 😅🎃

[the-inheritance-games]

I’m babysitting and I got bored and decided to line up all the silhouettes so far, and I think it was the greatest idea I’ve had yet.

btw before anyone ask, ALL I did was line up all the cards so they were all the same size and drop fill all of them on a different layer, and lined them up again next to each other. I also changed the heights a little because it looked like they were standing at different distances away from the hypothetical camera also just bc it felt right. I also filled in lyras hair bc as someone who gets greasy stringy hair it annoys me so baaaddd. I didn’t really change anything else though

edit: I’m indecisive 🤷‍♀️

[ponfarrdraws]

WIP. me & @ceridwenannywl came to the same conclusion that Ominis is popsicle-coded. I want to do a whole series of Ominis using Sebastian as his personal space heater.

[pocketfullofsimshine]

flip aged up! / we spent basically all of our money & built him a small barn :)

[syn0vial]

boba watches old holodramas, confirmed

[fizzytoo]

adrien and rua take amaya to meet rua's side of the family! rua's nephew, broderick, makes his introductions too!

[rubythecrimsonwriter]

Flipping Legacies, middle/end part of Chapter 8, yes this is out of order shush

Snacks are churros grabbed from a street vendor, mostly because they smelled divine while passing by. Natasha grabs enough for six, plus a few extra. Between the super soldiers, the immortals, and the growing children, someone will eat them, she’s sure.

Arms full of churros, she lets herself into the apartment and holds the door open for Nightwing. Drakov’s head pops up from the breakfast nook at the second set of footsteps.

“Drakov, Nightwing,” Natasha introduces shortly. “Nightwing, one of my first trainers and the only one left alive, Drakov, also known as the Winter Soldier or Bucky Barnes.”

Nightwing slows for a second and visibly winces. “...how is Captain America taking that?”

“Mm,” Natasha hums with a mouthful of churro, passing a bag to Drakov.

“Badly,” Drakov says dryly.

“He doesn’t know Drakov is here right now,” Natasha says.

Clint exits the bathroom and works his way down the hall. About halfway down the hall, he registers the vigilante that doesn’t live there and starts grinning.

Natasha raises an eyebrow.

Nightwing catches the look and turns around. Natasha edges her way around because she desperately wants to catch this entire interaction.

Sue her. She’s a spy. Nosy is literally her job description.

Nightwing beams. It’s the only proper word for it.

Clint launches himself at the vigilante, and what follows can only be described as a casual roughhouse. It’d be deadly for most anyone else facing either of them. It’s fast, full strength, and utterly silent.

They break apart as fast as they started, grinning, neither out of breath. They’re both grinning like loons.

“Churro?” Nightwing offers.

“Fuck yes,” Clint says.

This is a normal interaction. Alright. Natasha is not asking.

“I gotta know,” Drakov says, amused. “How long have you two known each other?”

Clint smirks, a bit. Oh. Oh no. Bozhe moy.

“Your call, my dude,” Clint says. “I’m not the one with a secret identity.”

Natasha honestly forgot that no one but her and JARVIS had put everything together to then threaten Batman in the daytime.

“I’ve known him,” Nightwing says, with a deliberateness that speaks volumes, “for longer than Batman’s had Robin.”

Natasha very carefully does not choke. Clint does.

She pounds him on the back while watching Drakov, whose eyebrows have nearly hit his hairline.

“You do realize that you can’t be saying that to just anyone, right?” Drakov says.

“He was trained by Batman,” Natasha says dryly. “I’m pretty sure that’s a challenge to say, come discover my secret identity, I dare you.”

Nightwing laughs. “If Clint reported my involvement with his mission, I’ll eat Batman’s cowl after a bad night.”

“Of course I fucking didn’t,” Clint coughed out. “I would have been laughed right back into jail if I reported a fucking nine year old doing anything but flips on a trampoline.”

Natasha exchanges a look of resigned horror with Drakov. Her own words from the previous morning haunt her: Imagine if Clint couldn’t turn off the assassin like us. So lethal, so graceful, so talented, so obvious. So ripe for HYDRA’s picking, way back in 1996. Imagine if Clint didn’t have Coulson as a handler, who was notorious for going back for his agents no matter what and had the Director of SHIELD’s ear.

Coulson would have believed Clint. Which meant Coulson was not his handler.

Oops. Agent Barton had a tragic accident on a mission. We have to bury an empty casket, her own words echo back at her again.

“Where was your handler.” The words basically fall out of her mouth without permission.

Clint does a double take at her. She doesn’t know what she looks like, but based on the fact that she’s swiftly relieved of everything she might drop, she must look like she’s about to pass out.

“I ditched him,” Clint admits, grabbing her by the shoulders and shoving her into a chair. “Considering I later wound up killing the guy they sent me to protect, I’m okay with that mark on my record. Unfortunate failure is better than intentional sabotage.”

That old Winter Soldier has had his fun, but he’s a little too feisty.

Nightwing quirks a smile at her. It looks rueful. “However bad you think it is, I can guarantee it was worse.”

“Dick,” Clint hisses. Natasha knows it’s his name. It’s said as an insult.

Natasha buries her head in her arms. “How close did you come to being serumed up and brainwashed into doing some shadowy underground totalitarian government’s bidding?”

Nightwing rocks back on his heels. “Actually, you’re right on the money. How did you do that?”

Natasha pops her head up so fast her eyesight can’t compensate. “You. Don’t talk.”

She grabs Clint. “Where the fuck was Coulson, and why didn’t you refuse a handler that would deliberately fail to catch you?”

Clint looks like he’s doing complicated math in his head and he’s losing track of the numbers. “I’m definitely missing something,” he finally says.

“She’s talking about the fact that if the Black Widow was willing to run with a normal human, and have the normal human not be dead weight, then the normal human would be utterly spectacular as a super soldier,” Drakov says levelly.

He’s just. Like. Us. But he’d be better if he was serumed up and had all five senses fully working.

Clint and Nightwing exchange a glance. She knows that glance. That’s a, wow, shit was even more fucked than I originally thought it was glance.

“Oh my god,” she says faintly.

“It’s a long story,” Clint admits. “And not one we really have time for, or, uh. Patience. On the plus side, we killed them, their undead serumed monsters, their bosses, and like ninety-five percent of the underlings, too, so unless they reinvent the wheel--”

“They did,” Nightwing says.

“—we’ll be—I’m sorry, what was that?”

“They did.”

“What?”

“They revived the Court of Owls,” Nightwing says patiently. “And Batman and I took care of them. Again.”

“Oh, well--”

“And so did Robin, again.”

Natasha looks at Drakov despairingly.

Clint opens his mouth and shuts it. He looks at the ceiling and mutters something Natasha doesn’t quite catch, but makes Drakov snort.

Nightwing has a smile on his face that’s a threat. It lingers in the corners of his mouth, around the edges of his domino. It’s a smile that Coulson would be envious of. “Gotham’s a little...much for the Mainlanders. But Clint’s welcome to run with the Bats anytime. Birds of a feather flock together, right? Especially the ones that get stalked to be brainwashed assassins.”

Natasha puts her head back onto the table and gives quiet thanks that even Hydra wasn’t willing to fuck around with Gotham’s brand of crazy.

She pushes back from the table and stands up. “You crazy kids have fun. Drakov, don’t enable them. I’m going for a run.”

“Bye!” Nightwing calls after her. “Don’t forget a rebreather!”

She shakes one as she escapes out the door in response. Get her out of here. Now.

[aquamarineglow]

Rook and Bishop probably dislike Easter because the last time they did an egg hunt, it went badly.

[matchalovertrait]

Àngel and Dulce, the cutest siblings

[arcadewonder]

cec took lil out for an evening walk in order to meet her final set of neighbors who had recently returned home from their travels abroad. 

[buglaur]

a nice night coming to an end, with a bonus 50§ from roman’s pocket