lay your body down
let me cover you with shrouds
rating: pg
characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
warnings: torture
author's note: For hayleycreagine, who asked for an AU where "Natasha is still with the Red Room and Clint is brought in (unwillingly) for the girls to train with."
summary: She is an assassin, a killer, a dancer in the Red Room's hands - and she owes a debt to a marksman she has never met. Until today.
He is American, alone, trained to resist and prepared to hold out and almost broken by the time he is at her feet, held up only by the restraints that bind him to the chair. He is brown-haired, blue-eyed, blackened and bruised and opening bloody lips to whisper a single word when she studies him, distant, detached, defiled.
"Zagreb," he breathes, out of sight of the cameras, out of range of the young girls lining the walls to watch her work her arts on a living dummy, and Natasha meets his clear gaze with the light of the bare bulbs in her eyes.
She had never known his name, the unknown marksman who covered her back on that shithole extraction, the long exit route she had run to get to safety; had only known that every bullet aimed for her back was matched with another, a rifle’s retort echoing off the empty street facades. The enemy of her enemy, the demons she could no more understand than find, and a simple sketched symbol on the concrete when she clambered onto the abandoned hotel roof, cobwebs in her hair and heart in her mouth.
A symbol now imprinted into his skin, a spread-eagle emblem they have carved cruelly into it.
Natasha meets his eyes, this stranger, this soldier, and the fluttering thought that something had been missing, something had been wrong since then, calls up the empty hollow in her stomach.
She does her work, calls the apprentices forward to guide their hands on the blades and explain the purpose of each chosen stroke, and when a small hand slips and cuts an artery, she curls her lip and dismisses them with disgust. A waste, she tells them as the archer’s head falls forward and blood pools around his bound ankles, a disgrace to throw away this chance.
Two hours later she slides his arm out from under the tarp and hooks it around her shoulder, helps him hobble from the dark room and down hallways lit by what light slips under cracked doors.
They make it to the transport van, sliding into braced positions as the engine rattles from idle to chugging stolidly onwards, and in the electric glare of the overhead lights she cradles his head on her lap, counting his pulse against her own through the haze of exhaustion.
He doesn’t ask her why, doesn’t speak in the blood-loss fog that clouds his eyes, but she watches as he sees the scars that curve against her palm; sees the suggestion of a shape in the shadows and the light.
The van continues onwards, turning down roads that will lead to a small airport and a pilot who knows his way in the dark across the tundra, and a bird with its wings outstretched ghosts along the canvas of her hand.
rating: pg
characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
warnings: torture
author's note: For hayleycreagine, who asked for an AU where "Natasha is still with the Red Room and Clint is brought in (unwillingly) for the girls to train with."
summary: She is an assassin, a killer, a dancer in the Red Room's hands - and she owes a debt to a marksman she has never met. Until today.
He is American, alone, trained to resist and prepared to hold out and almost broken by the time he is at her feet, held up only by the restraints that bind him to the chair. He is brown-haired, blue-eyed, blackened and bruised and opening bloody lips to whisper a single word when she studies him, distant, detached, defiled.
"Zagreb," he breathes, out of sight of the cameras, out of range of the young girls lining the walls to watch her work her arts on a living dummy, and Natasha meets his clear gaze with the light of the bare bulbs in her eyes.
She had never known his name, the unknown marksman who covered her back on that shithole extraction, the long exit route she had run to get to safety; had only known that every bullet aimed for her back was matched with another, a rifle’s retort echoing off the empty street facades. The enemy of her enemy, the demons she could no more understand than find, and a simple sketched symbol on the concrete when she clambered onto the abandoned hotel roof, cobwebs in her hair and heart in her mouth.
A symbol now imprinted into his skin, a spread-eagle emblem they have carved cruelly into it.
Natasha meets his eyes, this stranger, this soldier, and the fluttering thought that something had been missing, something had been wrong since then, calls up the empty hollow in her stomach.
She does her work, calls the apprentices forward to guide their hands on the blades and explain the purpose of each chosen stroke, and when a small hand slips and cuts an artery, she curls her lip and dismisses them with disgust. A waste, she tells them as the archer’s head falls forward and blood pools around his bound ankles, a disgrace to throw away this chance.
Two hours later she slides his arm out from under the tarp and hooks it around her shoulder, helps him hobble from the dark room and down hallways lit by what light slips under cracked doors.
They make it to the transport van, sliding into braced positions as the engine rattles from idle to chugging stolidly onwards, and in the electric glare of the overhead lights she cradles his head on her lap, counting his pulse against her own through the haze of exhaustion.
He doesn’t ask her why, doesn’t speak in the blood-loss fog that clouds his eyes, but she watches as he sees the scars that curve against her palm; sees the suggestion of a shape in the shadows and the light.
The van continues onwards, turning down roads that will lead to a small airport and a pilot who knows his way in the dark across the tundra, and a bird with its wings outstretched ghosts along the canvas of her hand.