#natfic!

[mr-m-murdock]

hi, i have a request! nat and r decide to get married (will leave the timeline to you), it's a very small and private ceremony, only yelena, clint and his family, and a few other avengers are present. the ceremony gets crashed and r is kidnapped so they all go on a quest to save r. bonus points for nat kicking ass in a wedding dress/suit.

the bells

| natasha x reader |

warnings: violence, duh

a/n: didn’t do much of the marriage, sorry. but there is badassery. also r is a wimp because I can be realistic: if I got kidnapped I’d be blubbering for nat to save me within minutes

You can hear the music going outside: a slow, low tune. Yelena has left and it’s just you now, with your flower stems encased in your sweaty palms, your face ashy in the mirror.

It’s stupid that you’re nervous. Ridiculous. You close your eyes to banish your terrified reflection and think of Nat, picture her in her suit with flowers in her hair and that lopsided little grin on her face as she watches you walk towards her. All that stands between you and the rest of your life is a quarter-open door, where the sunlight is flooding in.

When you open your eyes, there’s a figure behind you in the mirror. The shock hits you before your thoughts can, and you open your mouth to scr

You blink sluggishly. The floor is pressed to your face, the nice white plush carpet. So soft. You could just sink into it, fall asleep. 

Arms loop under your arms and heave you up, as easily as if you were made of paper. Your head droops. There’s a pain starting at the back of your skull, dull and throbbing. The world wheels this way and that and settles on the mirror. Through half-closed eyelids you see a thick face, a square jaw. A man, dragging you backwards across the floor.

The fear hits. You try to kick out, to stand, but your legs won’t move. You tighten your shoulder and slam your elbow back and up into the man’s jaw. He grunts and drops you and you hit the floor, burning your hands on the carpet. You try to scramble for the door but your body gives up and you tilt sideways, hands clawing. Your head hits the floor and you pass out.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

It’s the rumble of the engine that wakes you, and the unpleasant sensation of a tire jack sticking into your thigh. Your head aches harshly as you open your eyes, your vision a burst of blue and grey, so you shut them again. 

You’ve been stuffed unceremoniously into the trunk of a car, your legs and arms at odd, painful angles. The car goes over a bump, jolting you up and whacking your head against the lid of the trunk,

“Ow!” you complain, shoving a hand out blindly and bracing yourself against the wall. You try to shift into a more comfortable position and your dress tugs, but doesn’t give. They’ve shut it in the mechanism, the morons.

Your head gives a particularly sharp ache and you moan wearily, half in pain and half in sympathy for the beautiful train of your dress, which must now be crumpled and smeared beyond recognition. The headache is splitting now. The man must really have hit you hard.

You dare to open your eyes again as the pain begins to recede, and see the dim red backglow of the tail lights, nothing else. You can smell that new-car smell, crisp in the carpet, fresh paint and lacquer.

You begin to search the interior with fumbling, shaking hands, but there’s nothing around except for you and that damn tire jack. You try to kick it away but you only succeed in bruising your foot. They haven’t bound your hands or legs. Maybe when they open the trunk you can leap up and bludgeon one of them to death with it. You’re certainly angry enough now that the realisation of what they’ve done to your dress and your wedding day has hit you, but the idea fades quickly. Your hands are heavy and clumsy with shock and pins and needles. Besides, Nat’s the one who does the bludgeoning, not you.

Nat. She’ll come. She’s probably on her way right now, incandescent with fury that some idiot in a nice new car has kidnapped her fiancee right before you were about to walk down the aisle. You imagine her perfect, beautiful face and the strong curves of her legs in her battle suit as she kicks down a door or bursts through a window and it makes you feel a little better. She really will be furious.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

The trunk lid lifts an eternity later, flooding your dark little prison with daylight. You scowl up, your eyes adjusting.

“You two, get her out,” someone says, and two pairs of hands reach in, grip you by the arms and legs and haul you painfully from  the trunk. Your muscles cramped long ago, so you don’t put up a fight: you just wince and allow yourself to be lifted. A shoulder lands none too gently in your stomach and you’re draped like a sack, the concrete-laden ground swaying beneath you.

“Ow,” you protest halfheartedly. It’s more of a wheeze, and the shoulder beneath you refuses to acknowledge it.

You crane your neck up to look around. They must have been driving for ages - the low evening light glows over an abandoned parking lot surrounded by wispy fields and patches of barren earth. Middle of nowhere. Fucking great.

Following you are two more people, a woman with blonde hair scraped back into a low bun, and the thick-faced man, a blue bruise flung across his jaw. You remember him from the mirror, remember your elbow flying up to crack into his jawbone, and feel a little bloom of triumph. The shoulder beneath you, or the person belonging to the shoulder, lumps you a little more securely onto them. The movement jolts your diaphragm and you glare vaguely at the two following. Thye both ignore you.

The shadow of a doorway passes over you like a cloud. The concrete is intterupted by a thin plank of wood, a doorstep, and the floor becomes dirty, gap-toothed planks.

A few more steps in, echoing now in the building, and then you’re dumped down onto a hard plastic chair. Your wrists are grabbed by the blonde woman and cuffed behind you, the link passed between the chair legs. Your shoulders are tugged cruelly down and begin to ache almost immediately.

There are four people in the room: the three who pulled you from the trunk and a man in a three piece suit, talking urgently and quietly into his phone. The building is narrow and tall and grey with the dusk, and you hear a pigeon hoot softly up in the dim rafters.

Finally, the fear begins to seep in. So far the shock and the headache have been keeping it easily at bay, but now that you can see properly and these rough and angry people in their dark bulky clothing are eyeing you up and you’re really, completely helpless, there’s no way you can temper down your panic. You don’t know where you are. You don’t have your phone. What if Nat doesn’t find you? What if they kill you before she gets here? 

A panicked sob climbs your throat and you gulp it back, your shoulders jarring with the effort. The handcuffs clank and one of the men shoots you a sharp look. Tears begin to fill your eyes.

The man in the suit ends his call, stows his phone away and looks over at you. His eyes are dark and wide, almost guileless. His expression settles.

“Easiest way to get her here is to bait her,” he says, and you know he’s not talking to you, even though his eyes remain fixed to yours. A single tear dribbles down your cheek. He hands his phone to the thick-faced man. “Serena, rough her up a little.” Those words hit you like a punch to the gut. You whip around to look at the blonde woman.

“Wait-” you say.

“Like how?” she asks, cutting you off. She studies you critically.

“I don’t care,” says the man. “Just don’t make her unrecognizable. And she’ll need to speak, to say the address.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” you say, the words hitting the air one after the other. They are your only protest, your only form of defence as you strain against the handcuffs. “Please don’t, please don’t-”

“Doesn’t matter too much,” the man adds. They’re all ignoring you. “We’ll kill her before Romanoff gets here. Hurry up.”

“What?” you say, alarmed. Serena circles you like a shark. The tears are coming freely now. You’ve never been hit before, but you know it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt. “Please-” you try, and Serena backhands you across the mouth. Your head whips to the side. Pain explodes over your lip like a burst balloon and you grunt from the force. She’s wearing a ring. Your head hanging sideways, you taste blood, your own tears creeping into the corners of your mouth.

Serena grabs your chin and yanks your head forwards. Your ears ring. Your mouth stings. She pulls a pistol from beneath her jacket and slams the butt of it into your cheekbone. You cry out, her hand keeping you from flying backwards, the pain blinding you.

When you blink away the fuzz of tears, she’s surveying you from above. “Give it a second for the bruises to come in,” she says. Your lip is split. There’s snot in your nose and you sniff messily. The third man, the one who’d slung you over his shoulder, is scribbling something down on a notebook balanced on his knee. The man in the suit is outside, his shadow slanting through the open doorway.

The thick-faced man raises the phone. “You done, Billy?”

“One second,” says Billy, the man with the notebook. He scribbles a couple more words, then rises and flips the notebook to face you. It’s covered in large lettering, but you still have to squint through your tears to read it. “Here are your cues,” he says, grinning. The first page says CRY LIKE YOU MEAN IT. You try to glare at him.

“Alright,” says the thick-faced man. The phone camera points at you like the barrel of a gun. Soon enough the barrel of a real gun is going to be staring you down, unless they choose to beat you to death. You imagine your body still tied to the chair, shot clean through the face, imagine Nat finding you like that, and you have the sudden, rising urge to throw up. Bile stings in the back of your throat and you start to cry properly.

“Good girl,” says Billy. “Lights, camera, action.” He flips to the next page. You hear the click of a video recording starting on the phone. You try to clear your vision. You’re no use to Nat if you’re just sobbing uncontrollably. 

On the page is written an address. You stumble through it, your voice wavering, tears dripping from your chin and into your lap. Billy flips the page.

BEG HER TO SAVE YOU

Your face crumples, and the tears take over again, the panic rising until it’s clouding your mind, all you sense, all you know. They’re going to kill you. They’re not even going to give her a chance to save you. You are a throwaway. You don’t matter, not after this moment. 

Serena cuffs you round the back of the head and you rock forward, your shoulders heaving. The ground is rough with dust under your heels. Strangely, it’s this that grounds you.

“Nat,” you say to the ground. Your voice is thick. “Please. Please come and get me.”

“To the camera,” grunts the man holding the phone. You raise your head. You must look awful. Billy flips another page.

FIVE MINUTES, STARTING NOW

“They said-” you try, and tears fill your eyes once more. “They said you have five minutes.” You take a breath that catches in your throat. Stalling will worsen it. Will give her less time. You close your eyes. “Starting now,” you say. A click. The recording has ended. 

“Sent,” says the thick faced man. You stare dismally at the floor.

“Alright, timer’s on,” says Serena. 

The next five minutes are the longest of your life.

You think about Natasha, your thoughts a constant stream of her. Yesterday evening when she kissed you goodnight. The first time you met. The second time you held hands and you could feel her gun callouses on her palms and you struck the little voice from your head that whispered is this a good idea? The wash of red hair down her bare back, and following the scar down her spine with the tip of your finger, listening to the unsteady hitch of her breathing.

You dredge up every memory of her, of her voice and laugh and the spark of her eyes and you clutch them tight and close your eyes, swaying in your seat. 

Your head hurts.

An alarm tone goes, snapping you out of your thoughts. Your memories scatter like a thin cloud on a windy day. The thick-faced man switches it off with the press of him thumb. “Billy,” he says, and he tucks the phone away. 

Billy pulls a gun from under his jacket. You want to cry: you should be begging right now, or screaming at them, grasping at some last words. But your head hurts. It hurts so much because it’s full of Nat. Because she takes up so much space, all that joy, all those memories, the fact that you’d almost had everything you’d ever wanted with her.

The gun is dark and matte and reflects no light. Serena steps away from you and you’re sitting there in the chair but really, you’re tied to a wire, swinging free in the air, straining to reach the ground. The fear turns everything white. You breathe and breathe and breathe, except it can’t have been that long, they would have shot you by now.

Billy is staring over his shoulder with a quizzical look on his face.

“Billy-” says Serena-

The man in the suit comes flying through the open door and hits the opposite wall. The gun goes off with a bang and you scream before you even realise that you’ve opened your mouth. The entire east wall explodes, shard of wood, dust ploughing the air. You feel the impact, feel it lift your feet from where they’re brushing the ground, and the chair tips and you fall backwards. 

Even unconsciously, you brace for impact, for the crack of your skull on the floor. It never comes.

You open your eyes.

Nat hovers above you, one hand out gripping the back of the chair behind your head. Her lip is split and her hair washes across her forehead.

“Hey, baby,” she says. She sets the chair back on all four legs and pulls out a tiny blade to fiddle with your handcuffs. The dust is still everywhere, blinding you, but you can hear the whine and blast of Tony’s repulsors, the hiss of Sam’s wings and the thud of Clint’s arrows, even Yelena grunting somewhere, the shadow of her kicks rising up and up again. 

The cuffs give and your arms swing down to your sides. You wince at the pain, even as Nat’s sliding an arm around your shoulders and under your knees, and hoisting you into the air. “Hold tight,” she says, warm in your ear, and she runs. Right through where the east wall used to be. You flinch, but instead of slamming into hard wood, the two of you emerge into the sunlight, and you hear Natasha’s feet hit the grass. You can tell she’s trying hard not to jog you around.

“You can put me down,” you say, watching your dust-coated dress trail flutter in the wind.

“I’ll put you down in the car,” Nat argues, obstinately.

“Okay,” you say, and you rest your head on her shoulder. When she reaches the car, she sets you down carefully in the passenger seat, and then, horror of horros, tries to pull away. You grab at her, fingers finding a collar: and that’s when you realise she’s still in her wedding suit. “Oh,” you say. There’s something about the blood on her lip and the strands of hair wild and loose from her braid and the flower, dust-covered but still perfectly arranged in her buttonhole that’s making your mouth water. What a ridiculous thing to be thinking, when you can still hear the sound of Tony beating a man into the ground with his metal fist not five metres away. “Don’t you look dashing,” you say. Nat grins, that sideways grin that’s on the verge of preening.

“And you look beautiful as always,” she says. You smile, and then your jaw twinges and you flinch at the pain and realise you really must look awful. Tears color your eyes again. 

“I don’t really,” you say. Your eyes drift away from her morosely. “God, we’ll have to postpone for a bit, so I don’t look like John Wick on a bad day, won’t we?” 

Nat grabs your face between her palms and twists your face gently towards hers. “I’d marry you if you were wearing a trash bag and had lost all your teeth,” she promises. “I’d marry you whatever you looked like. However many bruises.” She adds a perfunctory, “Don’t be so stupid.”

You sniff your tears back. “That’s an image,” you say, a smile appearing uncertain on your face. “Love you too.”

“Love you more.” 

You smile at her idiotically.

And then you see him - the man in the suit, holding his jaw, staggering up behind her. Nat’s eyes flick to the wing mirror.

“Nat, look-” you say, but she’s already turned. He lunges at her and she blocks his punch with a forearm and slams the side of her hand into his throat. The man drops. His body hits the gravel with a heavy crunch.

“Let’s go,” Nat says. She closes your door gently, kicks the man aside and marches around to get in herself. Once she’s in and the door’s shut and the engine’s up, her hand settles on your knee, like she’s reminding herself that you really are there. Her face is stormy. 

“Nat,” you say. She turns to you and her expression relaxes. “I’m okay,” you say.

“Good,” she replies. “I’m still going to kill him slowly, you know.” She squeezes your leg. You decide not to argue.

“I didn’t think the others were going to come,” you say, as the car moves off. Nat looks over at you for a quick second and you grin at her. “I know you could’ve taken all of them at once,” you say. She sits up a touch straighter in her seat and directs her smile through the windshield.

“Yeah. I could’ve.” Right turn, her hands crossing over on the wheel. The noise of the gravel vanishes, replaced by the relief of the silent tarmac road. “Everyone was coming, but they got there the quickest. I think I heard a sonic boom the second I told the others over the phone, actually.”

“When do you think we can get married again?” you ask, closing your eyes and setting your head back against the seat. You feel Nat shrug.

“Right now, if you want. I’ll marry you anywhere.”

So you marry in the courthouse of Austin, Pennsylvania, and the judge casts his aspersions on your bruises but Nat is holding your hand the whole way through, grinning like she’ll never stop, so you don’t care.

“You’re my wife now,” Nat says, when you step back out into the sunny air, her face still splitting with that dopey grin.

“No, you’re my wife,” you say, and the two of you bicker over it all the way to the car. Your smiles don’t drop.

requests | masterlist

notes: tried to make it a tiny bit silly and goofy UNLIKE tends to stick around which will hopefully have a heartbreaking 2nd part sometime soon. also i don’t know how people get married in courthouses leave me alone

taglist:  @when-wolves-howl @fayhar @maggieromanov @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624 @strangegardentaco @phantomvael @lorsstar1st @blckrwidow @ima-gi–na-tion @paryl @picnicmic  @smallestavenger @lainjupi  @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115  @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok @thorya22 @olicity-boo @iliketozoneout

#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x you #natasha romanoff #natfic! #fic! #fanfiction #anon cuties #written fic for anon

[this-ginger-has-no-soul]

Beautiful

(A/N): *cringes*

Request: A soulmate AU with Natasha where one of them (reader in this case) is blind but also part of the X-men and they meet eachother and reader realizes that Nat is they're soulmate bc they're able to see (I LOVE YOUR SOULMATES AU)

Warnings: none? 

   (Y/N) had spent their entire life not being able to see, for years everyone had theorized that it was all part of their mutation. They were enhanced in every other sense except sight, great hearing, great sense of taste, everything about them was amplified other than the fact they couldn't see. They may have been able to run a mile in under two seconds but they couldn't see, they may have been able to lift a car leisurely if they wanted and yet they had never seen what a tree looked like, they could run around for hours and never get tired due to their stamina but they had never seen the sky. 

   It was a little discouraging to say the least, (Y/N) didn't even know what they looked like, they didn't know what grass looked like or what a kitten looked like, they had never even seen the color of water or blood. But (Y/N) wasn't complaining, they had gotten around without their sight just fine for years and years.

    If anything was worth complaining about it was the mother of all headaches (Y/N) got after being able to see again. It was unexpected, strange, and downright scary but as soon as (Y/N) realized what was going on they calmed down quite a bit. It was their soulmate. Their soulmate was finally here. 

   Everyone in the world had a soulmate, everyone also had a way of knowing when they met their soulmate, guess for (Y/N) it was being able to see for he first time. 

   They'd been training with Jean Grey, their best friend at Xavier's school for gifted youngsters when a sudden voice rang through their head's; Charles' voice. 

   "All staff and team members report to the dining hall immediately," (Y/N) looked towards where they assumed Jean was before shrugging a bit and walking out of the room. (Y/N) didn't need any form of any assistance in walking, due to their amplified hearing they managed to navigate the world via vibrations, just like a bat. They knew the entire layout of the school better than anyone else, they could tell you exactly what was where just by taking a few steps down a hall; another piece of their amazing powers.

    (Y/N) smirked as they jogged up some stairs, leading them right into the dining room. 

   "Ahh, (Y/N), you're here," 

   "Yeah," (Y/N) smiles towards Charles' voice. "I just got done training with Jean, she should be up soon," 

   "Good. Very good. Did you happen to acknowledge the fact that we have guests with us today?" (Y/N) listens intently to the air, listening for the vibrations of the so called guests. (Y/N) smiled softly as they tapped their foot, listening to the vibrations that came afterwards.

    "Well- I've noticed them now," (Y/N) chuckles as they take a step towards the dining room table where the guests were all sitting. "Hi, I'm (Y/N)," There was a collection of soft hello's and hi's before the group fell silent again. 

   "(Y/N) is one of our most extraordinary mutants here, they're blind as you can tell but somehow their ailment has only proved to make them stronger. Improved hearing, sense of touch and smell, incredible strength and speed, anything you can think of (Y/N)'s sure to have it." (Y/N) blushes a bit at Charles' words, casting their 'gaze' towards their feet. "If you don't mind (Y/N) will be joining us on our little tour today, I hope that's okay with you all," The group all quietly murmurs a yes, some louder than others. "Great, well then, lets get going,"

    Charles' led the group through all the halls, through the dorms, through control and training rooms, through every possible room in the mansion in fact. The group would all ask questions now and then to which Charles would answer immediately. (Y/N) had remained primarily silent the entire time, just following along but that all changed when suddenly there was a soft voice beside them. 

   " hi, I'm natasha," (Y/N) was almost startled by the voice, nearly jumping out of their skin but they quickly laughed it off. 

   "Um...I'm (Y/N) but you already knew that..." 

   "So you're part of the x-men?" (Y/N) nods, humming softly.

   "And you're part of the-?" 

   "I'm part of the Avengers..." (Y/N) stops in their tracks, immediately looking towards Nat's voice. 

   "Oh my god, are you serious?"

   "Uh yeah..."

   "I've heard all about you guys!" (Y/N) smiles excitedly, like a child on Christmas morning. "What you did at Washington was really incredible,"

   "oh- well, thank you! I've been reading about the whole 1970's thing, that was some pretty incredible stuff, I mean, what you did to help Logan was absolutely amazing-" Nat reaches out to touch (Y/N)'s shoulder and that's when it happened. All of sudden the world exploded with light and color, leaving (Y/N) to reel backwards in surprise. 

   It took quite a few moments for (Y/N) to adjust but when they did the sight that greeted them nearly took their breath away. They could see. They could finally see. They could see colors and the intricate wall designs, they could see Charles for the first time, they could see all the avengers, but more importantly they could see Nat. She was beautiful, the most beautiful thing (Y/N)'s eyes had ever seen, and she really did take their breath away. 

   "(Y/N) are you alright?" Charles wheels towards them, concern lacing his voice. 

   "Oh my god Charles," (Y/N)'s voice quivers with emotion. "Oh my god I can see, I can see you," Charles looks at them strangely for all but two seconds before he's smiling widely, nearly beaming at the mutant.

   "(Y/N), I think we've found your soulmate," Charles gestures to Nat, who looks nearly as awestruck as the rest of everyone else. Her beautiful eyes were wide with surprise, her lips parted slightly. She was the epitome of beauty. 

   "Are you- are you serious?" (Y/N) asks, tears now sliding down their cheeks effortlessly.

    "I knew from the moment Nat stepped in the mansion, I was just waiting for you two to figure it out," (Y/N) sighs shakily, running a hand through their hair. Their sight and soulmate in one day, this had to be a dream. 

  (Y/N) looks towards Nat, eyes filled with hope. Nat mirrors the same expression, both parties hoping against hope that what Charles was saying was really true. 

  "I believe this is the point you should embrace each other-" Charles chuckles lightly as he looks between the two, waiting for one of them to react. The two share one last look before they're suddenly tangled together, hugging tightly, lips connected.

    So, that's how (Y/N) regained their sight, that's how they were they were today, curled up beside Nat as she taught them colors for the first time.

    "Okay this is-" 

   "Blue," (Y/N) smiles proudly at themself as Nat shows them a picture of the ocean.

    "Good job!" Nat coos, beaming at he soulmate. "And what color is this?" Nat asks as she tugs at a piece of her flaming red hair. (Y/N) smiles as they leans forward, gently pressing their lips to Nat's. 

   "beautiful,"

#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff imagine #natasha romanoff #Natalia Romanova imagine #Natalia Romanova x reader #Natalia Romanova #black widow #black widow x reader #Black widow imagine #Scarlett Johansson #Scarlett Johansson imagine #marvel #Marvel imagine #avengers imagine #avengers #Natfic*

[vhenadahls]

I believe in you, for Nat

The Inquisitor is nowhere to be seen, causing a slight panic among Josephine’s staff, but their anxiously chattering knot in the great hall splits to allow Leliana to walk through as she emerges from the rookery tower. Their nervous whispers take on a new tone as she steps into the weak mountain sunshine - is something truly wrong? Why would the spymaster do this herself?

She finds Nataliya perched in a tree just outside the fortress walls, easy enough to see if the runners sent to find her had thought to look up as well as down. But she stays in her perch, even with Leliana standing right below her, and she doesn’t speak over the sounds of the castle behind her.

“Inquisitor -” Leliana begins, and Nataliya visibly winces.

“Don’t call me that,” she says, a hard edge to her voice. “Or herald, or worship, or anything like that. I still have a name.”

“Nataliya,” Leliana amends, and this time she inclines her head in a go ahead motion. “There are better places to hide than a dead tree, no?”

The barest hint of a smile tugs at the corner of Nataliya’s mouth, just for a moment. “Obviously not, if only you were able to find me,” she says, but she disentangles herself from the branches and drops to the ground, light and silent.

Once Nataliya is steady on her feet and has brushed the tree’s detritus from her tunic, Leliana starts to walk - away from the castle, rather than back towards the keep’s warmth. Confused, Nataliya follows, confident that between them they have enough daggers to defend against whatever may wander this close to the fortress.

They walk in silence for a number of minutes, even turning onto a trail apparently made by the curly-horned sheep that live this high up the mountain, and still Leliana walks. Eventually the trail opens into into a small clearing, a lone rabbit scurrying into the undergrowth as they enter.

Nataliya surveys the small space slowly, still confused. “Where are we?”

Leliana leans over to touch the petals of a small white flower growing at the base of a tree, her shoulders far less tense than they are in Skyhold. “A better place to hide.”

She straightens, reaching out to briefly rest her hand on Nataliya’s forearm. “You are too hard on yourself.”

The sound Nataliya makes is just short of a snort. “You’re one to talk. But regardless.” She rests a hand on a tree trunk, almost looking if she’s going to climb this one as well. “I’m suddenly a figurehead. They believe in a me that doesn’t exist, but I have to pretend she does or the world falls to chaos. I’m not being hard enough.”

A sheen of ice forms under her hand, thin as glass, and Leliana reaches out to tap it until it shatters. “I believe in you. And there are others, too, who know there is still a person under the title, you know this.”

Nataliya’s eyes are already rolling. “Even you must be prompted to remember that I have a name.”

Leliana doesn’t take the bait, pretending she doesn’t notice the cold steel in the words. She turns back to the sheep trail, motioning that Nataliya shouldn’t follow her. “You have a better place to hide, now. Take advantage of it.”

Her footsteps disappear into the trees, and Nataliya sighs heavily as the quiet mountain sounds take over. It’s not Leliana she’s upset with, she knows, it almost never is. She holds her hand out and lets icicles form and melt in her palm, imagining the frustration leaving and melting at the same time.

Later, she slips back into the castle, frayed nerves slightly less raw, and she can feel the collective exhale as word spreads that she is found and safe. Candles flicker in the rookery windows, and she hurries through the back staircase and the library before slowing as her head appears above the rookery floor.

“Thank you.” Her voice cracks slightly, and Leliana’s silhouetted form nods once.

“Of course, Nataliya.”

#thanks for asking! #nataliya lavellan: trying to bloom in snow #otf: never out of second chances #leliana #dearophelia #ask logan #logan writes fic #natfic

[mr-m-murdock]

hiii can i request nat x reader where reader hides an injury from Nat and Nat finds out? maybe angst ending with fluff

band-aids for bullet holes

| natasha x reader |

warnings: injuries

a/n: thanks for the angst :) I'm enjoying torturing you guys. BUT it does have a happy ending, as requested

The apartment is dark when you open the door. You scan for any signs of Natasha, a plate on the drying rack or her jacket thrown over the back of the couch: nothing. But your tired eyes skim right over the takeout box on the coffee table, and you stumble into the bathroom down the hall without noticing it.

You discard your ruined shirt on the edge of the bathtub without bothering to close the door, and begin to rifle through the medicine cabinet. Painkillers, cough syrup, even damn hand sanitizer, anything you can find just to take the edge off the pain in your side.

You can't bear to look at the wound yet, but even in the dim light, you can see your stomach is slick and wet with blood.

You shake three paracetamol into your palm and take them dry with a desperate swallow and a wince. Then you sink down onto the toilet lid, slowly, slowly to avoid agitating the pain, and rest your head back against the tank with a clunk.

You touch the wound tentatively. The light brush of your fingers sends a sting through your ribs and you suck your bottom lip in past your teeth, bite down hard so as not to make a sound. You're stiff, your head swimming. God, if you'd just dodged the idiot, this wouldn't be happening.

With every movement sluggish and careful, you slit open the first aid kit and try to clean yourself up. You wet a cloth with water and drip it down your side, ignoring the pink puddles it makes on the bathroom floor. Then you blot the cloth with antiseptic, take a deep breath, and press it all up against the wound.

The pain is instant like a burn. You whimper into your teeth. Thank God Nat isn't here, thank God she's not going to see you like this and worry and panic-

"You okay?" comes a voice, from just down the hall - Natasha's voice, low and rough with sleep. You freeze, your side stinging like a bitch. Her feet thud closer, purposefully noisy, and she calls your name as she emerges from the hall. You react, slamming the door closed with your foot, and you hear her stumble backwards. "Um..." she says.

"I'm naked," you blurt. You smack yourself in the head. I'm naked? Seriously?

Predictably, Natasha laughs. "Okay, babe. What are you actually doing in there?"

"Cocaine," you reply acidly, fumbling for a bandage. She tests the door handle and you push your heel more securely against the door.

She says your name again, worry creeping into her voice.

"I'm fine," you reply.

"So let me in."

"I'm having a bath."

"I didn't hear the water running."

With the bandage now in your teeth, you can't reply, and she then she says your full name, her voice tinged with urgency.

Uh-oh.

"Let me in," she says. No room for argument. You thump your head against the toilet tank and glare at the ceiling. Then you release your foot from the door.

It swings open torturously slowly. She stands in the doorway, head tilted, surveying the mess you've made. And when she speaks, her voice is tight. "What the hell happened to you?" she says. Rhetorical question. Her face is carefully, casually blank. She's angry.

And she's right to be. You'd only recently been shot in the shoulder by an asshole with a sawn-off shotgun, and after that she'd made you promise you wouldn't go picking fights by yourself. Promises mean too much to her in your opinion, but you really had intended to keep this one.

"Knife," you say, in between your short breaths. "Nat-"

"Don't," she says shortly. Ice cold. Sharp as a blade. You shut your mouth. You'd been about to apologise.

She steps in, avoid the smears of blood on the floor, and kneels next to you. She pulls your hands from the wound impatiently. Were she less pissed, she'd be scolding you for not cleaning it properly, but now there's just thick, freezing silence between the two of you.

She cleans you up, stitches you closed and bandages the whole thing in clean, methodical movements, her touch gentle and her face hard as stone. You watch her hands move and wait for your chance to speak, a lump in your throat. You never want to scare her. Never.

When she's finished, she stands to wash her hands without looking at you. You sit slumped on the toilet lid, blood crusting and drying on your skin and clothes.

Natasha stoops to pick up your ruined shirt and leaves silently. You let her go. You hear her pedal open the kitchen bin and drop the shirt in amongst the trash.

Natasha's never forceful when she's angry, never loud or abrasive, never emotional. She's silent, viciously so, which is somehow worse. She'll speak softly - you know she hates to get mad, especially at you. And you know her well enough to recognise all the signs.

She doesn't talk to you when you limp out of the bathroom, your side aching. You avoid her eyes.

Until she's turning to walk away, and you realise she's put pants and a jacket on, and she's about to walk out.

"Nat, wait," you say. She halts, reaching for the door handle. Her shoulders are tight, her knuckles pale as she grips the handle. You search for words to fill the silence. "Where are you going?" you ask. They fall flat in front of you.

"Out," Natasha replies. She offers your bandaged ribs a cursory glance over her shoulder. "I'll be back to redress that."

"Can you just-" you say, your throat thickening. "I'm sorry. Please stay." Useless right now. She wants to be alone. But you can tell she's reluctant to leave.

She releases the door handle, and clenches her hands by her sides instead. "You promised me you'd be careful," she says. Her voice is not cool and vicious anymore: now, the vowels shake and her shoulders are tight as she gets the words out.

"I'm fine," you insist. "It was a mistake. Just one mistake." She turns to face you, but she doesn't look at you. Her eyes are rimmed angrily red. "Nat?"

"If I can't trust you, of all people, to keep your damn promises," she says, and she takes a large breath that seems to catch in her chest. Her eyes drag painfully up to yours and narrow. "Then who can I trust?" And she turns, yanks the door open and is gone.

The jamb clicks. You can't hear her footsteps receding.

Fuck.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

You're sprawled across the couch when Natasha gets back, your eyes closed and a frown resting like a stone between your eyebrows. She closes the door quietly. Waits. Watches.

She regrets arguing and growling and leaving. She regrets that she didn't really explain anything at all.

You wake slowly, sensing a shift in the room. You turn left, right, and your eyes slide right over her before you double take and snap back.

"Nat," you say, your voice slurred with sleep.

She twists her hands into the front of her shirt. I'm sorry. So easy to say, two words, three syllables. "How are you feeling?" she asks instead.

You blink at her, still registering her presence. Relief rising: she came back, she's not so angry that she wants to leave you hanging off a hook like a guilty idiot who took the bait. "You're back," you say. Your breath rushes out of you and your side twinges and you wince back from the pain. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry-"

"No, it's okay," Natasha says, and she crosses the room and pushes your hair off your face. She kisses your cheek. "It's okay. I'm sorry." She traces a pillow crease down the side of your jaw. You frown at her. "I should have explained. I should have trusted you. I know you can take care of yourself." The sentences come piling out of her mouth, each one eager behind the other, like three bullets in a wall. You grip her wrist.

"You were so angry," you say sadly. But she shakes her head.

"I wasn't angry, I wasn't. I was upset. I was - I was scared. I shouldn't have taken it out on you." She doesn't seem able to keep your gaze.

"Okay," you say. You press your lips to the inside of her wrist, feel the tendons relax. "I'm sorry I got my ass beat."

Above you, she snorts. Her fingers play over your skin and you lean into her hand.

"Stay tonight," you mumble, your eyes closing. Her other hand drifts through your hair.

"I will. I'm sorry."

"And stop apologising." You know what she feels, even if she still hasn't explained. She cares far more for you than she ever has for anyone before: it's a terrifying thing. But losing this is even more terrifying. You grip her arm and tug her down to kiss her.

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#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff #fic! #natfic! #m answers #written fic for anon #fanfiction #natasha romanoff x you

[mr-m-murdock]

Hiii so am the anon who asked about opf. So firstly am greek and I absolutely adore you for putting Greece in this masterpiece of yours. I was wondering if you could do more of their time in Greece like doing simple things like going to a park and Natasha teaching r how to live cause I adore some cold hearted widows being soft for each other

those hands pulled me from the earth

| natasha x reader | only pretty faces

warnings: none

a/n: Γεια σας, anon! I have never been to Greece (never left my country lol) but I will do my best! I've heard that it's beautiful, so it's the perfect place for r to find her soul again <3 (again, Duolingo level Greek, please forgive haha)

"I love you," Natalia says into your hair. Then again, in Russian. The breeze moves the rushes of the date palms like dancer's fingers against the sky. Her arm, where it is slung around your shoulder, hasn't shifted since you pulled it around you.

 Σ’ αγαπώ. You mouth it at the slow wind, let the breath leave your lips and tumble off in the river of the world around you. Your eyes track a woman walking the path with her baby slung to her chest. She is singing, only quietly, but you can hear her. You can hear everything.

The thud of Natalia's heart in her carotid artery is the loudest. Slow, unreasonably steady, just like yours. You'd be able to find it from the end of the world. You already have - it mirrors yours. Imitates you. Your hand goes to your shoulder where her hand hangs free, and you trace the lines of her fingers. You imagine you can see the bones, where each knuckle is bound and wrapped with muscle and cartilage. Gun callus on the inside of her thumb.

Each touch you keep as light as air.

Eventually she pulls away - only to tug you to your feet - and insists you walk.

"This is what people do at parks," she says, hands in both of yours, that infuriatingly familiar teasing light in her eyes. The sun catches her face, throwing her attention from you.

"I'm not an idiot," you grunt, and you loop her arm around your shoulder once more. "I know what parks are for." You glance at her. "I've studied urban form," you add, for good measure. Her slight smile fades somewhat.

"Sure," she says. "Haven't we all."

"You should. It will allow you to recognise the-"

"I know what parks are for, too, you know."

You raise your eyebrows. "Ambulation, exercise and socialisation?"

The odd look she throws you is practically amusement. "You're messing with me."

"You started it," you say.

"Oh, good. We've reverted to our twelve-year old selves."

"I'll snap your neck if you snap mine." It's almost in poor taste, so it surprises you when she laughs, mouth-open-head-back kind of laugh. The hair she's pushed behind her ear falls forward over her face and you have a sudden, incomprehensible and almost irresistible urge to take it in your fingers. You already know how soft it is.

Disappointingly, she tucks it away.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

"We're going to dinner," she says. You pause with a piece of honey-dripping toast halfway to your mouth. You place the toast down.

"What if I say no?"

Natalia blinks once, slowly. The smallest of smiles curls at the edge of her mouth. "I'll persuade you," she says. She seats herself in the chair across from you. "It doesn't have to be a restaurant. It can be street food, souvlaki, anything." She tilts her head at you. "Pretty please? I promise it's a normal person thing to do."

"As if you would know," you say, eyes still fixed on her mouth. She touches your shin with the tip of her foot beneath the table.

"That's mean. I'm perfectly well-adjusted."

"In this room, maybe." You drag your gaze up to hers and shrug lightly. "Go on, then." You practically see her swell with delight, even though she doesn't move a muscle. You can't help but smile. "Persuade me."

Natalia slumps and sighs, exaggerated. "Devil," she says. The afternoon sun on her face gleams on the tiny little scar above her eyebrow, one that you've kissed a hundred thousand times before.

"Of the worst kind," you agree. You reach across and touch her lightly on the nose. "Okay. I give in." She laughs. Your chest clenches and you know, without a doubt, you'd commit atrocities to hear it again. Murders.

But you don't need to.

Dizzying thing, desire.

Tell her, you urge yourself. Tell her you want to make her laugh. Tell her what she means to you. You'd never be able to put it into words.

So instead, you let her take you out to dinner. She buys you a mountain of food and watches with delight as you devour it all. In an afterglow of satisfaction and evening-cooled streets, you play poker on the balcony and lose to her drastically, on purpose.

You can't help but notice that her bluff face is real. It's one you've seen through the scope of a long-range rifle, or across the green expanse of a casino table with your heart in your throat.

It's almost easy to forget how fucked up she is, too.

"I lose," you say, and her face makes the shift. Practically imperceptible. Smallest of smiles. You spread your hands. "Come and take your prize."

Now her face splits in a grin, and she leans across the card table to kiss you. "Loser," she mumbles against your lips. "You know what happens to losers?"

You open your eyes to see her filling the whole world. Beautiful, impossibly so. "I think I'm going to find out," you say. Fuck me against the railing, you don't say.

Somewhere in the city, a dog howls, so lonely in its grief. But you don't hear it. Her hand is up beyond the hem of your dress and she is against you, all warmth and that glorious wave of red hair.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

"We're going to the library. Expanding horizons and all that."

"Are we going to learn about urban forms?"

"We're going to learn about whether or not you can keep quiet when I tell you to." Her gaze rakes you like a laser, suggestive.

You think it's a joke. It forces you to flush anyway. She laughs.

"Heart on your sleeve, huh?"

You slap at her shoulder. "You're incorrigible."

"Do you love me, though?"

It takes you by surprise. She's been doing that a lot lately, alongside all the things you anticipate.

"Yes," you say, with barely a moment's hesitation. You tip your head to the ceiling and let loose a crazed little laugh. "You dug me out, Nata. What a stupid question." I have loved you so long I don't remember not loving you.

Say it. Say it.

You fix your eyes on hers and force yourself not to move. "I have loved you," you say, everything in you trembling, "so long that I don't remember not loving you."

What a thing to say on the couch, on a Saturday morning.

"Good," Natalia says. "I-I thought so." It can't be the first time you've ever heard her stumble over a word, but it feels like it must be. You're so new. Everything is the first time. It's glorious.

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notes: (I had Like Real People Do on in the background repeatedly as I was writing this)

#m answers #anon cuties #written fic for anon #fic! #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha x reader #natasha romanov x reader #natfic! #fanfiction #natasha romanoff #only pretty faces #x reader #natasha romanoff x you

[mr-m-murdock]

omgomg can i request number 86 on the kiss prompt for either tptf and opf?? i love both so much and the prompt is so cute

p.s. i love your writing so much it’s so detailed and amazing

86. “ you kissed me first. “ “ i definitely didn't. “ “ you were literally all over me. “

| natasha x reader | prompt list | only pretty faces

warnings: fluff so sweet and dumb you'll throw up

a/n: YES

"So who asked out who?" Clint asks, settling further into his seat. He shoves a pizza crust into his mouth and dusts off his hands. Across the room, Kate Bishop is licking her fingers clean, eyes glued to you. She hasn't looked away since she first stepped in the door: whether with wariness or curiosity, you don't know.

"She pinned me to the floor when we were fourteen," Natalia replies. "Does that count?"

Clint nods. "Oh yeah, the good ol' sexual tension sparring."

"Fourteen, you creep," Natalia says. She chucks a piece of pepperoni at him and he catches it in his mouth, grinning.

The TV is on with subtitles, muted in the corner. It's darkening outside, the sweet humid nine o'clock of a summer evening.

You miss Greece. You miss the quiet of your apartment, hung so far above the street that the cars and shouts and trains were distant to the ear. You miss the heat. The solitude with Natalia, knowing she's only ever a few metres away.

But New York is fine. New York is pizza and Clint's playstation (that you're really damn good at) and Clint's humour and Clint's dog, who is currently lain half across your lap, blinking up at you morosely as you chew.

You pet the dog's head and Kate shifts in her seat. She's nervous.

Fair enough.

"Okay but like actually," Clint says after a pause. Natalia cuts him off with a groan, her head tipping back against the cushions of the couch. You allow yourself to trace the column of her throat with your eyes, the bob of muscle as she swallows. A little more overt than you should be, perhaps.

"Shut up," Natalia says.

"I wanna know," Clint protests.

"Fuck off."

"Nata asked me out first," you say. Natalia blinks at you.

"Right," Clint says, a grin growing. "Was this before or after you recovered from the brainwashing?"

"After," you say. You open your mouth to continue.

"I was nice to you before," Natalia cuts in. "Don't you dare say I wasn't."

"I wasn't going to," you say. She narrows her eyes at you and you smile, sweetly.

"Aw, Nat, you romantic," Clint says. Natalia launches a cushion at him and he allows it to hit him square in the face as he laughs.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

"You're squashing me," you say, shoving Natalia half-heartedly. "My leg."

"It's not my fault this bed is two feet wide," Natalia grumbles. She shifts, and her elbow sinks into your stomach.

"My stomach," you complain.

"It'll be your lungs next if you don't shut up," she says.

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you," Natalia counters. She pokes your cheek. "I love you. Even when both your knees are halfway up my ass."

"I know where my knees are. I've found the stick you've got lodged up there, too," you say. You press your face against hers and try to kiss her, but she rears back, almost falling off the bed.

"Someone's found her attitude," she says. "Couldn't you tell me you love me once in a while?"

"I hate you."

She laughs.

You fall silent again. The curtains are rustling in the light breeze. A car honks below the window and you jump at the sound, your muscles tightening for a second.

Natalia's hand flattens over your stomach. "Hey," she says. "It's okay."

You shove your head against her shoulder, your heartbeat slowing. How stupid. You're like a spooked horse.

"Fuck," you say. "I don't like it here." You're voice is muffled against her shoulder. She winds an arm around you and strokes the length of your spine, slowly.

"I know," she says. She waits a beat. Then, "I didn't really come on to you first." You frown against her skin at the change of subject.

"Yes, you did," you say.

"Discounting everything before," she says, and her voice is matter of fact. She's been thinking about this. "I didn't."

"You can't just discount fifteen years," you say.

"Come on. You kissed me first."

You think about it. It hadn't really been a kiss. You'd probably intended for it to be a punch. "I definitely didn't," you decide.

"You were literally all over me," Natalia replies. She's teasing you.

"Shut up."

"You love me."

"That is a lie," you protest, and you reach around her and pinch her leg. She kicks at you, her foot tangling in the blanket. "I barely even like you."

"So if I kissed you right now..."

"I'd drop you out that window," you say. She tugs on your hair, none too gently, coaxing your face up to hers. You pretend to try and squirm away, but she's fast and she kisses you before you've made it an inch across the mattress. You make a gagging sound, and she giggles and kisses you again. Again. Again. "Stop," you complain, as she presses kisses to your cheeks, your chin, the tip of your nose. "Let me sleep."

Natalia tucks her face into your neck and blows a raspberry. You squeal, laughing, and push her away.

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notes: emotionally stunted IDIOTS

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @rysnwilder  

@ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smallestavenger @lainjupi  @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok  @thorya22

#only pretty faces #m answers #natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff #fic! #natasha romanoff x reader #natfic! #written fic for anon #prompts!

[mr-m-murdock]

Hey! I’m not sure if your requests are open or not and if they aren’t, (or if you just don’t want to write it), feel free to ignore this. Can I get 7, 8, 37, and 58 for OPF?

~Btw, you are such a talented writer and I am in love with this series <3

ivory tower

| natasha x fem!reader | prompts from this list | only pretty faces

warnings: child assassins

a/n: NICE

Scotland is engulfed in snow when you next look out of the plane window. The runway, almost invisible against the grey of the ground and the sky and the sweep of Edinburgh, looms ominously. You tuck your book away and touch the back of your head against the headrest.

Natalia will be there. It's a fact you haven't allowed yourself to dwell on the whole flight: hell, you haven't thought about it since you were choosing which suitcase to bring. Even just that single thought of her invades your mind like a storm. It has ever since you met her: but that's how everyone reacts. That's just the effect she has on people.

It's calculated and purposeful. She knows exactly what she's doing and she executes her effect with grace and ease. She's a paradox in and of herself.

And it's nothing to do with you. So you might as well stop thinking about her.

The flight attendant offers to help you with your suitcase as you approach the door, and you briefly entertain dropping it wheels down onto her foot.

"No, thank you," you say sweetly. A light Serbian accent, easy as breathing. She smiles back at you.

The air is cruelly cold the second you step out of the safety of the cabin. You've endured far worse weather. No sleet, but wind ruffles the furs around your shoulders and you pull your scarf up before it can get to your hair. You descend the plane's steps with grace, as a lady of standing would.

You're supposed to be twenty three, and rich. You're pretty sure you stand somewhere between sixteen and nineteen in actuality, but it doesn't matter, and it never has.

They've sent you a limousine to the airport and it glides up to the taxi rank like a panther under the threatening grey sky. Instantly, the chauffeur leaps from his seat and takes your suitcase from you, ushering you into the back of the car with his other hand.

The interior is luxurious. One of the more enjoyable missions: perhaps your handler was having fun spending her money. You slide the partition up and settle yourself into the seat, listening to the growl of the engine.

Not listening to the slightly too-quick thump of your heart. Not thinking about Natalia Romanov.

The hotel is expensive, too: five storeys of white stone and tall glass windows, and the interior carpeted in deep lush red. You think, briefly, about the colour of Natalia's hair. Of course she would choose this place, self-obsessed as she is. Her sense of humour. She's everywhere you look.

The handrail in the elevator is gilded wood. You tip the porter a hundred Scottish pounds when you take your case from him and he doesn't even blink as he folds it away into his pocket.

You knock on the white wood of room 45C with your gloves still on. Natalia leaves you standing there for a full minute before she opens the door, a wide smile on her face. She's in slacks and a blouse, her blazer discarded carelessly on the expansive bed behind her.

"Katya, darling," she says, in perfect, clipped West London English, and she seizes you by the elbows and kisses you on both cheeks. Then she drags you inside, endowing you with an onslaught of chatter and you barely have time to snag the handle of your case and drag it in with you before she shuts the door.

She lets you go and turns, arms out, still grinning but sleeker this time, not excited but pleased with herself. Persona dripping away.

"You're enjoying this," you tell her, switching to Russian. You begin to tug your gloves off.

"Aren't you?" She reaches out and brushes at the fur on your coat. "You look like you own half the oil in Russia."

"For this week," you reply haughtily, "I do."

"You're too good," Natalia says, still with that insufferable smile on her face. "Oh, come on." You raise an eyebrow at her. "Have some fun. For once."

"I'm here for business — not pleasure." You turn away to sit at the vanity and begin to rearrange your hair. Natalia slinks up beside you and bends to rest her chin on your shoulder. She surveys you in the mirror. Tilts her head this way and that. She seems, beneath her makeup, as young and brilliant as she really is, innocent and excited to be playing a glamorous older woman.

She's projecting what she wants to project.

Or maybe you can see right through her like no one else can.

"Your lipstick is smudged," she observes. You meet her eyes in the reflection, her contact lenses dark brown and solemn.

You bristle. "No it isn't."

"Let me fix it for you." Without waiting for an answer, she circles the chair and settles herself in your lap, like a cat on a pillow. You stiffen and look past her, refusing to meet her eye.

She can play games, but that doesn't mean you have to join in.

With an intense look of concentration on her face, Natalia leans forward and wipes her thumb gently under your bottom lip. You fixate on the twists of her braid in the mirror.

"All done," she says, looping her arms around your neck, elbows balancing on your shoulders. You finally look at her.

"Good," you say. "Get off."

A cool eyebrow is raised, undermined by the sly little smile on her face. "So you don't want me to kiss you?" She's so close you can feel her warm breaths on your nose, one after the other.

You'd be lying if you denied. Not that lying has ever, ever bothered you. But you just hold her gaze, and hold it, and hold it, like you're down seven feet of water and fighting the ocean to see who'll live the longest without air. And you break. "No," you say. "I don't." You must have leant closer without realising, because a coil of red hair is brushing your forehead and her skin is centimetres from yours. Her arms slide further forwards.

"I think you do," she teases. "We've kissed before, sweetheart. Didn't you like it?"

For missions. You've kissed for covers. And neither of you ever pressed it further.

What makes Edinburgh so different?

You narrow your eyes at her, determined to last longer. The weight of her arms and the curve of her lips in your peripheral is making this game hard. But she wouldn't have started it if she didn't find it fun in some way: and you know exactly which way that is.

You tilt your head. "You just can't help yourself, can you?" The words slide past with a bite in them.

Natalia looks at you, eyelids lowered, face blank. "I beg your pardon?" she says, in English, in that impeccable accent. You touch the side of her nose with hers, and neither of you pull back.

"Why don't you just tell me what you want, instead of tricking me into it?" you ask.

"But it's so much more fun this way," Natalia replies. Her voice is quiet now, dampened by the thrumming tension.

"So you do want to kiss me," you say, triumphant in your effort to turn the game around. Like swallowing a bubble and feeling it reappear in your lungs.

Natalia doesn't answer for a long time. The board is hers now. She can talk with all the bravado in the world, or she can kiss you. She can skip backwards out of the way, or she can kiss you.

She moves forward - she doesn't have to move far - and she does kiss you. A gentle, slow press, insistent. Her arms tighten at your neck.

It's like every time before. Your heart swallows itself with a skip. Your hands are on her thighs before you can stop yourself. And when she pulls away you try to follow her.

"Beat you at your own game," you whisper. And then you realise - this was her endgame. You walked into it like a dog at heel. She wanted to kiss you, and not only did she get what she wanted, she got you to want it, too.

"But you didn't win," she says. She's smiling. Your lips are burning. This is what you've been not thinking about: Natalia in your face, on your lap, touching you almost all over. This is what you wanted all along, too.

Maybe you should let her think she's won.

"Kiss me again," you say. You brush your nose against hers, content to let her lean in to you. "But don't stop this time."

requests | masterlist

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st @blckrwidow @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smalls-words @lainjupi  @d1s0nym @meimei-a @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115  @idkjustliving2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok  @thorya22 @olicity-boo @iliketozoneout

#m answers #anon cuties #I told y'all I don't delete requests #written fic for anon #only pretty faces #natasha romanoff #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x you #natfic! #fic! #fanfiction

[mr-m-murdock]

i just saw your most recent reblog and the tags. pleaseee do m!reader i would die. well written m!reader fics are way too sparse in number! idc what it is but this is me (a desperate male) asking - :)

no one compares to you

| natasha x m!reader |

warnings: none

a/n: i wanna be her bf and give her everything she wants

"You look incredible." The words are out of your mouth before they've even reached the forefront of your mind.

Thankfully, Natasha smiles at you: not the blinding, graceful blessing she saves for the cameras. No, this is a grin, hidden half behind her glass. "I know," she says. "Tony knows how to pick a color." And a cut, you think, and thankfully this time your thoughts don’t get ahead of you. Her dress is royal blue, the neckline daring and the decoration tastefully extravagant. Her hair is curled and swept and pinned to one side, leaving half her throat bare and white under the brilliant lights.

You look at your feet.

“Not too bad yourself,” she says, and your head snaps up. “You pull off that suit much better than the hundred and one other men wearing the exact same thing.”

“Shut up,” you say, a smile latching careful beginnings on your face. You tug your left sleeve sharply down and her eyes follow your movement. Her glass is nearly empty. “Refill?”

She looks at her glass. “Oh. Yes, please.” She holds it out between delicate fingers and you take it dutifully, already moving off even before your eyes have found the bar.

Tony made it an open bar: you’d say he was an idiot for it, but you guess even the combined efforts of a dozen or so superheroes on the alcohol supply wouldn’t make even the smallest of dents in his fortune.

As the bartender takes your glass for a refill, you feel someone step up beside you.

“Glass of red when you’re done,” they say: deep voice, cracking hard on the low consonants. Grainy and almost unpleasant. You turn to look and find a man with a face that matches his voice: thin and sallow and pale and observing you with great interest. “Hello.” He holds out his hand to shake and you take it cautiously. “John Vermont,” he says, and you drop his hand almost instantly.

John Vermont, the journalist who’s recently made a name for himself digging up things about Tony, and where Rhodes was born, and what Steve’s mother did for a living and generally being quite spiteful about what he manages to find. You’ve never met him face to face, and never wanted to. You’re not really in the mood to be one of his next targets, although with how waterproof your identity is, you’d truly be suprised (and grudgingly impressed) if he ever did find anything worth writing about.

You introduce yourself coldly and his eyes gleam. 

“Pleasure,” he says, his voice dripping with something belying rudeness. “Another of Miss Romanoff’s handlers, are you? Or perhaps the latest...date for the evening?”

So he’s after Natasha. You can’t help the way your shoulders tighten, but you can disguise it by reaching for the glass the bartender hands you. Vermont watches your arm move at the shoulder interestedly.

You know what he’s implying.

“No,” you reply stiffly. “And no.” 

And before you can come up with a cutting rebuke, from somewhere over your shoulder - “He’s actually my boyfriend.” An arm slips through yours, pale and edged at the shoulder with that damn royal blue dress. You blink hard at the glass in your hand, registering the words very slowly. A flush begins to form at your ears and you pass Natasha her glass whilst directing Vermont a cold smile. Her fingers pass over yours.

Your ears are ringing. You vaguely register Natasha giving Vermont a few sweet, carefully chosen words. Oh, God, you have to pull yourself together. She looks over at you, and she’s chosen a pretty smile showing white teeth and a position that makes the extent of that neckline very visible to you. To save your eyes from wandering and perhaps your throat from subsequently being slit, you look back up at Vermont, who is eyeing the pair of you with great interest in his slate eyes, once again. You see his fingers itching for his pocket.

“...so if you don’t mind, we’d like to go and dance,” Natasha is saying, and she squeezes your elbow. You take the hint and wheel around, then dive into the crowd with Natasha clinging to your arm. You can feel Vermont’s eyes hot on the back of your head as the dancers close in around you. “Slow down!” Natasha insists, hiking her dress up and stumbling after you. “I’m wearing seven inch fucking heels, for Christ’s sake.”

“So that’s why I can finally look you in the eye - sorry, the forehead,” you say, earning yourself a slap on the arm. It stings. “Ouch.” You slow as a couple whirls past you, and Natasha steps on the back of your shoe. She circles you and positions herself in front of you, hands held up. Her glass has disappeared somewhere along the journey into the crowd. “Um,” you say. You squint at her.

Natasha rolls her eyes monstrously. “We’re dancing, Мудак.” She settles her arms over your shoulders, links them around the back of your neck, and looks you seriously in the eye. “Now dance. You can dance, can’t you?”

“You’re being mean,” you complain. Your hands settle uncertainly on her waist. She tilts her head.

“You like it when I’m mean.”

You lead her into a box waltz and she raises a perfect arc of an eyebrow at you. “Don’t be mean,” you insist.

“You’re the only one who’s got the balls to come back with something,” Natasha replies. She steps purposefully on your foot.

“I just had those shoes polished.” She’s warm under your hands, but not so warm as the back of your neck is, not so warm as your chest as your heart throws itself desperately against your ribs with a panicked, fast beat.

You need to calm the hell down. You’re only touching her. Holding her. Holding her by the waist and waltzing her in slow circles as her eyes follow the room lazily and her fingers play with the back of your collar. You’ve seen Tony dance with her hundreds of times, the two of them touching each other naturally, and you know that’s never meant anything because Tony’s gayer than the day is long and-

Natasha sighs as the music changes and shifts against you, looping her arms further around your neck and pressing her chin into your shoulder. “Your heart’s going very fast,” she notes casually, and you almost grind to a halt and run right there and then. You don’t, because you’re not stupid and not a coward and you’d never be able to face her again if you did. You let a few steps pass before you reply, your voice low and easy.

“Vermont’s got a face like a mad rat. It’s the adrenaline: I keep thinking he’s gonna spring up on us.”

She laughs against your ear - why?? Is she trying to kill you? You almost miss a step. “God, this is dull.”

Your heart droops like a wilting puppy. “Sorry to bore you,” you say, careful to keep the acid from your voice.

“Oh, you’re not dull, don’t worry.” She pulls back from you and studies your face thoughtfully for a second. With great effort, you raise your eyebrows at her and keep your expression otherwise neutral. “Wanna get out of here?” Fuck. What does she think she’s doing to you? “I need a couch or something. Someplace I can take off these fucking shoes.”

“Yeah, I need to bin this tie,” you say, and it’s true: your collar is uncomfortably tight. Since when was the room this hot? You distract yourself by searching for an exit.

Predictably, Natasha finds one before you do. She grabs your wrist and propels you hurriedly towards it, easily dipping between couples and groups talking and dancing until the door is looming at you and she’s leading you through it. You grab at the knot of your tie and winch it open, then pull the entire thing off over your head and drop it in a passing trash can as Natasha bears you onwards in her search for a couch. The place is all white walls and tasteful art prints in tasteful frames and indoor pot plants (not the plastic kind, not for Tony Stark) and before long Natasha finds what looks like an ante room: leather couches and soft-seated wooden chairs and a long glass coffee table.

She sinks into a seat and works her heels off with a soft groan. 

You avoid looking at her and drop down onto the couch, lie back, slipping open your top two buttons and letting out a sigh. The party’s only been going for an hour and a half and you’re already exhausted. One arm droops over the side of the couch to brush the floor. The ceiling is cream and smooth, the lights a warm yellow.

It’s silent in here save for the rustling of Natasha’s dress, the music and chatter distant beyond the walls.

When you do look up, she’s got her chin in one palm and she’s staring at you. One leg is crossed over the other: there’s a slit in her skirt and it’s falling away to reveal her thigh, tight with muscle. You turn your gaze back to the ceiling and try to count to ten in your head.

You have to swallow before you can speak again. “How are your feet?”

“They’re fine.” It’s an uncharacteristically blank reply. You can still feel her eyes on you. Unsettling.

“What are you looking at me for?” you ask.

“Well, I can’t help it, you’re just so devastatingly handsome,” she replies, and this time her voice is biting with sarcasm. But when you look up at her she might not have said it at all. Her eyes are on your shirt buttons.

She rises from her seat restlessly, tests her toes out on the carpet, and then she paces the length of the room and back, arriving at the arm of your couch by your feet. She plops herself down on it with a sigh.

She looks at you and looks at you. You’re instantly all too aware of your rumpled shirt and ruffled hair and your arm thrown back behind your head and you shift uncomfortably. Her hand descends on your knee and you freeze. “No, don’t move,” she says. “You look like...” and she trails off. She’s not one for pretty words. You know all these things about her.

Natasha slips off the arm of the couch and you expect her to walk away but she doesn’t, she keeps going down and your heartbeat keeps rising. 

All those months of stealing looks at her, of trading sharp remarks softened with amused grins, of having her back and knowing she’s right beside you. You even knew, maybe unconsciously, that she’d be right there to save you from Vermont at the crucial point.

Now the crucial point is this, is her sinking to her knees and shifting up beside your head to brush her fingertips over your hair and down the side of your face. You’re sure your lungs don’t work. All you can do is keep your eyes on hers. You’d never dared to hope. Never let yourself want.

What if she just gets up and walks away?

Natasha dips her head towards you and like a dance, like you’ve choreographed this moment, you raise yourself to meet her and she kisses you, tender like her fingers at the back of your collar on the dance floor. You can taste wine on her lips. You can taste her. You can taste your own ecstasy rushing through you as you lie prone on a couch like some lamenting Greek hero and you kiss Natasha Romanoff and she kisses you back. Soft, a hand ghosting over the side of your face.

requests | masterlist

notes: I am so doing an nsfw part two

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar @maggieromanov @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624 @strangegardentaco @phantomvael @lorsstar1st @blckrwidow @ima-gi–na-tion @paryl @picnicmic  @smallestavenger @lainjupi  @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115  @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok @thorya22 @olicity-boo @iliketozoneout

#natasha romanoff x male reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x you #m!reader #natfic! #fic! #m answers #anon cuties #written fic for anon #:) anon

[mr-m-murdock]

Hey! I love your writing, especially your to play the fool series! Would you consider writing a part where Clint and the rest of the team find out Natasha is seeing the reader? Feel free to make it angsty as long as it has a fluffy ending. Totally okay if you don't want to write it or decide to take it in a different direction!

i would absolutely consider that because it's a great prompt. I love angst. Angst will abound. (But fluff will as well) Thanks for the request!

| natasha x fem!reader | to play the fool

warnings: claustrophobia, angst but it ends happily :)

a/n: consider this a part 4 for anon, @maddess and @strangegardentaco because i don't think I really did a justified ending for the actual story. also the nightmare drabble is set after this.

The week ends with you lying on your couch and staring wearily at the TV, your eyes glazed as the news babbles on. The Avengers this. The Avengers that. The Avengers cleared up the Empire State building mess and we all owe them our lives. Let the villain rot in jail.

You flop onto your back when Tony Stark starts making speeches and promises. You’ve been out of action for almost five days, and it’s driving you bonkers. Not because of the injuries, long since faded, but because you just can’t force yourself into your suit and out the window. It’s not because of the Avengers: you know you can skirt them if need be. Maybe it’s the fear of that tight space and the dirt under your nails and your mask, wet against your face.

Maybe it’s because you haven’t seen Natasha since she disappeared down the hall still wearing your clothes.

Whatever it is, you haven’t gotten up all day. You’ve eaten Thai on your couch and glared at the ceiling. You haven’t been to work since before the Empire State fiasco and you just know your boss is looking for a reason to fire you. You can’t play out the sick excuse for another week.

Frustrated, you kick a cushion off the couch with a twitch of your foot: it flops sadly onto the floor. 

It’s just getting dark outside: there’s still time to pull your suit on and go stop a mugging or something. Revert back to your funny little vigilante ways.

“And really,” Tony Stark is saying on the TV, “if it weren’t for the people of New York, the firefighters and the police, we never would have won. You guys are the true heroes.”

“Fuck you,” you say loudly, as Stark grins toothily into the camera. Fuck them all.

The drop from your window to the ground seems longer than ever before, but you make it and stand briskly, dusting off your palms. It feels good to don the mask again, to slip into this persona and become someone else, someone useful for the evening.

You find a roof with a good view, far enough away from your neighbourhood. It’s almost the other side of the city. 

A police car winds its way downtown with lights going, siren wailing. Your feet dangle above the street, buffeted this way and that by the wind: it’s almost like old times.

The evening is surprisingly uneventful: you thwart a grocery store robbery and the owner, fresh out of bed, shakes your hand with tears in his eyes. You twist out of his grip, tell him no problem, and walk away.

Maybe you should work on your PR.

When you crawl up your wall back to your apartment, back to a well needed sleep, you don’t bother to check inside before sliding up the window, slipping in and tugging off your boots.

“So,” someone says from the dark interior, deep voice. You freeze. Your boot drops from your fingers and thumps to the carpet, probably scattering mud everywhere. “This is where she was.”

“Who’s there?” you snap. “Turn on the light, for fuck’s sake, or I’ll light you up myself.” You hold out your hand, and sparks fly from your palm.

“I don’t doubt you will.” The light flicks on. You narrow your eyes against the sudden brightness, and when you adjust, Hawkeye is leaning against your front door. There’s a knife in his hand. A bruise under his eye. A deadly look on his face.

“Do you people ever knock? What, is the sitting in the dark thing for dramatic flair or something?” you snap. Your heart is pounding from the shock.

“Or something,” Hawkeye replies. He doesn’t look amused at your biting comments, like Natasha always did. “You brought her back here.”

“What?” you say sharply, adrenaline still gripping you hard. It takes you a second to figure he’s talking about Natasha. “Yeah. You’re welcome.”

“Listen,” Hawkeye says, and his jaw tightens around the word. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to. But whatever the hell you are, whatever the fuck you’re doing to Natasha-”

“To Natasha? What the fuck are you talking about?” you exclaim. Hawkeye narrows his eyes. “I fucking sewed her up and fed her pizza! Where the hell were the rest of you?”

“Why did you bring her back here?” Hawkeye demands, brushing aside your comments. He thinks you’re lying. Lying. You’ve just about had it.

“Sorry,” you snarl. “You wanted me to leave her in that fucking rock fall, did you?”

“Cut the bullshit!” Hawkeye snaps at you. “Every fucking time I ask her about it, she brushes me off. She won’t talk about you! She won’t talk about the explosion! She won’t talk to me anymore! What the hell did you do to her?” 

You stare at him. There’s panic written clearly across his face, though he tries to hide it with gritted teeth. Something’s wrong.

“I didn’t do anything,” you say slowly. “She’s probably- dealing with it. I swear-”

“That’s not how she deals with stuff,” Hawkeye replies. His face is tight, but you can tell he believes you somewhat, at least. “Just- stay away from her. You stay away. Alright?”

“Are you threatening me?” you say, eyeing the knife in his hand. “I didn’t think Avengers stooped to that kind of level.” You keep your voice cold. No point reasoning with him now.

“I wasn’t always an Avenger,” he growls. He stares you down, and for a second you see a shock of steel in his eyes. You believe him. He could have been something much, much worse.

He leaves through your door, his knife nicking the wood of the frame on the way out.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Bad day, you think, as you sink onto your bed with your toothbrush in your mouth. Just another bad day. 

The threat still lingers in your mind. The stay away from her, the white of bone showing through his knuckles as he’d gripped his knife.

But it’s not like he’ll be inclined to carry it out, seeing as Natasha doesn’t seem interested in returning. 

You’re being an idiot about it. Every creak of a foot in the corridor has you perking up, convinced it’s her. You wilt each time it passes. Stupid, stupid. But you find yourself imagining her turning up, even just to give your clothes back. You know what you’d do: you’d invite her in and feed her and the two of you would talk, just the two of you.

That’s probably not accurate, actually. You might just stand there and stare with your mouth open. Who can blame you? She’s pretty, and she kissed you, like eight times.

You spit your toothpaste out in the sink, return to bed and pull the covers right up to your head. You spend the rest of the night trying to get Natasha out of your head. But she won’t budge.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

You hear your name in the morning, softly somewhere in the distance. The early, early morning sun is just heaving itself through a gap in your curtains, splayed across your face. You wake slowly.

“Hey, asshole. Wake up.”

“Huh?” you blurt, struggling upwards, eyes half open. Someone waves at you from the foot of the bed, redheaded someone. “N’tasha,” you mumble. You shake yourself awake. “Jesus Christ,” you say, when you’ve registered that Natasha is indeed crouching at the foot of your bed, waving at you with one hand, a gun in the other. A fucking gun. You scrambled backwards, your back hitting the wall, curses flowing from your mouth like water. “Fuck,” you say, pressing yourself against the headboard. Your flight response slows. She’s not going to shoot you. You tip your head backwards and sigh. “What is wrong with you people?” you groan. You check your clock. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Rise and shine,” Natasha says dryly. “What did you say to Clint?” 

You rub at your eyes, your thoughts moving sluggishly. “I- what? I- he broke in.”

“Yeah. Last night. Quit playing catch-up and tell me what happened.” She waves the gun illustratively and you cringe back. This is not the Natasha who was eating pizza in sweatpants on your fire escape a week ago. She’s impatient and cold and expecting an answer.

“What do you mean?” you ask weakly. It’s a good thing she’s a couple metres away, or you might take it into your head to kiss her again, after so long. She doesn’t seem right now like she’d want that.

“He knew you brought me here. He told the others.”

“They know where I live?” you exclaim, sitting bolt upright. Natasha just rolls her eyes.

“Calm down. They’re not coming near you, not if I have anything to say about it,” she says. “Besides, they’re not hitmen.”

“Beg to differ,” you say shortly. Natasha’s eyes harden. You regret that comment instantly. “Nat-”

“What does he know?” she demands, her patience clearly lost. You frown.

“What? I told him we ate pizza together. That’s it. He seemed to think you were...off.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” she replies testily. She sighs, frustration evident on her face. Maybe fear. Maybe.

“You don’t want him to know,” you say, the revelation dawning on you. Natasha’s eyes flick downwards, almost shamefully. “Yeah,” you say, slumping back into your pillow. “I guess I’m not really good enough for you, am I?”

“Oh, shut up,” she snaps. She gets to her feet.

“You shut up,” you say, insulted. “Get the fuck out of my house, Jesus Christ!”

She frowns at you, finally that cold cool mask broken a little. “Fine,” she says.

“I don’t need your mess around me,” you say, just to push her further. It’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Breaking things. Natasha backs away to the doorway, hurt evident on her face. But she doesn’t apologise: of course she doesn’t, she never would.

“Fine,” she says again, and she turns and is gone in seconds.

You sag, the moment you hear the door click closed. You roll onto your side, draw the covers up over your head, and yell into your pillow.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

It’s almost two weeks before you decide you have to do something. Two weeks, and although the Avengers tentatively ignore you, you can feel something about to break. Like they want an excuse to come raining fury down on you. You barely go back to your apartment anymore, for fear one of their little freaks is crouching in the dark, waiting for you again. And you won’t let them chase you out of your home.

Funnily enough, it seems that two weeks is enough for Natasha to give up, too. She’s been stoically blanking you at any fight, and though it’s not quite hostility, it puts hooks in you, like blades. You don’t want to be ignored, or feared. You just want her back.

So when you arrive at Avengers tower in civilian clothing with your face uncovered (so weird), and when you feel a tap on your shoulder and spin around, there she is. Eyeballing the ground.

“Oh,” you say.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. It sounds tentative.

“I- came to make the peace,” you say. You stuff your hands in your pockets. “You look nice.” She snorts, and doesn’t move away like you expect her to. “I’m sorry, you know-” At this, though, she rolls her eyes and pushes past you, towards the steps leading up to the tower. “O-kay,” you say, pushing hard down on frustration. Wouldn’t do to lose your temper right now. When you don’t follow her, Natasha looks over her shoulder at you.

“Are you coming, or what?” she asks. On instinct, you start forwards, and you follow her up the steps like a lost puppy.

The lobby is cool and sleek, just like the exterior. A receptionist with perfectly gelled hair begins to inform the two of you that an appointment is required for an audience with Mr Stark, and that the wait is currently approximately six somethings, but you don’t get to hear the last part because Natasha cuts him off smoothly.

“Stop giving me bullshit, Henry,” she says. “Which floor is he on?” The receptionist clears his throat.

“Fourteen,” he says, timidly.

“Thank you,” Natasha says, with a smile you’re not sure you ever want to be on the receiving end of. Henry sinks back into his seat.

You follow Natasha to a pair of silver elevator doors, and she reaches for the button engraved with a shining 14. “Jarvis, tell the idiots to meet at 14. Urgent, twelve,” she says.

“Of course,” says a cool, disembodied voice. You curse and press yourself against the back wall of the elevator, staring around. The elevator jerks smoothly upwards and you catch Natasha smirking in the mirror before she catches your eye and drops the expression. “Should I alert the President?” asks the voice.

“The President?” you exclaim.

“Not necessary,” Natasha says. “Just make sure they’re all there.”

“I have,” says the voice. “Captain Rogers is somewhat distressed.” Button number fourteen glows blue, and the elevator comes to a halt. The doors slide open.

“Morning,” Natasha says, and she glides out of the elevator like she’s on rollerskates. Seven Avengers turn to face you with wide eyes.

“Nat,” says Hawkeye, glaring right at you, a muscle going in his cheek. “What the actual goddamn fuck is going on?”

“Language,” whispers the Falcon, the actual Falcon, out of the corner of his mouth. Captain America is breathing hard. Thor, his head practically brushing the ceiling, is surveying you with a squint.

“Actually,” Captain America says, making an obvious attempt to calm himself down, “I agree with Clint.” His t-shirt says certified nonegenarian in big bubble letters. It stretches almost comically over his chest.

“And that’s a first,” says Tony Stark. You say nothing. There’s nothing you can say. Natasha turns to face you. “Nat, who is this? You just called a national emergency. I have Rhodey scrambling jets right about fucking now.”

“Well, call them off,” Natasha says, with a roll of her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. You’re all just so slow in getting up the stairs unless there’s food or an emergency.” She shrugs. “And I didn’t have time to make food.”

“And your food is famously terrible,” says Thor, with a chuckle. The whole national emergency thing hasn’t seemed to phase him one bit.

“Nat,” you squeak. “What the fuck? I was going to segway into this.”

“You couldn’t segway into the ocean,” Natasha replies. You might catch a hint of fondness in her voice, but it’s gone instantly. She presents you with two hands, to the crowd of gawking Avengers. “She wants to make peace.”

“Make peace?” Stark explodes immediately. “She tried to kill Cap!”

“No I didn’t,” you interject. You fold your arms over your chest. “That was an accident.”

The room bursts into chatter, angry, accusing chatter. And in the midst of it, Natasha turns to you and gives you an interminably triumphant smile. You just about hold back from hitting her really really hard.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

The fucking peacemaking takes all day. In the end, you have to consent to having your mind read by a lady called Wanda with red stuff coming out of her eyes, which has always been your biggest nightmare. Not least because Natasha is sitting literally right in front of you and you have to look at her while Wanda fiddles with your brain and you’re quite sure, with your face becoming progessively redder and redder, that Wanda knows not just how innocent you are, but how much you’ve thought about Natasha even just in the last day. Because when she pulls away, she gives you a sweet little smile.

“She’s telling the truth,” Wanda announces. “All of it. She wants to be appreciated.” You groan internally. Wanda pats your hand and smiles secretly at you. “Don’t we all?”

“Okay, and is she dating Natasha?” Clint calls gruffly, over Natasha’s head. He fixes you with a glare, but the suspicion is melting fast away from it.

“No,” you say swiftly, before Wanda can so much as open her mouth. “And if it’s alright with you, I’m going home now.” You get up. They’re still surrounding you, and none of them look inclined to move. Stark and Captain America are conversing in rapid, hushed whispers.

“You don’t have to gossip like hens,” Clint calls. He looks at you. “They want to invite you to join.”

“Huh?” you say cleverly. “Join? The Avengers?”

“No, the boy band we hold in the basement,” Stark says. “Yes, the Avengers. One condition.”

“What, that I kiss your ass?” you say sourly. Stark snorts.

“Oh, she’s funny.”

“What’s the condition?” Captain America asks curiously, looking between you and Stark.

“That you and Nat stop fucking around and date each other alre-” he’s cut off with Natasha’s hands around his throat, and you have to force yourself to stop from joining in.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Nowadays, the thing that irks you most about the Avengers is the fact that they leave the toilet seats up in the Tower. All. Of. Them. You’re pretty sure Natasha does it too, just to assert dominance. Or maybe she started it.

Whatever. Life has become pretty good, all things considered. You fight with a team now, a team that’s always got your back and sure, they still mess up and they’re still idiots, but they’re not quite the snobbish, elitist fuckers you thought they once were. They just want to get it right.

The thing you love most about the Avengers, though, that’s got to be Natasha.

Natasha, who turns up at your door sometimes at the oddest of hours, who allows you to plant yourself on her lap whenever you see fit, who will kiss you in front of her idiot friends now without hesitation, who smiles when you trade insults with Tony and who tells you practically every night that she’s sorry, that she would have come for you too, and every variation of those things.

They morph pretty soon into something resembling I love you, that tumbles from her mouth as a mix of speech. And you grin and pull her close and tell her that she’s your favourite idiot.

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taglist:  @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizli @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @rysnwilder  @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smallestavenger @lainjupi @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @emril-osvigne @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok

#anon cuties #written fic for anon #m answers #natasha romanov x reader #fic! #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff #natfic! #tptf #no clint slander please he's my boy

[mr-m-murdock]

your stuff is so well written, with the word choices and the descriptions, i love the way you write so much it’s so..IDK HOW TO DESCRIBE IT BUT LIKE ITS SUPER GOOD!!

i was wondering if you’d write any little drabbles about opf about either reader or natasha being sick and the other taking care of them but like the sick one is trying to hide the fact they’re sick and trying to deal with it alone bc they’re so used to it 😞🫶

how d'you like your eggs?

| natasha x reader | only pretty faces

warnings: none

a/n: I. LOVE. SICK FICS.

The bed is empty when you wake, and you register this with your sleep-sluggish brain.

Then you hear her sneeze, in the bathroom through the door. Twice. Three times. Four.

"Nata," you say hoarsely.

"Yeah?" she replies. You see a glimpse of red hair. Her voice is thick.

"You are disturbing me."

She laughs, and you hear the rustle of tissue. "You're such a jackass."

You pull the sheets more securely over your head, blotting out the sound of her sniffs and the light from the window. "Come back to bed," you say, your arm falling over the side of the mattress to brush the floor.

"Coming." That thick sound again, like there's something stuck in her throat. You stick your head out of the covers and frown at her as she enters, ignoring the fond smile on her face.

"What's wrong with you?" you ask. She grabs your nose and you squirm out of her grasp.

"Rude."

"Why is your face like that?"

"Rude," Natalia repeats. Her nose is red. In fast, her whole face is flushed. She sits gingerly down on the edge of the bed. "You want breakfast?" she asks.

You study her. Her fingers gripping the covers, her wrists trembling. The way her chest is moving shallowly, her breaths in tight little gasps. "I'll make breakfast," you say. She raises an eyebrow at you.

"Oh, you will?"

"Yes, I will." You wave a hand vaguely in the direction of the ceiling. "That thing James said about assimilating back into the world."

She studies you critically for a second, but she doesn't appear to have the energy to protest, and you scramble out of bed, touch her shoulder and make for the kitchen.

Behind you, you hear a whoof as she collapses back onto the mattress.

Natalia only emerges when you begin to burn the food. She leans against the kitchen doorframe, barefoot. Her face is pallid now, her shoulders slumped.

"You're burning that," she says thickly.

"You really are the most observational-"

"Idiot."

You turn back to the oven with a sigh. "Sit." She pauses, then obeys, her feet making no sound against the floor. The chair scrapes and she drops heavily into it.

You serve her a watery fried egg on a piece of toast with the burnt edges cut off, and she beams at you like you've set the world on her plate, her bloodshot eyes turning up at the corners.

"Sit," Natalia says, and when you've sat down, she forks a bit of egg white up and pushes it into your mouth. She's only eaten a small square of toast when she pushes her plate away.

You touch her forehead under the guise of affection. Her skin is hot like sunwarmed stones, alarmingly so.

"You're ill," you say.

Natalia pulls away from your hand, her constant smile fading. "No," she says. "I'm not."

"Okay, so eat," you prompt. She eyes her plate reluctantly.

"I have work to do today," she says eventually, and she pushes herself up to stand. You grab her shoulders and shove her down again: it's frighteningly easy. She stares up at you.

"You're going back to bed."

"I'm not sick."

"Nata," you say, fixing her with a look. Her nose is still red, her lips cracked, her eyes half closed. You wonder if she has a headache.

Finally, she gives in. She leans forward slowly and presses her face to your stomach with a sigh. "Okay," she says, muffled. "Only if you come with me."

You scratch at her scalp, thumbs in circles just behind her ears and she melts into you with a groan. "Of course."

"My head hurts." She shivers, hard like she's been holding it back all this time. "I'm cold."

"I'll get you an Ibuprofen."

Still, she doesn't move away from you. In the end, you have to lift her up with arms around her waist, and walk her into the bedroom yourself. You lay her down amongst the tornado of sheets, draw them over her shoulders, and make for the bathroom to get the medicine. When you return, she's curled into a ball, shuddering under the covers. You switch the light off.

You set the glass of water you'd poured down on the bedside table and climb in next to her. Immediately, she loops her arms around your waist and pulls you in, shoving her face into your shoulder.

"I have pills," you say. Her knee is in your stomach, but you don't move. Natalia's hand worms into yours and finds the tablets. She swallows them dry, her face screwed up in the dark. Then she sighs against your neck and relaxes.

You draw your hands over the curve of her back, gently.

"You should tell me, next time," you say softly. "Don't hide things from me."

"We don't really talk about things, though, do we?" Natalia says. Her voice is muffled and slurred. You paint patterns against the cloth of her t shirt. "Besides, I'm used to dealing with it."

"We could." She stays silent. "We could talk about it," you say. "And you don't have to deal with it. You never made me deal with it."

No reply. Then: "I want to go to sleep."

"Okay." You hesitate. "I love you."

You feel her smile. "Love you too," she says. The shutters thump gently against the window sill. Natalia tightens her arms around your waist. "Thank you for looking after me."

You can't communicate the emotions those words surface in you. How could you? When she's cared for you so much more? When she's saved you from the brink of hell, when she's tolerated and loved you, even as cracked and abrasive as you are, all this time. You will look after her always, in any way, at any time. If this is what you can do to love her and comfort her, you will do it.

You say nothing. You let her sleep, her wet breath warming your skin and think over and over again I love you I love you I love you.

Such a shame you can't say it any other way. You'll run out of I love you some time or other.

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taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar @maggieromanov @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @blckrwidow  @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic @smallestavenger @lainjupi @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok  @thorya22 @olicity-boo

#only pretty faces #natfic! #fic! #sickfic! #m answers #written fic for anon #anon cuties #natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff #natasha romanoff x reader #fanfiction #marvel

[mr-m-murdock]

Will there be any more OPF flashbacks? Maybe their mission days or where R is badass? The series could've been a black widow prequel!

| natasha x reader | only pretty faces |

warnings: violence, blood, yuck, mentions of sex

a/n: im doing this because I love you anon. crawling back into the light on my stomach because of u. sorry it's bad

"Ten seconds," says the handler, snug in your ear. The wall presses to your spine, obstinate and immovable and cold. The elevator doors scrape open at the end of the hall around the corner, and three sets of footfalls whisper against the deep carpet.

The first shadow falls around the corner and the man steps within inches of your pistol muzzle. He takes the bullet in the temple and his brains fling themselves at your hands and face. You break the second man's larynx with your elbow and he staggers backwards, wheezing, as you shoot the third in the heart. Blood on the back of your hand.

The second man tries to speak, a hand up in your face as a silent plea. You break his wrist, wrench his arm sideways and shoot him in the eye.

Three men in five seconds. It's almost a personal record.

You're smearing blood on the second man's white shirt as you rifle through his suit pocket, but it doesn't matter. No one will find them for days. You extract his wallet, stand and make for the window.

It's a long drop down. You hook your wire to your belt and the sill and lever yourself backwards. You step off the edge.

The wind chills the blood on your face as you fall, feet to the wall, face to the sky. The wire rappels out with a high keen.

"Completion approved. Out," says the handler, and the line cuts off with a crack in your ear. Your heels hit the concrete half a second later: they really do trust your competence, to cut your feed before the extraction is complete. You detract the wire and it comes soaring down towards you like a snake flung through the air. You tuck the wallet away and turn towards the street.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

She's waiting for you at the writing desk, one foot up on the chair and her chin on her knee. She tilts her head at you when you walk in and shut the door behind you.

"Bed," she says instantly.

You point to your face. "Blood," you reply. Natalia raises her eyebrows at you.

"Get on the bed before I fuck you against the door."

"Wouldn't be averse," you say. A flicker of amusement: so small, minuscule on her indecipherable face. You bask in your knowledge. She breaks only for you.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

There's blood on the sheets when you're done: yours, this time. Natalia's nails are mean.

Now she's tracing her name on your stomach with the tips of her fingers, not a sharp edge in sight. "Can you feel that?" she asks. "What am I writing?"

"You're branding me," you say, looking down at her. She's smiling, lips red and parted like an open wound. You kiss her, one hand in her hair. You're entangled in her, always will be. "I'm yours," you say into her teeth.

"I know."

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

She's so fast. So graceful. So brutally, cruelly efficient. You track her through the scope of the rifle, your finger a hair away from tripping the trigger. She knows you're watching, excited by the track of a bullet as she slaughters her way across the concrete prison yard. It's making her show off.

"Do you need me?" you ask, as the prisoners flank her.

"No," she replies, breathlessness turning the feed into a crackle. She snaps the neck of a man twice her size and shoves his body into the gathering mass.

"You do need me," you tease. "Come on, Nata. Say the word."

"I need you to shut up," she says. She flings a knife that rips through two throats and impales a third in the chest.

"That was hot," you say.

You see a prisoner rise from the ground right by her foot and grab at her leg: on instinct, furious instinct, you whip the rifle to the left and fire. He slumps back, dead. The thrill of it wires you, and with a small adjustment, you aim and fire again. Again.

The prisoners drop around her like ripe pears from a tree, your invisible presence infuriating them. Eventually, Natalia stands alone, breathing hard, bloody from head to toe. She raises her face in your direction, pale like the surface of the moon.

"Love you," you say.

"You're gonna pay for that."

"For stealing your thunder?"

"My thunder is fine. You grazed me." She grabs her arm illustratively.

"Liar." You both know you can't miss. But your grinning against the cold stock of your rifle, still.

Natalia starts for the heavy door across the courtyard, her walk silent and purposeful. "When have I ever lied to you?" she asks

You laugh. "You lie in your sleep. You'd lie to me in death."

"Untrue," she replies. You hear the sound of her fingers against the keypad, imagine the blood smeared across her gloves and over her mean fingernails. "Where you go, I go. When you die, I die. You're mine, remember?"

"My romantic," you say, and you shoot the guard on the other side as the door springs open. This time, you graze her on purpose.

requests | masterlist

notes: I still have 10 requests from about July time onwards, so if you requested something and it's not been done, I haven't deleted it - if that gives you any hope at all

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @blckrwidow @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smalls-words @lainjupi  @d1s0nym @meimei-a @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115  @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok  @thorya22  @olicity-boo @iliketozoneout

#natasha romanoff x reader #m answers #natasha romanoff #fanfiction #marvel #fic! #natfic! #only pretty faces #anon cuties

[mr-m-murdock]

to play the fool pt 3

| natasha x fem!reader | request by @strangegardentaco | part one, two, four

warnings: blood, injury, IDIOTS

a/n: final (?) part! hope you guys enjoy

You collapse through your window, a tangle of legs and arms, and sprawl across the carpet.

The ceiling is murky in the dim afternoon light. You can still smell smoke, woven into the fabric of your suit, the twists of your hair.

You don't know how long the two of you lie there, unmoving. Natasha is a dead weight across your bruised ribs. You can smell something else, too: blood in your nostrils, on your tongue.

The sun must go down at some point: it's as if you blink, and the darkness closes in. It wakes you up. When you can no longer see the outline of the couch in the dark, the tunnel-panic clamps hard down on your heart. You grip Natasha by the shoulders and push her with trembling arms until she rolls onto the carpet beside you, and you shove yourself upright, your breath hot against the inside of your mask. You pull it desperately off, fingers catching in your hair, and discard it. You tug at the laces on your boots by the light from the window, trying to calm your heart, to catch your breath. You can still feel the rock against your palms, the soil sneaking down your shirt.

The boots come off and you get to your feet, stumble your way to the light switch. Your pulse staggers on doggedly, faster than you can count. You flick the switch and the room floods with light. You sink against the off-white wall and press your face to the cool, lumpy paint. You don’t dare close your eyes.

Beyond the couch, Natasha is draped over the floor like a dead thing, red ponytail splayed across your carpet. You stay by the wall, your eyes on her, until your heart has slowed and your chest has loosened and your head is firmly on your shoulders.

You move across the room on shaking legs, using the furniture as crutches, towards her. You roll her onto her back, yank up her sleeve and search for a pulse: your fingers leave smears of dirt and blood across her pale wrist. You feel the beat, shallow and weak under your thumb. Good. Good.

Your brain won’t work, neurons firing sluggishly. You have to wake up. You have to assess the situation.

All you really want to do is collapse on the floor next to Natasha and sleep.

But you won’t. You tug your gloves off, wincing as they peel away from your ruined fingernails, and check Natasha’s airway. She’s breathing. You try to think.

You’ve done this before, a hundred times. You’ve stitched yourself up. You’ve dug bullets from skin, you’ve cleared grit from wounds, you’ve done CPR and cracked ice packs and set bones. You can do it.

You hesitate only once more, when your hands move to unzip Natasha’s suit. God, if she ever wakes up, she’s going to be so mad at you. But you take a look at her grey, peaceful face, and worry overtakes embarrassment. You pull the zip down: beneath, her undershirt is ripped and bloodied and dirty with sweat and soil. You peel the suit off her shoulders and down, scanning for wounds - a slice down her upper arm, a huge splay of bruises over her stomach, grazes on her elbows and knees and hips. Little nicks on her legs, seeping blood. Another larger knife wound stretches over her ribs when you roll her onto her side.

And that leg, the one that had been trapped under a rock when you’d first found her: it’s bruised and the knee is bent at an odd angle. Dislocated, perhaps.

She’s battered. You hate it, a deep well of anger that rises like a bucket drawing water the more you uncover. You hate that too, that you care so damn much. She doesn’t care about you. She barely tolerates you - she only ever talked to you to keep you out of trouble. What right do you have to care?

You eventually decide to move Natasha to the bathroom: that’s where your first aid kit is, and the light is bright in there and you have a multitude of fluffy bathmats that you can use to carpet the floor. You hook your hands under Natasha’s arms, brace your legs and pull. You drag her across the carpet, through the kitchen and into the bathroom. You lay her down halfway through the door, and drag the first aid kit and a few bathmats out of the cupboard, laying them haphazardly across the floor. Then you grab Natasha again and haul her in the rest of the way.

You collapse down beside her, your spine to the cold bathtub, knees up, and rest your head on the lip of the bath. You catch your breath. Natasha’s blood seeps into one of your bathmats and you groan, but make no move to shift her. Your energy is spent.

With tired fingers, you tug the first aid kit towards your feet. You unzip it, flip it open. Suture packs and bandages and single-use ice packs stare back at you. This is useless. You can barely lift your head.

But you manage it. It takes you hours. You clean Natasha’s wounds, slather her bruises in arnica, stitch her up, all the while keeping an eye on her sleeping face. She doesn’t so much as twitch, not even when your hand cramps in the middle of a loop through the knife wound on her ribs. Deep sleeper, you think, and you want to slap yourself for noticing anything about her. She’s not your friend.

So why is she unconscious on your bathroom floor? Why did you crawl through a hundred metres of rock to rescue her?

“Fuck you,” you say. Her body doesn’t reply. You don’t want to feel like this, panic sitting perpetually in your throat like a stone lodged there. You shouldn’t have gone. You should have let the Avengers fend for their damn selves, like Natasha was so adamant that they would. You rest your head against the lip of the bath again, and your eyes glaze over. You mustn’t sleep, though: sleep means dark.

The pain reaches you late. Something aside from the grazes and bruises and blood still sitting heavy in your nose. At first you think it’s a remnant of the knot in your throat, of the tide of adrenaline receding slowly and sadly and leaving you on the brink of useless, useless tears as you stare at Natasha’s stone-still face. But it’s not.

It becomes a burn, a sting in your side first, then a flare that becomes impossible to ignore. You unzip your jacket, letting gravity pull your heavy hand downwards.

You’re bleeding. You register this slowly, the soaked and half-dry patch of your dark top, the wetness uncomfortable on your hip. “Ow,” you say, to the empty room. You poke, and the pain intensifies, fades back to ground state. You hiss in through your teeth as you roll your shirt slowly up.

It’s a long gash down your side, the edges of the wound pink and raw like a burn, steadily seeping blood. The gun. The shot. The burst of energy from your eyes. The bullet must have grazed your side, deep. “Ow,” you say, and it drops from your lip as a whimper. With fresh blood on your fingers, you fumble for the first aid kit and drag it towards you, searching one-handed for gauze to soak up the blood. Your shirt keeps slipping down. Frustrated, you pull the shirt up and grab it with your teeth, then press the gauze hard to your side. It hurts, burns, and you grunt through your teeth, tongue against the roof of your mouth. Your eyes flicker sideways to check that Natasha is still sleeping.

The stitches are torturous, dipping in through your ragged skin and drawing the sides of the wound together as you pinch with one hand, your eyes watering and tears spilling onto your cheeks. Your stomach is a mess of blood and water that you’ve splashed on to clean yourself, your pants soaked with it. You swear into your top, damp with saliva. You feel filthy, your nails black with dirt, snot and blood welling in your nostrils. You finish the last knot and think desperately of a shower.

But you should wake Natasha, before she chokes on her own vomit in her sleep or something. You can’t leave her unconscious on your bathroom floor.

You strip your ruined shirt off and tie it around your face, trying to ignore the stink of blood in your nose. You don’t know why you bother to hide at this point, but something about the covering makes you feel safer, surer of yourself. You don’t bother with your hair.

You take Natasha by the shoulders and shake her, once, twice.

“Natasha,” you say, your voice slightly muffled by the shirt. “Natasha!” Louder. Nothing. You grab your phone from where you’ve discarded it on the edge of your bloodied sink and search for an alarm sound: the most annoying, repetitive ring on there. You press play. It rings. And rings.

Natasha’s eyebrows move, shift into a frown. Her eyes open into slits. You don’t turn the alarm off, not yet. The ringing becomes louder, more insistent, and she blinks twice, lips parting, tongue passing over them. Her eyes slide to you, a little unfocused.

“Asshole,” she says, her mouth barely moving.

“Huh?” you say, playing it up.

“Turn that the fuck off.”

“You’re welcome,” you reply sharply, and you cut the alarm off. Natasha says nothing for a few seconds. She licks her lips again, stares glassily up at the ceiling. You wait, ignoring your pounding, anxious, traitor heart.

“It’s bright,” she observes.

“Your knee is dislocated,” you say. “I would’ve put it back, but I didn’t think that would be a pleasant wake-up.” Her eyes shift back to you. You try to ignore them, how brilliantly green they are, how keen and observant even in their half-focused state. Impossible.

“Why are you still wearing that?” she asks. Her voice is rough. Your fingers touch the shirt over your face.

“Who was the kid?” you counter. Natasha sighs. She digs her elbows into the floor and shoves herself up into what looks like a painful sitting position. She notices the blood and water and stitches and bruises and perhaps the fact that she’s in her underwear.

“Oh,” she says. Her fingers drift across the line of stitches over her ribs. You might be imagining it, but you think you see her shudder.

“I have a paramedic certificate,” you say. “And like - a shit ton of experience. I go to a lot of protests as a medic.”

“You shouldn’t have done that while I was asleep,” she says.

“I don’t have any anaesthesia,” you reply, slightly irritated. A thank you would be nice. But Natasha doesn’t thank you. She rises fast, face clenched in pain, flips up your toilet lid and retches into it. Her spine curves, the vertebrae showing starkly under her pale skin. Muscles roll as she convulses again, but you don’t hear the splatter of vomit. She must be dry-heaving - by the look of the bruises on her stomach, that will hurt.

She stills eventually, panting into your toilet bowl. Her hair snakes down her back, the nape of her neck damp with sweat.

“Do you want some water?” you ask.

“No.”

“Okay.” You wipe your hands on your ruined bathmats. “Do you want a shower?”

“Leave me alone,” Natasha says. Her voice echoes in the toilet, but is somehow still incredibly small. You frown at her curved back, heat rushing to your face. How can she make you feel this stupid in your own home?

“Fine,” you say. The bathroom is far too small for two people. Too cramped, too bright, too hot. You get unsteadily to your feet and leave, shutting the door hard behind you. She slumps to the floor with a rustle, and you walk away before you can hear anymore.

You wash off in the sink, your ruined shirt discarded in the kitchen bin. The water lands cold on your feet and you don’t care, can’t bring yourself to care. The world is bright beyond your window, even this late at night, the glitter of street lamps and windows and billboards. Maybe even the orange glow of fire. This is where your effort to become a meaningful part of that world has landed you. Splashing yourself with cold water in the kitchen sink, banished from your own bathroom and bleeding like an idiot.

You turn the tap off and pat yourself dry with a tea towel that ends up in the bin as well, smeared with blood. You fetch a towel from your room, lay it over the couch and lower yourself gingerly onto it, rest your head back. The room is well lit, warm now. You won’t sleep. You want to, but you know it won’t come. You probably won’t sleep easy for the next week.

Inevitably, as you gaze out of the window from your seat, your thoughts return to the idiot woman hacking up blood and nothing in your bathroom. You can’t hear her, so she’s not showering, not throwing up. You have a sudden awful vision of her lying passed out on the blood-soaked bathmats, frothing red at the mouth, and you have to stop yourself from getting up to check on her.

You sit there as the sun comes up. Natasha doesn’t come out, even as the hours drip past, and eventually you make up your mind to talk to her. You pull your mask back on, grimacing at the dried blood and smell of sweat in it, and you walk to the bathroom door on unsteady legs.

“Natasha?” you say, tentatively. No answer.

Then, just as you’re about to call again; “Yeah,” she says, from within the bathroom. You hesitate, trawling for what to say next.

“You can have a shower if you want.”

“You can come in if you want,” she replies dryly. You take that as an invitation and open the door to find her sitting with her back to the wall, head tipped back. Her face is still ashen. You expect her to say something, an apology maybe, but instead she sits there with her damn wounded pride and stares you down.

“Nice mask,” she says. You seriously consider kicking her out at that moment, but the feeling fades just as quickly as it comes on. Because her eyes drop almost shamefully and her fists curl in her lap. It’s not an apology, not a thank you, nowhere near to anything you’d accept for either of those things, but for some fucking reason you can read those movements like words on a page and it softens your resolve to be harsh with her.

“Shower,” you say shortly. “You stink.”

“You stink,” she fires back at you. You turn and leave again before you can snap at her.

You hear the shower switch on as you’re eating an apple and glaring aimlessly through the kitchen window. Natasha doesn’t shower for very long. You’re only halfway through your apple when you hear the water shut off again. You stay where you are, hear her climb out of the bathtub, feet squeaking on the ceramic.

She calls your name. You take a large bite of the apple and toss it into the trash can. You take your time walking to the bathroom, and when you open the door she’s wrapped herself in the shower curtain and is scowling up at you from her seat on the edge of the bathtub.

“What?” you say, your voice faltering from the anger you’d meant to inject. Her eyes are large and her lashes are wet and her bare, pale shoulders are scattered with freckles and small wounds and you rip your eyes away from her.

“I didn’t want to use your towel,” she says. She shifts, and the curtain rustles around her.

You roll your eyes and turn to leave. You pull a towel from the hall cupboard and throw it through the door at her: she catches it before it hits her face, with a wince.

She clutches it to her chest and you raise your eyebrows at her.

“Anything else, your majesty?”

“Why are you so angry with me?” Natasha asks, and that heat, that hatred with yourself that you’ve lain your thoughts out before her, rises again from your stomach.

“You-” you say, but your throat is thick with emotion now and you know you can’t explain it.

Natasha tilts her head at you. “I didn’t ask you to do any of this,” she says.

“What?” you exclaim. “Are you serious?!”

“I told you to leave,” she fires back. “It’s not my fault you’ve got a hero complex like all the rest of them-”

“Hero complex?” you spit. “You’re the one who ran alone into an explosion to save a baby! Let me have this, you said that! Hero complex my fucking ass.” Natasha opens her mouth again and you step back and slam the door on her, your heart trembling in your chest with rage.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

She doesn’t emerge from the bathroom after that until you swallow as much of your pride as you can and hand her sweats and a t-shirt without looking her in the eye. You feel like she’s trying to catch you off guard, constantly now, and you half expect her to drop her towel or something just to shock you, make fun of you. But she doesn’t. She takes the clothes and waits until you’ve left, and then she wanders out of the bathroom in her borrowed clothes, limping on her bad knee. You look over at her from the couch, where you’re spooning cereal into your mouth under your mask.

You frown. “Your knee,” you say before you can stop yourself. She looks surprised like she expects you to snap at her again.

“I put it back,” she replies, with a shrug. Like it’s nothing. You gape at her for a second, then pull yourself together when you realise she can’t see your expression.

Shower. Dress. You’re still practically half-naked and you’re cold now, and you suddenly don’t want to be the only one undressed. You set your cereal down and move past her to the bathroom.

“Ice in the freezer,” you say, and you shut the door behind you. You pull the mask off and wipe with relief at the condensation on your face.

The shower is glorious, warm, and the pressure harsh on your shoulders. It’s freezing at first, which makes you jump and curse - Natasha must have taken her shower cold. You spend as long as you dare under the spray, ever conscious of running up your water bill for no real reason. When you step out, you see that Natasha has left her towel folded on the window sill. Her ruined suit is nowhere to be seen until you pedal open the bin and you see the suit, the ruined bathmats and a length of bloodied bandage.

“Huh,” you say to yourself, quietly, without meaning to. You pull on a jumper that won’t rub your stitches and loose shorts, and you step out of the bathroom. The steam follows you out like a cloud. Natasha is slumped in your armchair with your frozen bag of peas on her knee, the early morning sunlight glowing across her face. Her eyes are closed.

You pull open your fridge and reach for a beer.

“I feel like it’s a bad idea to drink right now,” she says.

You look over. She still hasn’t opened her eyes. “Shut up,” you say. You flick the cap off on your counter and drink deeply.

Natasha shifts in her seat, to face you. That’s when you realise you forgot to put your mask back on. You freeze. Your stomach lurches.

Natasha stares at you for a second too long, her mouth moving like she’d been about to say something. Then her eyes flick away, almost guiltily. In the silence that follows, you both try hard not to acknowledge it. But your face feels cold and bare, under the stare that lingers even as Natasha sets her eyes firmly on the arm of the couch.

Your heart thunders like a drum.

“Thank you,” Natasha says, almost too quiet to hear.

“What?” you say, shock reflexes taking over even as the words register. Natasha looks at you again, eyes narrowed, like she thinks you’re messing with her. And sure. It would be easier to mess with her, draw it out of her again and again and revel in your victory but-

-you don’t want to. You don’t even know what she’s thanking you for: some idiot, pretentious part of you could imagine she’s thanking you for the honour of seeing your face - as if she ever would. Maybe the stitches, the clothes, the shower, maybe she’s thanking you for dragging her out of that hot, damp hell-hole on trembling legs.

“You’re welcome,” you say, and you take a long sip so you don’t have to see her face change.

More silence, thick as a wall between the two of you. You don’t want to think of her shaking and trembling against you, how determined you’d felt right then in the dark, but the images come anyway.

“What happened to you?” she asks, and she nods at your side, where the deep graze and the stitches are. You look down. You remember all the questions you have for her, that’s she’s so adamant not to answer.

“Bullet,” you say. “Grazed me. Some idiot in a hood.”

“You don’t know who it was?”

“I was a little too preoccupied to ID them,” you reply, a bite in your voice. You’re not angry. You’re just thinking real hard about how heavy Natasha had felt against you. Like a corpse. You tilt your head at her. “They wanted to know where that baby was. You feel like filling me in?”

Her face closes off. “No,” she says.

“Right. So I got shot for nothing.”

“Did you blast them?” Natasha asks, ignoring your comment.

“They’re dead,” you reply, dully. You look at the floor. She’s fallen silent. “I didn’t mean to, I just-”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

You can’t look at her. “Hawkeye will have found them by now.” She rustles the bag of peas, rearranges them. “What did they want with the kid, Natasha?” Now that she can hear you, is awake and looking you right in the eye, or attempting to, her name feels naked coming from your mouth. Raw and too personal.

“Doesn’t concern you,” she says.

“It does,” you say. You wait for anger, but your body’s too tired for it. “Please just tell me what’s going on.”

She shifts again, and pain materialises on her face with the movement, for just a second. You rest a hand on the countertop and wait it out.

“Fine,” she says eventually. “Sit down. You’re dead on your feet.” That irks you, for a reason you can’t decode.

“I’m fine.”

“Sit down.”

“Jesus Christ.” You move to the couch and throw yourself down, glaring at her. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic,” she says dryly. She molds the bag of peas to her knee and begins to explain.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

She falls asleep on the armchair to let you digest what the hell you’ve just heard, and the sun comes up through the window like a torchbeam. You call into work at eight, holding your nose closed, and tell your manager you have a shitty cold. He answers with a grunt and hangs up. Easy enough. You toss the phone onto the cushions beside you.

The silence coating your apartment seems to buffer the noise of the outside world, of car horns and voices. Natasha sleeps fitfully, half-woken every few minutes by the sunlight on her face, but you’re too exhausted to get up and close the curtains. You finish your bottle and set it down on the coffee table, where it sweats condensation.

You don’t know when you fall asleep, but you wake with your heart in your mouth and your hands fisted in the couch cushions. You suck in breaths through trembling jaws. Visions of tight tunnels and blood under your nails and Natasha’s ashen face fade as you blink them away.

The armchair is empty when you come to your senses. Something overcomes you: a wave of disappointment maybe, or regret - and then you hear the toilet flush and you feel monumentally stupid. You’d missed her for a second there. What right did you have to miss her? Why should she make you feel that way?

Natasha emerges from the bathroom, drying her hands. “It’s midday,” she tells you, and your heart lurches in shock. “You don’t sleep very well.” She leans a hip on the kitchen counter and pushes a hand through her hair, observing you through quarter-closed eyes.

“Neither do you,” you say. Her eyes narrow. “Can you get me a drink?”

She turns away, turns on the sink faucet and fills a glass with water. She rounds the edge of the counter and hands it to you.

“You know what I meant,” you say, but you take it anyway.

“You’ll get a beer belly,” she says, her voice flat. She must be tired if she’s too exhausted to tease you properly. You pull your sweatshirt up and poke at the muscle on your stomach.

“I think I’m okay,” you say. You raise your head to take a sip of water and Natasha’s eyes move from your stomach to your face. She looks awkward standing there: and that’s not a word you’d ever think to use to describe Black Widow. But she doesn’t look like Black Widow right now - she looks like a woman barely scraping five foot six in a t-shirt way too big for her, and the sun is turning her hair copper-gold through the window. She looks normal.

“Stop staring at me,” she says.

“You first.”

She breaks the eye contact.

“What are-” you don’t know what you intended to ask. You stare down at your water and collect your thoughts. “Do they know where you are?” you say eventually.

She raises one eyebrow at you. Your heart does awful, traitorous things in your chest and you hold her gaze for as long as you can. “You mean the Avengers? I don’t let them track me.”

“Okay,” you say. “You know, you can sit down if you want.” Your stomach growls. The corner of her mouth twitches up. “I’m hungry,” you say. “Sue me.”

“So eat.”

“Too tired.”

“God, you are pathetic.”

That should piss you off. It doesn’t. You give her a lazy grin and secretly wonder to yourself how the hell all this happened to you.

Natasha smooths down a loose thread on the seam of her (your) sweatpants. They’re rolled up twice at the waist. “Thank you,” she says. “For coming back for me.”

“Choose a better way to die next time,” you say, instead of something nice or gracious or meaningful.

Natasha sighs. “I don’t know why I bother with you,” she says, sinking onto the arm of the couch, above you.

“I’m irresistible.”

“You’re an idiot.”

You think about calling for pizza, a half-smile on your face. You wipe it off quickly, but not before she sees.

“I wouldn’t have left you there,” you say. Her eyes drift away. Makes you think about who else left her behind before. You don’t think promises mean much to her: they’re only words. Like threats. Blackmail. You don’t think words get under her skin as much as they do yours. “Swear.”

“I know.” She looks down at her hands. “I tried to stay awake. I thought you weren’t coming, in the end.”

You have this stupid, terrible urge to reach out and take her by the hand and tell her - what? What would you tell her that would mean anything?

It doesn’t subside. The moment passes. You slump into the couch.

“You know, you didn’t have to hide your face,” Natasha says. “When we got back.” She’s stumbling over words.

“Yeah, you already knew what I looked like,” you reply. You shrug. “It just felt better, having it on.”

“I didn’t know what you looked like. You know, you’re not too bad at the whole secret identity thing.”

You frown. “Then how did you find me the first time?”

“I followed you,” Natasha says casually. “You were bleeding everywhere. You weren’t moving very fast. I guessed which apartment was yours.”

“You guessed?” you echo. You imagine Natasha turning up in Nadia Henstridge’s apartment next door: the woman is verging on ninety - seeing Natasha in her boots and leather jacket sitting in the dark would probably send her headfirst into a heart attack.

Natasha grins. “I’m a very good guesser.”

“Sure,” you say. More silence: you hate the silence. You don’t want to hear your own heartbeat, or Natasha’s breathing. “The mask made me feel safer,” you say. I didn’t want you to be disappointed, you don’t say.

Natasha looks down at you. She reaches out and touches your cheek, softly with the pads of her fingers. You stare at her, your heart in your ears, drowning out everything. “You look better without it,” she says.

You want to kiss her. You realise that, what that stupid, burning heat in your chest is. Once you’ve found that urge, you can’t stop thinking about it, even as she withdraws her hand and looks away.

Do something, you scream at yourself. All this inward thinking is driving you insane. Say something.

You reach for her hand, and you intend to tug her round to look at you, but you pull too hard and she overbalances, sliding off the arm of the couch and onto the seat beside you with a surprised yelp.

“What the hell?” Natasha exclaims. Her bright green eyes are narrowed, cheeks flushed - God, she looks incredible.

“Um,” you say. You can’t do it. You can’t do it.

“Um,” Natasha says, mocking you, and she slides a hand into your hair and pulls you in to kiss her.

It’s easier than you’d thought it would be. Her face fits right to yours. Her lips are warm. You can feel where it’s split, taste the blood. You kiss her back, one hand wrapped around hers, one settled on her knee. Your chest tightens, loosens, excitement firing like sparks in your brain.

She pulls away from you. You take a second to open your eyes.

“Idiot,” she says. You frown at her. “I’m gonna kiss you again,” she says. You make an agreeable noise and she pulls you in, hand on the back of your neck. She steals your breath. She kisses your bottom lip, the corner of your mouth, and your fist curls in the fabric of your sweatpants.

The two of you surface, still centimetres apart, and you suck in a breath. “Thank you for coming back for me,” she says, against your mouth. Her hand loosens in yours.

“Always,” you say.

“You have really nice abs.”

You laugh, a crazed little giggle. She grins at you. You kiss her again, mouths half-open, smiles half-formed.

The next time you pull apart, she runs her thumb down the column of your throat.

“I’m still hungry,” you say, to distract yourself from the feel of her skin on yours.

“I’ll buy you pizza,” Natasha says.

“To thank me for saving your life.”

“No, this is to thank you for saving my life.” She tilts her head sideways and kisses your neck, and a gasp of surprise falls from your open mouth. She laughs, sending vibrations through your skin, into your bones.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

She orders pepperoni. You accuse her of playing it safe and she swats you with a pillow, and the two of you eat out on the fire escape and watch the day roll past. You rest your head on her shoulder.

“This is fucking good,” Natasha mumbles around a mouthful. She wipes her fingers on the pizza box and reaches for another slice. She crams half of it into her mouth at once.

“You eat a lot for such a small person,” you observe. Natasha throws you a playful look of disgust.

“You’re like, an inch taller than me.”

“An inch can make all the difference,” you joke. She slaps your shoulder halfheartedly. A truck horn goes off in the distance. There are three wisps of cloud in the sky, and the metal of the fire escape is warm beneath you. Natasha’s clean hand winds its way into yours.

“I like you a lot,” she admits, quiet. Your heart swells instantly.

“I like you too,” you say. You squeeze her hand. Silence, once again. You know what you’re both thinking. Natasha words it first.

“They’ll be looking for me,” she says.

“I know. You should go.”

She sighs, and her breath ruffles your hair. “I will. I don’t want them coming after you.”

“I thought you said you don’t let them track you,” you say. A little, helpless worm of fear squirms into your words. You try to squash it.

“Hawkeye can find me,” Natasha says. “If he tries really hard.” She snorts to herself.

“Where will you go?” you ask. “I’ll give you some shoes.”

“Manhattan,” Natasha says, almost dismally. “I’ll come back, though.” She looks at you. She presses her face to your hair. “Promise.” You smile at the sun, eyes half-shut. You hope she catches it.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

You lend her sneakers and help her into a coat and you swallow jealousy when you open the door for her. They have her all the time, see her smile and hear her talk: why don’t you get a little more time?

You kiss her hard, so she’ll remember, so she will come back, even though you know she will. Her hands curl into your shirt, and she grins against your mouth. When you separate, she licks her lips.

“I wanted a good one,” you say. She tugs on a lock of your hair.

“I’ll come back for you,” she says, in earnest.

“I believe you.”

And you watch her walk away, until she’s all the way out of sight down the corridor.

requests | masterlist

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizli @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624 @strangegardentaco @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @rysnwilder  @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smallestavenger @lainjupi   @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @emril-osvigne @natblackwidow2

notes: PLEASE REBLOG IM REALLY PROUD OF THIS ONE. pt 4? idk what I would write though

#natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff #natfic! #fic! #fanfiction #marvel fanfiction #tptf

[mr-m-murdock]

i have a request! you should do an x reader thing where nat and r are both in the red room and it’s a forbidden love thing obv idk about specific plot lines or scenarios but i feel like that’s something you could write really well. do what you want with that, or dont :) also i’m gonna start using a thing to mark my anon notes cause i keep coming back lmao

- :)

thank you so much for this!

| natasha x reader |

warnings: brainwashing, blood, child abuse, ANGST because come on. y’all know me by now

a/n: I was considering doing an OPF prequel thingy but this can be read as OPF or not, whichever you want. ALSO it's a little messed up. They're all insane. anyway enjoy :)

You all watch the armour-clad soldiers bear the girls in on stretchers. A little blonde one with child-thick fingers, and Natalia. They disappear around a corner, Natalia's knuckles brushing the ground.

Kira rests her head on your shoulder, her fingers still threaded in your hair, the braid half done.

When Natalia returns, they have shorn her blue hair off, down to a fuzz of red across her scalp. She makes no eye contact, her blank stare firmly and stubbornly on the ground.

She assembles rifles with small hands as steady as ever. She always was the best. She dances like no one else, with the grace of hot glass.

They pit you against each other on the hard ground outside, in the snow, the hot sun, the rain barefoot.

Natalia will size you up with one glance. She will see the end of the fight before you've even raised your fists. And when, inevitably, you're flat on your back in the dirt or the snow or a puddle, you'll think of how her eyes dulled when she struck first.

Natalia was always different to the rest. Stronger, faster, meaner, sure. But sometimes you'd hear in the middle of the night, an animated clank of a chain, and you'd look up from the hard pillow, eyes heavy with sleep, and you'd see her sitting up at the head of her bed. Profiled in the dark. Her buzzed-off hair grown out an inch, brushing the tips of her ears.

When Kira's neck snapped in the crook of your arm, and you were thirteen and unnaturally strong, Natalia found your gaze and held it. You didn't cry, and Kira's blood oozed out of her ear to smear across your skin.

They never praised you, but you're sure you saw a cruel gleam of triumph in the eye of the trainer. It didn't matter to you, not with the blank, methodical way your brain operated then.

Something mattered, though.

Natalia was impressed: you could see it as she displayed it plainly on her face. She never had before, and everyone begged to be the one to impress her, to be just as good, to put a knee in her back and hear her tap out. (There was no way they'd let anyone kill Natalia.) But no one ever could.

Until you.

You measured when you lost: every flick of her eyes, every twitch of muscle, the twist in her mouth the instant before the final punch landed. And you weighed these measurements out into ounces and pounds and when you stood across from her for the last time and the trainer ordered her to kill, you did not back down.

Natalia ended up on her stomach in the dust, foaming at the mouth, her hands twisted behind her back. The trainer’s face was blank as ever, as slate, but you were not looking at him. You were looking at Natalia.

And she was laughing. Spitting it out like teeth into the dirt.

From then on, you were never apart: and you never wanted to be. Before long, Natalia’s pistol by your side was like an extra limb, your flashing fists an extension of her body. They sent you to kill a man in an ill-fitting suit - Natalia sat on his lap and drew her hair behind her ear and you thrust a blade through his throat from behind, spattering her with cartilage and blood. She sighed, a puff of calm boredom, as he choked to death in her face.

Now you are thirteen and she is fourteen and the world has plunged into a freezing winter, bitter enough to bite your skin off. Natalia steals privacy in slips of moments, the two of you with your backs to a tree trunk, the two of you playing stupid games in the frozen dirt, the two of you shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee in a shed with the wind whistling through the gaps in the boards. And she grips you by the back of the neck, the fur on her gloves tickling your skin, and she kisses you gently. Then you sit there in shy silence, hands linked.

Now you are eighteen and she is nineteen and there is blood under your fingernails. Always there, no matter the process you go through to clean up. She pushes you into a wall by the neck. “You idiot,” she spits at you. “You weren’t supposed to kill her.”

The woman had been aiming for the crown of Natalia’s skull, a bullet aimed to blast apart bone. “She was going to kill you,” you say. You revel in the feel of her hand around your throat. It’s been so long since you’ve fought her.

Natalia laughs, high and bordering on hysterical. “I am unkillable,” she replies. She pushes away from you. Her eyes are bright.

You reach out, grab her by the collar and pull her in to kiss her, and she comes willingly, her hands grasping at your suit, digging in past the buckles. She grips you so hard you feel the bruises forming. “I know,” you say, when you’ve broken apart, both clawing for air. “I know and I killed her anyway. I’ll kill anyone for you.”

Natalia smiles at you, all her white teeth on display like a wolf pulling back her lips. “Yes,” she says. “You will.”

When you’re done, when objectives have been completed and weapons cleaned and you’re waiting for a plane to land or an unmarked car to draw up outside, Natalia will find a room, closed off to the outside world: a hotel or a hovel, doesn’t matter.

The two of you will clean each other methodically in the shower: you know every part of her, every scar and dip of skin. She is perfection, molded from white marble.

Sometimes, she’ll drag you to a sufficiently large area of floor and drive you to the ground, stripping you and kissing you and touching you without giving either of you the chance to clean up. Blood, yours and hers and someone else’s, mingles on both your skin, dirt, grease, gunshot residue: neither of you care. In these moments, you know only her. It is all you want.

And when she leaves, they take advantage of it. They take your desire for her and the hairline crack in your heart and they twist it to hunger, they wipe your mind clean and they push the muzzle of your pistol to follow her, wherever she goes. You endure this willingly, always willingly. For her, for them, no difference. Except your love for the Red Room is artificial, pumped in through a needle. Your love for Natalia is crimson and volatile and constant.

Somewhere in the deep, blank recesses of your mind, you know she’s better than you. You know she’ll outrun you and outsmart you. You know there will always be a twitch of hesitation in your trigger finger, blasting apart the plaster next to her head instead of the bone between her bright, bright eyes that you know so well.

requests | masterlist

notes: it’s a bit shorter than I wanted it to be and probably than you were hoping for, but I hope you liked it! <3

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar @maggieromanov @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624 @strangegardentaco @phantomvael @lorsstar1st @rysnwilder @ima-gi–na-tion @paryl @picnicmic  @smallestavenger @lainjupi @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115  @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok @thorya22

#:) anon #anon cuties #requests #written fic for anon #only pretty faces #natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff #natfic! #fic! #black widow!reader

[mr-m-murdock]

to play the fool pt 2

| natasha x fem!reader | request by @strangegardentaco | part one, three

warnings: injuries, idiots, claustrophobia tw

a/n: I know I wrote this but DAMN just kiss already

You don’t see her again for almost a week after that. It drives you a little crazy, because you know she’s looking out for you and has probably been within feet of you at one point without you noticing, but won’t show herself.

She does seek you out eventually, though. You’re watching a police car whine its way downtown below you when you hear a light thump of feet, and you know Natasha has just landed behind you.

“Evening,” you say shortly.

“Blast of cold air much?” she asks, settling down beside you.

“I know you’ve been following me,” you say. You turn to look at her, narrowing your eyes to catch any semblance of guilt flashing across her face, but all she does is blink innocently back at you.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says blankly. Before you can argue, she says, “Anyway, I’m here to warn you, not entertain your paranoia.”

“Oh yeah?” you grunt, turning your attention to the street below. You try to ignore the frustration gathering beneath your skin.

“Yeah. We’ve got intel that means you need to stay away from the Empire State building on Friday,” she says.

“What intel?” you ask sharply. “Stay away?”

“None of your business,” Natasha says smoothly. “And yes, stay away. Because we have it under control.”

“The Empire State building? But there’ll be so many people-”

“Like I said,” Natasha says, through closed teeth. “We have it under control.”

“Right,” you say, your frustration building to spite. “Like you had that robot infestation under control.”

“Until you turned up,” Natasha says coolly. This enrages you even more, and your hands fist on your knees.

“Fine,” you say, teeth gritted. “Whatever.”

“Oh, you want to get mashed by the Hulk before you even have the chance to introduce yourself, do you?” Natasha asks - it almost sounds like a taunt.

“No I don’t want to get mashed by the Hulk, Romanoff,” you snap back. “You can fuck off now, if you want.” She’s stiffly silent beside you for a second.

“Right,” she says. “Message received.” And when you look around, she’s gone.

Maybe if she had a little more faith in you, you wouldn’t be so angry. But come on, she’s the Black Widow. It’s not like you even have a chance of ever being on her level: of course she’s not impressed with you.

With a long-suffering sigh, you lever yourself off the edge of the roof and get to work.

Friday comes with bright blue skies and fire engines. You don’t register it at first, half-asleep brushing your teeth at the bathroom sink, but then the high whine and whoop of the sirens passes right by your window, and you jolt awake. You rush to the window to see the fire engines rushing past in droves, lights going, cars skirting left and right.

You lunge into your kitchen and flick the radio on.

“Panic in Manhattan today as fire spreads downtown from the Empire State building. Fire engines have been scrambled and an evacuation issued a kilometre wide. The New York City subway service has been drawn to a stop all through Manhattan, and commuters are encouraged to steer clear of the evacuation area. Firefighters are working hard to stop the fire from spreading, and there have been rumours of the Avengers on the scene. Over to-”

You switch the radio off. There’s no point stewing about the situation if the minute you try and help, you might be blasted into the next century. Fucking Avengers.

Muttering under your breath, you tug on your clothes and head to work.

Soon enough, it’s five in the evening and when you get home and switch on the TV, CNN is live streaming the Empire State building debacle. There’s rubble and fire everywhere, the tower still miraculously standing. The camera focuses shakily on Captain America’s dirt and ash-streaked face as he surveys the situation, panting hard.

“-all the New York heroes have come out to play,” announces the reporter gleefully. “Look at that, even Spider-Man is here, haven’t seen that guy in a while-”

You grab the remote and turn the damn thing off. Silence permeates your apartment like syrup. The sun is blank and white amongst the apartment blocks outside your window, and the sky is the colour of ash. It’s probably because of the fire. You sigh and slump back against the couch.

Maybe you should go. Not to get involved, just to sit somewhere out of sight and watch until the whole event gets too much for everyone. Maybe you’ll be forced to step in. You cast a long glance at your dresser, which is just visible past your bedroom door a few metres away.

It doesn’t take you long to get dressed. Thank God, your ankle is healed now, and you slip out of your window and down the wall with no trouble. Manhattan is a little while away, but you can fly: you like to fly. It’ll be fun.

You land haphazardly on a rooftop in the smoke ten minutes later, and within seconds you’re hacking up coughs, even through your mask. It’s much worse than the news is making it out to be, and that’s saying something. The whole place is orange, buildings mere shapes in the gloom, only broken by the flash of fire engine lights and the shouts of rescuers down below. Your eyes start to stream with tears as you struggle to make out what’s happening. It’s odd. It’s like they’re fighting a forest fire, not a supervillain. And they’re losing, apparently. The smoke is engulfing everything.

Though Natasha never actually said anything about a supervillain.

There. You see a shadow dart over the rubble on the ground, and you know it’s her, even from this distance. You sit back, content to let the Avengers do their thing, for once.

As you watch, the evening comes on, and nothing seems to be getting better. The flames and smoke are still high, the screams of civilians and the roars of orders still permeate the thick air. You begin to get restless.

“I told you to stay away.”

You spin, startled, to see Natasha standing above you, her pale face and her suit streaked with ash and dust. Her mouth is set in a thin line. There’s blood dried over a thin cut on her cheek. You rise to your feet.

“I am away. I’m just watching.”

She raises her eyebrows wearily at you. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Didn’t wanna sit at home like an idiot,” you say with a shrug.

“I see,” she replies. “So you’re going to sit here like an idiot. You know, you’re just one more casualty if this building goes up, too.”

You bristle at the tone of her voice. “I can handle myself,” you snap.

“You’ll only get in the way, I don’t need you on my mind as well. So go home,” Natasha replies, with a bite in the words. She’s not too weary to argue, then.

“And do what?” you reply, stepping up to her in your anger. “Why do you think I made this suit, so I could sit on my couch and watch shit go down? What if one of you gets injured? I defend this city, too!”

Natasha observes you for a long, tense moment. “I said we can handle it,” she says, her voice flat. Stubborn. “Go home. For your own safety.” You open your mouth to protest again, but she’s already turned around, and she walks without looking back.

“I’m not leaving!” you yell, desperate to have the last word. She disappears into the smoke.

Maybe to spite her, or prove something to her, or whatever, you decide to slip down to ground level. No one sees you through the smoke, and no one cares: ha. Mashed by the Hulk, your ass.

You crouch behind an overturned dumpster to watch, the smoke stinging your eyes. Maybe you need a film over your eyeholes, like Spider-Man.

You don’t have time to ruminate on it because suddenly the ground ripples with a sound like a thunderclap, and the dumpster is ripped off the ground and goes flying past your head, leaving you completely exposed. You’re thrown backwards and slammed back against the concrete. Your head spins. Your ears ring. You try to breathe, the wind knocked out of you.

Slowly, you come back to your senses. Your hearing returns in cuts and whines. You raise your head and feel warm blood soak your nostrils, your upper lip. The ground is still trembling beneath you and you cling to it, your head throbbing. Fires flare in little pockets all around, the air still dry and brittle, sucked clear of spray from fire hoses.

You hear the thud of feet.

You look up and you see Natasha: just a shape in the gloom with a flash of a red ponytail. She’s running across the ruined ground, stumbling as the ground warps beneath her feet. She yells something, a word, the sound jumbled in your head. She’s angry, desperate. She’s limping as she runs.

You want to warn her: of what, you don’t know. But she’s exposed and upright, a perfect target.

That’s when the second wave hits. The ground bursts open around Natasha, great slabs of rock soaring upwards towards the sky. You slide backwards amongst the gravel, scrabbling at the erupting ground to keep yourself from being thrown backwards.

The rumbling ceases. When you dare to look up, the ground is a heap of huge concrete slabs, rubble, dust settling in waves. And Natasha is gone.

A second later, you hear a whoosh and a roar, and flames leap towards the sky once more, spreading across the ground. Your brain takes a second to register this, even as the heat hits you like a wave. You blink, slowly, tears filling your eyes, expecting Captain America to leap through the flames after her, or for her to come rushing through the thick smoke. Nothing happens.

You wait, begging the world to change, the future to shift. But the place is silent now, save for the crackle of fire. No shouts, no commands given.

You can’t leave her down there.

You get to your feet with difficulty, still breathing hard, grazes all down your legs and sides. You stagger forward on shaky knees, skirting little pockets of flame. You’re going in blind: you have no idea who they’re fighting or what the hell just happened but you know there’s no way you’re sitting by and watching now.

You reach the pile of rubble and pause to catch your breath in shallow little sips. Your side aches. You reach out and press a hand against the rock: it’s warm through your gloves.

“Natasha?” you call, tentatively. Your voice emerges hoarse and cracked.

“Step away,” comes a deep voice from behind you. You spin, alarmed, hands up in front of you and ready to gather a blast of electricity. Hawkeye levels an arrow at you evenly. His arms are streaked with ash and blood, his hair wet with it. He’s favouring his right leg, unsteady on his feet. But his aim never wavers.

“I’m not your enemy,” you say. Hawkeye opens and closes one eye, shifting his aim almost imperceptibly.

“Funny you should say that, since I don’t even know who we’ve been fighting this whole time,” he replies. “And here you are. Right place, right time. Now step away.”

Frustration builds and builds, sparking at your fingertips. Why does this happen? How can they be so dense? “No,” you snap. “I am not going to fight you.”

“Then you’re going to take an arrow to the eye,” Hawkeye replies. His lips are wet with blood.

“You’re wasting time,” you growl. “Natasha’s in there. I’m going to get her out.” His eyes narrow, the bowstring tightening.

“You’re not going anywhere near her,” he spits.

“For fuck’s sake!” you exclaim. “What is the matter with you people? I’m trying to help you!”

“So get facedown on the ground before I shoot you!” Hawkeye replies. His arm is trembling, the arrow ready to loose.

With a yell of anger, you thrust your arm out: a stream of energy bursts from your fingertips and blasts him right in the chest, throwing him off his feet. When you relent, chest heaving, he sprawls backwards on the ground, bow clattering beside him, and he doesn’t get up.

No time to consider the outcome of that terrible decision. You turn back to the heap of rock and scan it, your heart pounding. There’s a little opening a few feet to your left, a chunk of darkness barely visible through the smoke. Your eyes sting. You move up to it, shove your hands into it to feel it out. The walls of it are rough and narrow, sharp cold rock.

There’s no time to be cautious now. Natasha is in there. You swallow your hesitation and thrust yourself head and shoulders first into the crack, and pull yourself all the way in.

It’s pitch black inside. You feel your feet drag past the opening and although you can’t look back over your shoulder to check, you can feel that you’ve been swallowed. You prop yourself up on your elbows, panting hard. Your hair sticks to your forehead.

You begin to inch forward, the rough ground digging into you at all angles: there’ll be bruises tomorrow, big fat purple ones. The tunnel swells and tightens and rises and falls as you struggle deeper in, pausing every few feet to listen, the darkness absolute and almost overwhelming.

At one point, it’s wide enough to crouch, the rubble loose beneath your palms, and you look over your shoulder. Nothing but darkness, like a pressure on your eyes. Panic seizes you by the throat like a clawed hand, and it’s suddenly swelteringly hot in the tunnel, your skin crawling, your hands clenching in the dirt. You feel a cry build up in your chest and you stuff a gloved fist into your mouth to keep it from erupting. Your chest grows tight. Your head spins, the rock harsh against your bruised knees.

You don’t know how long you kneel there, whimpering into your knuckles in panic, but at some point your mind clears. Maybe it’s the thought of Natasha’s eyes narrowed in anger as she spits the words I don’t need you on my mind as well right in your face. There are tear tracks drying on your cheeks: you don’t remember crying. Doesn’t matter now. Natasha matters.

You begin to crawl forward again.

The tunnel widens as you move, blindly feeling your way with palms skinned even through your gloves, fingernails cracked from scrambling in the rough dirt. You can feel blood on your hands. Eventually, you gain the courage to speak, to call for her. “Natasha,” you say, and your voice emerges from your throat hoarse and tired. It vanishes into the dark ahead of you. You must be deep into the rubble now. You can hear water dripping, smell gas. You wouldn’t dare a spark now, not even to light your way.

The walls of the tunnel drop away, the ceiling still painfully low. You come to a stop, still on all fours, and search through the gravelly floor with your hands. Nothing but cool soil and stone. The air is still stiflingly warm, though.

It strikes you, the absurdity of this. You dived headfirst into a pitch black hole to search for a single woman, when you have no idea the magnitude or even the faintest clue of the threat you’re facing, the threat that blew the ground below the Empire State building to pieces. No one knows.

But to be fair, you’ve never been one for caution.

You shift yourself to a sitting position, so you’re angled feet first into this new, wide unknown. Fear rises for a sharp second: what if you can’t find the tunnel again? What if you never get out?

“Natasha,” you say, speaking over your own thoughts.

In the darkness, an answering groan. Your heart lifts like a kite on the wind, stupidly. It might not even be her- but you know her voice. You know it far too well.

“I’m here!” you exclaim, shifting forwards. She’s not been crushed under eight feet of rock. Yet. “Where are you?”

A grunt. You angle towards it and shuffle faster, the ground sharp and uncomfortable beneath you. Rocks clatter in the dark ahead.

Your name, spoken in a gasp. She’s right there. Blindly, you reach out a hand and feel warmth, the smoothness of her suit smeared with blood and grime. “That’s my ass,” she mumbles. Mortified, you instantly snatch your hand back.

“Sorry,” you say. “Sorry, sorry-” Your heart is thundering in your chest, excitement, relief, embarrassment.

“Shut up. Where’s your hand?” Her fingers grope blindly over your knee, hit the ground, inch towards your hand. You grip her by the wrist. Her fingers flex against you. “Pull,” she says.

“Pardon?”

“Pull. I’m stuck.”

You frown at nothing. “Under what?”

“A rock. I don’t know,” Natasha replies impatiently. “Hurry, we gotta get her out of here.”

“Let me find it,” you say. “I’ll move it.” You pause. “Wait, her?”

“A kid,” Natasha says. “You think I ran into that fucking explosion willingly?”

“A kid?” you exclaim. “I thought there was an evacuation-”

She says your name, her voice hard. “Hurry,” she repeats urgently.

“Right,” you say. “Right.” You pull yourself together. “What part of you is stuck?”

“Leg,” Natasha says. She must have been hiding it before, but now you can hear easily that her voice is strained with pain. “Below the knee. Please hurry up.”

You reach out and your hand lands on her thigh, the back of her knee. Your knuckles collide with a large slab of concrete. Natasha’s breaths hiss in and out, barely audible.

“Got it,” you say. “When I lift, you move. The ceiling’s low but there’s nothing around you. Just crawl.” You hook your hands under the slab. With the sheer adrenaline feeding your body right now, you can do anything.

“Okay,” Natasha says. Her voice is impossibly small.

You brace yourself into a crouch, head bent against the ceiling, and lift with your legs. The slab creaks, groans, and rises. “Go,” you say through gritted teeth, straining with every muscle in your back, your thighs, your calves. You hear Natasha squirm against the ground and you keep the slab there, until you're sure she’s gone, even as your muscles burn and your bones ache and sweat drips into your mouth. You drop the slab, barely missing your toes in the dark. “Natasha,” you say, collapsing back onto your ass.

“I’m here,” she says. You shake off the exhaustion.

“Okay.” You try to wipe your face, only for your hand to hit your mask. “Where’s this kid?”

“Got her.” You hear her shuffle closer, until you’re shoulder to shoulder. Her breath lands hot on your neck above your suit collar. She sounds exhausted, and she’s dragging her leg. Understandable. “Here, take her.” Fumbling, she presses the child into your arms, and God, it’s a baby. Heavy, awake, snuffling, hands grasping in the dark. Maybe eighteen months old. You grab it and hold it the way you would when you were younger, when babies got passed around at family occasions, their big heads heavy in the crook of your arm.

“Okay,” you say. You don’t know how you’re going to get this child back through that godforsaken tunnel. You don’t even know where the tunnel is anymore. Somewhere behind you. “Nat, give me your hand. Let’s find the tunnel.” She doesn’t answer, and when you search for her, you realise she’s fallen back onto the ground, lying there, breaths laboured. “Nat,” you say. Fear rises. She doesn’t respond. She’s the only damn reason you came down here in the first place, in this hot, hellish dark. “Nat,” you say, your voice rising.

“Godammit, take the fucking kid and get out of here,” she breathes, a bite still in her voice.

“I came for you,” you insist. Your eyes are watering.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says. The words are little more than puffs of air. “I can’t make it that far.”

“Nat,” you say, tears collecting at the corners of your eyes. “You’re the only good one. We can’t lose you.” I can’t lose you.

“Fuck off,” she says, softly, seriously. “Are you fucking kidding me? Just let me have this, for Christ’s sake.” Something shifts in the dark, the groan of rock against rock. You twist, staring uselessly around. “It’s coming down,” Natasha pants. “Go on. If you don’t go I’ll kill you myself.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you for making me do this.” The tears come freely now, an ache like a bullet hole in your chest.

“Fuck you too,” she says. You find her hand and grip it. The child shifts in your arms, whining against your chest.

“I’ll come back for you,” you say. Her hand is limp and lifeless. Your hand travels up her arm, to find her face; it's warm and wet. Tears or blood - same as you. You press your cheek to hers and when she speaks, almost too quiet to hear, her jaw moves against your face and you feel her voice in your skull.

“You’d better fucking not.” She's shaking against you.

“I will,” you say. More rock shifting and sliding. You squeeze her hand and pull away, even as it pains you. “I’ll be back in a minute.” You leave her before she can argue. You leap away, on two legs and one hand, your spine scraping the ceiling and the baby snug against your chest. You find the tunnel like you’re magnetised to it, a circular opening, and it feels horribly small as you tuck yourself into it. The baby whimpers when you drop to your hands and knees. “It’s alright,” you say, cradling her. You begin to crawl, feeling out the walls. “I got you. We’re gonna get outta here.” You keep talking the whole way, even when your breath is coming in short bursts, even through the narrow stretches where you have to set the baby down and push her along ahead of you, trying desperately to ignore her cries of protest.

When the dull, smoky light of the outside shows like a pinprick in the distance, you almost weep with relief. You drag yourself the rest of the way and when the opening widens to swallow you, you tumble head first onto the ground, sucking in air with the baby wrapped in both arms. The light is an onslaught, a relief, like water on desert parched lips. You feel a sob erupt from your chest, more tears.

Someone grips your shoulder and weakly, you twist away from them. “Hey.”

“Hey, fuck off,” you mumble, one hand protectively over the baby’s head. “I’ll blast you. I can do it.”

“Yeah, I know that,” they say dryly. You squint upwards. Hawkeye is eyeing you from above, his face in anxious twists. “Gimme the kid,” he says.

You hand him the baby and she grabs at you as she��s lifted away. “You’re alright,” you say. Her face is smeared with dust. You did good.

“You did good,” says Hawkeye. His voice is tentative.

Natasha.

Your heart drops like a stone with a splash into your stomach. You try to scramble upright, but where is up? Your hands scrabble in the dirt. “Natasha,” you blurt.

“Hey, hold on,” Hawkeye says, and you launch yourself right back into the tunnel. It’s a miracle you manage to get yourself in: the world is spinning every which way and Hawkeye’s hands are on your shoulders, your ankles, but you kick him away and soon you’re crawling back down that hellish wormhole, your breath hot on your hands.

The fear sets in again about a third of the way in. Panic in your throat, your stomach, seizing at your spine like whipcords. It’s different this time, feral, sending you scrambling like a mad rabbit down the tunnel with tears and snot on your face, bile on your tongue. You can’t do it, won’t make it, but you must. And you burst into the opening with the sound of rockfall in your ears, your hands numb and wet with blood.

“Natasha!” you rasp. No, she won’t hear you now. She’ll be drifting in and out of consciousness, easily slipping away. You crawl towards where you know you found her before, hands patting every inch of ground. The place is coming apart around you, dust choking the air and forcing dry fingers down your throat.

Your hand finds an arm. A shoulder. Half buried in gravel and soil. You grab at her waist and heave, pulling her out. You can’t tell where your strength is coming from: desperation, perhaps. “I told you I’d come back,” you say, the words a gasp. Of course, she doesn’t reply.

The next few minutes is a smudge of time, blurred like the wash of buildings outside a car window in the rain. It’s dark and hot, it’s Natasha’s terrifyingly heavy and cumbersome body in your hands. It’s dragging her down that tight tunnel with oxygen always tantalisingly out of reach. It’s smoke in your lungs. Tears on your face. Your voice, barely even your own any more, billowing in your mouth and forcing out incoherent babble.

When your feet hit the ground and the light hits your eyes, you are alone. Hawkeye is gone. You give an almighty tug and Natasha’s body slithers from the tunnel. She lands across your chest, forcing the air from your lungs once again. You wrap arms around her, twist and shove her off.

The sky is a dull grey - but that’s not the sky, is it? It’s smoke. You can hear the fire, sparks and grease turned flame.

A shadow steps into your view. The click of metal. You close your eyes: Hawkeye’s come back for you.

“Give me the child,” says the shadow, and you open your eyes again.

Not Hawkeye.

The shadow squats, a hood coming into a blurred view. Something cool and round rests against your forehead. “I’m going to decorate the ground with your brains unless you come to your senses and tell me where she is,” says the shadow. Hard voice, like treated wood. You register this slowly. Your arms are still wrapped loosely around Natasha’s torso.

“Fuck you,” you mumble. You hear a hammer cocked.

“Fine,” says the shadow. “I don’t need you anyway, whoever you are.”

It must be reflex. It must be the last of your energy. Through slitted eyes, you see a burst and crackle of light, feel the heat coming from your own head. The beam cuts through the shadow’s hood, the head jerks back, the gun goes off. The shadow falls. Crumples on the ground beside you.

Silence.

“Ha,” you say weakly, as your eyes return to their normal state. You sigh, feel something wet on your lips. “That was cool.”

No one comes for you. You lie there, hear sirens in the distance, the gush of fire hoses. The shadow lies dead beside you: you don’t register this - the death, the murder, the gun still hot in their hand.

Instead, when it becomes clear that you are on your own, you get to your feet, as if in some kind of dream. You drape Natasha’s arm over your shoulder. Even if you were in the right mind, you wouldn’t dare to look over at her pallid face or check her pulse. She’s alive. She has to be.

The two of you take to the skies.

requests | masterlist

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar @maggieromanov @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizlil @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624 @strangegardentaco @phantomvael @lorsstar1st @rysnwilder @ima-gi–na-tion @paryl @picnicmic  @smallestavenger @lainjupi   @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @emril-osvigne

notes: okay so part 3... I PROMISE I’ll be quicker this time. PLEASE REBLOG PRETTY PLEASE

#natasha romanov x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanov #natasha romanoff #natfic! #fic! #tptf

[mr-m-murdock]

the skyline falls

| natasha x reader | only pretty faces

warnings: death, injury

a/n: angst, not sorry :) r joins the fight against Thanos but it’s just the ending boooo

“What the fuck was that?” you say, staggering to keep your balance. You glare at the ground, daring it to ripple and roll again. It’s still now beneath your feet.

“Don’t know,” says Wilson. His hands clench uselessly by his sides. There’s still blood in your mouth, still broken bone digging into flesh, but you grip at your pistols anyway and you scan the trees for any sign of movement.

“Sam!” calls Rhodes, from a distance, behind a thick screen of vines. “Sam!” Wilson sucks in a breath to answer: silence drifts out instead of a word. You twist, and see an empty space.

You can hear your name being yelled, too, in the distance. The thud of moving feet, a dance-like run you’d hear a mile away. You stare at nothing, the edges of Wilson’s profile fading in your mind. “Nata,” you say, not nearly loud enough. She crashes through waist-high grass behind you and is still moving when she grabs you, sending you overbalancing backwards. You stare at her, trying to focus.

“You’re okay,” she says, her voice falling dim on your ears, her face pale and earnest, inches from your own. You grasp for her hand and you can’t feel her warmth through your glove, like you always could.

“I’m-” you say. Your legs give out, and the two of you sink to the floor together. There’s pain building in your muscles, the deep marrow in your bone, creeping up and stealing the breath from your lungs. You frown, gulping in air that won’t reach your brain. “It’s good,” you say, a reassurance. Your hands drift to her face, her cheeks between your palms. Cold, so cold.

“Stay with me,” Natalia demands. There’s blood on her face, dirt where your hands once were.

“It’s all good,” you say, in a last rush of air. Panic, rising like a towering wave. You can’t breathe. Can’t speak.

Natalia says your name. “No,” she says, the syllables blurring together. Her eyes gleam, far too bright, far too green. “Don’t you fucking dare. I am not doing this again, please just-”

requests | masterlist

taglist: @when-wolves-howl @fayhar  @maggieromanov  @transbi-spidey @romanoffscottage @blackxwidowsxwife @lizli @screechcat @maddess @mellxa @haeva @diaryoflife @natashasilverfox @vicmc624  @strangegardentaco  @phantomvael @lorsstar1st  @rysnwilder  @ima-gi--na-tion @paryl @picnicmic   @smallestavenger @lainjupi @d1s0nym @simpforflorencepugh1 @the-v01d @kqmui @s1ut4nat @btay3115 @natblackwidow2 @lokisjuicyass @mmmmokdok

notes: ouchie

#only pretty faces #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff #tiny writings #fanfiction #fic! #natfic!

[mr-m-murdock]

to be human

| natasha x bucky | 18+

warnings: kind of smut at the end :) MINORS DNI just to be safe sorry babes

a/n: the cutest anon request I've ever received. I’m soft for them. the only m/f ship I will allow

bold = Russian

1.

When he emerges from the shower, Natasha is sprawled across his bedcovers with her dust-smeared face pressed into the white cloth.

"Are you serious?" Bucky asks, tucking the towel in securely around his waist. One of Natasha's hands raises limply to beckon him over. "I just showered. I'm clean, he protests.

Natasha raises her head, an affrontedly quizzical look on her face. "So you don't love me," she says. She dumps her face back onto his bed.

“Nat, come on,” he says, as he crosses the room to his dresser. He makes the mistake of passing too close to the bed and Natasha grabs him by the back of the towel and pulls him down on top of her.

Bucky makes an undignified grunt, but he goes willingly, and allows Natasha to wrap her arms around his waist and dump her dirty face into his shoulder. He combs wild strands of hair back from her face. “Wonder what the others would say if they could see you now,” he teases, and Natasha pinches him sharply in the ribs. “Ow!”

She mutters what sounds like half a threat into his skin.

“You would never,” Bucky says. He runs a palm down the length of her spine and feels her relax into him, her arms loosening. It’s been a long day.

2.

Natasha curses in frustration as she misses the tiny piercing hole again, flicking her hair irritably out of the way.

“You alright?” James calls, from the other room. She hears him flip open a box.

“Fine.” She stabs herself accidentally in the neck. “Fuck!” Natasha exclaims. She flings the earring onto her dresser and it skitters away under the mirror. She crosses her arms over her chest. 

James appears in the doorway and Natasha glares at him through the mirror. He approaches her with mild amusement on his face, reaches out and combs a hand carefully through her hair. "You look incredible," he says. He tucks her hair behind both ears, untucks it. His hands settle on her shoulders.

"I'd look even better if I could get my damn earrings in," Natasha grunts. "And don't touch my hair," she adds half-heartedly. "I haven't done it yet." He sifts through her hair again as she reaches defeatedly for her earring, the frustration fading to embarrassment

"Let me do it."

Natasha's eyes meet his in the mirror. "Pardon?"

"I'll braid it. Here." His fingers trail up her crown to the top of her head, arranging her hair into a strict parting. Natasha waits, until it's too late to speak, too late to pull away: and anyway, she wouldn't want to. James' hands are skilled in her hair, careful not to tug or pull as he gathers strands and feeds them into the growing braid.

The room slides into silence save for the rush of hair on hair.

"Done," James says. He reaches for a hair tie, binds the end of the plait and drapes it over Natasha's shoulder. His fingers brush the nape of her neck, then drop away. "Beautiful," he says, proudly, softly. He steps back, and turns to leave the room.

Natasha stares at herself in the mirror, fingers running the length of the plait.

"Thank you," she says. Too quiet, but she knows he hears it anyway.

3.

"What is that?" Sam exclaims, lunging bodily across the table and snatching up Bucky's paper pumpkin decoration. Sam stares accusingly at him.

"That's funny, you'd think more people would know a pumpkin when they saw one," Bucky replies. He tugs it out of Sam's hands. "Specially a guy who's got one for a head." Sam swipes at him, accidentally knocking over the glue.

"No fighting!" Morgan calls, from the head of the table where she's covered in glitter and bits of orange paper. Bucky settles back into his seat.

"I meant why is it so good," Sam says, almost accusingly. "Since when can you draw?"

"Since I went to art school," Bucky fires back.

"Huh." Sam tries hard to hide how impressed he is, but he wears his emotions on his sleeve. Always has.

"Huh," Bucky mocks, instead of taking the compliment.

"Be nice," Natasha admonishes him. Clearly, she's become bored of the crafts, as she's pulled Bucky's metal arm into her lap and is doodling little bats on it with a marker.

"Is that dry erase?" Bucky asks, reaching for the glitter glue.

"Kate brought them," Natasha says, with a distant shrug.

"Bishop! Are these dry erase pens?" Bucky yells, craning his neck down the hall.

"No!" comes the distant reply. Natasha's pen pauses.

"Oops," she says, hiding her grin in her shoulder.

4.

"Four cups of flour," James says. He's sitting on the counter, whacking his heels against the cupboard doors, egg sticky on his fingers and the recipe book in hand. His hair is tied back, concentration evident on his face as he reads.

Natasha smiles at the batter, her hand going astray and missing as she reaches for the flour. She knocks some accidentally onto his thigh, and he blinks dolefully at her.

"How dare you."

"I'm sorry," Natasha says untruthfully. She grabs a pinch from the bag and sprays it into his face. James jerks backwards, spluttering and flapping at the air.

"You devil woman," he growls, and he upends the bag of flour on her head.

Natasha freezes for a second, shock kicking in. She blinks the flour away, hands up in a position to protect herself, far too late.

"Asshole," she grinds out. "Oh, I am so getting you back." She grabs an egg, and with a laugh, James hops off the counter and dashes around the opposite side of the table. He makes a face at her and Natasha launches the egg. Lightning fast, James dodges and the egg smashes against the opposite wall. "Fuck you," Natasha says, hurling another egg at him. It explodes on a cupboard door and James sprints out of the kitchen door, laughing still.

Natasha grabs a spoon full of batter and makes chase.

5.

Her hand has been resting high in his thigh the whole evening. He's been struggling to keep still, to stop himself leaning into her, and he knows she can tell. She's got a tiny, tiny smile on her face that means good things, disguised as apprehension and a deep breath in his chest.

They break for dinner when the speeches are over. Natasha eats with one hand, very purposefully not looking at him.

"I know what you're doing," Bucky mutters, in Russian, his voice low.

"Oh? What am I doing?" Natasha replies, her voice light and casual. Steve tilts his head curiously at the two of them from across the table and Bucky fixates his gaze firmly on the white wall behind his blond head as Natasha's fingers explore the seam of his trousers.

He takes a breath, one that shudders in his throat. "If you wanted to get in my pants, you could just ask," he says. He can't look at her. He won't. He can tell she's got that look on her face, those sharp eyes and that sharp smile.

"But this is more fun," says Natasha. She tugs lightly at his belt. "Besides, I get to tell you exactly what I want to do to you, and no one's the wiser."

"You're a sadist," Bucky says, shifting into her touch subtly.

"Just wait until you hear how many times I'm going to make you come," Natasha says. She groped between his legs with one hand and forks chicken into her mouth with the other and Bucky stiffens, bites the inside of his cheek hard to keep a sound from falling out. "You love it," Natasha assures him, grinning at her plate.

Bucky swears into the backs of his teeth. "How much longer are we here?" he asks, attempting not to sound petulant. All he really wants to do is touch, have her touch him, kiss him-

"If you're that desperate, I can pull you to the bathroom and have you right now, as many times as I want until you beg for mercy twice," Natasha replies, utterly cool.

Bucky takes a breath in. "I've never begged for mercy in my life," he says, braver than he feels. Natasha squeezes him through his trousers, and Bucky's spine straightens involuntarily.

"Twice," she says, her voice low.

When it ends, Bucky stands far too quickly. And when the journey back ends, they barely make it out of the car. They reach the bedroom with their hands on each other and Natasha strips him of his blazer and shoves him down onto the bed.

She tosses her hair to one side, golden-red in the warm yellow lamp light, reaches for the zipper on her dress and drags it down. The dress slides off her body like water and Bucky allows his gaze to drift: she's perfect. Every dip and stretch of skin, each curve smooth as marble.

She's not wearing underwear. Bucky's mouth goes dry.

Natasha swings a leg over his hips and mounts him, grabbing him by the tie with a wicked smile on her face. She knows the effect she has on him.

"You were dressed like - that - the whole evening," he chokes out, and Natasha presses her forehead to his, raking her nails down his chest over his shirt.

"Don't dwell on it, your head might explode," she says, and she kisses him. She tastes like wine, all bitter and rich. He arches into her touch, runs his hands carefully up her sides. Her skin is hot and she gasps at the cold of his metal hand. He palms her breasts and she presses into him with a pleased hum.

She yanks his zipper down so ferociously he's scared it might break.

"Now fuck me like you mean it," she whispers against his lips, and he tightens his hold.

requests | masterlist

notes: I don't know if y'all on the taglist wanted to be tagged for just x reader or for others as well so I played it safe, but I hope you enjoyed!

#natasha romanoff x bucky barnes #natasha x bucky #winterwidow #buckynat #written fic for anon #fic! #buckyfic! #natfic! #fanfiction #natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #smut