GENERAL OPEN POST
° Drop off a starter, texting or leave a prompt of some sort, whether text based, quotes or images. AUs welcomed. Please, make sure to link to all pictures.
° Include the character in the subject line or be surprised!
° This is open to all even if we haven't talked before. Feel free to toss things at me.
[After SHIELD crumbles, after the days upon days of hearings, after she gives Steve the folder, Natasha vanishes. She loves him, but after everything that's happened she doesn't know how. When he reads through the folder enough times, he probably starts to work out why. She could have pulled pages, pictures, censored it for the story she wanted him to know, but she didn't. Instead, she gave him the truth the only way she knew how: in old, sepia-toned pictures of a young girl with bangs and a ponytail that stood behind the Winter Soldier in some of the photos from the 50s.
A mission report from an assassination in Paris, and if he looked carefully you could see that same girl in a newspaper clipping that featured the departing crowd. A girl with the same jawline as Natasha, and even through sepia tones you knew her hair was red. It was fragments like that, woven in between the horror story of what they'd done to Bucky, how they'd changed him, used him.
But Natasha's never handled truth well. And she has a starting point now. And it would take a conversation she doesn't know how to have, and so she just leaves. Maybe it's juvenile-- she knows that it's cruel, that Steve doesn't deserve the way she slips away like a whisper. Even Tony can't quite track her, but he's sure she's probably alive. Every few months there's a grainy photo that one of his facial recognition algorithms manages to pull, but it's never enough. It's never quite enough to be a lead, just a face in a crowd.
The years go by and then one evening there's a knock on his door, insistent but erratic. Natasha's standing there, bloody and exhausted. A short black dress and a blonde wig, but it's unmistakably her under the split lip and bruises. She hasn't changed, even if there's a sense about her that the past years have not been easy, and she's a little unsteady on her feet.] --Hello, Steve.
[ Never fall for a wild thing - an age old adage but one Steve suddenly knew all too intimately at Natasha's sudden disappearance, which none of them understood. But Steve had a better idea of the why once he started looking into the folder contents she left as a parting gift, digging in a little more into the finer details with Tony's help, the man flat out insisting on being involved. Not just with the information but with trying to locate Natasha, the rogue Avenger.
Weeks past and then months, the hollowness of it all aching his heart but eventually he set it all down to slip back into work. They were both gone and he needed to find a way to keep living if he ever wished to find them.
Things blurred as they often did and the years flew by in a mess of blood, screams and at times even bursts of happiness. The latter being too far in between but maybe he mostly had himself to blame, far too burned to attempt to try moving close to anyone again.
Natasha ripped his heart from his chest when she left. It left an ache when his heart should have been.
The knock on the door halted his current painting project, Steve wiping his hands on his jeans as he went to open it, coming face to face with the one who haunted his dreams at night.
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stardustly2018-01-01 05:57 pm
that au prompt @steve
A mission report from an assassination in Paris, and if he looked carefully you could see that same girl in a newspaper clipping that featured the departing crowd. A girl with the same jawline as Natasha, and even through sepia tones you knew her hair was red. It was fragments like that, woven in between the horror story of what they'd done to Bucky, how they'd changed him, used him.
But Natasha's never handled truth well. And she has a starting point now. And it would take a conversation she doesn't know how to have, and so she just leaves. Maybe it's juvenile-- she knows that it's cruel, that Steve doesn't deserve the way she slips away like a whisper. Even Tony can't quite track her, but he's sure she's probably alive. Every few months there's a grainy photo that one of his facial recognition algorithms manages to pull, but it's never enough. It's never quite enough to be a lead, just a face in a crowd.
The years go by and then one evening there's a knock on his door, insistent but erratic. Natasha's standing there, bloody and exhausted. A short black dress and a blonde wig, but it's unmistakably her under the split lip and bruises. She hasn't changed, even if there's a sense about her that the past years have not been easy, and she's a little unsteady on her feet.] --Hello, Steve.
no subject
Weeks past and then months, the hollowness of it all aching his heart but eventually he set it all down to slip back into work. They were both gone and he needed to find a way to keep living if he ever wished to find them.
Things blurred as they often did and the years flew by in a mess of blood, screams and at times even bursts of happiness. The latter being too far in between but maybe he mostly had himself to blame, far too burned to attempt to try moving close to anyone again.
Natasha ripped his heart from his chest when she left. It left an ache when his heart should have been.
The knock on the door halted his current painting project, Steve wiping his hands on his jeans as he went to open it, coming face to face with the one who haunted his dreams at night.
But he looked completely unimpressed. ]
Natasha? What are you -