You guys will definitely be in for a somewhat creepy chapter in the next update. I wonder if you can guess why Marlon's trying to escape or what he's trying to escape from...
Give me all of your dcxmarvel crossovers I need them, I'm looking for one right now where Tim ended up there and decided to mess with stuff, but I am free to all others you want to give me.
Natasha arrives back at the safehouse with Jason and fast food in hand. She hands out the variety pack of burgers and fries, plows through two burgers in under ten minutes, and makes her escape to change.
It has been a long day.
She changes back into the sweats, tank top, and silk robe that she’d been in last night and takes a moment to just breathe. Confronting Batman and Agent A, corralling the kid, running after Jason—it’s been a long day.
She stands in her doorway and listens to Drakov extolling the virtues of one of his knives to Damian, who she can’t see, but the fact that he’s being quiet means that he’s probably engaged. And Clint, very quietly: “I was never supposed to be a hero.”
Jason says nothing, but the air is charged.
“I’m a carnie, or an assassin, or a mercenary, or a government drone—not a hero. Was never supposed to be a hero. And then a portal opened up and Loki turned my heart to ice and my will to his, and Nat had to break me out again. And then another portal opened up over Manhattan and I said I could fly a plane, for some fucking reason, when Captain America shows up and says we need to go. And he just looked at Nat and she did her little chin lift that means so much and yet so little, you know the one?”
Jason croaks a laugh. Natasha smiles to herself a little. Nice to know she can still befuddle Clint sometimes.
“Yeah, and then Captain Fucking America nods and says let’s go. Like he just needs the word of a former KGB assassin to trust the word of the freshly un-brainwashed assassin. Like, what the fuck?”
“What the fuck,” Jason agrees, sounding like he’s sitting on a laugh.
“And then there was an alien invasion,” Clint says. “And I thought, ‘you know, I don’t think this week could get any weirder,’ and then I’m being called everything from stupid for being the only baseline human on a team of enhanced people—from technologically enhanced, to genetically enhanced, to being a fucking alien—thanks, Thor—and like. Fair. I also think I’m stupid for, uh, accidentally signing onto this circus—shut it—“
Jason’s laughing.
“I’m a carnie, I know exactly what a circus is like, and the Avengers have it all!” Clint sounds indignant. “But I’m being called stupid and badass in the same breath and then there’s the word ‘hero’ and I’m busy looking around for Captain America. I can’t say a damn thing, because it’s ‘bad for image’ and ‘we have enough issues, Hawkass, stop making my job harder’ and—well, you get the picture. So I kept my opinions to myself and thought that those people calling me a hero were stupid. And then I met Kate.”
Kate, Natasha knows, is a damn good hero. If a little rough around the edges. Which is why the callsign Hawkeye suits her down to the ground. She also takes great glee in yanking on Clint’s worldview, which is always hilarious to watch.
“And I realized that you can’t call yourself a hero. Maybe you can’t see it. Apparently I saved someone and did something badass during the Battle of Manhattan and Kate idolized me. She’d already been in archery and martial arts and after the Battle, she took it up to ten, and then I found this idiot teenage girl with a bow and arrow and a thousand dollar jacket wandering around Bronx and doing a good job almost getting herself killed. And of course I pulled her ass out of the fire, and told her to stop being stupid, and this girl had so many stars in her eyes she might as well have had a couple of galaxies hanging out in there, but she tried so hard to play it cool.”
Kate did not play it cool. Natasha remembers meeting Kate the day after. Kate was cool like a raging bonfire. Kate was not cool. Funny as hell, but not cool.
“And she followed me home and showed up on my doorstep and demanded training because she was going right back out there whether I trained her or not,” Clint says.
And now she’s the most dangerous seventeen year old girl on the eastern seaboard, Natasha thinks, grinning.
“And she knows me now. She knows that I’m not a hero, I’m just a guy that’s going to sit there and say, ‘I have this skillset. This is what needs to be done. I’m the guy that can do it. No one else around can, so let’s do it.’ And apparently that’s how that works.”
There’s a long silence, and Jason finally asks, “Was there a point to this, or is today Therapy Day and I’m the mannequin everyone’s talking to?”
“I knew I was forgetting something,” Clint says to himself, and Natasha giggles quietly. Jason snorts. “The point is that there’s a shitton of fuckups like me that get seen as heroes for some fucking reason. You have a special skillset, you see a need, you’re going to do it, damn the consequences. That’s why heroes are so controversial, because we’re needed, but we don’t work within limits as defined by laws or morals or whatever. I work with the Hulk, I’ve been brainwashed, I’ve been every bad guy in the books. Natasha’s KGB, her job was seduction and assassination and gathering information and toppling regimes, and she’s damn good at that. Tony was called the Merchant of Death. He’s a damn good weapons inventor. Batman might not call you a hero, but Crime Alley does. Natasha sees an Avenger in you. We all did, frankly, when she showed us the baby she tripped over.”
“Hey,” Jason says mildly.
“Nat’s a hundred and three, you’re a baby,” Clint says blithely.
Jason chokes. “A hundred—“
“And three,” she agrees, stepping back into the dining nook. “Can’t wait to be a hundred and thirteen, I’m going to start claiming I’m a teenager and watch all the double takes go in the opposite direction.”
Clint guffaws.
“Did you think I was joking about immortal assassins?” Natasha asks, curious.
Jason shakes his head. “I mean—Bucky Barnes. That was proof enough. I thought, maybe you were in your fifties and got recruited in the 70s. Twenty years is plenty for needing the kind of bloody revenge you talked about, not—“
“Almost eighty,” Natasha says, not unkindly. She grabs her tea and some blackberry jam and starts preparing it. “Did you want some?”
“I—yes, please.”
Drakov, in the living room, also requests tea. Natasha goes through the motions of making tea for three fairly quickly, snagging a jar of honey and some milk and bringing it all back to the table. “In the nook, Drakov,” she says. Clint gives her a puzzled look, and then realizes as Drakov comes back into the nook, Damian in tow.
“Your sneaky Russian brainwaves,” he accuses cheerfully, passing the honey.
“Clint,” Natasha says, very fondly, “you’re deaf.”
