heavy are the shoulders
the weight of ghosts
rating: pg-13
characters: Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Thoy
warnings: canon-typical violence
summary: Before she is Natasha, she is Natalia. And she dreams. The Avengers are shadows, impressions, dreams linked to her by the truths that live under her skin and seep through her blood. They are her ghosts - and she will carry them.
Before she is Natasha, she is Natalia.
And she dreams.
Lithe-limbed Natalia dreams during autumn days of someone as broken as she is, as warped by the weight of her past and her ancestors and the machine that made her. In the darkness she finds him with a quick smile and shadowed eyes and a heart thrumming in his chest like hers, striking and charming and so very easy to question, to doubt.
On cold nights she tastes her anger embodied, a violent haze and its aftermath and the sickly sweet coat of someone else’s blood in her mouth. She wakes with damp skin and a regret mingled with lust for more carnage, knowing the intelligent mind underneath a disguise and beneath the impressions made by surface skin and bone.
Less often, and only when she carries her guns in her left hand and her knives in her right, when her prowling steps take her east towards the sun, she thinks of someone with the need to act, to put sinew and strength into thought. A body formed from a child’s intent and a will she compares herself against, force made flesh and offered a weapon - offered the chance to become a weapon, far away from the lonely winters of what she thinks may have been her youth.
The fourth she never sees but for the colors of stained glass windows, the dust of cathedrals and the gold of old icons. In him is a past that reaches into the present and will stretch out into a future no one can fathom, anchored in a millennia of myth and propaganda, a people’s belief they are never in the wrong. Then she feels the weight of history, destiny, thundering down on them all like the cruel gods of old.
Sometimes, when she sleeps long enough, lightly enough, she catches a glimpse of someone with scars and strings and a long line of broken lives along his own shattered path. He is, if she had the words for it, her inverse and relative and opposite, the other star of her binary system.
Lithe-limbed Natalia dreams of shadows, of those who have been made to be like her. And when she wakes from her dozing, to the sound of gunshots or her fingers breaking, she carries the ghosts of them with her.
rating: pg-13
characters: Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Thoy
warnings: canon-typical violence
summary: Before she is Natasha, she is Natalia. And she dreams. The Avengers are shadows, impressions, dreams linked to her by the truths that live under her skin and seep through her blood. They are her ghosts - and she will carry them.
Before she is Natasha, she is Natalia.
And she dreams.
Lithe-limbed Natalia dreams during autumn days of someone as broken as she is, as warped by the weight of her past and her ancestors and the machine that made her. In the darkness she finds him with a quick smile and shadowed eyes and a heart thrumming in his chest like hers, striking and charming and so very easy to question, to doubt.
On cold nights she tastes her anger embodied, a violent haze and its aftermath and the sickly sweet coat of someone else’s blood in her mouth. She wakes with damp skin and a regret mingled with lust for more carnage, knowing the intelligent mind underneath a disguise and beneath the impressions made by surface skin and bone.
Less often, and only when she carries her guns in her left hand and her knives in her right, when her prowling steps take her east towards the sun, she thinks of someone with the need to act, to put sinew and strength into thought. A body formed from a child’s intent and a will she compares herself against, force made flesh and offered a weapon - offered the chance to become a weapon, far away from the lonely winters of what she thinks may have been her youth.
The fourth she never sees but for the colors of stained glass windows, the dust of cathedrals and the gold of old icons. In him is a past that reaches into the present and will stretch out into a future no one can fathom, anchored in a millennia of myth and propaganda, a people’s belief they are never in the wrong. Then she feels the weight of history, destiny, thundering down on them all like the cruel gods of old.
Sometimes, when she sleeps long enough, lightly enough, she catches a glimpse of someone with scars and strings and a long line of broken lives along his own shattered path. He is, if she had the words for it, her inverse and relative and opposite, the other star of her binary system.
Lithe-limbed Natalia dreams of shadows, of those who have been made to be like her. And when she wakes from her dozing, to the sound of gunshots or her fingers breaking, she carries the ghosts of them with her.