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FIC: Roses Are Red, Widows Are Black (T)
Feb. 15th, 2015 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alphaflyerAuthor’s Note: Written for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
be_compromised Valentine's Day Promptathon, for a prompt from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
franztastisch: “Valentine’s Day is the only day Natasha lets Clint defend her in non-life-or-death situations. Valentine's Day normally ends with Clint getting into a fight.” Maybe not quite on target, but I hope it will do.
It's also on AO3, as Chapter 17 of "Moments."
“It’s a dive, Clint.”
“Yeah? So? It’s got the best yakitori in Kyoto. You know what they say about Asian food – the more the place looks like a bus stop, the better the food.”
Natasha sighs. Who are those ever-convenient ‘they’ people keep citing? But he’s not wrong, and the smells coming from the little hole-in-the-wall are nothing short of mouthwatering. And as for eateries in which to spend some post-mission chow time, they’ve done a lot worse.
Not that she’s given a choice in the matter. Her starving partner is already holding the door open for her, impatience disguised only very thinly as courtesy. A group of satisfied looking customers file out as she goes in, taking advantage of his gesture. The momentary traffic jam means they’ll have the place to themselves, which is both rare and nice.
Behind the open counter, wedged into the tiny kitchen, a sumo-sized cook in a white bandanna wields an enormous blade in a blur of motion. His moves are being watched worshipfully by a dishwashing assistant, who – in the finest Japanese tradition -- is probably in the tenth year of his apprenticeship with the master. Because that much is clear: That man is an artist. Natasha can do many things with a knife, but cutting chicken into paper-thin slivers without watching her fingers is not among them. Him? He does it with a fluidity and an understated ease that speaks of years of practice.
She climbs on the barstool without taking her eyes off the flashing silver.
The cook looks up, his eyes and nostrils widening a little as he takes in her red hair. Young girls in Japan dye theirs in all sorts of colours from pink to turquoise, she has noticed, but her natural red still turn heads.
“You,” he says, pointing at her with a stubby finger and a smile that could definitely use some dental work. “Byootiful. American, no? English?”
Natasha ignores the overture, and orders a bowl of ramen with chicken, in her best Yokohama-infused Japanese. Let Clint go for the yakitori; she needs soup to combat the creeping chill outside.
The man’s eyebrows rise almost into his bandanna, but when Clint takes the seat beside her – his temporary career as a doorman over -- he becomes more interested in making money than comments. Clint shoots him a quick glower before ordering in quite passable Japanese, his voice a touch sharper than usual.
Natasha is torn between amusement and exasperation. Clint has absolutely no issues when she goes after a mark with her feminine wiles blazing, but off-duty, his reaction when someone comes on to his partner can be downright visceral. Although it’s not a jealous Neanderthal routine -- he just seems hell-bent on ensuring that she doesn’t have to deal with male attention in her spare time, too.
Still. It’s not like she needs Clint Barton’s help to maintain her personal space, and Great Protector is not a role she wants him get too comfortable with. (Those bullets he’d taken for her in Barcelona had been quite enough of that, thank you.)
Time to nip this in the bud.
“Feeling a bit territorial tonight, are we, Hawk?”
Clint eyes her from the side, trying to assess whether she is joking or not. The man is not entirely a fool.
“Nah. Just making a point.”
“And what point would that be, exactly?”
Not only has he dug himself in deep, but she’s just handed him a shovel. Natasha takes a delicate sip from the cup of green tea that has appeared before her courtesy of the cook’s assistant, and watches him squirm.
“Ummm…”
Lucky for Clint, he is spared the need to come up with a response. The door opens with a blast of chilly February air and a young girl walks in, carrying a bunch of roses. She heads straight for Clint -- must have seen them sitting there through the brightly lit window, customers ready to be plucked: Two Eastern tourists, male and female, on Valentine’s date. A homing beacon for floral capitalism.
“Nice rose?” the girl asks brightly in Japanese, and then again in English, for good measure, waving her bunch under Clint’s nose. “Smell good. Valentine gift for the lady?”
Natasha is appalled. Of all the bits of American culture to have metastasized into this ancient city of geishas, temples and cherry blossoms (in season), this is not the one she would have looked for. Nor would she have expected her partner to pounce on the distraction quite so readily. In return for a folded bill he gets a single rose, complete with plastic sleeve.
“My Lady,” he says, handing the thing over with as much of a flourish as possible while perched on a rickety barstool, “pray forgive my presumption, and my mistaken belief that your virtue requires protecting.”
Bobbi is right. When Clint does become articulate, you never know what might come out.
“Did Happy make you watch Downton Abbey again?”
He drops the rose in front of her, on the counter. Surprisingly, it actually looks quite decent, and even has a water clip at the bottom.
“No comment. But as red-blooded American male, I do know what to do with a pissed off woman and a rose,” he drawls in response. “Happy VD, darlin’.”
And he’d been doing so well.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have. Now I feel bad that I didn’t get you anything,” she purrs.
“That’s okay,” he allows with an earnest nod. “You can buy me some chocolates later. The hotel shop is open twenty-four seven.”
“That’ll be the day. You know I don’t do Valentine’s.”
And she doesn’t; she really doesn’t. Valentine’s Day is a conspiracy between greeting card producers, florists and the chocolate industry, preying on the sentimental and the desperate. The best thing you can say for it that red praline boxes will be on sale for weeks after.
Clint, on the other hand, is a fan – of certain aspects, at least. He gives her a suggestive look from under hooded lids.
“Well, there are other things we could do when we get back to the hotel. Things that are traditional to do on the day, but that are sufficiently universal so you can pretend you want them for purely selfish reasons.”
Lucky for Clint, their food gets plunked down on the counter and gives him something else to put in his mouth beside his feet. He dives in quickly, chopsticks clicking.
Turns out he was right; those plastic vats and magic blades do in fact produce something that transcends the Formica countertops and bare neon fixtures. For a few minutes, they eat in companionable silence, making only those little noises that come out when food crosses the threshold from nourishment into pleasure, and exchanging the occasional appreciative glance.
There is a sudden cool breeze as the door slides open and four young men walk in. No, not walk – swagger. Dressed all in black leather, with slicked back hair, they exude a finely honed sense of entitlement. The predatory look in their eyes instantly puts Natasha on edge.
Yakuza. Or wannabes, looking to prove themselves worthy of membership in one of the gangs. Judging by their age and lack of visible tattoos they’re at the aspirational basic thug stage, with a long way to go before they can graduate to drug smuggling. (They don’t look smart enough to reach that Holy Grail of organized crime, international finance.)
The cook and his assistant have stiffened noticeably, before bowing and schooling their features into ingratiating smiles. A regular shakedown, then. Figures.
Clint, too, has noticed the sudden change in the atmosphere. His posture has undergone a subtle shift, and the grip on his chopsticks has changed.
The four men remain standing together for a moment, almost as if to check whether their entrance has been accorded sufficient notice and respect. One of them (the leader?) makes a short comment, and they fan out along the counter, flanking Clint and Natasha two aside.
Judging by the way her two are leering at Natasha, and the others are eying Clint with a mixture of challenge and contempt, it’s obvious they’ve decided to have a little gratuitous fun with the gaijin.
So much for a nice, quiet post-mission evening out.
“Hello Lady,” one of them says, leaning close to Natasha, pushing out his rather thin and unimpressive hips and demonstrating his ignorance of dental hygiene all at the same time. “Want to fuck?”
The other two, meanwhile, are crowding Clint, oblivious to those weaponized chopsticks. Subtlety – not to mention threat assessment -- is obviously not their strong suit.
“Oh, puh-lease,” Natasha says in her best bored Valley Girl tone, giving his equipment the briefest of contemptuous glances, and punctuating her reply with a snort. “I can’t stand shrimp.”
While her would-be assailant is trying to process just how he has been insulted, something occurs to her. Something that should resolve a whole host of male ego issues all at once, plus be fun to watch.
“Hey, Clint,” she calls out, talking right past her wannabe sex god. “Remember that ‘virtue’ you wanted to protect? Go for it. They’re all yours.”
What follows is a blur of motion, not unlike the cook’s performance with his knife. The first of the quasi-yakuza is down for the count before Clint has even gotten off his bar stool, thanks to a short rap to the larynx with the heel of a chopstick-reinforced hand. Number Two goes down with a cracked kneecap, his howl of pain shortened to a gurgle by a quick chop of Clint’s hand, after he hops off the chair.
Natasha makes a small contribution to the fight by tripping up the guy who tries to get around her to come to his comrades’ aid; she hopes Clint won’t notice, or mind. She resists the temptation to ram her ramen bowl into the man’s face, though -- waste of good noodles, that would be.
A nicely executed turn from Clint to avoid a poorly executed karate chop to the face (red belt at best), a well-placed kick, and Elvis The Pelvis won’t be tempted to strut for a few weeks. Clint neatly dispatches the stumbler with a hard knock to the back of his head, kicks him in the chin as he goes down, and steps aside to watch him fly gracelessly into the wall, head first.
Natasha picks up her ramen bowl, takes a sip of the delicious liquid and looks at the heap of bodies at her feet. Getting off that stool gracefully will be a challenge.
“Can you throw them out for me, too?” she says. “You know what they say – you kill it, you clean it.”
Clint is barely breathing faster.
“Who’s they?” he frowns. “And what do they ever get right? Besides, they’re hardly dead. Way too much paperwork.”
“We will clean up,” the cook – whom Natasha had almost forgotten about – chimes in from where he’d ducked behind the counter. He motions his assistant and heads to the flip-up portion of the counter. “They come here many times, take money. We don’t like.”
Clint seems to be about to say thanks, but then something occurs to him.
“Hey, man – I hope they won’t give you any more trouble now, after this?”
The cook has already hooked his enormous hands into a pair of armpits, and started dragging a limp body towards the back door.
“They not come back,” he huffs, with a matter-of-fact shake of his head. “Much loss of face. We put by garbage. Maybe in garbage. Then call police.”
Then his face splits into a wide, conspiratorial grin. He obviously appreciates fellow artists, even if they operate in a different field. He even switches to Japanese.
“I suggest you finish your dinner quickly and leave before the police get here. No need for ninja to do paperwork. Also, dinner is free.”
They do finish quickly, although Clint does take the time to change chopsticks. The cook holds the door open for them as they leave, with many bows and arigatos, before heading back in, presumably to call the police and chop some more chicken for the next wave of customers.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Natasha hooks her arm into Clint’s on the way back to the hotel, via the beautiful shimbashi. “Did you enjoy that, honey?”
Clint nods, and turns to her with the kind of grin that would drop lesser women to their knees.
“Better than the finest chocolate. Thank you.”
be_compromised Valentine's Day Promptathon, for a prompt from franztastisch: “Valentine’s Day is the only day Natasha lets Clint defend her in non-life-or-death situations. Valentine's Day normally ends with Clint getting into a fight.” Maybe not quite on target, but I hope it will do.It's also on AO3, as Chapter 17 of "Moments."
“It’s a dive, Clint.”
“Yeah? So? It’s got the best yakitori in Kyoto. You know what they say about Asian food – the more the place looks like a bus stop, the better the food.”
Natasha sighs. Who are those ever-convenient ‘they’ people keep citing? But he’s not wrong, and the smells coming from the little hole-in-the-wall are nothing short of mouthwatering. And as for eateries in which to spend some post-mission chow time, they’ve done a lot worse.
In fact, the restaurant is typical for the grittier parts of the Gion district: brightly lit, non-descript, utterly charmless. The view from the street extends right into the kitchen, where plastic vats and jugs with mystery ingredients line the wall. It looks reasonably clean, but Natasha has long since learned that it’s the things you can’t see in a kitchen that will get you in the end.
Not that she’s given a choice in the matter. Her starving partner is already holding the door open for her, impatience disguised only very thinly as courtesy. A group of satisfied looking customers file out as she goes in, taking advantage of his gesture. The momentary traffic jam means they’ll have the place to themselves, which is both rare and nice.
Behind the open counter, wedged into the tiny kitchen, a sumo-sized cook in a white bandanna wields an enormous blade in a blur of motion. His moves are being watched worshipfully by a dishwashing assistant, who – in the finest Japanese tradition -- is probably in the tenth year of his apprenticeship with the master. Because that much is clear: That man is an artist. Natasha can do many things with a knife, but cutting chicken into paper-thin slivers without watching her fingers is not among them. Him? He does it with a fluidity and an understated ease that speaks of years of practice.
She climbs on the barstool without taking her eyes off the flashing silver.
The cook looks up, his eyes and nostrils widening a little as he takes in her red hair. Young girls in Japan dye theirs in all sorts of colours from pink to turquoise, she has noticed, but her natural red still turn heads.
“You,” he says, pointing at her with a stubby finger and a smile that could definitely use some dental work. “Byootiful. American, no? English?”
Natasha ignores the overture, and orders a bowl of ramen with chicken, in her best Yokohama-infused Japanese. Let Clint go for the yakitori; she needs soup to combat the creeping chill outside.
The man’s eyebrows rise almost into his bandanna, but when Clint takes the seat beside her – his temporary career as a doorman over -- he becomes more interested in making money than comments. Clint shoots him a quick glower before ordering in quite passable Japanese, his voice a touch sharper than usual.
Natasha is torn between amusement and exasperation. Clint has absolutely no issues when she goes after a mark with her feminine wiles blazing, but off-duty, his reaction when someone comes on to his partner can be downright visceral. Although it’s not a jealous Neanderthal routine -- he just seems hell-bent on ensuring that she doesn’t have to deal with male attention in her spare time, too.
Still. It’s not like she needs Clint Barton’s help to maintain her personal space, and Great Protector is not a role she wants him get too comfortable with. (Those bullets he’d taken for her in Barcelona had been quite enough of that, thank you.)
Time to nip this in the bud.
“Feeling a bit territorial tonight, are we, Hawk?”
Clint eyes her from the side, trying to assess whether she is joking or not. The man is not entirely a fool.
“Nah. Just making a point.”
“And what point would that be, exactly?”
Not only has he dug himself in deep, but she’s just handed him a shovel. Natasha takes a delicate sip from the cup of green tea that has appeared before her courtesy of the cook’s assistant, and watches him squirm.
“Ummm…”
Lucky for Clint, he is spared the need to come up with a response. The door opens with a blast of chilly February air and a young girl walks in, carrying a bunch of roses. She heads straight for Clint -- must have seen them sitting there through the brightly lit window, customers ready to be plucked: Two Eastern tourists, male and female, on Valentine’s date. A homing beacon for floral capitalism.
“Nice rose?” the girl asks brightly in Japanese, and then again in English, for good measure, waving her bunch under Clint’s nose. “Smell good. Valentine gift for the lady?”
Natasha is appalled. Of all the bits of American culture to have metastasized into this ancient city of geishas, temples and cherry blossoms (in season), this is not the one she would have looked for. Nor would she have expected her partner to pounce on the distraction quite so readily. In return for a folded bill he gets a single rose, complete with plastic sleeve.
“My Lady,” he says, handing the thing over with as much of a flourish as possible while perched on a rickety barstool, “pray forgive my presumption, and my mistaken belief that your virtue requires protecting.”
Bobbi is right. When Clint does become articulate, you never know what might come out.
“Did Happy make you watch Downton Abbey again?”
He drops the rose in front of her, on the counter. Surprisingly, it actually looks quite decent, and even has a water clip at the bottom.
“No comment. But as red-blooded American male, I do know what to do with a pissed off woman and a rose,” he drawls in response. “Happy VD, darlin’.”
And he’d been doing so well.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have. Now I feel bad that I didn’t get you anything,” she purrs.
“That’s okay,” he allows with an earnest nod. “You can buy me some chocolates later. The hotel shop is open twenty-four seven.”
“That’ll be the day. You know I don’t do Valentine’s.”
And she doesn’t; she really doesn’t. Valentine’s Day is a conspiracy between greeting card producers, florists and the chocolate industry, preying on the sentimental and the desperate. The best thing you can say for it that red praline boxes will be on sale for weeks after.
Clint, on the other hand, is a fan – of certain aspects, at least. He gives her a suggestive look from under hooded lids.
“Well, there are other things we could do when we get back to the hotel. Things that are traditional to do on the day, but that are sufficiently universal so you can pretend you want them for purely selfish reasons.”
Lucky for Clint, their food gets plunked down on the counter and gives him something else to put in his mouth beside his feet. He dives in quickly, chopsticks clicking.
Turns out he was right; those plastic vats and magic blades do in fact produce something that transcends the Formica countertops and bare neon fixtures. For a few minutes, they eat in companionable silence, making only those little noises that come out when food crosses the threshold from nourishment into pleasure, and exchanging the occasional appreciative glance.
There is a sudden cool breeze as the door slides open and four young men walk in. No, not walk – swagger. Dressed all in black leather, with slicked back hair, they exude a finely honed sense of entitlement. The predatory look in their eyes instantly puts Natasha on edge.
Yakuza. Or wannabes, looking to prove themselves worthy of membership in one of the gangs. Judging by their age and lack of visible tattoos they’re at the aspirational basic thug stage, with a long way to go before they can graduate to drug smuggling. (They don’t look smart enough to reach that Holy Grail of organized crime, international finance.)
The cook and his assistant have stiffened noticeably, before bowing and schooling their features into ingratiating smiles. A regular shakedown, then. Figures.
Clint, too, has noticed the sudden change in the atmosphere. His posture has undergone a subtle shift, and the grip on his chopsticks has changed.
The four men remain standing together for a moment, almost as if to check whether their entrance has been accorded sufficient notice and respect. One of them (the leader?) makes a short comment, and they fan out along the counter, flanking Clint and Natasha two aside.
Judging by the way her two are leering at Natasha, and the others are eying Clint with a mixture of challenge and contempt, it’s obvious they’ve decided to have a little gratuitous fun with the gaijin.
So much for a nice, quiet post-mission evening out.
“Hello Lady,” one of them says, leaning close to Natasha, pushing out his rather thin and unimpressive hips and demonstrating his ignorance of dental hygiene all at the same time. “Want to fuck?”
The other two, meanwhile, are crowding Clint, oblivious to those weaponized chopsticks. Subtlety – not to mention threat assessment -- is obviously not their strong suit.
“Oh, puh-lease,” Natasha says in her best bored Valley Girl tone, giving his equipment the briefest of contemptuous glances, and punctuating her reply with a snort. “I can’t stand shrimp.”
While her would-be assailant is trying to process just how he has been insulted, something occurs to her. Something that should resolve a whole host of male ego issues all at once, plus be fun to watch.
“Hey, Clint,” she calls out, talking right past her wannabe sex god. “Remember that ‘virtue’ you wanted to protect? Go for it. They’re all yours.”
What follows is a blur of motion, not unlike the cook’s performance with his knife. The first of the quasi-yakuza is down for the count before Clint has even gotten off his bar stool, thanks to a short rap to the larynx with the heel of a chopstick-reinforced hand. Number Two goes down with a cracked kneecap, his howl of pain shortened to a gurgle by a quick chop of Clint’s hand, after he hops off the chair.
Natasha makes a small contribution to the fight by tripping up the guy who tries to get around her to come to his comrades’ aid; she hopes Clint won’t notice, or mind. She resists the temptation to ram her ramen bowl into the man’s face, though -- waste of good noodles, that would be.
A nicely executed turn from Clint to avoid a poorly executed karate chop to the face (red belt at best), a well-placed kick, and Elvis The Pelvis won’t be tempted to strut for a few weeks. Clint neatly dispatches the stumbler with a hard knock to the back of his head, kicks him in the chin as he goes down, and steps aside to watch him fly gracelessly into the wall, head first.
Natasha picks up her ramen bowl, takes a sip of the delicious liquid and looks at the heap of bodies at her feet. Getting off that stool gracefully will be a challenge.
“Can you throw them out for me, too?” she says. “You know what they say – you kill it, you clean it.”
Clint is barely breathing faster.
“Who’s they?” he frowns. “And what do they ever get right? Besides, they’re hardly dead. Way too much paperwork.”
“We will clean up,” the cook – whom Natasha had almost forgotten about – chimes in from where he’d ducked behind the counter. He motions his assistant and heads to the flip-up portion of the counter. “They come here many times, take money. We don’t like.”
Clint seems to be about to say thanks, but then something occurs to him.
“Hey, man – I hope they won’t give you any more trouble now, after this?”
The cook has already hooked his enormous hands into a pair of armpits, and started dragging a limp body towards the back door.
“They not come back,” he huffs, with a matter-of-fact shake of his head. “Much loss of face. We put by garbage. Maybe in garbage. Then call police.”
Then his face splits into a wide, conspiratorial grin. He obviously appreciates fellow artists, even if they operate in a different field. He even switches to Japanese.
“I suggest you finish your dinner quickly and leave before the police get here. No need for ninja to do paperwork. Also, dinner is free.”
They do finish quickly, although Clint does take the time to change chopsticks. The cook holds the door open for them as they leave, with many bows and arigatos, before heading back in, presumably to call the police and chop some more chicken for the next wave of customers.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Natasha hooks her arm into Clint’s on the way back to the hotel, via the beautiful shimbashi. “Did you enjoy that, honey?”
Clint nods, and turns to her with the kind of grin that would drop lesser women to their knees.
“Better than the finest chocolate. Thank you.”
She brings her mouth close to his ear, and drops her voice to a whisper.
"Any other male instincts you feel like indulging tonight?'
He twirls the almost-forgotten rose in his hand, in fine disregard of its thorns, and breathes in its sweet scent.
“Well, I might have an idea for those petals.”
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Date: 2015-02-15 09:27 pm (UTC)