➸ Playing House by chez_amanda

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: angst | Smut: yes
Word count: 8825 | Status: complete

My comment:  An undercover mission as a couple makes our two favourite assassins confront their own feelings

Of all the things that Natasha Romanoff had been asked to do for a mission, being a housewife had to be the weirdest. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind that she couldn’t, but her domestic skills had never really come into play in her work with S.H.I.E.L.D. In order to fit into her cover and the conservative gated community where she and Clint were headed, Natasha had to buy a new wardrobe. She wasn’t one for sweater sets, but from the intel in her mission folder, the women in this community did not do worn jeans and fitted t-shirts. There was now a considerable amount of beige and pastel in her closet.
Natasha hated beige.
Clint didn’t seemed thrilled about the polo shirt and chinos he was wearing either. Every couple of seconds, he fidgeted with the collar or shifted in his seat and Natasha tried not to laugh. Tactical gear was perfectly fine, but a pair of khaki pants and a collared shirt made him uncomfortable. She looked out the window at the desert thousands of miles below as she ran through her cover’s facts once again.
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➸ Underneath and Unexplored by eiluned

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: hurt/comfort | Smut: yes, explicit 
Word count: 5211 | Status: complete

My comment: A class on seduction with our favourite pair of assassins. A progression of emotion in five parts. Natasha-centric.

1. Natasha first tried to seduce Clint a few weeks after he helped her defect from Russia. Well, she gave it a half-hearted try back when he was just trying to kill her, but she didn’t think that counted.
The first time she tried it, she thought it was a way to repay her debt to him.
She was grateful, you see, that he had looked into her and saw something more than a coldly efficient spy and a killer. She was a coldly efficient spy and killer, but she had always felt something lurking beneath the surface. There was more to her than what she had been trained to do, but she had never really had the opportunity to dredge whatever that was from the bottom of her soul.
He looked at her and saw something. Maybe it was something familiar, something he recognized from himself, from his own past, but whatever it was, it made him stop, think twice about just putting her down. It made him defy his orders, made him help her rather than kill her.
And she thought sex would make up for that.
She was young back then, and her head was still firmly in a bad place.

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➸ Better Than Silence (series) by samalander

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: smut, angst, hurt/comfort | Smut: yes 
Word count: 13585 | Status: work in progress

My comment: Clint and Natasha’s journey + loads of smut

When she got to SHIELD, fresh out of the Red Room program, Natasha had never made her own decisions, never been in charge of her own time. And suddenly there she was, an agent who was facing the most dangerous foe she’d ever seen–the revolutionary idea of weekends, of time to be herself. For the first time in her life, Natasha balked, and she wasn’t sure, later, if it was because she didn’t know how to take a day off, or because she didn’t know what self to be when the choice was left to her.
How she managed to go six months with barely any days off, taking mission after mission after mission, wearing out partners and handlers and support staff, Clint wasn’t sure. She probably had to make some promises, tell some lies. But she did it.
And when Hill found out, she was furious that Natasha had managed to skirt the rules about mandatory rest and recovery after missions. But Hill’s fury was never hot; never the safe kind that burned itself out on revenge. Hill was methodical and evil. She assigned Natasha to Strike Team Delta, because, she said, if Clint was going to recruit pain-in-the-ass agents, then Clint could deal with them himself.
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➸ Bruises by Tahllydarling (ff.net)

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: angst, hurt/comfrot, romance | Smut: yes
Word count: 66683 | Status: complete

My comment:  Angst angst and angst! Clint tries to deny his feelings for Natasha without any success. But right now, Natasha needs him, and he’ll go to the end of the world for her. A must read.

For several months he had tried to conceal the desire he felt for her whenever they are in close proximity but he knew he was fighting a losing battle. His desire for her would be his undoing and possibly the end of his career with SHIELD. He had made his peace with that thought some time ago and was content to sacrifice life as he knew it for he chance to be the one man she lit up for when she stepped into a room. Now however, she needed him more than she had ever needed him before and he was determined no matter the cost he would be there for her.
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➸ Worlds Collide by SugarFey 

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: angst, hurt/comfrot, romance | Smut: yes
Word count: 13215 | Status: complete

My comment:  A story of the development of Clint and Natasha’s relationship from the first day they met.

She has been in America for a month and progressed from interrogations with suspicious S.H.I.E.L.D agents to men and women in tweed with degrees in front of their names. Somewhere S.H.I.E.L.D has gone from considering her a threat to a salvageable asset.
She is not sure what to make of that.
Barton visits her in a quiet moment between the endless physical examinations and interviews. He tells her about the new bow he is testing, how the strike team he is placed on won’t stop bickering and that he isn’t allowed to smoke on base. After a good ten minutes of blather he asks about her day.
“They did a pelvic exam.”
Barton nods as if considering the information. “Ouch.”
She shrugs. Being poked and prodded by men in lab coats is a known variable.
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➸ Between the shadow and the soul by viverella

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Steve Rogers
Genres: angst, hurt/comfort | Smut: no
Word count: 11924 | Status: complete

My comment: A beautifully written piece on the development of their relationship. Highly recommended!

Clint Barton learns fairly quickly that Natasha Romanov is one person he may never quite be able to figure out (it doesn’t stop him from trying though, either because he’s stupid or he likes torturing himself or both).
So when he asks Natasha, “Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”
And she replies, “You know that I do.”
All Clint can think is, No, no I don’t, because he’s been working and fighting alongside her for years now and if he’s learned anything, it’s that she’s the most difficult person to know anything about that he’s ever met.
Clint learns the way her body works before he learns how she thinks, learns the feel of her soft skin, the exact placement of all her scars from bullets and knives and worse accumulated from a long, long career as a killer, the quiet stutter of her breath when she comes apart entirely beneath him. He learns that she talks in her sleep in tense Russian before he knows which of the skeletons in her closet make the ridge of her brow furrow and her teeth clench. He knows the sensation of her heel at his throat and her fist in his gut, but not why sudden movements when she’s sick can put her on edge for hours.
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➸ Couldn’t Get That Boy To Kill Me by redbrunja

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: angst, hurt/comfort | Smut: yes
Word count: 3158 | Status: complete

My comment: Clintasha and angst and just Clintasha :)

Her right knee is dislocated, three ribs broken, wrist sprained. There’s blood dripping into her eyes, sweat stinging at her cuts, and she’s out of bullets. He’s panting, faced bruised to hell and back, the left leg of his fatigues glistening with blood, black on black, and he has an arrow pointed at her forehead.
Kill me, she thinks, empty gun trained right between his eyes.
She is so tired.
He lowers his weapon.
Natasha hates him for that for  years.
During her intake, with SHIELD combing through her mind and testing her body, she thinks she should have forced the issue, fought Barton until he put her down. She would have deserved it. Death clears all debts. But Natasha has never been one to take the easy way out. Dying wouldn’t wipe out the red in her ledger.

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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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➸ 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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➸ طائر غريب (Strange Bird) by CloudAtlas

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha 
Genres: alternate universe (ish), hurt/comfort, angst | Smut: none 
Word count: 5919 | Status: complete

My comment: Clint was a hawk before he was human. Natasha was a little girl, before she was made into a weapon. A must read :’)

Natasha Romanov’s life was saved by a man who had once been a hawk, though she did not know this at the time.
She was finishing up a mission in Zagreb, an extraction-slash-assassination job with an oil tycoon and all round arsehole, when she turned around and he was just… there. No one had ever managed to sneak up on her before and it unsettled her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself. Her gun was up before she had time to process, but he just looked at her calmly, apparently unfazed by the .9mm pointed right between his eyes.
He had a bow in his hand and a gun at his hip, and, if he was anything like her (and she assumed he must be, because who else would be able to stand within two feet of her without her knowing?) he had more weapons hidden away where she couldn’t immediately see. But he didn’t use them. He just stared at her not blinking and then, telegraphing every move, raised his hand and covered the end of her pistol.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” he said, sounding as if he was coming to the realisation that this was not the most logical course of action. “But I think… I think you should come with me instead.”
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➸ You Were A Kindness by AlwaysLera

Warnings: non-con/rape, self harm, child abuse, childhood trauma 
Characters: Clint, Natasha, Phil 
Genres: angst, hurt/comfort | Smut: none 
Word count: 8701 | Status: complete

My comment: It’s beautifully angsty with a well-deserved happy ending for our favourite pair of assassins. One of my all-time favourites.

She liked to hear her feet hitting the ground. The steady clap clap clap clap of her sneakers against the surface of the city streets felt like the world affirming that she was alive, alive, alive, alive. There was something about the loudness of it that comforted her. Even her own breathing couldn’t drown out her steps the way her breathing drowned out her heartbeat. When she left the Red Room, she hunkered in the basement of abandoned buildings in a derelict town in southern Spain where unemployment was rampant and it was easy enough to slip between the cracks of a warehouse, hide between druggies, learn to pick out the shape of sharps on the floor in the dark. She used to take her pulse then, time it on her wrist watch, reassure herself that her pulse was normal for a woman of her height, size, weight, and fitness level. Normality made her feel alive, then.
It was not true what they said. There was no rooftop battle. She did not try and seduce Hawkeye. When she came to SHIELD, she was not whole. She was not the Black Widow. She had not been the Black Widow for a long time. It was a title she would earn back over years, long after she had chosen a new name, found herself again, learned to trust, and learned to love.
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➸ Trust Building Exercises by chez_amanda

Warnings: none 
Characters: Clint, Natasha
Genres: romance | Smut: yes, explicit 
Word count: 6092 | Status: complete

My comment: A fic following the pair of assassins from that day Clint made a different call. A bit of angst in the beginning, but ends with beautiful smut.

Natasha was 17 years old the first time she tried to seduce Clint. The face that had been all coy smiles and batting eyelashes went as cold as a Russian winter in a flash, and he found himself backed against a wall with a blade dangerously close to his jugular. He still wasn’t quite sure how she had kept it concealed under that impossibly tight skirt she was wearing. Given her rap sheet, he should have expected her to turn on a dime, but she was so much deadlier in person.
She wouldn’t go without a fight and left him with a broken nose before he got her pinned beneath his weight. There was something in that near feral gaze that gave him pause, something human and vulnerable that belied her deadly exterior. Perhaps it was something he recognized in himself. He too had been made into something else and more than once - a frightened child of an abusive, alcoholic father, exhibitionist carnie kid-turned-thief, and finally, highly trained government agent. There was a glimmer of something … familiar. What he had offered to that shred of humanity was exactly what had been offered to him - a second chance.
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