Fandom: THE AVENGERS
Pairing: Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill, Phil Coulson/Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov/OCs
Length: 9807
Author on LJ: waldorph
Author Website: At AO3
Why this must be read: Because it incorporates the myths, the legends, and more importantly, the *reality* of Natasha, then leaves it up to the reader to decide which is which. It's *gorgeous* and hits all the right beats

These are not all lies:

She’s Anastasia’s great-granddaughter, last of the Romanovs. Natalia Alianovna Romanova (“You’re joking.” “Look, that is the Romanov nose.” “That was lifetimes ago, and they found her body.” “But you flinched, and they have not proven that it was her, yet.”).

They call her паука, for her too-long limbs and the way she weaves a deadly web even as a child. Little spider.

She cannot be unmade, because there is nothing about her that is concrete. She has no personality that cannot be shifted, nothing but the desire to survive.

Her mother was an agent who retired, got married, had three children. Two she was to be allowed to keep, but the third was to become an agent, like her mother. It was the price one paid for freedom.

She is Anastasia, modified by the Communists to live forever. There has always been a Black Widow.

Her first kill was a drug lord who crossed the KGB. He took her to his bed and he never left it.

If they had put her in the field like they were supposed to, instead of handing the assignment to an older, more experienced agent, the Counter-terrorist Operation on Chechnya would not have happened.

When she is 14 she has three husbands. They start calling her the Black Widow because when she is 15 she attends three funerals dressed in black, and dabs at her eyes as her husband is lowered into the ground each time.

She takes to characters well, too well. They have to unmake her each time.

She never tries to run.

The Black Widow was an ordinary Russian teenager until, on a school field trip, she was bitten by a radioactive spider. The cuffs around her wrists are actually to disguise the fact that her venom is natural, and when she’s done with her victims she wraps them in her web and feeds off their blood.

She never leaves a debt unpaid. If she cannot repay it, sleep with a gun at your bedside (or don’t, because the likelihood you’ll have the opportunity to use it against her is naught).

American studios hear about this master assassin in Russia, coming out of the post-Cold War depths, and they want to make her their villain. No one ever comes to the casting calls, and screenwriters refuse to touch the project.



RED

Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Gen (First 3 parts; last is obviously Sasuke/Naruto/Sakura)
Length: 4,100
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: spoilers for the beginning of the series
Author on LJ:
Author's Website: Shadow_of_Quill on AO3
Summary: N/A

Why this must be read: Naruto is a series that has several major ongoing plot points, with one of the most important explored here: Naruto's ostracized from Konoha because of the circumstances of his birth. In this fic, Naruto's marked as a monster because he has no daemon. The stories focus on how others react to that, specfically Sasuke and Sakura. The emotional impact is high especially in the second part of the series, which covers Naruto and Sasuke's infamous school scene. Overall this series deals with Naruto's soul and how people think he doesn't have one, which fits effortlessly into canon in a way that had me engaged from beginning to end.

Although I loved this series, I have to warn for two things. The first being that knowledge of canon is probably mandatory to understand the concepts in this fic. The second is that the author labels this as gen, but there's a clear Team 7 threesome endgame. As a Sasuke/Naruto fan I would've preferred advance notice, but I still enjoyed it.

Daemonic Naruto

Note: Another WIP that's kind of not exactly a WIP. It's a collection of shorts, all sort of connected but also easily read independantly of each other. The exception is the fourth, which really stems from the second. Actually, my favorite was the second: A Simple Slip. If you know Naruto, it's a great fic.

Fandom: Person of Interest
Pairing: John Reese/ Harold Finch
word count: 3200
Author on LJ: dien
Author Website: unknown

Why this must be read:

When Harold Finch was kidnapped by nefarious hacker Root in the season one cliffhanger episode, John Reese did everything in his power to find and rescue his employer. Dien wrote one of the best and most touching of the follow up stories I’ve read. It combines excellent characterization, h/c and the definite feeling of love that Reese has for Finch.

“Troubleshooting” is actually a missing scene, starting right after Reese finds Finch in the train station where Root had taken him. Reese spirits him out of the station and onto a train heading north, still tense and anxious after his forty eight hour search.

Finch slept all the way to Baltimore. Reese gave himself a migraine with tension, with waiting: waiting for the conductors to squint at his tickets and say there was a problem (there wasn't), waiting at every stop for police officers to board the train, waiting for the announcement over the intercom that the train needed to halt, waiting for an excuse to launch himself back into action again. He studied the window, the frame and the emergency release. He could carry Finch easily, he was sure; if they had to, the window was a feasible escape route.

Dien’s Reese cares deeply for Finch, but hesitates to show his emotions or his feelings, understanding that Finch is also reticent in that regard. But the story ends with the reader realizing that Finch appreciates and cares just as deeply for Reese.

Troubleshooting