Looking For My Heart Part IV
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 IV
These Fishes In The Sea They’re Staring at Me, Oh Oh
“That’s your daemon?” Clint regrets it the second he hears it, but in his defense, she’s, like, a fucking weasel or something.
“Yes,” Steve’s eyes narrow, and shit there’s the capital-C-Captain back again. “She is my daemon.”
Clint opens his mouth to apologize, because he’s an asshole but he’s not that much of an asshole, when Tony fucking Stark has to shove his fat head in to drop his two cents. Or like, two million knowing him.
“Well Cap, you gotta admit, she’s pretty small.” He waggles his eyebrows. “You know what they say about men with small daemons.”
Aria is around Aster’s neck in a flash of brown fur and sleek muscle. “What do they say,” she asks softly. Her teeth are white against Aster’s black hair, and Clint remembers that mongooses are famous for killing and eating poisonous snakes. He hopes viciously that Loki knew that.
Aster laughs, huge sharp teeth bared. “That big things come in little packages, duh.” Aria squeaks as Aster ruffles her fur. “So sensitive.”
“Ahh the Napolean complex,” Tony’s tone is teasing, but there are lines of weariness around his eyes that Clint knows hadn’t been there before. Tony nudges his daemon. “Come on, give ‘er back. We’ve still got half a shwarma left.”
“You shouldn’t have ordered so damn much.” Aster grumbles. She slowly untangles her fingers from Aria’s fur, dragging her fingertips along the hard chords of muscle underneath. Aria lets out a breathy gasp that makes Clint’s eyebrows shoot up. No one else shows any sign of having noticed however, although Nat definitely did.
“Hey, if there’s any time to indulge it’s when you’ve just stopped The End of The World. Caps intended. It’s like Christmas, the carbs don’t count now. What,” teases Tony, the tip of his tongue poking out in a way that makes Clint think he might not be as bad as Tasha always bitches. Or really, just as bad, which is why Clint finds himself liking the guy despite himself. “You worried about your girlish figure?”
“More like worried about Pepper dumping your fat ass after you gain ten pounds in shwarma.”
Tony squawks as Aster slaps his ass, her gauntlets echoing off the metal in a ringing clang that mixes with Bruce’s burst of laughter, bright as the sun after the rain.
Steve almost blushes as Aria wraps herself around his neck like an amulet, his fingers going up seemingly unconsciously to trace the same pattern Aster had made. But he meets Clint’s eyes without hesitating, cold and flinty in a way that says son, I have seen far worse than you.
And punched it in the face, Clint’s inner voice adds, because he can’t help but compare himself to Hitler, jesus fuck does he have issues.
“I just -“ Clint says lamely. He swallows. “In the comic you have a bald eagle daemon.”
“Propaganda,” Steve says flatly. “Not my idea.”
“To protect our identity,” Aria’s voice is a knife in the gut, disdainful and cold. Loquis’ tiny feet scratch Clint’s chest, and he can’t even imagine what it must be like to have to pretend like that. Tasha does it all the time, enough that she shrugged it off whenever the file landed in her lap, but he sees the way her eyes tighten every time she has to pet her pocket and say he’s a little shy.
Clint swallows again, his throat swollen and painful. He doesn’t answer properly, can’t quite articulate what it means that Captain America has a daemon so small. Coulson knew, Clint’s sure. Clint’s still riding the adrenaline from the mission, can feel the dull ache of despair and pain starting to claw its way up from his belly. He swallows again harshly, grips his bow and pretends he’s not clinging to an edge.
Loquis crawls out of his shirt to hover gently in front of Aria. Her wings glitter under the florescent lights. “I’m not weak.” She says fiercely, and she looks so ethereal that Clint almost snatches her back before the filthy tendrils of the world can reach out and destroy her too. Natasha touches his arm without looking at him.
Aria leans out under her nose touches Loquis, until she wears Clint’s heart like a crown. “Neither am I.” She says, and she looks like a painting, bold chestnut brushstrokes that stand out clear and strong against the dingy background of the shwarma shop. She looks small, but in the way that Natasha is small. In a way that promises so much more than you can see. Clint licks his dry lips, and thinks that this, this is why Coulson loved this man so much. He understands now. “None of us are.”
--
“Be careful,” she says.
Steve jumps, but she manages to school the smile off her face by the time he turns around. “Hello Agent Romanoff,” he says, taking his hat off. It’s oddly touching, and she feels charmed in a way that immediately puts her on guard. “I, uh, didn’t hear you come in.”
She shrugs, saying, “I know.”
She gets a smile from that. It shocks her with its warmth. She’d rather suspected he’d dislike her based on he association with Fury, and with the SHIELD agency that dragged him back to life.
She shifts her stance into military, and watches as he relaxes into mirroring her. It’s not much, but she finds herself wanting to put him at ease. It’s a strange power he has, one that world leaders and martyrs all share. He could run for president, she’d vote for him and she doesn’t even vote. Doesn’t, not can’t. She doesn’t believe in democracy. She just doesn’t believe in any kind of regime as a rule.
Aria is looking right at her, not staring around for her missing daemon. She’d decided to leave him with Clint. She won’t hide who she is. Not if they’re to be a team. Not if she has to trust him.
“I’ll be back,” Steve says, “but I have to, well-”
“You have to figure out who you are,” she completes, “you need to figure out how to remake yourself.” She wonders if she should have made a trip through Russia, tried to find her old home and old name. Her old world.
It’s immaterial now, her daemon reminds her. She agrees. No use crying over the past. Tonight though maybe she’ll make borscht and force it down Clint’s burger swilling throat. Bruce would probably like it, she thinks, and is a little surprised at herself for it.
“You understand.” It’s not a question, but she nods anyway.
“I think everyone on this team should do what you’re doing.” She says frankly. She’s the one who writes up their psych reports for Fury. They’re the most fucked up bunch of people that never should have worked. Every single one of them could use serious therapy. (She goes every Friday. Clint brings her donuts for after her meeting, and she brings him donut holes after his appointments on Monday.) And a sabbatical to figure themselves out, try to come back a little less psychotically insane.
Although you could argue that this is Thor’s.
He grins, ducking his head almost shyly. “It says something when the most well-balanced guy on the team was frozen in ice for 90 years huh?”
“Maybe we should try freezing Stark for 90 years, see if it balances him out.” Fury would approve that plan, she’s sure. He’d probably want to drop Stark into the Arctic himself. He’d have to battle half of SHIELD to do it though, not to mention most females over the age of 18.
“No matter when he woke up, I think Tony would still be the smartest guy in the room. And he’d still make sure everyone knew it.”
She raises an eyebrow at the Tony, at the fond exasperation in his voice. It’s warm in a way that reminds her of the way Clint whispers to her daemon. She’d obviously missed something since the last time she saw them, when they were snapping at each other like wolves, snarling their own Alpha status. She feels her daemon’s amusement at her disgruntlement, and she vows to pinch off a few feathers when she gets back.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you,” she says, because it’s the truth and he deserves to know it. He looks weary, but nods. “Make sure you don’t do anything that’ll mean I have to come get you.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’ll try to keep out of trouble, Ma’am.”
She’s honestly impressed at how much sass he can fit into such a seemingly innocuous statement. Sometimes she forgets he’s a born and bred New Yorker. She makes a mental note to introduce him to Monty Python when he gets back. Clint loves it too. Together they’ll probably be so obnoxiously happy it’ll be painful to be around. It’ll even be worth putting up with Loquis shrieking NI in her ear every five minutes. She makes a mental note to maybe spend more time with Bruce after introducing them. He has enviable amounts of control; he might even be able to stop her from squishing the bug after a week’s worth of NI.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Aria promises, “You do too. Sometimes the idiot forgets that I’m the better half.”
She blinks, opens her mouth, and for the first time in so long (1,209 days) she has no idea what to say. Steve asks her to give his respects to her daemon and to apologize for not being able to say goodbye in person. Then he climbs onto the bike that Howard Stark had kept, and then Tony Stark had kept, and drives away.
Her daemon is watching them, his eyes following them much longer than hers ever could. She knows that. And so does Steve.
She thinks she understands now why, almost a century later, people still know and love the name Captain America.
--
“Do you remember it?” Clint asks her, after everything. He can’t look at her, but he knows she’s looking at him. Dragonflies can’t close their eyes. She can never look away. He’d never thought of that as a bad thing until today.
“All of it,” she says fiercely, because she’s far too strong to lie to make him feel better. It wouldn’t, anyway. “He took you away from me.”
Clint can still remember the sharp angles of Loki’s smile as he said you have heart as he touched the staff to his chest.
In the split second before everything went bright and cold, Clint had thought that’s not my heart. He hopes he managed to say it, spit it in Loki’s face before the staff stole him away.
He doesn’t know though, can’t really remember anything. He remembers the purity, the bone-deep sense of rightness. Everything else is a jerky mish-mash of moments. The clearest is Loki, smiling almost proudly as he calls Clint his. Clint scratches his chest, a habit he knows he’s picked up but can’t quite bear to stop.
Even after he’s been banished, Loki still managed to create yet another rift between him and his daemon. Clint wants to kill him, to rip him apart atom from atom and then set those atoms on fire.
Eye snatcher, Loki had laughed as he stroked Clint’s hair right before Germany, like Clint was his pet. Clint clenches his fists impotently, and imagines plucking out those too bright blue eyes and shoving them down Loki’s throat.
Loquis crawls under his shirt to bite savagely at the spot where Loki’s spear had touched them.
He doesn’t press a hand against her, because he’s never been quite so aware of how very vulnerable she is before. She’s so small. He’d known that, had prized it as the ultimate spy tool. It’s the first time that it bothers him. Scares him.
He finds new depths to his hatred for Loki.
Loki had picked apart everything that made him Clint Barton and just left a man with his memories. Loki had stolen his daemon away.
And the worst part was that he had made Clint not care.
He can remember that. He’d been happy.
He hadn’t cared that he’d been so alone.
The memory tastes like vomit and blood. Spitting doesn’t make it better. Neither does his old friend Jameson. He used to just have nightmares of all the times he’d been captured to be tortured, he thinks bitterly.
“We’re still us,” she buzzes, and he can taste the vibrations like metal on his tongue. “We’re still connected. He tried to unmake us, but he couldn’t take us apart.” She doesn’t say the word, but Clint can picture a gleaming silver knife just fine without it.
--
She lays each coin down like a flower. One for Coulson, whose blood still stains the helicarrier. One for her parents, who gave her life and nothing else. One for the KGB, who gave her the tools to save the world. One for everyone she couldn’t save. One for everyone she had to kill. And one for a nameless girl who’d sat in a cell for 215 days without her daemon. Six coins. Six seems to be a big number for her lately. She’s just glad it isn’t seven. She shudders at the thought of being that much of a cliché.
She chants the laments, throws them into the wind like knives. The ancient words are like rust in her mouth, heavy with age and weariness. Her voice cracks when she goes too high, but there’s no one around to hear it. Her heart is with her team, watching them while she cannot.
She sprinkles a handful of dirt on the empty grave she dug herself, on top of the crisp paper crown and gold coins laying on the bottom. She doesn’t remember ever doing this. She actually had to look up traditional Russian funeral rites to figure out what to do. But the words echo through her throat into her bones, and the slow sway of her hand as the dirt falls feels almost like it could be familiar. The muted patter of it hitting the coins sounds like absolution.
She grips the shovel and starts filling in the hole, turning it into a grave. She doesn’t leave a marker, no name to pray for. It’s not necessary. They’ve been put to rest. They don’t need any more than that. The dead, after all, don’t actually need anything. It’s the living that need the rites. They’re the ones who truly need to move on at the end.
(Clint says her name sleepily when she crawls into his bed, grave dirt still cold under fingernails. “Tasha?” he mumbles. She knows that if anyone else were to enter the room, he would be awake, alert, and armed within seconds. She kisses him, and tastes her name on his lips)
--
Natasha’s daemon dives beneath the fox’s belly, seizing the fragile belly with her claws and gutting it in one quick move. The animal dies with a horrifying scream, and her human topples over soundlessly, one hand clawing towards his heart.
“Thanks Addy,” he grins, wiping a spray of blood off his forehead. He’s not sure whether it’s his or someone else’s. “Where’d you come from?” The accusation I didn’t see you hangs between them unsaid.
“I vas in the neighborhood,” he says. He speaks slowly, every word carefully chosen. He sounds so much more foreign than Tasha does, who can pass as native anywhere she goes. She can speak, like, a bajillion different language without so much of a hint of an accent. Clint has a nagging suspicion that Adrastos spends a lot less time in the ol’ US of A than Nat does though. Or anywhere. He’s not a balloon with a chord the way most daemons are. He’s a satellite. The whole point of them is to never stay anywhere longer than it takes to get a reading.
Loquis barks out a fierce, bloody laugh. “We don’t need you to keep tabs on us,” She circles the bird like she was a raptor herself. “We’re fine. Just because someone got us once, doesn’t mean we’re a liability.” She laughs again, sharp as broken glass. “Not many other Loki’s walking round right? ‘Cause I’m gonna have to have serious words with Thor if he neglected to mention Loki’s got an eviler twin just walkin’ around. That’s the kinda thing that should come up in conversation you know? Just by the way,” she mimics, voice swooping low to try and match Thor’s rumble “might wanna keep an eye out.” Her voice cracks on eye.
Addy cocks her head in the way birds do, regards him with one red eye, and doesn’t say anything.
Clint sighs. He’s never been able to see either of them if they don’t want him too, even with Loquis. He hears the wood of his bow creaking in his hand, and has to concentrate of loosening his joints before he breaks it.
“Is this ‘cause I ditched Helmson? ‘Cause that guy’s a total idiot, the mission went better without him jabbering in my ear.”
“Obviously.”
“That’s impressive you know,” Loquis says, morbidly fascinated, “How you can put so much sarcasm in a monotone.”
“It’s a gift.”
“I hope you kept the receipt.”
Clint rubs his temples, and pretends that he doesn’t still hear Coulson chiding them to keep radio silence, the ache in his ear where he tore out his communicator after that bastard had said Coulson obviously gave you too much of a free reign.
He is an asshole, Clint will admit that with pride. But Helmson is going to die, die bloody, for disparaging his partner. Coulson was the best agent SHIELD ever knew. Is still the best man Clint knows. And he knows Captain America now. He thinks, a little wryly, that if Coulson had ever heard Clint put him before his idol - in anything - Clint would be scrubbing latrines with his teeth.
“We’re leaving,” he says, and breaks the dead man’s fingers to get the flash drive out. He holds out a finger for Loquis.
“We don’t need you to protect us,” Loquis hisses, and Clint aches because he knows that’s not what any of them mean. But he’s never been able to say I’m sorry, much less, help me oh god please help me.
“Coulson did not die because of you,” Adrastos says, “Do not demean his sacrifice thus.”
Clint’s mouth twists. “Give him the dignity of his choice?” Coulson had fucking loved spouting off random Cap facts, stuff that, really, no one should have ever known. He looks at Adrastos through narrowed eyes. “You’re so full of shit, you know that right?”
The bird bristles indignantly. It’s actually adorable.
Loquis is almost gentle as she alights on the bird’s beak to look him in the eye. “Are you afraid?”
Adrastos brushes Loquis with the very tip of his wing. “My kind protects their nests.”
“Yeah,” Clint remembers a mission in a forest in Portugal, where a whole flock of non-daemon goshawk came out of nowhere to claw the shit out of his scalp. Apparently he’d accidently settled into their nesting site. “And you come out of nowhere to do it.” He strokes down the daemon’s smoothly feathered head with one finger. The frisson of energy is close as he can come to giving life to words that he can’t even bring himself to think properly, much less say. “You’re such a creeper Addy,” he says fondly.
He bites the finger. “Idiot.”
“Asshole,” Loquis laughs, and for the first time Clint really smiles. He hates himself for it a moment later. He shouldn’t be okay. And he isn’t. But he will be, one day. The thought is like bile in his mouth.
Loquis crawls under his collar and lies on his heart. She rides the shallow rise of each breath, and he feels the blood pumping through his veins and keeping him alive with almost painful clarity. Clint breathes awkwardly, hyper aware of each motion.
“The mission’s not done yet,” Loquis whispers.
“The mission will never be done,” Adrastos says quietly.
“Good,” He shakes out his bow with one smooth movement. They still have to get outside. He still has a target to take out. He still has a job to do. “Let’s go.”
--
Stark corners her shortly after she’s forced to move in to what the media has labeled Avengers Mansion by a combination of Clint’s puppy eyes and Fury’s not-quite-orders. She allows it with only a little elusion, just to keep him on his toes. She does owe him, after taking an unprofessional level of joy in stabbing him in the neck. Besides, she is living in what is technically his house.
“So what is he really?” He throws the question at her like a weapon, like one of his Starkbombs that he’s not quite sure how it’ll react in the world outside his pretty simulations.
“Do you need to know?” She shoots back.
“Hey, I just wanna say hi to the guy,” Aster grins up at her in a traditional ape threat. The daemon makes a great show of sleeking down the black hairs on her body as if in preparation to meet a guest.
“He’s not here,” she says bluntly. The nice thing, she reflects, about Stark having a bonobo for a soul, besides all the horrible sex jokes Clint insists on making, is how she’s too human to be able to hide a wince behind a snout or feelers.
“That’s not possible,” Aster insists, voice high and tight, at the exact same moment Stark asks her, “Are you a witch?”
“Afraid I’ll turn you into a toad?” She deadpans.
“Gross,” Stark makes a face.
“Where is he?” Aster sounds half-mad with the need to know, her gnarled black fingers unconsciously scratching at her arms in horror.
She sighs, because she’s living in his home now. She could always leave, but she’s already decided to follow Steve, to become an Avenger. It’s almost strange how quickly she’s fallen into place. She doesn’t want to have to leave. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” Aster’s voice rises into an overwhelmed shriek.
She tenses automatically. It’s always the daemons that react the hardest to her. Perhaps it’s like staring into an abyss, to see their own absence reaching back for them. Perhaps they’re afraid of the abyss gazing back.
“He’s on a mission. I don’t know where. He doesn’t always know where I am. It means I can do twice as many missions.” It means she can be in two places at once, it means she’s safer and more dangerous and more feared than anyone as human as her has a right to be.
“Of course,” Stark says.
She can recognize Stark’s dangerous tone by now, the smoothly seductive one that tells you to just come a little closer, warm yourself by the hearth, before he sets you on fire. She half wants to slap him and tell him that she knows all about the habits of the bonobo, pan paniscus, and she will not be fucked into a more obliging state.
“I mean, Aster’s shape is a real blessing. Another pair of hands in the shop is invaluable, I’m tellin’ ya.”
She wonders if he’s remembering Afghanistan, whether he would have been able to make it out without that extra pair of hands. Doubtful, she’d run the odds. But then, the odds against him escaping at all had been nil. Tony Stark had a way of changing those odds in his favor. She was sure that if he was ever asked about it though, he’d just grin along with his daemon and say something about seducing Lady Luck and bagging all three sisters of Fate at once. It made her a little annoyed at how easily she could imagine his responses. She really needed to meet some people outside this group of insanity and daddy issues.
“He’s a hawk.” She says finally, because for god’s sake she’s living here. She can’t be on guard all the time. Even she needs to sleep, to eat, to relax enough to sit around in her sweats and watch old black and white Marx Brothers movies with her daemon on the other side of the couch, just close enough to remind them both that they are still one.
“A… hawk?” The corner of Stark’s mouth twitches. She sighs and steels herself. “Oh my god, are you and Clint just a matching set then? That’s adorable.”
She slides past him, and somehow manages to keep herself from ‘accidentally’ catching him around the ankle to send him to the floor in the motion.
“No really, should I make you two matching outfits? I have a tailor on speed dial, I can make this happen.”
She walks out, to a chorus of innuendo and barely muffled laughter, and feels oddly light. She taps the tips of her fingers to her face to feel the smile, and reflects that, really, she should maybe start calling him Tony.
--
“Friend Clint!” Thor booms. There’s really no other word for it. The dude does not do things quietly. Clint can respect that.
“Hey big guy,” Clint nods, flicking another 5 grains of salt into Tony’s coffee on the other side of the room with the tip of his cereal spoon. His record is 70. Yesterday had been a bad day, only 25 before Steve had caught him and made him run laps. Laps. This time Loquis is keeping a careful eye out for any brown furry streaks of pure grumpiness. Little shit could sneak up on you anywhere. It made Clint burst with pride, for all that he had absolutely jackshit to do with teaching the mongoose any of his tricks.
There’s something comforting though, even so much later, in knowing that Coulson was so fucking right to love Cap that much. The dude is so much more than the blonde wall of chiseled muscle that Clint had always pictured that it makes Clint swell with second hand pride. It’s not often your heroes turn out to be actual, well, heroes. He should know.
“May I ask you something?”
“Shoo- go for it,” Clint corrects himself hurriedly. Thor isn’t always totally up on pop culture. His left arm gives a painful twinge as he remembers the last time he’d absent-mindedly told Thor to ‘hit me’.
“Did my brother have an animal with him such as you and your fellow Midguardians do? A companion to his heart?” He taps his chest in a gesture terrifyingly reminiscent of the movement Loki had made with his staff.
The spoon snaps beneath Clint’s fingers. He watches the round bowl of it bounce against the marble counter top. It should make a sound, he thinks vaguely. But he can’t hear anything above the roar of blood pounding in his ears, of you were always meant to serve.
“I ask because,” Thor hesitates, “he did not have one growing up. I believe our father cut it away from him, to ensure he was taken as an Aesir by all in our realm.”
Clint stares at him. Finally, it’s Loquis who breaks the silence. “He… took your brother’s daemon?”
Thor nods.
Clint knew Thor was from another world, knew he had no daemon even. But he’d never thought of him as a monster until now. Even Loki, broken and scarred and evil as he is, is more human. It’s repulsive, and the realization that he feels sorry for Loki is like a staff point to the heart all over again.
He stands up, and walks out. He knows it’s not fair. Not fair to Thor, not fair to himself, not fair even to Loki, for whom there’s a tiny grain of pity in his stomach that he hates himself for. Probably not even fair to Odin, who never had a daemon to lose.
“He knew,” Loquis shakes with anger, because she has always been better at rage than him, who always just wants to curl up and die to escape it. “He knew what it was like, and he still took you from me.”
Clint closes his eyes so he can see himself through hers. She crawls over his face, her tiny feet prickling his skin. It feels vaguely like when a limb wakes up, a tickling sort of sting. She itches, and he almost wants to scratch her off.
“We’re still together,” he reminds her. Reminds himself.
“Clint,” she breathes, and she’s so close he fancies he can feel the warm gust of it on his skin.
“Lolo,” he murmurs back, and feels the bond between them flow with a swell of love that brings tears to his eyes. It’s still there. They’re still one.
--
Everyone gives Thor a bit of a wide berth. Even Tony tends to circle him like a satellite, never quite coming in for a landing. She can’t really blame him though, not since Thor tried to clap Aster on the back after “a valiant battle, my friend!”
Thor’s still learning what it means to be human. She can sympathize.
So Thor usually spars with her, even though he’d be better off with Steve or even Tony in his suit. But she’s the one who goes, because Thor doesn’t understand why he can’t just attack a person’s daemon. She has a sneaking suspicion that the reason he’s never asked to change sparring partners is because Thor sees flashes of his brother in her green eyes, and the way she fights with her fists only when she’s forced to. She sees it in the way he watches her smile for the reporters, and the way his hands are soft and heavy with guilt when he touches her outside of practice. It makes her skin crawl, but she’s not above exploiting it.
“It seems a great folly,” he confides in her during one session, “to ignore a potential attacker, one whom it take one mere blow of my hand to knock aside and thus cripple both foes at once.”
She teaches him how to ignore the feints and distractions of a daemon, “You can’t touch a daemon, but they won’t touch you either. It’s a matter of honor.” It’s almost painful for her to watch how obsessed with honor he is, (honor won’t keep you alive, honor won’t get the job done) but she’s grateful for it now.
But Thor’s innocent, not stupid. “But Lady Natasha, I have seen you touch daemons before,” he points out as his fist glances off her ribs. Even a glancing blow from Thor is no laughing matter though, so she rolls to get as far away as she can to recover.
“Clint is different,” she winces, and wonders how the hell she’s supposed to explain them.
“Nay, twas a villain’s daemon you grasped.” His blue eyes are sharp, and she remembers with a cold rush that he is a king. “Explain yourself.” His huge hands clamp down on her shoulder, thumbs pressed warningly against her delicate clavicle. “Please.”
She says, “I take every advantage I can,” and demonstrates by high kicking him in the testicles. It serves its purpose beautifully, and Thor spends the rest of the afternoon whimpering.
Thor is, to put it bluntly, the exact opposite of subtle. People would notice if their hero broke the taboo. He’s already an alien, but he can’t be a freak. Not if the Avengers are supposed to function in the public eye. He has to be a good man for all that he is not a man; he’s the representative of his entire race.
Luckily, she has no such obligation. She can go where he cannot. There’s no shame in it. She can’t fly or shoot lightning bolts, but she can do the dirty, unspoken work that Thor never could.
She knows what the world says about her. That she is a monster; that she sold her daemon to Satan for demonic superpowers; that she is a witch; that her daemon is a tapeworm eating her alive from the inside out; that she killed her own daemon so she would have no weaknesses. She’s particularly fond of that one. There’s a poetry to the sense of death magic there that she finds appealing.
She wraps ice in a towel for Thor, and braids his hair until he stops whimpering. They’re a team. They take care of each other.
--
“That equation is off.” Clint says, polishing his bow. “It should be 2.867 not 2.865.”
“Excuse me?” Tony clutches his math to this chest, hiding it from Loquis’s prying eyes. “Are you insinuating that I, Tony Stark Genius-Extraordinaire-and-Holder-of-Three-Doctorates-and-who-has-patented-more-inventions-than-you-can-shake-a-stick-at-and-you-can-use-a-really-big-stick, did math wrong? Did one of your arrows finally blow up in your face and rattle your brains? Not one of my arrows of course, because those would only blow up when you wanted them to. Or when I wanted them to. So actually if it blew up in your face it could be one of my arrows.”
“Christ you never shut up do you?” Clint snorts. But the corners of his mouth turn up anyway. Tony sounds impressed despite himself. It’s always nice to disprove the whole brawns over brain thing. People seemed to forget how much fucking physics is in archery, even if a lot of it is instinct by this point. Even with Loquis’ eyes, he still has to calculate distance and wind and a million other tiny things that could all fuck up his shot. And Clint never fucks up his shot.
Aster lets out a blood-curdling shriek as Loquis bites her right behind the ear. Tony falls out of his chair, screaming more out of shock than any pain, and landing on his ass just in time for Steve to see as he runs in brandishing his shield and daemon and nothing else. Clint lets himself ogle. Every man, no matter their sexuality, has to go gay for Cap right out of the shower, dripping water and righteousness. It’s like, a patriotic duty.
“What happened?” Steve demands. “Who’s been hurt?”
“HALT VILLAIN!”
Tony winces at the sound of his (probably very expensive) floor-to-ceiling windows being smashed to bits. “Those open you know!” he shouted above the din of wind and thunder that heralded Thor’s arrival.
“SHOW YOURSELF AND FACE MY MIGHT!”
“Jesus fuck!” Tony shouts, because Aster is still trying to bite Loquis in half. “Everything’s fine! Clint’s just being a dick, and Loquis bit Aster.”
“I resent that term!” Clint shouts back. “I prefer asshole.”
“THIS CANNOT BE.” Thor booms. “I HEARD THE CRY OF A YOUNG FEMALE CHILD IN PAIN.”
“Stark screams like a girl.” Clint smirks. He knows Tasha will definitely get him for it later, but it’s totally worth it to see the twin veins in Aster and Tony’s forehead pulse.
“I do not!” Tony fumes. “That was Aster! Aster is a female and she screamed, big deal.”
“SHE WAS THE SECOND TO SCREAM, YES?”
“Oh fuck you.” Tony mutters bitterly as Clint nearly doubles over with laughter. “Fuck you, I do not scream like a girl.”
“Yes.”
Tony whirls around to see Natasha lounging against the table right behind him where she had definitely not been five seconds ago. Even Clint, used to her appearing like a fucking ghost, is a little freaked out. She’s totally been using Tony’s unfamiliarity with her evil, ninja ways to get her kicks. Clint knows the sadist hiding behind that bland face. He kind of loves it.
“You scream more like a scared little boy.”
Clint nearly falls off the fridge at the look on Tony’s face, like he’s not sure whether to snark back or try to hide behind Steve. Aster hides under the table. Loquis follows her to buzz in her ear and make her hit her head on the bottom. Clint really does fall off the fridge laughing at the shriek this time. Steve leaves, muttering about idiotic geniuses. He doesn't bother trying to cover up his exit, soldier that he is. Everyone in the room pauses their shouting to appreciate that fact. Aria glares at them both around his neck. It’s less terrifying than it is usually, since she still kind of looks half-drowned. Loquis waggles her abdomen at her cheekily in a way that pretty much guarantees them extra laps during the next training session, but it’s worth it.
The next day though, Clint’s shower turns him bright pink. Even Loquis has somehow become a lurid cherry color.
When they run out of the shower, like a pair of flamboyant ghosts, Tony and Aster greet them at the door with a bucket of glitter and a camera. Natasha casually trips Clint when he chases the fuckers, and they flee, cackling like hyenas.
“Bitch,” Loquis screams after them, trailing glitter like Tinkerbell.
“Whore!” Aster shouts back.
“I was a whore!” Loquis shoots right back. “Professionally! And way above your pay grade buster! So up your ante!”
There’s a minuscule pause before “ASSBUTT” and then a furious volley of pop culture heavy insults before Pepper and Basil come to herd Tony away properly.
Natasha gives them the hairy eyeball and calls him idiot like it’s a pet name. He’s pretty sure it is. “I will never understand your friendship.”
He struggles from where she’s managed to immobilize him with one casual foot to the back. “Well apparently you two get along just fine.”
“Traitor.” Loquis says affectionately. She lands in Tasha’s hair, and he shivers at the feel.
He smiles against the carpet when her foot leaves his back, and she settles down next to him in a crouch. Something dangles in front of him, and he nearly goes cross-eyed trying to see it.
“Is that film?” Loquis asks hopefully. She’s practically pooping glitter. Clint doesn’t even want to think about how the hell he’s going to get the stuff out of her wings without leaving her totally drenched and flightless.
“Indeed.” Adrastos says. His voice is grave, but Clint knows that’s his version of laughing hysterically. He flips the bird off without looking.
“Not of you.” Natasha says, dashing his hopes like the evil, evil woman she is.
“Not even our sex tape, baby doll?” He squeals as Adrastos rakes a claw over his ass, love and pain searing through him in a way that leaves him a little confused as to whether or not to he should be concerned over how aroused it makes him.
“It’s of Stark.”
“Boner killer,” he says, even though it’s kind of not. “Is it him and Cap? You know, Aria and Aster are way too friendly during their fights. You just know they’re boffing like bunnies.” He doesn’t even joke about it being Tony and Pepper. He’d honestly feared for Tony’s life after that break up, even though it had been Pepper crying about can’t take being afraid all the time anymore and Tony not-crying in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar.
The pause it takes for Natasha to answer makes him prop himself up on his elbows. “What, really?”
“No,” she says, but the far off gaze tells him she’s thinking about it.
“Hot,” Loquis says. They exchange looks. If Nat thinks it’s sexy, then a) Clint will be getting laid soon and b) she will make it happen. Clint really hopes that Steve is gay, or bi more likely, because dude won’t really have a choice in the matter soon.
“So what’s it of?” He asks, because the ground is a little uncomfortable and he’d like to move this party to his bedroom. Or at least the couch. He fantasizes for a moment about leaving horrible, horrible stains on Tony’s favorite chair.
“Stark singing.” Loquis’s wings still. “Justin Bieber.” Clint’s eyes widen. “And dancing.”
“Marry me,” he says fervently, and cradles the film as he would his firstborn.
“Budapest,” she reminds him, and he winces.
“Have lots of you are the most amazing and fabulous creature in all creation sex with me before posting this everywhere in the Internet?” He offers instead. He’s pretty sure SHIELD would help make sure not even Tony could burn all the videos from existence.
She tastes like laughter when he kisses her, and he suddenly realizes that he’s happy. Truly, deeply happy. Guilt and rage claw at his stomach like hellhounds, but he just turns the kiss into a biting, savage thing. She lets him.
“We got him,” she breathes against lips, “We won.”
He closes his eyes and lets himself believe.
--
“A goshawk?” Bruce grins a little awkwardly at her. She gauges his reaction carefully. He seems a little surprised, but not scared or angry. Good. She’s a little surprised at the flutter of relief in her stomach. Considering his own… issues with disappearing daemons, if anyone would be fine with it, it would be Bruce. But still. She grips her tea up a little tighter to keep her hands from trembling with the sudden loss of a tension that she hadn’t even realized was there.
“I would have pegged you for a peregrine falcon, personally.” Kali’s great golden eyes watch the bird with the calculating eyes of a hunter sizing up a formidable opponent, her spotted tail swishing slightly.
“Oh really?” She says, smiling ever so slightly, “Why is that?”
“Well, you work for Fury, and peregrines are traditionally the hunting birds of royalty.”
“Don’t tell Fury you think he’s a King, you’ll give him an even bigger head.”
“Any bigger and you could use it like a bowling ball, just stick your fingers in that empty eye socket and roll.” Clint’s voice echoes out of the vents. Kali hisses at the sound, but lets Bruce pet her fur back down.
“Thank goodness he’s not a peregrine,” Natasha says, flicking a piece of granola through the gaps in the vent to hit Clint in the eye, “I’d never get anything done if I had to serve royalty.” She smiles at Clint’s curses. “I hunt for people, not regimes.” They tended to fall with dreary dependency.
“So whom do you hunt for now?” Bruce asks. He smiles, as if it doesn’t matter. Even his daemon doesn’t twitch, her tail swaying serenely. She’s impressed despite herself. She knows most people hail it as a miracle (actually, most people probably think it’s some kind of divine punishment) that Bruce not only survived the radiation but also survived as The Hulk, but she thinks that it only makes sense. Kali yawns, fangs glinting under the lights to remind everyone that she only looks like a cat. Her daemon bobs his head in a nod and gnashes his razor sharp beak. Like recognizes like. Birds of a feather and all that. Bruce didn’t need the Hulk to be dangerous.
She allows herself one smooth, luxurious stroke of her daemon’s feathers. They’re so soft they nearly swallow her. “Why, the common man of course. Those who cannot fight for themselves. Everyone,” she smirks at the pained howl of laughter ricocheting off the vent walls.
Kali chuckles. “For a given value of everyone of course.”
Her daemon alights on the couch’s chair, touches Kali’s cloud soft fur with one wingtip. “Of course.”
--
“So you’re the jolly green giant,” Clint’s mouth hurts from smiling too wide, but he ignores it.
Bruce gives him a pained smile.
“I like you,” Loquis decides, after she buzzes in Kali’s ear. The ocelot doesn’t react, except to put on a long-suffering face. “Careful, your face might freeze like that.”
“I don’t think I can stand any more people liking me,” Kali remarks. “Between you and Aster, I think all my fur might turn grey in a week.”
“It’d make you look distinguished,” Bruce says, at the same time that Loquis tells her that they could always “dye it green to match!” and Clint offers to “gank the bonobo bitch, if she’s bothering you.”
He shrugs at Bruce’s raised eyebrows, “No biggie. Tasha would totally help me hide the body.”
“Nahhh, she’d be pissed at you for not letting her kill Stark herself,” Loquis buzzes, “You know she called dibs.” Every member of the Avengers has a contingency plan in place for how to kill them, just in case. He knows that Natasha loves Stark, as much as she can’t stand him. Which seems to be the default for anyone who hangs around Stark too long, come to think of it. It’s like some kind of infectious disease. Stark-it is. Even Natasha’s not immune. She wouldn’t let anyone else take him out anyway. He wonders if it’s weird that he kind of hopes Natasha will be the one to kill him. Even if she wasn’t assigned, and she wouldn’t be, she wouldn’t let someone else do it. Old age would be nice, sure, but he’s not stupid. He knows what his job is. Best he can really hope for is to go out with a bang.
“Do you often offer to kill your teammates?” His voice is light, but Clint can hear the hint of green steel behind the question. He knows that he should proceed with caution, should gently reassure Bruce that no one is going to hurt him. There’s a whole handbook that SHIELD gave everybody with scripts for pretty much every occasion. He can see the big black type in his mind’s eye.
So instead he flutters his eyelashes and retorts, “Only the ones that piss me off big boy, so you might wanna stay on my good side.”
Kali sounds as surprised as anyone by her burst of laughter.
“You’ll fit in just fine around here I think,” Clint grins. Bruce had an ocelot inside him long before he had a Hulk. He’s always had teeth; people were just too stupid to realize that the pretty kitty could bite. Bruce Banner is not a cat. He’s a fucking leopard. A leopard with a history of being hunted, slaughtered for its skin, at that. Clint licks his lips and wonders again about the fucking mystery that is settling.
stop trying to figure it out, Loquis whispers, you’ll break your brain if you try any of that thinking stuff, dumbass.
“Oh really?” Bruce asks, raising an eyebrow. The corner of his mouth twitches as he tries to shush his hiccupping daemon. “Somehow I don’t think people will much like the idea of their superheroes working with a monster.”
Loquis lands on Clint’s nose, and spreads her wings like a gossamer mask.
“Oh baby,” she laughs, “we’re all monsters here.”
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