for the hunt is a'coming
away, come away
rating: pg-13
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
warnings: canon-level violence
summary: It's always New York that they keep coming back to. [Fae AU]
author's note: This was originally written for the be_compromised Secret Santa 2013 as a community gift. The basic fae aspects/concepts came from the show Lost Girl, which I expanded on as needed. Thanks to my fantastic beta, cybermathwitch!
"Well?" She stands alone in the murky water, its tainted currents caught around her hips and sinking into her skin, reviving and refreshing even as it heads for the salt-laden bay ahead. The rivers of this New World are already thick with waste and greed and warm to the touch, warmer than the icy streams of her homeland, but she will do as she has always done, what her lord has commanded; she will do what she must.
"They forgot to mention the boss' son was upset with a rusalka," the stranger on the riverbank says conversationally, as though her mob-ordered death is not hanging over their heads, as though the revolver in his hand is not aimed at her heart. The Hudson stirs around her submerged fingertips, ready to rise and drown him, ready to reach out with death in its grip and seize him -
And just when she is ready to release it the stranger's eyes begin to burn, washed through with a luminescent glow no human could ever imagine.
"Shame on them," Natasha replies, reconsidering her options as the water subsides into its normal path, and wonders if the truce struck in the distant past will be enough to hold even now, even in a world where fae and prey alike are strangers, invaders. Dark and Light and dancing outside their boundaries Chaos, riding over the moors and hills with laughter and shadows in its wake, exempt and excepted and always on the edges, the exits, the answers. In this strange country they are carrying the rules of the old, of the familiar, and the restraints that held all in check are flexing even now.
Then he smiles, easy and calm and centered, and she knows her death will not come at his hands, not this night.
"Seems like."
.
Eighty years later, she watches his death come at the hands of another.
"Clint!"
He doesn't hear her, can't hear her, caught as he is in the grip of the surly-eyed fae who pinned her to the hospital wall with a humming sword and left her to hang there while she dragged the life from her partner. The blade sings with the lightening held within it, with the electricity that is even now running through her body, her veins, her heart; nothing more deadly to a water fae, nothing more painful than this lightning's touch.
But she fights, sparks dancing over her skin and leaving agony in their wake, because her partner is sinking to his knees while the Cat-Sith drags her claws out of his chest, a gleaming green soul held in her hand.
"Not so much fun," the dark-haired fae purrs, bending close to peer into Clint's now-vacant eyes. "Hmm, I hope Odinson's other guard is at least more of a challenge. You would think he would be more cautious..." And lifting the green vapor to her mouth she inhales, slit pupils widening in pleasure as it vanishes over her rough tongue, through her pointed teeth.
When the Cat-Sith releases the hold she has on his body, watching it slump to the floor, Natasha stops struggling.
"Now, little fae," Clint's killer murmurs, turning towards her. "Your soul next, I think, and then the girl's. I wonder, what will a half-Light soul taste like? So young, and so sweet..."
"If you want my soul," Natasha replies, blood running over her breast and dripping onto the floor, "come and get it."
And her focus turns, diving inwards, plunging through the dark spaces of her own mind towards a moonlit night and the beacon of warmth, of energy, of Clint that radiates from there even now.
.
A hunt! Forward, with pleasure, with the thrill of the chase, the impact as another soul invades this dying body and searches through the emptiness of a hundred years of immortal life, searches in the pursuit of a death-riddled soul.
.
The moonlight gleams on the revolver in his hand, on the familiar face relaxed despite the impasse, on the shoulders that rise and fall with every breath, alive alive alive.
"What now?" Natasha asks quietly, water trickling over her bare skin as she stands in front of this man, clad in her element and her past and the glimpse of a warm future she is straining to hold onto, striving to reach. It should be terrifying, what she will do for that bright moment, but she has drowned and stolen and deceived for her own life a hundred times before; for a better life, for the one she is trying to protect, for the one with him?
There is nothing she is not willing to do.
"I'm not sure." He holsters the revolver as smoothly as though it is his preferred weapon, as if the hands that would have killed her do not belong around wood and string instead, and those hands are warm when she takes them, folds her slick fingers around his callouses and chaos. "We're going to have to find a way to fix this, though."
"I have an idea." It's there, beating in the back of her heart, a quiet whisper that perhaps her time in this strange city will not be so empty after all, that the darkness embracing her will not be lonely - at least for a while.
And Clint grins wryly at her as he helps her climb onto the riverbank, smiles the way she remembers, treasures, and even now the heart of him is strong, is beating still in this glimpse of her past.
"Let's hear it," he tells her softly, so very alive in the silver light, and with hope in her chest Natasha tips her head to steal the smile from his mouth.
.
Run; the first instinct is pounce, to chase, to pursue. Such easy prey, such simple prey, to taste sweet and clean after the long stain of human soul; with glee the black tide sweeps over the ramparts made to defend against such an attack, opened by the panic of this feeble fae. Run, run, as fast as you can…
.
"I'm running out of time," Natasha says to the man sitting on the park bench beside her, watching the colorless sunset above a city that will burn if her side has its way. There should be red in the air, blood orange lights instead of grey clouds above glittering towers, and she thinks distantly that it's such a shame they will be nothing but dust if her kin win this war. Cold or not, quiet or not, the Iron Curtain is hiding a multitude of sins and weapons, is parting to let creatures like her slip under the fluttering edge, slide out into a world on the brink of another war.
How many humans will go missing, in the aftermath? How many more than would have died if naught but human-kind had inhabited this world?
She drowns, she kills with the living water of her homeland's frigid lakes and ice-filled rivers, but even with death in her hands Natasha can taste the destruction that will smother them all if she follows through on this mission.
"I know." Clint leans forward, elbows on his knees, for all the world - truly, for the world's sake - looking relaxed, as though they are not speaking outside all fae law, all fae and human reckoning. The treason of custom and spirit and wanton will they are planning will bury the dark secrets of their kind, in the cold light of a Cold War; will leave the balance in the hands of the mortals who know no better than they. "You only need a few more moments, Tasha. You can do this."
And his faith in her, not in morals or their clans or the laws they should have sworn to, is reassurance enough.
"Even now?" She asks, a crooked smile on her lips, as around them the memory hangs motionless and trapped in black and white, leaving them - leaving herself and the ghost of the fae she loves - the only living things in this moment.
He smiles back at her, just as lopsided, just as heartfelt.
"Even now."
The frozen wings of a pigeon caught midair tremble, the briefest hint that her hold on this moment is beginning to loosen. With the rustle of feathers building in her ears, Natasha leans forward and kisses the lips of a shade, of an impression of a man she once knew.
.
Behind her the darkness comes swirling, sweeping, spinning down the long alleyways of the walls she has built around her soul. Seeking, searching, hunting with malice and laughter for the bright spark racing ahead of its seething grasp.
.
"Almost," she gasps, sinking against the wall as the dust of the fires and ruined lives coats her tongue, her throat. One burned hand curls around the jagged wound in her side, cradling it even in the drift of the past, a reminder of all that has been lost this day despite her efforts, of everything she has lived to see, of everything she may now never live through.
He bends over her, sinks down to his heels in front of her and leans into her space to press a kiss against her ash-dusted lips, even now desperate and struggling to cling to a world that makes sense, to something that still holds the fabric of the universe together with more than string and blood-soaked pages. In the sprawling city around them the passersby stand still and silent, as statue-like as they had all been in the terrible saga of this endless day; somewhere the ruins of the skyscrapers like those she had once admired are now littered with bodies and bones and broken dreams.
"I'm almost done," she breathes, the dual echoes ricocheting off of bricks and marred landscapes. All the water in her was not enough to quench those terrible flames, not enough to save those lives; all the rivers in her will have to be enough, now, to save herself, to save him.
"Take it," he tells her, hands on her sides, running down her heaving ribcage, offering everything he was, everything he had left. Imprint and impresser, the soul of the man retained even in the echoes of his energy.
That's what she's counting on.
She accepts his touch, cups his face with one blood-stained hand, and takes what he has to offer.
.
There; the end of the chase, the end of the line, the final barrier between it and its prey. And all that stands in the way is a single bright spark, weak and pathetic and radiant with nothing more than the light of a murky waterway.
.
When the Cat-Sith glides from the black void into the last glimpse of Natasha's heart, she moves with lethal grace, a satisfied smirk. Her prey is cornered, her games are about to begin; what could she possibly lose?
"Is this the best you can do?" She dismisses the pale ghost beside Natasha with a contemptuous sneer, pupils narrowing to slits in her amber eyes. "All that running, little fae, and here you end, with a pretty bauble to amuse you?"
"I would have guessed you had more sense that that. Have you even looked around you?" Natasha counters, gesturing to the white haze that surrounds them, and ignores the pang that runs through her body at the motion. She truly is running out of time, out of blood, out of the will to do once more what she must to survive.
To keep Clint alive.
In front of her the Cat-Sith flicks an ear, only glancing towards the haze for a moment before her gleaming gaze returns once more. So the other Dark fae misses the faint images that begin roaming through the white mist, flashes of a hundred years of death, dying, deceiving - and returning, again and again and again, to the one lying dead on a New York hospital floor, to the one standing wraith-like beside her.
"Soul-eater, soul-stealer - but you're in my soul, now. And you've been playing in the wrong pantheon." She smiles, slow and predatory, showing the edges of her teeth with pleasure at the Cat-Sith's growing unease. Black tendrils slip out from the other fae's human-seeming, twisting with nerves even as Natasha's feral grin widens. "Of course everyone knows that I'm a rusalka… but did you ever think to ask what he is?"
The pieces she's collected of him, the scattered scraps scented with leather and oil and a burning cinnamon aftertaste, coalesce into a single whole, a shadow of a soul strong enough to escape the labyrinth of her own mind. In a flash, in a movement that settles her own being back into its proper form but inexplicably leaves a gaping hole behind, Clint vanishes -
And, in the world of flesh and sensation and outside of the prison she's built inside herself, wakes up.
"You stole the soul from one of the Hunt, Cat-Sith. He belongs to the Horned Lord, to the wind and the arrow and the hounds of hell. Be glad you die now, rather than waiting for the cries of the Wild Hunt," she tells her attacker, Clint's killer, secure in the knowledge that the truth will die with the other fae. "He is one of the Hunt… and he is mine."
.
Natasha opens her eyes to see Clint dropping the Dark fae's lifeless corpses onto the floor, her neck twisted at an impossible angle. For just a moment the tangles of her black hair lift, stretching upwards even as her body falls, a glimpse of the dark form cloaked by her human shape - and then she is out of sight, hidden by the overturned chairs, the upset table. The rusalka stirs, touching the now-lifeless blade she is still impaled on as her partner steps to her side, eyes aglow with a ghostly green light.
"Are you all right?"
She gives him a look and he laughs, wrapping a hand around the blade's hilt.
"Don't bite my throat out for saying it, but you look like you could use some help." And yet she considers him for a moment, the weight of her water-weighed past still roaring inside her chest, the lifetime she has thieved his presence from still shuddering in her heart. Then she tips her head and he draws the sword out in a smooth motion, catching her with his other arm when her legs buckle underneath her.
"I got you, I got you," he murmurs, lowering her onto the nearest chair. She ignores the wound in her shoulder, forcing her breathing to steady, and instead brushes the fingers of her good hand across the phosphorescent fire spilling from his eyes.
"Time to go?" He asks, lips quirking ever so slightly. Because he knows, he understands, this variant of her beloved she has cobbled together from memories and magic, freed from the pain and scars she has not shared in, lightened by the absence of his own history.
After all, this soul was made to be broken.
"I'm sorry." She can say it because he is leaving, he will be dust in the wind and an ache in her heart; because here these words are not a weakness, only a truth. The fire catches on her fingertips and trails in the air, and when the flames are gone there is nothing left to show for it.
"I'm not."
And she wants to believe him, to think that this could be such a fundamental part of him that even his echo could express it. Instead she leans forward, kisses him, and takes back the ghost of the hunter she would defy two worlds for.
His true soul is still there, glimmering in the charred heart Natasha drags from the Cat-Sith's corpse. She breathes it back into the vacant eyes of his body, watching the ashes dance and swirl into the flickering green fire, and when Clint once more looks out at her from the confines of his mortal body, she licks her fingers clean.
All the water in her is not enough to drown this longing, this love, and she would not do it even if she could.
"Fuck. Is it over?" Her partner asks, taking in the wreck of the waiting room, the body on the tile floor.
Natasha rubs her fingers over the healing wound rather than answer directly, feeling the bone and flesh knitting themselves back together under blood-soaked fabric. She hears him inhale when he sees her back, watching her turn and slide the curtain aside to check on the little girl sleeping in the other room, the girl whose death would start a war between the fae. But he doesn't say anything, doesn't ask again if she's all right; a hunter can tell a mortal blow from a flesh wound, understands the silence of injured prey.
Clint knows her, and the taste of his soul is still lingering on her lips.
"In eighty years, Barton, have I ever let you down?"
"Never," he replies from behind her, hand threading through her bloody one, and in it she finds a heartbeat matching the rivers of her homeland that course through her veins.
.