Warnings: character death (but not really)
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Bobbi, Pepper
Genres: alternate universe, romance, hurt/comfort | Smut: none
Word count: 9324 | Status: complete
She remembers very little of her actual, human, life. Only flashes and sensations. She remembers the smell of the animals, and of fur pelts; the cold of the snow and the warmth of the fire.My comment: Clintasha AU, where Natasha is the Angel of Death. It’s heartbreaking, it’s brutal, it’s beautiful.
Long ago, when she was a young woman, she was accused of practicing magic; a child she had been tending had fallen ill and died. It was not her fault, she had tried to save the girl, but she could not and she was cast out of her village.
She died in the snow in the forest where she grew up.
The Elders of her village told stories then, about the woman in the forest who killed and ate children. The lone woman became three, who became sisters, who became old and deformed, living in a walking house and flying through the sky in a bowl, helping or waylaying travellers depending on their whim. And eventually those three sisters were given a name – Baba Yaga.
The stories were never true, not really, but they became true in a way. She shifts – changes with the telling, because she was never really dead, see? She woke up in that same snow the next day. She dug herself out of the snow knowing that she could never go back, could never again show her face in the village in the forest where she grew up, because she was dead.
But not really.
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