hillsdentalcare

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@lexpxrdus​ (steve!) || sc.

Being as small and slight as she is, while making it embarrassingly simple for enemies to physically overpower her, does make it easy for Natalia to sneak around undetected. She drifts like a ghost through the halls of their facility—the Avengers, they call themselves. Apparently she used to be, or will someday become, one of them. No. Used to be. Now she chooses what she’ll become. At least that’s what they say. Natalia isn’t sure she believes them.

For the last fifteen minutes, she’s been hovering in the door to the kitchen, watching the big blonde one cook. Captain America. He should be very rich, if he lives in a place like this, but doesn’t make anyone else prepare his food for him. That could mean that he’s a good man.

To speak, or to remain silent? Probably she could watch him all afternoon and he won’t notice, but she thinks maybe he’ll get too scared when he finally does notice, or maybe be angry. Angry is worse.

“You have onion in your hair.”

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@assembledtm​ continued from x

Now the man is crying, and Natalia knows she should feel sorry because it’s her life, her death, her very existence that’s making him cry. But all she feels is resentment burning like acid at the back of her throat. It’s not her fault she’s the wrong person, the wrong version of herself that they meant to steal from another time, as if she’s their property, their bounty to be claimed. She is not the woman who died, and maybe never will be, now that she’s here, and they can’t expect her to comfort the people her other self left behind.

“We are nothing alike, then,” she stubbornly says, crossing her arms and refusing to look at his face any longer. Even though her mind is determined not to give him an inch, her heart still feels sorry.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@beautifultragedics​  || sc.

Natalia has been in the year 2024 for six weeks, now. She’s about as adjusted as it’s possible for someone to be at this juncture, which she knows, and yet she can’t help feeling like there’s no way to be ready for what’s in store for her. This unfathomable, unthinkable, erroneous violation of human decency they’re about to inflict upon her, her! 

They’re sending her to school. It’s her worst nightmare. She, the Black Widow, the Red Room’s prize jewel, their most precious and deadly daughter, is going to school. An American school. She’s good at blending in, but she isn’t so sure she wants to blend in here.

“Isn’t there some way to leave that no one will notice?” she asks Peter Parker in her carefully cultivated American accent, learned after weeks and months of watching and reciting Snow White with the other girls. The man named Clint about died she sounds so cute, and then he about died because she about killed him. “Or will the...computers stop us?” She still isn’t quite sure how computers work, but it seems that they’re everywhere and know everything about everyone.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@soulstcne​ || sc.

Day 4 of confinement, Natalia writes in Cyrillic cursive in the notebook she was given—by Captain America, of all people, along with a ball-point pen that slips in her sweat-slick fingers as she feverishly goes on. I have never used a ball-point pen, and find them both convenient and, maybe because of my delicate communist sensibilities, highly annoying. What is wrong with fountain pens? Not good enough for lazy Americans? The woman watching me is not American, but English or Scottish. We have not gotten to accent identification yet in our training. Day 3 of no sleep, I trust no one in this unfamiliar place. They tell me the year is 2024, which does not sound like it could possibly be a real year. It is the stuff of science fiction. It has to be a test of some kind. If Comrade Mother Ibagrimova learned of my plan she would surely want to punish me. I have been observing the woman monitoring me for signs of the test, but so far she has done nothing but offer me food and look very sad. I have eaten little and slept not at all, unwilling to give up my vigil so I may escape when there is a lapse in their ruse. Though I am not sure how they managed to create that feeling, when the man grabbed me, of being pulled through a hole in the very air itself.

The pen slips from her grasp again and she snaps the notebook closed in frustration, giving up for the day. She swallows hard, remembering that feeling of being squeezed on all sides but by light, which should be intangible. And the sound it had made! Like ripping paper, but instead of paper, the very atmosphere.

The woman is still here. It’s morning now, and the woman fell asleep sometime around midnight. She has to keep herself sharp, that might mean the test is coming to an end. Maybe the woman is being punished too but doesn’t know it yet. Despite her misgivings, this causes Natalia to feel conflicted; she despises the Red Room, and they ought to work together if that’s the case. So, huddled at the head of the bed she’s been given, she says “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.” Over and over until the woman will wake.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@amvses​ (Steve) gets an au starter

Every time she closes her eyes she hears that sound, like the sound of tearing paper, but instead it’s the tearing of everything. The sound she heard in the moment before a man’s voice shouted her nickname, a pair of arms wrapped around her, and with the same sound she was thrust into the world as she currently knows it. A foreign world, made of broken glass and battered chrome, but still so much brighter than the Red Room in the hours before she was taken. In the hours before she intended to leave it. 

They don’t know yet that she had been planning to run away. She isn’t sure if it would be tactically wise to let that slip. 

They tell her to try and get some rest, but it’s impossible. The air smells different, the light is different, the sheets and bed are different. So Natalia pushes back the covers and pads silently to the kitchen, where they fed her earlier, and tries to make warm milk. But everything works differently than back home, and within moments she’s dropped two saucepans on the floor and is valiantly trying not to cry, alone in the dark.

Footstep behind her, likely to be followed by a question. “I don’t know how it works,” she explains, voice choked as sh continues to jab hatefully at the stove.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@amvses (logan) gets an au natasha starter!

The question Have we met? briefly crosses Natalia’s mind as she takes her first look at the man, but that’s a foolish notion. It’s been 87 years since the night she stood over her bed preparing to leave the Red Room for good, anyone she knew back then would be long dead. Especially a grown-up man. So she remains still and cautiously watches the man from her safe vantage point on an overstuffed armchair. 

“Who are you?” she asks suspiciously, arms wrapped around her knees. She’s wearing Natasha’s—her own, apparently—clothes, which fit her just the barest bit loose around the chest but smell fine. A pair of denim trousers that are snug to her legs and oddly revealing for covering her all the way, a black undershirt that one of the men called a tank top, which seems odd only because she doesn’t know what it has to do with tank warfare, and her hair tidily brushed back thanks to Clint. “Another scientist?”

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@kinderdersterne (Peter) gets a very au post-endgame starter

“I like these.” Munching down on another of the crunchy snack (Takis Fuego, the bag says) and relishing the tingling burn on her lips and tongue as she chews. “I’ve never—hah! hot! haha!—I’ve never eaten anything like them before. I just want to lick the powder off and throw the crunchy away.” Licking the powder off her fingers, she gives the boy a sidelong look. In sixteen years, she hasn’t spent much time around boys, just the other girls her age and the grown-up men who trained and guarded them. “Where did you grow up?” Is he like her? Was he raised to fight, like her? Or how did he become like this some other way?

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@thesunisalonetoo (Clint) gets a very AU post-Endgame starter

“We were friends,” Natalia says, not a question but an observation. She’s sitting on the other side of the small lounge room, watching him from the safety of an exceedingly comfortable armchair. So much excess, in this lavish building of glass and chrome. Even though she was raised to bristle at this level of luxury, she also can’t help enjoying the warmth and light.

She’s still wrapping her head around this new world, if only because it doesn’t seem there’s any choice for her to return to the old. So she may as well keep herself sharp while doing so. “I found photographs. I suppose I’ll still be pretty when I grow up.”

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@soulstcne gets a very au post-endgame starter

No one seems to know what to do with her. The adults calling themselves her friends—just, you know, later—watched her hover around that building of glass and chrome for two weeks before deciding she needs to adjust to the real world. Whatever that means. So Barton, the one who looks pained every time he looks at her, put her in his car and drove her to the city, and left her in a cafe. He had words with the woman before leaving her, so she must be a friend of his. No friend of Natalia’s.

“They don’t know how to put me back,” she says when he’s gone, picking at a spot of dried syrup on the table. No one’s asked her if she wants to go back, but being asked her feelings of opinions has never occurred to her before. All the decisions are made for you in the Red Room.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

@kidfrombrccklyn liked for a very au post-endgame starter

“Что вы наделали?“ Is Natalia’s first demand, spoken trippingly over her tongue as the sensation of wrongness settles over her. Even without hearing them speak or seeing any written words, she knows this is not Russia. Last thing sh knew, she was standing by her cot in the Red Room, packing her rucksack preparing to join the Red Army’s war efforts. Then there was a sound like...like tearing paper, only more like the tearing of everything, a man’s voice shouting her name, arms around her waist, the feeling of her entire body scattering apart and being pulled back together.

And now she’s in some other place. It’s daytime when moments ago it was night, and the man who said her name is standing before her. Or, it must be him. He looks like the owner of that voice. Swallowing, she rearranges her stance into a defensive one and rearranges her mind into English. “Who are you? Where have you taken me?”

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

16yo murder teen natasha is about 5′1″ (she will have a final three-inch growth spurt at 17 and then never grow any taller) and 90 pounds soaking wet, and because of how the girls were taught, yes, she does speak English exactly like Snow White in the 1936 animated movie. She can do accents but it takes more effort, but if you laugh at her or remark on it at all she will fuck you up.

[agecfmiracles-archive2]

Natasha verses:

MAIN: takes place any time after Natasha’s introduction to the MCU through the most recent canon material. Most often, Natasha has abandoned her place on the Avengers after the events of Civil War and went on the run with Steve and company, taking advantage of her decades-old underground network of connections and safe houses to help team Cap stay off the US government’s radar while still helping wherever possible.

SHIELD’S FINEST: Natasha’s early agent days part of Strike Team Delta with Clint Barton, Jasper Sitwell, and Phil Coulson.

I WANT TO LIVE NOT JUST SURVIVE: ship-exclusive verse with @assembledtm‘s Clint Barton, where, shortly after the events of The Avengers, Natasha and Clint secretly get married with Steve and Bruce’s help, and between TWS and AOU have a child, Alexei, whom they entrust to the care of Barney or Kate to look after. Everything comes to light during the farmhouse in AOU because that is where Alexei is being kept safe.

LAST CHANCE: pre-SHIELD days. Natasha has separated herself from the Red Room and is struggling to stay alive as a hired mercenary and assassin.

MATRYOSHKA: Natasha’s time at the Red Room as a child and “on loan” to the KGB as a young adult. May or may not be in an illicit relationship with the Winter Soldier after she comes of age when their handlers send them out on assignments together.

CAGED BIRD: High school au. Natasha was abducted as a small child from her family in Russia and shipped to America as part of a trafficking ring, paraded in the world as the daughter of her handler, Ivan Petrovich, during the day, and chained to her bed under the mercy of the ring’s “clients” at night.

COPPELIA REWRITTEN: After the events of Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers go back in time to attempt to bring Natasha forward from the recent past, inspired by Gamora’s “resurrection.” However, something goes very badly wrong with the damaged Pym particles, and instead, they bring sixteen-year-old Natalia Romanova, a Red Room assassin and spy in training, to the present day.