Looking For My Heart Part III
Title: Looking For My Heart
Author: Rainbowrites
Artist: Crescent_Gaia
Link to art: Fanmix, Dr-Kara's art
Fandom: Avengers/His Dark Materials
Wordcount: 17K
Pairing: Clint/Natasha, a few mentions of Steve/Tony, Tony/Pepper, and some Clint/Coulson if you want to look at it that way
Rating: T
Warning:
Disclaimer: I don't own either the Avengers or the idea of daemons, but I do own THESE daemons! :D FINALLY! I HAVE SOMETHING (no but seriously, this is a fan work, please don't sue)
Summary: In which Natasha is a witch, and Clint's useless in a fight. That is, just because your heart's outside your body doesn't mean doesn't mean people see it
Loquis lands on Clint’s nose, and spreads her wings like a gossamer mask.
“Oh baby,” she laughs, “we’re all monsters here.”
A/N: Part of the Avengers X-Over Big Bang
Oh god, there are so many people I need to thank for this monster. It's the longest thing I've ever written and could never have existed without you guys. Penroseparticle, who is my comic guru and flagrant enabler. Luckyjak and Nowishforwings who both looked this verand let me flail at them over it. Dr-Kara, from whom I commissioned this AMAZING art. And of course my wonderful artist crescent_gaia, who made a FANTASTIC mix <3 <3
Thank you all! I love you guys so much <3
Title comes from "Cough Syrup" whose lyrics I also use through out the fic
Master List
Part III
Losing My Mind, Losing Control
“Natasha, Barton’s been compromised.”
For the first time in a very, very long time (1,206 days) she wishes her daemon were there to protect her.
“Let me put you on hold.”
But he’s not, so she breaks a dog daemon’s neck with a twist of her wrist and hangs the other man by his broken leg, and then picks up her heels. No sense in losing a good pair of shoes.
Her daemon meets her at the entrance. She doesn’t know where he was, and he doesn’t tell her.
“We’re going after the big guy,” she says, and bends down to slip on her heels.
“We’re going after Clint.” He alights on her shoulder, just long enough to dig his talons into the skin there.
She straightens. “That’s what I said.”
--
Loki smiles at him. “Do you know what they call dragonflies, Barton?”
Barton shakes his head.
Loki laughs, and runs a finger down his daemon’s body. She’s coiled around him like a necklace, her forked tongue continually tasting the air. “In Welsh, they are called the ‘adder’s servant’. In this pathetic country, they are deemed ‘snake doctor’.” He laughs, and it sounds like glass being shattered. “An instrument of evil, the devil’s darning needles, the eye-snatcher!”
Loki reaches out and strokes the dragonfly on Barton’s shoulder. The dragonfly quivers, but doesn’t move beyond one sluggish wave of its wings.
“You were always meant to serve me, just as all your kind were meant to be ruled.”
Barton nods.
--
Even through the crackle of her headset, Loki’s voice is like broken shards of ice. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.
‘Not to you,’ she thinks viciously. Her daemon watches from the opposite angle, tucked into the shadows of the museum’s eaves. The mottled black and white blends in perfectly with the stone. He was never meant to be a prince’s bird.
She hits the release button with her thumb and watches Captain America dive through the air.
--
Barton watches as his master (his liberator) is taken.
His eyes find the speckled dot of a goshawk, almost invisible against the ancient grey arches. His calluses protect him from the pain as he stretches back the thin wire, a pure iron arrowhead notched there A simple arrow, for a simple bird. He’s just a cook’s bird, he thinks disdainfully. Not meant to serve nobility. Loki will have no use for him.
After one tense moment, he lowers it. He’s got his target. It’s not the bird.
He folds up his bow with one move, and leaves to find his target.
--
She can see Rogers stare at her out of the corner of his eye, can see his mongoose looking around for her daemon. She finally takes pity on him and touches her pocket as if out of habit, the way she did when she was Tony Stark’s babysitter and telling him how “he doesn’t like the light.”
Her daemon is actually miles away, watching a tiny jewel of a soul lie lifelessly against her human. Loquis looks like a broach, not a daemon. She doesn’t move from Clint’s shoulder, no matter how long her daemon watches. For the first time, she thinks she understands why people are afraid when they see her alone and soulless.
She walks out of the meeting, leaves them flexing their muscles and growling at each other like feral dogs trying to out piss each other, and goes to see Loki.
She knows why the rest of them are there, and it’s why they won’t get what they need from Loki. But she will.
They are there to save the world, these great men. They fight for good.
She bites back a laugh as she pulls herself into a vent, slithering in just the way Clint taught her.
Bruce might understand, she thinks, as she winds her way through the entrails of the hellicarrier. He knows what it means to make yourself small, make yourself weak, in order to be even more dangerous. But in the end, he is one of them too. A good man.
She drops into Loki’s cell without a sound. He has no daemon, and she smiles despite herself. She’ll leave the men to their games. It’s time to get answers, one monster to another.
The world can burn, for all she cares. She’s just got a debt to repay.
--
Barton unfolds his bow with a single fluid movement. He closes his eyes instinctively, but opens them again a second later to aim.
He has his target.
--
She can see the muscles rippling in Bruce’s back, see his skin turning green, and oh god she has never been so scared in her life.
She’s going to die.
She’s going to die alone, without her daemon beside her. It feels like she’s drowning, once more too small and terrified to know how to fight Their hands as they drag her heart from her hands.
She chokes down a sob, because what if the Hulk hears her and comes back? The Hulk isn’t something she can manipulate, or trick, or persuade. The Hulk is something that she has to run as far away from as her oh-so-breakable body can take her.
She claws at the pipe holding her down. She can’t die here. She can’t die alone like this. She’ll die someday, someday soon most likely. People in her line of work don’t exactly end up collecting their pensions. But she won’t die like this. Not alone and trapped in the dark, and so alone.
She reaches for her daemon, feels the bond that nothing has ever managed to break. He’s still there. He’s so close.
She pulls her leg out from the pipe at almost the same moment her daemon flies in, half mad with fear. He hits her so hard it’s painful, his cruelly sharp beak gashing her cheek. But she just wraps her arms around him and lets herself sob, once, before standing back up. Her daemon settles against her shoulder, grounding her.
Sucking in one quick breath, drawing in the musky smell of his feathers, she pushes him off her. She can’t break down, not now. She has a job to do.
“Where is Clint?” If her daemon is here, Clint has to be here too.
He flies ahead of her, and shows her the way.
--
Clint can feel Loquis’s tiny feet dig into the skin at his temple, and grounds himself in the sensation.
“Where’s Coulson?” Loquis asks, because he can’t quite speak yet. “Is Thea gonna try and bite me in half for causing their precious SHIELD property damage or some shit? You just know that’s what she’ll be focusing on, instead of the whole mind control thing. Fucker. Not that she could.” She adds quickly, and she’s talking too fast. Clint doesn’t know why his hands won’t stop shaking but he wishes, viciously, for his bow. He never shakes when he has his bow. “Dumb bitch never could catch me.”
Natasha closes her eyes for one quick second. It’s barely a flicker, but it’s enough. “Shit. No. No.” He grips his bow so tight he can hear the wood creak. “Did I?” His voice cracks.
She touches his face, her thumb right below his eye. He knows that if he cries, she’ll catch the tears before they have a chance to stain his face. No one will ever know. Except her. “It was Loki.”
“Where is he,” Loquis says, voice tight and thready. It’s not a question. It’s a demand.
“Lolo.” Clint murmurs, the childhood nickname clumsy on his lips.
“No. No, this isn’t okay.” She rockets around the room, searching for a way out, and Clint gasps in pain as she struggles against the limit of their bond. Natasha catches him as he tries to tumble out of bed to follow her, and he hides his face in her hair. All he can see is red.
“Bring him back!” Loquis rages. Clint doesn’t know if she means Loki or Coulson. “Bring him back!”
Clint smothers a gasp into Natasha’s hair as her hawk dives out of nowhere to snatch Loquis out of the air. He alights onto Clint’s bare shoulder, his talons digging in and almost drawing blood. Clint nearly drowns in the borrowed love and grief, sparks going off behind his eyes as Loquis burrows into the feathers of the hawk’s back until she’s completely surrounded by him.
“We have a mission to do,” Natasha’s voice is soft in his ear. “We need to stop Loki.”
“We need to kill him,” Clint says, and he means we need to hurt him, we need to torture him until he doesn’t even know his own name. He has a close and intimate relationship with pain. He knows it the same way he knows his daemon.
Natasha doesn’t respond to that. A part of him selfishly wants to shove her away, because she didn’t know Coulson as long as he did, didn’t care about him the way Clint did. She probably knows that Coulson had had a golden retriever growing up but she didn’t know the way his face softened ever so slightly when he saw one. She’d never bought a doggie calendar for Coulson’s your-file-is-totally-locked-down-like-seriously-were-you-grown-in-one-of-SHIELD-labs-or-something? not birthday. Her daemon had never ridden on Amalthea’s back and watched Coulson smile at the tickle.
Clint brushes a strand of red hair out of his eyes, and carefully freezes those memories. He has to complete his mission. He takes a deep breath, and then another. Natasha releases him.
“Can you handle this?” She watches him closely, and he can feel Adrastos rubbing the very tip of his wings over Loquis’ tiny body. He knows that if she decides that he can’t, she’ll have no problem just knocking them both out and stashing them somewhere until the battle is done and Loki is long gone.
This isn’t a revenge mission. This is a rescue mission. Loki must be stopped, but the priority is saving New York.
He locks down the grief, drags a tight lid over the pit of despair and rage in his belly. It won’t hold long, but it’ll do. Long enough to complete the mission, and that’s all he needs.
Clint brushes his fingertips over the pulse in Tasha’s neck. Loquis burrows a little deeper into Adrastos’s feathers. They’re so warm.
“I can do this,” he says, and he’s a little surprised by how much he means it. “I need to do this.”
She watches him for a second more, and he’s just steeling himself for another bang on the head when she nods. “Go clean up,” she orders him. “You look like shit.”
He’s in the bathroom when he hears Captain America’s voice. A dispassionate part of him notes that Coulson must have met him before he died, if he’s aboard the hellicarrier. Coulson must have been so happy.
“Can you fly one of those jets?”
Clint steps out of the bathroom, even though he knows that Natasha can fly anything with a steering wheel. And even if she couldn’t she certainly knows enough to set auto-pilot. “I can.”
He sees the tiny nod Tasha gives Captain America. Clint tenses, but the man seems to be willing to take her word for it. To trust them both.
Walking out, Loquis is a burning hot mark on his chest, riding his heart. He doesn’t see the Captain’s daemon, and wonders if he’s like Tasha. Wonders why the man’s even trusting them in the first place.
But then again, Captain America knows what it’s like to wake up to find his whole world changed.
His fingers tighten around his bow, and he promises himself that when this is all over, he’ll go take the Captain (Steve Rogers, a ghost whispers in his ear) and really test the limits of his super soldier ability to metabolize alcohol.
<< Part II Part IV >>