quigonejinn | (no subject)

(no subject)

SO. There are, I am told, now a variety of Iron Man kinkmemes out, but how about a good ol' Doomthreading? Talk, riff, fic, Iron Man One or Iron Man Two, porn or not porn, anon or not anon. Open to all.

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You don't even have to hurt her badly enough. Or hurt her, really. Or even look at her funny. Natasha has a temper and an itch underneath that tidy mouth and smooth, smooth skin, and you never know about it until you're on the floor, trying to breathe: Happy finds out, for example, in exactly that way. The only thing that keeps it in check is that she likes winning even more than beating the shit out of you.

not be adverse to probably crippling people for life

Let me tell you a story about tiny, baby Natasha who just happens to be very, very strong. She has never had Ms. Marvel strength or the ability to lift up cars or rip steel in half or streak across a continent at the speed of sound. It isn't superhuman strength or speed or anything like that. What she has, instead, is freak strength and freak speed that she doesn't know what to do with. By the time she is six, she can lift up her father. By the time she is nine, she plays pickup basketball at the local blacktop with fourteen year old boys and takes it to them and goes home bloody.

Her father tapes her up on the back stoop next to the laundry line and tells her, next time, don't beat on boys too bad. It's not fair.

Why isn't it fair, Natasha wants to know. They're speaking to each other in a mix of languages. It's their private game -- take a little German, take a little Ukrainian, throw in a little Demotic Greek. The game is to see how you can make them fit together in a way that makes sense. Points for clever turns of phrase that work across multiple linguistic languages.

"She doesn't approve, little sun, and she doesn't want you hurt. Remember, she still thinks it's her fault that you're special. "

Natasha bites her lip to keep from saying that she can't help being the way she is, and her father sighs to let her know that he knows it anyways, then goes back to cleaning out the grit and dirt from her knee. When it's over, he pats her on the shoulder and tells her that she is brave, and then they talk about the school and the Knicks and by the time that they're done talking, the bloody mess of her knee has knitted itself back together, smooth as if it had never been scraped down to the bone.

Freak strength. Freak speed. Superhuman healing power.

Edited 2010-05-23 20:08 (UTC)

"She doesn't approve, little sun, and she doesn't want you hurt. Remember, she still thinks it's her fault that you're special. "

Oh eff. Oh eff. Russian ex-pats and their little government freak baby they bring into the states and maybe they ran because there's really no room for error when you're working against the clock of the cold war and a budget.

It takes a year or two for it to fully develop to test accurately. Gotta build up some antibodies some base muscle fibers before running the battery, you know? Two, three years should do it.

Superhuman healing power but just freak strength, just freak speed, 1 out of 3 is better than the zero for zero they had last batch, so they know they're getting somewhere. They're close. They'll just have to try again.

There's barely enough in the budget for coffee in the canteen, the care and feeding of a mistake? Cute. But no.

Oh my god, I need all of this like yesterday. Dear lord.

And so of course she raises herself as much as the streets do, and she figures out pretty quickly that a pretty girl with that body attacks all the wrong stares. But she asks for trouble anyway, she rides the Subway late at night and gets off at Times Square because there's something glitzy about it - she's just from Brooklyn, nothing special - but as soon as she strays far enough away she gets the catcalls and the wandering eyes and sometimes, the wandering hands.

That's how she learns what works best as a weapon. Her hands are good, but sometimes she breaks knuckles and fingers and then it takes a while for them to fix themselves and she can't have downtime, so she tries trashcan lids and pipes and bricks. She figures out the quickest way to get a guy down in the way that he's never getting up again, at least not under his own power.

She likes her legs the best, and her feet, and the way you can drive a knee up into someone's stomach and then watch them fall, hold them under your heel, because she wears an old pair of her dad's boots that she found at the back of the closet, and she shoves scarves of her mother's in the front to make them fit right, but all that matters is that they're heavy and they feel right, and that she makes them hers.

OH GOD. OH GOD.

And here I'd been thinking that they were just emigres. Maybe got out under a semi-legit Jewish visa or something like that, St. Petersburg to Nairobi to Italy to a three AM arrival in La Guardia, actually were in love and got married and she got pregnant and took the vitamins and went to the clinic didn't -- didn't think that it would pass on down. It doesn't, with the son. A couple of miscarriages suggest that the particular set of genes associated with it is incompatible with less than two X chromosomes, but she got pregnant with a girl first, and it wasn't like they exactly knew what went into making the program, OK? OK. It had been something of a state secret.

By the time they figure it out, it has a name and a personality and her father's mother's eyes. Wet-work, assassinations in Prague, once garotting a would-be defector with her bare hands in front of a bathroom mirror and keeping her eyes on his face in the reflection until blood came out of the nose. Super-strength, super-speed, going on your first mission at the age of fifteen and your first kill three weeks later. Still, Yelena can't bring herself to kill her own baby in its crib.

"How much of that did you understand, little sun?" her father asks.

It's late afternoon on a spring day in an apartment in Brooklyn. The crib is in the only bedroom in the place, and shadows make lines across the walls. It's warm enough that the windows are open, and he reaches down and picks her up and goes for a walk with her. Yelena isn't exactly crying in the kitchen, but it's probably best that neither Natasha nor her father are around for a few hours. He knows Yelena; they used to work together. In fact, he knows her better than any human being alive because he used to be her handler.

Phil reminds Natasha of her father.

AHHH OH GOD.

Here I was going for street savy, rough and tumble girlchild and then you go and do this and oh my god. And this whole little sun thing and she's kind of like a star, you know? She burns and she burns and it takes SHIELD to reel her in and give her a purpose, to turn her into a supernova that knows where it's going. She likes having something to do and actually needs it, and she's so good at it and that's why after a few years with Fury, with SHIELD, no one can ever get a read on her ever again because she's not going to let them do it.

It's late afternoon on a spring day in an apartment in Brooklyn. The crib is in the only bedroom in the place, and shadows make lines across the walls.

And that is just all sorts of amazing and gorgeous.

DUDE. DUDE. I AM GOING FOR THE STREET SAVVY, ROUGH AND TUMBLE, TOO. I SAW YOURS ABOUT THREE SECONDS AFTER I HIT POST AND I WENT OMFG WHAT OH GOD HOW SO AMAZING. HOW SO AMAZING. Because that is exactly how it goes. That is exactly how she learns to keep her face still, to deal with whatever stupid cracks Tony or Tony's business associates throw at her, to go from zero to three mach and to fight dirty and how she comes up with the style she does. No matter how much freak speed, streak strength, she still has the same bones. The ones in the hands break easily. The ones in the legs, not so much.

She does still grow up on the streets, you know. Her dad loves her, and her Mom is distant because she knows exactly -- because she remembers what she looked like when she was that age, and the engineering that was done on her is proving to be uncannily dominant over the regular, human aspects.

After the first run-in, Natasha goes to her dad and asks him to teach her. All the bones have come back together, and it doesn't even hurt anymore -- there is just an ache in her hand, sort of nice, actually. By now, she has pieced together enough to figure out the outline: her dad, who now works in an electronics shop, had another life. Her mother can be a very, very dangerous woman.

"Little sun," he says. "I can't teach you. Your mother would kill me."

He turns his hands over, so that they are palm-up, and Natasha looks at him for a long, long moment.

Even before her parents get divorced a year after that, Natasha has been spending a lot of time riding the subway and looking for somebody who will give her trouble, so that she can learn.

WHERE IS THE MOVIE FOR THIS. IT NEEDS TO HAPPEN. I just love all of this so much, and you know she loves her parents but her mother has just been that slight bit more distance, because she knows what's going on, and maybe she won't hurt Natasha if Natasha doesn't grow into it, but of course she does anyway.

And oh man, her and Tony. And her and Tony and Fury, and Fury knowing that maybe they slept together once but now they're allies and they respect each other, and Fury only respects the people who really deserve it from him (Howard). And he's not going to step over that line, and she's not ever going to let him. And maybe she thinks about letting Tony cross it, if only because she needs to know exactly how he ticks, and she's still not sure she knows the real Tony. She's not sure she ever will, even though she probably sees him from time to time when he lands unsteady, in the suit, injured, pulling pieces off because the armor has buckled under god knows what kind of artillery, alien maybe.

I think I am totally in love with Natasha and could write about her forever.

At the same age Tony was at MIT, finding out that he really was smarter than the smartest people in the country, she was roaming the back alleys of New York City, finding out that she really was better at beating the living shit out of people than the toughest assholes in the roughest situations. It creates a certain kind of person, a certain sort of attitude. When Tony just knows Natasha as Natalie, the Superhottie Paralegal and Personal Assistant, it bugs him. He can't put his finger on it. What does he have in common with this girl? What could he have in common with this girl?

After he has seen her in action a few times as Black Widow, he pieces it together: it's realizing, back when most kids are still trying to get their acne problem under control and learn how to drive and trying not to care that they will never be the most popular kid in the class -- it's the realization that there is only one way your story will ever end.

(That doesn't even goddamn make sense. Oh God, I should be in bed.)

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