➸ Chess by HappeningInMyHead

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: hurt/comfort, angst | Smut: yes 
Word count: 4215 | Status: complete

My comment: Oh my goodness, all the beautiful smut. So…..what exactly made Clint bring Natasha into SHIELD?

Some people compared him to God.
He was watching from the rooftop as she emerged from the building into the throng of people outside, her red hair taunting him as she swished from person to person. It’d be so easy to end her right then and there: to send an arrow shooting through her skull at breakneck speeds and watch the chaos that ensued around her lifeless figure, but he needed information from her. The arrow would have to wait.
Leaving his makeshift nest he gripped the edge of the roofing and swung in through a door on the second floor into a vacant room. He shot out into the hallway only encountering a single tipsy couple as they scurried to their room. He took the stairs two at a time, threading seamlessly through the thickening crowd. He slipped out into the cool night air and caught sight of her instantly. Her read curls bounced as she schmoozed another ancient businessman into a conniption. He sped up as she began to turn away and barely caught her shoulder in time. She whipped around to face him, her body tense, and her blue eyes sharp and warning. He looked into her eyes and he knew—without a doubt—that she knew exactly why he was here. He broke out into a jovial smile as he released her shoulder from his vice like grip.
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➸ Laid Bare by chez_amanda, eiluned

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Phil Coulson
Genres: hurt/comfort, fluff | Smut: yes, explicit 
Word count: 19594 | Status: complete

My comment: So much unapologetic smut.

“All right, Agent Barton. You’ve convinced Director Fury,” Coulson said as he stepped back into his office. “You are to fly to Moscow and make contact with Agent Romanoff. Provide assistance with her mission if she deems it necessary.”
Swallowing a sigh of relief, Clint picked up the black folder Coulson slid across the desk to him. Natasha was in trouble. Well, she might be in trouble. She had been undercover in Moscow for the last month and a half, and she hadn’t made contact with S.H.I.E.L.D. in the last two weeks. So she might be in trouble, but no one really knew, and Clint wasn’t going to take any chances. This was Natasha, and Clint never fucked around when her safety was on the line.
“That is your identity,” Coulson continued, sitting with his usual precision of movement. “You are Alex Reynolds, the son of an American oil baron, and you are in Moscow for a series of meetings with a Russian petroleum company. This will leave your evenings free to visit The Pigalle, the club where Agent Romanoff is working undercover. Your flight leaves tomorrow morning.”
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➸ buying a stairway to heaven by zihna

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Mcu!Avengers 
Genres: hurt/comfort, alternate universe | Smut: no, brief mentions 
Word count: 34592 | Status: complete

My comment: One of the best Clintasha AUs I’ve ever read. This fic uses the plot of The Avengers but in an alternate universe where the six of them are fallen angels, messengers and servants of God. There are also some BrucexTony and past StevexTony in it but it’s a must-read especially if you like mythology as much as I do.

God has many eyes. Some are small, some are vast, some peer into the darkness, others stare into the sun, but no pair of eyes is sharper than Uriel’s.
(Though that is not what he will call himself, one day. Uriel is a strange name, even among humans.)
Uriel’s eyes see everything, given enough time.
He finds Gabriel in 1881. It was only a matter of time, really, and good ol’ Gabe hasn’t made himself all that hard to find. (Granted, it’s been nearly three thousand years. He’s grown arrogant, not that he wasn’t in the first place.)
“Raz,” Uriel whispers. “I’ve got him.”
“We moving in?”
On the wind, there’s the faintest rustle of wings.
Uriel pauses. “No,” he says, folding his own wings (wide, golden-brown) in tight. “Not today. We know where he is. Now we just wait.”
“For what?” Raziel turns towards him, heaven’s light stirring beneath her eyes.
Uriel is God’s sharpest pair of eyes, and he is the archangel of wisdom. “For when it’s time.”
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➸ Grieve by ReaperWriter

Warnings: character death 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: hurt/comfort, angst | Smut: yes 
Word count: 1795 | Status: complete

My comment: Natasha comforts Clint in the few ways she’s good at after Coulson’s death.

From where he stands, leaning against the tree, in the shadows, the bright gleam of the brass on the shiny, black coffin hurts his eyes. He would rather be up the tree, bow in hand, guarding them all, but Nat’s hand on his arm, the look in her eyes, stops him.
They are the two odd birds in a team of circus freaks and weirdos. No crazy exo-skeleton powered by an internal arc reactor for them. No super serum or gamma radiation making them insanely stronger, nigh on invincible. And certainly no god like powers. Even if the Red Room had enhanced Tasha in some ways, over all, they are startlingly, achingly human. He knows, because he remembers the feeling of waking up the morning after that had taken chunky swaths out of Manhattan while saving the world to the feeling of at least two cracked ribs, splinters of glass, a strained back, and a shoulder he is pretty sure he re-located himself when he swung through that window. Of seeing her after, his hand unconsciously rising to wipe the tacky blood from her scalp.
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➸ Cupid by AlphaKantSpell

Warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, suicidal thoughts 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Phil Coulson, Barney Barton
Genres: alternate universe (ish), hurt/comfort, romance | Smut: yes 
Word count: 46088 | Status: work in progress

My comment: What if Clint was actually a cupid? A cute (yet at times heartbreaking) Clintasha fic.

“Well Fuck.”
The capital F was important. It stood for “Frankly Ulcers Can Kill,” as in he felt a lethal ulcer forming because of the given circumstances. Those weren’t things a person said upon meeting the love of their life, with a capital F or otherwise. However, Clint had never been a normal person. Not even in the unusual fellow sort of sense – he was literally not a person. To be more precise he was a Cupid. ‘Match Maker, Match Maker make me a match’. That kind. He had wings and everything (though they were tiny – no bigger than a quail’s wings, not even restaurant quality). Clint even had an inexhaustible set of magic love sparking arrows, though that’s getting ahead of things.
More important than all the menial tidbits about Cupids and their duties was the fact that Clint could see the love strings that connected any random person to any other random person. They came in a multitude of colors from platonic friendly yellow to Roxanthin Red for romantic love, invisible and intangible to non Cupids. He once followed a rosebud pink line from a quiet girl on a city bus to a farm hand several miles away. The string connected the two by their ring fingers over the long distance without snagging. Clint pricked the woman with an arrow (just as invisible to her as her own love line) with an urge to stop by the farm one day soon. As far as he knew the couple was still happily married.
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➸ I’m Not Ready (For the Weight of Us) by Sproid

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Phil Coulson, Maria Hill
Genres: hurt/comfort, angst, romance | Smut: yes 
Word count: 7655 | Status: complete

My comment: Clintasha in the early days of their partnership.

Clint isn’t worried.
Really, he’s not. He knows damn well that Natasha’s capable of handling whatever Fury throws at her and then going back for more. Just because she’s been in his office for three hours now doesn’t mean that things are going badly. Fury probably approved Natasha’s enrollment with SHIELD within two minutes, and they’ve spent the rest of the time exchanging frightening stories from their even more frightening pasts.
No, Clint isn’t worried. He might be a little anxious though, which is why he’s currently sat in his room cleaning his bows while listening to radio chatter. Just in case. If Natasha and Fury had a throwdown he’d probably hear the commotion even from here, but it pays to have an ear to every available source of information.
At the knock on his door, Clint scrambles off the bed so quickly that he almost gets tangled up in the sheets and just barely stops himself going head first into the wall. Gives his elbow a good whack in the process though, which hurts like hell. When he opens the door to Natasha, who definitely heard the thump, she looks amused but doesn’t say anything. Clint’s pride is grateful for that.
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➸ Bows and Catapults by Sproid

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, OC 
Genres: hurt/comfort, alternate universe | Smut: no 
Word count: 8345 | Status: complete

My comment: What if Clintasha first met when they were children?

The Laurensons put Clint in a room with a tree outside the window. In his opinion, that’s a really stupid thing to do, because if they ground him there’s no way they could make him stay in the house when the tree is right there. He hasn’t said anything though, because he’s not as stupid as they are even though he’s only nine, and also because he really likes watching the branches make cool shadows on the ceiling at night. Sometimes when he can’t sleep, he puts his hearing aids back in and goes to sit on the window ledge so he can listen to the wind make the leaves whisper to him. It always calms him down.
He’s doing that tonight. Not because he can’t sleep though, but because he doesn’t want to. At dinner, Ben and Monima told him that they’re going to pick up another foster kid tomorrow, and he knows what that means. Oh, they said it’s because they’ve always had two kids at once, and he needs someone his own age to play with, but that’s not how it works. The new kid won’t like Clint, and Ben and Monima will prefer her so they’ll get rid of Clint, and he won’t see this room again. He’s already got most of his things in the backpack hidden under his bed, so that when they tell him they don’t want him any more, he can run away before they can pass him on to someone else.
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➸ In love and war by Anuna

Warnings: none
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: hurt/comfort, romance | Smut: yes 
Word count: 2720 | Status: complete

My comment: After Clint makes a different call, Natasha tries to sleep with him as some kind of debt payment. Most of these fics have him declining - but this fic explores the possibility that he does actually sleep with her and emotions.

They say everything is allowed in love and war. Except love is for children and war is for fools.
Natasha isn’t sure she likes the list of rules that SHIELD has, but at the same time, their disciplinary procedures usually don’t involve killing their operatives. She is still not trusted enough to be sent on a mission on her own. She is being trained, observed, briefed, and everything she does, every intel she gives is being checked and double checked. She knew, of course, that this would happen and she agreed to it, but it doesn’t make the process go any faster, and she doesn’t feel any easier. She likes to spend her time sparring, but most other agents don’t enjoy sparring with her.
Then there’s agent Barton. Hawkeye. Clint. That guy who was sent to put an arrow through her, and he could have, but he didn’t. Instead he offered her a cigarette and told her that he really didn’t want to spill her blood. She looked at him and she knew that he could do it, that his decision wasn’t caused by some kind of a weakness but a conscious choice. She thinks about it – the way the rain poured over the street, wide and empty as he waited for her, his cigarette a single spot of light in the long sea of darkness. Clint is like that light, small, just a spot, but it’s there and you can’t miss it. It’s an unnerving thought, too large to fit, and it’s pricking her mind. She owes him. The notion is constantly there, even when it’s silent.
She feels indebted.
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➸ bright horizon beckons (series) by sweetwatersong

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: alternate universe, hurt/comfort | Smut: none 
Word count: 2188 | Status: work in progress

My comment: Another beautiful Clintasha AU. Ever wonder what it’d be like if one of them has wings?

The irony tastes like copper in his mouth, like dust and ashes: if he only had his wings, he could fly out of this mess. But he can’t because he’s lost them, because they’ve been torn from his back and the scars have never quite healed; because for twenty years he’s only had bloody designs dripping down his back, had the mockery of reality, of the past. The car starts to tip farther over the edge even as Clint makes it to the window, makes it out from under the crumpled roof with hands slashed with glass and a heart lashed by fury.
It’s still not going to be enough.
The valley is wide below him, deep and welcoming and echoing, and he thinks almost absently of a sea he cannot cross over, of knowing at last he is sinking instead of swimming. Maybe he has been, all along.
With a metal-tearing groan his car shifts again, rocking forward as its rear wheels scrape against the loose rocks. Those are sent tumbling down in a mockery of an advance guard, a demonstration of gravity, and still Clint refuses to close his eyes. He doesn’t want to see his life flash before them; he remembers it all, all too well.
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➸ You’re poison, running through my veins by mercscilla

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Fury 
Genres: alternate universe, hurt/comfort, angst | Smut: none 
Word count: 923 | Status: complete

My comment: Another amazing Clintasha AU.

The case has trouble written all over it from the beginning, from the moment they’re called into Commissioner Fury’s office. Someone has given the department a tip to take a closer look at recent deaths of high society men that were determined to be sudden heart attacks with no foul play involved. According to the little birdie though, they’re anything but ordinary deaths. Unfortunately, the source is found dead the next morning near the river but Fury decides to investigate further, turning the case over to Clint and Coulson.
“You never miss a thing, Barton,” the Commissioner tells him and he’s right. Only a few days later, after hours of digging, Clint finally finds something, the one thing connecting the deaths. Each man has died within the next 48 hours after visiting the infamous nightclub Spider’s Web.
The men of the upper class love it, for what happens behind the scene is every man’s dream of sin coming true. Of course, it’s never acknowledged they’re part of the debauchery taking place in the rooms beyond the club and getting the information from the families of the deceased is quite the battle. Sins belong to the night, are the words they hear over and over again. Never to see the light of day.
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➸ The Red Thread (series) by Anuna, Koren M (CyberMathWitch)

Warnings: descriptions of violence and blood 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: angst, hurt/comfort | Smut: yes 
Word count: 21277 | Status: work in progress

My comment: Clint and Natasha begins with red. Read it. You’re gonna love every single tiny bit of this story.

It begins with red.
She begins (again) when she cuts off the dyed hair. All of it, the artificial faded blond hanging around her shoulders. She cuts it off mercilessly, because it makes her feel faded as well, like a picture without a face.
In days to come she watches (gleefully) how red reappears.
She is red. Strands of red, swirling around her like snakes, winding like ropes, a beautiful warning – her hair, the only thing that was always hers.
She knows she is red in the blur of things and choices; different kinds of bread and different ways to have your coffee; a variety of fabrics under her hand while she touches and tests them under her palm. She wonders what would the girl from two months ago like, the last one among the fake girls. It would be like flicking a switch and then, this would be easy.
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➸ compass rose ‘verse (series) by sweetwatersong

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: alternate universe, hurt/comfort, romance | Smut: none 
Word count: 3303 | Status: work in progress

My comment: A merman!Clint and pirate!Natasha AU! One of my favourites. Beautifully written.

“‘S that way,” Clint managed to say, blinking as he pointed towards a stretch of horizon almost no different from any other. The argument might have held more weight if his finger hadn’t drifted from side to side.
“I’m sure it’s not,” Natasha replied, lips curving in a faint smile despite herself. She let out an ‘oomph’ when he pulled abruptly on her shoulder, sagging down into the cold water.
“It is,” he countered with an annoyed curl of his lip. “‘m a merman, Tasha, I always know which way the poles are, ‘s part of being part shark.“ He tapped his very human nose with his free hand.
"I don’t think the sun sets in the north,” the pirate told him, leaning to the side to get a better grip under his dorsal fin. Clint blinked again, processing that.
“Oh.”
“I think that porpoise hit you harder than you realized. Even your skull has limits.” Curling her fingers around the smooth human skin of his arm, she braced her foot and heaved. The unresisting merman slid out of the ocean into her small craft, his long tail slithering into the bottom and curling around the mast.
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