Out of the bone white afternoon by lorax (R)

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Fandom: AVENGERS
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
Length: 7,092 words
Author on LJ: sullensiren
Author Website: @ AO3
Why this must be read:

Sharp and evocative look at Clint and Natasha and their relationship before, during, and after the movie, with a really great Natasha voice.

Natasha knew Clint, but she didn't know the pieces to pick out and put together to assemble the man he used to be, to see where the thing Loki turned him into was thinnest and she could chip through to the man beneath. She knew all of Clint's weakest points, but Loki had learned them too, and he'd have shored them up so high she could never climb past. If he woke up Loki's, Natasha didn't know how to make him hers again when she'd never really claimed him to begin with.

It had been her call more than Clint's, keeping secrets and pasts as far in their history as they could. Things they didn't know could never be tortured out of them. And Barton knew so much about her. He knew about the Red Room, about what she'd been and why she couldn't ever be that again. (The details she hugged close--they still came hazy, but the picture of how she'd been made, Clint knew, just not the brushstrokes that had gotten her there.) He'd learned her long before he met her. Half of what she knew herself to be, she'd learned again because Clint had already assumed that was who she was, and Natasha adapted well to expectations. She hadn't asked to know the same things about him. If she had asked, Clint would have told her, and then it would be something soft and shared - a mutual accounting of miserable histories and great washes of red left behind them.

Natasha had liked owing him for his silence, because she was accountable to no one anymore, save those she chose to be. It had felt like gratitude to her, leaving a debt that could have been paid. It was the easiest thank you Natasha knew how to find. But now here they were, limping along in the sky on a countdown to the end of the world, and she didn't know what to say that could toss a rope into the water and let Clint climb back to shore if he was lost beneath the ice.

Out of the bone white afternoon by lorax

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