Hello there,
Your writing deserves a Michelin star. I eat it up every time and I’m NEVER disappointed. Thank you.
If I may, I’d request (in a very polite and “no pressure” tone) a fic about Natasha and spider-reader regarding the Odesa mission Natasha outlines in The Winter Solider or a “first time” fic for the couple if you are comfortable.
Keeping doing what you are doing. You are great at it. In the meantime, I will be talking to Michelin about getting you more stars.
synopsis: based on the request for the odessa mission above! plus a backstory and a little character exploration of our spidey!reader, wherein the mission highlights a little of their dynamic too.
natasha romanoff x reader
word count: 3.4k words
a/n: i'm back :) thank you everyone for your patience, and i hope you enjoy this one.
masterlist
a thumb brushing over your own. her knee pressed up against yours. her scent calming your senses down. natasha was beside you, red hair a stark contrast to the all-black tactical suit. on her face, was a comforting look. she didn’t smile, but she didn’t need to. her being there was enough.
“you okay?” you knew she knew something was troubling you deeply. but for the sake of the mission, yours and her sanity, and the engineer sitting behind the both of you at the train station, she didn’t ask. you thought she did it so naturally, being able to comfort you.
you didn’t know it was taking all she had in her not to freak out. she wasn’t sure if this was what people did, or how best she could do to comfort you. she could only reciprocate what she found she liked best when you comforted her. but in the presence of everyone else, she couldn’t do the last thing you always did for her; pull her into the tightest hug and let the world itself disappear away. she knew the both of you needed to be half-alert, at least.
natasha felt like she was the one breathing out a sigh of relief when the wrinkles in your forehead disappeared slightly, your own thumb rubbing hers back. “yeah, i–i’m fine.”
“do you want to talk about it…?” she was pushing her luck.
you looked back at the engineer. he was asleep. the contact for the rental car wasn’t due to arrive in an hour. natasha looked back at him as well, and offered you a small smile, “ninety percent of the mission’s done anyway. simple in and out, get him transported back to SHIELD. makes me wonder why fury asked us both. maybe he felt guilty for sending you away on that undercover for so long; let us have a little bit of a workcation together.”
your mind was screaming at you; but you shrugged and gave her a smile back. “yeah. maybe he did.”
she didn’t know that you and her had separate missions, after all. while hers had been to sneak into the research facility and escort the engineer out, and transport him safely back to SHIELD, you had been informed that there would be…obstacles, in the way. you just didn’t know when.
you remembered the meeting with fury well. you had told him, that with such a statute and reputation the winter soldier had, that you weren’t confident of taking him alone, especially in a place so out of your element. but he had reassured you that you would be fine, and that you should focus on your own assignment when the time came, while natasha focused hers solely on the engineer. you had thought it wasn’t very fair. natasha deserved to know of any dangers, at least, that might pop up, but fury insisted that since it was one of her first few missions as a team lead, he hadn’t wanted to shake her confidence. you had no choice but to comply.
turning your attention back to the hand holding yours, you squeezed it for a moment, then said, “when we get back, can we…just…have a break around the chrysler building? the rooftop, just you and me?”
natasha nodded. she understood. and she didn’t push.
—
when the three of you finally reached odessa, you sat with the engineer as natasha convinced the guards to let you through without passports. knowing russian, aided with a heavy handed helping of flirting and subtle lowering of her zipper, definitely did wonders. and while nervous as you were, spider-senses tingling all over for the winter soldier, you still managed to let out a less-than-annoyed tsk when she returned, taking great care to zip up the rest of her suit and glaring at the guards behind her.
“careful,” she smirked, hand reaching for your cheek to turn your eyes to her, “they won’t let us through if they don’t at least find it believable that they can have me.”
“no one else can have you,” you replied, but she was already walking towards the car, hips swaying purposefully so, and another wave of irritation crept up upon you, “no one, you hear me?”
natasha waited for the engineer to get in, before chuckling and looking back at you. “are you getting in, spidey?”
when you had safely passed the borders and began driving on the snowy, white roads, natasha unbuckled her seatbelt for a minute, before pulling you in from your attention on the road to steal your breath with her lips. it was only when the cherry from her lipstick had fully melted into the heat of your mouth did she let go, panting just as hard as you were. you were very thankful the roads were empty.
“god, i love it when you get jealous,” she muttered.
to her displeasure, however, the engineer behind let out a disgusted scoff, and murmured, “you guys know i’m here, right?”
“yes, and we don’t mind returning you right back to HYDRA if you complain one more time,” you replied.
—
at a gas station pit stop, natasha knew it was wrong to pry, but she caught a glimpse of your wallet as you paid for snacks on the trip, and an old, almost-faded picture of a younger you next to an older woman was all that her eyes could zero on. you were in a new, freshly-ironed SHIELD uniform, and the woman had her hand on your shoulder, grin mirroring yours. natasha had never seen her before.
you shut the wallet promptly after, and natasha trailed behind as you both returned to your car.
about an hour into the drive later, with the engineer’s soft snores behind the both of you, and natasha’s own eyes drooping, she knew she had to keep the both of you awake somehow.
“you can take a nap, it’s okay,” you told her, but she sat up, the sight of your wallet on the dashboard reminding her of her curiosity earlier.
she angled her head to face you, admiring the older, finer lines on your face that grew more beautiful as time passed. the younger you couldn’t compare to the sight she was treated to now.
“you always this good-looking, or did something happen when you were younger, to turn you like this?” she decided to start.
a tint of red on your cheeks, you chuckled nervously. “um…i don’t think….no. i’ve always been like this.”
“was SHIELD your first job?”
“my first job was when i was twelve. worked for a car mechanic near my place. then i took up newspaper delivery, then a restaurant, researched for my university, and a ton of other jobs,” you said sheepishly, “i wasn’t…that well-to-do.”
she let her thumb caress your cheek. you relaxed a little more. “what did you study?”
“quantum physics. full-ride scholarship, or i never would’ve been able to afford those years.”
then, after a beat of silence, you continued. “it was also where fury found me. recruited me to SHIELD intelligence then. i guess you could say it was my first official job. i wasn’t…uh…wasn’t supposed to be front-facing, you know? i wasn’t a combat agent or anything, just the intelligence. i was in intelligence for five years.”
“what changed?”
you looked at her through the mirror, eyes carrying an emotion natasha could not quite figure out. you looked away again, before sighing. “intelligence got bombed one day, everything was on fire. i was helping my teammates escape, was one of the last few out, and a burning pillar fell on me. i almost died then, paralysed from the waist down. i guess nick felt bad, that the medal of bravery he awarded could only do so much to my current situation. felt even worse when he saw my mother crying by my side. he gave me a second chance.”
“the spider serum.”
“it was experimental then, i believe the number of exclusion of liability clauses i signed reached the hundreds. i was lucky it worked. there were a few others…not so lucky ones.”
natasha reached over the console to where your leg was shaking, and she ran her palm up and down, helping you regain your sanity. “thank you for telling me.”
“it’s not–” you never finished your sentence, because in the next second, your senses overloaded with warning signals, and your hands moved quicker than your brain in swerving the car, the steering wheel jammed to the left so the bullets that you barely saw incoming landed on the car’s tires instead of the glass and right at the engineer. you remembered the engineer screaming as the car skidded off of the cliff, and you remembered jumping out right then to shoot a hanger web to save it from falling completely and crashing onto the ground.
you groaned as you gripped onto the web, feet planted on the ground as you tried pulling the car back up. you have to be quick, quicker than this. he’s here, your mind ran through those thoughts, but your arms were burning. you pulled little by little, hoping natasha was protecting the engineer down below, and the car was moving. it was probably a minute before it was near the edge, and you had one last pull left to bring it up again.
but of course, right as the wheel of the car barely touched the ground you were on again, a blunt force came ramming to the side of your head. you could hear the metal whirring of the winter soldier’s metallic arm as you felt the webs slip from your fingers, sending the car right over again.
—
luckily, the last of your webbings managed to catch on the railings of the edge of the cliff, preventing the car from crashing, but merely hanging precariously in the air.
the blaring pain in the right side of your head was all-too-consuming, but you managed to recover and gather yourself quickly enough, to see him in full view, stature almost twice of yours, face looking down to where the car was hanging. then, the winter soldier raised his rifle, and taking aim, you flew off from where you were to tackle him, throwing him off as the bullet landed astray. he grunted in annoyance, fighting you off as you tried snatching his gun off of him. your legs were straddling his torso, holding him down as the gun was wrestled between the two of you. from below, natasha was holding onto the engineer’s arm, watching the fight as she tried to figure out an alternative escape plan; rather than merely relying on you.
but when the winter soldier felt the gun finally slipping away from his hands, instead of pulling it back, however, he gave one final grunt, before pulling you in. the air was knocked out of your lungs as he slammed the both of you against the railing, his metal arm then travelling to your neck, squeezing as tight as he could.
natasha watched in horror as you struggled against his hold, her heart dropping to the pit of her stomach as the winter soldier began choking you. it didn’t look like a fight you could win, and her hand went to the handgun in her thigh holster, taking a leap of faith and shooting at him.
the bullet riveted off his metal arm, but it was enough. the man took his eyes off of you for a moment, and zeroed in on natasha. unfortunately, it meant that he noticed the engineer behind her too, and immediately, he threw you off of the cliff, and came closer to her. she wished she had the capacity to worry about you, but she was immediately obligated to protect the engineer first.
she angled her body over his, heart pumping in her chest as the winter soldier took aim again. from how she was shielding the engineer, and the angle the winter soldier was at, there was no way he would have a clear aim. he wouldn’t take the shot.
surely not, she thought, as his gun clicked. surely not, she thought again, as the look in his eyes became empty, almost as if he was seeing through her. surely not. he pulled the trigger.
the last thing natasha could register was the burning sear on the side of her stomach, before she was falling straight into the sea below.
—
on your end, you caught the moment right as the shot was fired, and immediately jumped off of where you landed to catch both bodies falling through the air before they hit impact and broke the surface of the water. while you were thankful that natasha’s distraction worked, it was even more horrifying to have to pull her body out of the water beside the engineer’s, your eyes fixated on the gaping wound on her stomach.
you dragged them to shore, and it was then that you noticed both of them were bleeding out, the wound on natasha was bigger than you imagined, and the bullet was still lodged within the engineer, you were sure, as he grappled with a neck that was drenched in red. he was struggling to breathe, mouth opening and closing desperately as the blood loss incapacitated him.
you were cruelly reminded of your own assignment to capture and / or kill the winter soldier, as you glanced upwards to where he was, half-expecting him to be gone already. but he was there, standing still and watching you. almost as if he was challenging you. the hatred rumbling in your heart could not account for the disappointment you felt in already failing the mission. he held eye contact with you, gun no longer aiming at either you or natasha, but instead tucked into safety. his head tilted for a moment, you heard a car pulling up a few seconds later, and he broke eye contact first. entering the car leisurely, he made his getaway without pursuit.
you contemplated giving chase, swinging upwards and taking him down. killing him with your own bare hands, for what he did to natasha, stuffing his own gun down his throat–
natasha shuddered underneath you, and those thoughts were gone as fast as they came, replaced by the instinctive need to stay and make sure she makes it out of this alive. you gathered the first aid materials from the boot of the hanging car, cursing when you dug through the kit and only found the bare minimum. half a roll of bandages, stitches, and some antiseptic. barely enough to only keep one of them alive.
when you made it back down, the engineer was seizing, and you had to turn him on his side and stabilise him for a brief moment, the coldness in your fingers not merely from the frozen waters you had just come out of. natasha, clutching onto her side, managed to notice your dilemma, and the materials you had, and her hand reached out for yours.
she was shaking, and on the verge of bleeding out, but her hands were more steady than yours. she knew. she shook her head as you began grabbing the antiseptic for her wound.
“save him. they…they…need him more,” she choked out, eyes darting between you and the engineer, but the tears brimming in your eyes barely noticed it. you swallowed down a broken sob, looking between the two one last time, before making your final decision.
fuck the assignment. fuck fury, and SHIELD, and anyone else who was going to punish you for saving natasha, anyone who even thought of saving the engineer over natasha, anyone who thought natasha was more dispensable than the engineer. you let go of natasha’s hand, and began working on her, despite her protests. the antiseptic splashed onto her wound, the stitches came weaving through her skin, you tuned out everything else to save the woman you loved first.
even the engineer groaning beside you. even his hand gripping faintly on your suit, him pleading, “i…have a family…a kid…back home. p-please.”
a kid back home. i’m killing this man with a kid back home. you were the worst person in the world, you were sure, as you spared a look at him, his lips blue and pale by then. natasha had used up all the supplies then, so all you could do was hold his hand, angling him at a half-sitting position against your body, and murmuring i’m sorry to him about a thousand times.
“...please.”
“i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.” you were killing the main objective of the mission. you were killing an innocent man because of your own selfishness.
his blood was on you, literally and figuratively, as your hands could only do so much to press against the bullet wound and try to prevent him from dying so soon. but it was imminent; he was never going to make it back, and you and him knew it. the bullet was still lodged somewhere in the back of his neck, and life was leaving his eyes.
you held him until he took his last breath, still apologising.
—
when you reached out to check on natasha for a moment, her skin was getting colder then, too. the stitches and bandages could only hold for so long, and her condition would drop steadily if you didn’t make a move soon. there was no time to wait for help to arrive. so you made the final decision to rest the engineer’s body to where emergency services could easily find him, made a call for help, and promptly brought natasha home first.
—
it was inevitable that you were suspended for almost a year for what you did. you had taken the brunt of the punishment, and volunteered to take natasha’s end of it too. fury had never looked more disappointed, and upper management had a field day berating you for your poor decision-making. you distinctly remembered one of them yelling at fury that you were the reason why they should implement a relationship ban among agents.
you should have known better. you knew you should have done better, as well. more than blaming the winter soldier, everybody could see that it was your own self that you placed the heaviest blame on. the team also knew you would have almost lost yourself, if not for natasha.
she gave you a second chance this time, making clear that you were the only one she would trust to help her get back on her feet, to help her heal. you were reluctant to ever leave the training grounds, to even let yourself handle any other mission other than getting back stronger and better, but she was there. she always was, and she ensured that you wouldn’t regret saving her instead, even if she also thought it had been a difficult choice.
when you lay in bed each night after her recovery, tracing the scar on her stomach and killing yourself in your own mind, she would run through her fingers through your hair, reminding you to get out of the headspace. when you doubted your abilities even in training the younger agents, she would back you up. even when you made the weekly visits to the engineer’s home back in the states, helping out his wife and apologising for your failure to her family. she knew even supporting his child financially for the rest of his life wasn’t enough for you.
odessa was probably the biggest failure in your career as a SHIELD agent. and there was no happy end, or satisfying outcome, you would have achieved then. but at least having natasha through the journey of your recovery from that, helped your growth and acceptance in part.
when she would be asleep beside you most nights in the years after, you would often sneak out and, in the quite space between your balcony and the rooftop of the building, tell yourself that you would have done the same thing over if you were placed in the situation again.
natasha liked to think of herself as cold, her personality and actions as impersonal as things got. she was never sure she was doing right by you, or able to comfort you as much as you comfort her. but clearly, she was quite the opposite.
most nights when you came back after your hours alone, pondering over the day of the incident over and over again, you would look at her sleeping figure on your shared bed, and think to yourself how no one was able to know you the way she knew you. no one came close.
she was your sanctuary as much as you were hers.
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🃏 Kokichi Ouma Age-up Timeline 🍇
Here, I've used his initial designs as inspiration! I like looking back at older designs cause for a lot of them, it's like watching them grow up!
Headcanons under cut (HUUUGE SPOILER WARNING FOR DRV3)
(Content Warning for child abuse, mental illness and disorder, self harm, generally dark and unsettling topics ahead)
-=-
First off, I'm firm in my take that Tsumugi was lying about everyone being fictional. There's a lot that doesn't match up, and the local V3 fandom celebrity responsible for the Amalgamate fic has helped me tremendously in solidifying my stance. I think they absolutely do belong to the DR universe, but the memories they get that aren't part of their backstory are completely fabricated.
If there's any additional input on V3 in Raincode, don't let me know because I haven't played yet ;w;
That said, there's many things I, like Kokichi, will refuse to clarify or elaborate on. His character demands mystery, and it would be a trivialization of his writing to just. lay it all out there. I think approaching his writing with the mindset of knowing the whole truth would be to bastardize his integrity and simplify him in a distasteful way - so all my headcanons here will be written and are intended to be seen as broad strokes as opposed to finely tuned detail.
-=-
I like to think of his past as muddy and confusing, even to him. There's not a lot he can remember clearly, and constantly confuses different takes on his memories. To me, it's clear that lying is a huge trauma thing to him - I would assume multiple sources would be responsible, like authority, family, and peers.
He's been lying as a means of survival, with multiple layers of how he feels about it - despite what he says, there's not actually one truth. Multiple truths exist for one single thing, and I think that mindset is something that scares him tremendously - he'd probably say that reality is just a lie you tell yourself, in order to justify trivializing and minimizing both feelings/emotion and trauma.
In his head, there's so much wrong with him that he can't even begin to unravel himself and understand everything that's happened to him, why he does what he does, why he feels what he feels... so on. He feels multiple things that often contradict each other, and he doesn't know how to understand that, so he often switches his justifications to suit whatever narrative he needs to cope.
In general, however, he claims he's just lying. There are in fact, genuine times he does actually lie... but rather than being a true compulsive liar, he is actually a compulsive method actor. He's so empathetic to everything and everyone, that he can easily switch his masking techniques to suit whatever he or others need, and does so involuntarily most of the time, though he does know how to "switch it on" purposefully.
In his earlier ages, he may have suffered from a guardianship similar to what those who have DID had gone through (not me projecting lol /hj). He's been bred and born into tragedy, not unlike Komaeda but absolutely distinct from him in that I do not believe this boy has had any good luck with anything in his life - not family, not friends, not money, nothing. I might even go so far as to assume that, similar to Yasuhiro having an unnaturally high good luck, Kokichi is suffering from unnaturally high bad luck.
I noticed that, on a lot of his designs, he seems to have always had *something* covering at least one of his hands - and even on his final design, though it could just be a design fluke or something weird with perspective I misunderstood, you can see the smallest scrap of fabric underneath his right sleeve that could be seen as another hand/wrist covering. When lined up with the other designs, it could very easily be taken as a wrist bandage - at least by my eyes. So, I (and a lot of others it seems, especially those who identify with him) have taken this to mean he may in fact be self-harming, and has been for a long while. Anyone who hyperfixates on this guy wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if that turned out to be true.
I think that age 11 is probably what Kokichi himself would think of as his 'turning point', just going off of my little chart here; something tremendously awful happened to him, then. To fuel speculation and abide by his character rules, all I'm going to definitively say is... he likely wouldn't even trust doctors with a needle, let alone his life.
So, the hardest year of any modern kid's life... 12 years old. In my family especially, it's the worst year you'll ever face, and my god was that true for me. So I think this year fits him for gaining his... as the creators put it, 'otherworldly' expressive nature. This is the year he completely stops putting effort into trying to understand the truth, and fully embraces the chaos that is his reality. He's fine!!!!!! :)))))
He mellows out around 15, and I like to think of this year as his cringe-fail-iest year to date. This motherfucker would likely be seen in Hot Topic, jamming to MCR, glomping his friends, verbally roleplaying, so forth. His phone signature is a series of kaomojis. Idk if there's a similar equivalent of being a cringe baby weeb for Japanese who are my age, so I'm really just basing this on my own experience of being 15 in 2011. But whatever the equivalent is, he is absolutely it. 15 year old Kokichi is current Kokichi's most embarrassing time ever.
However, it's also likely the age he started his talent's namesake - of becoming the Ultimate Supreme Leader. Which, I choose to believe is, much like Kokichi in general, both true and false. Same for his actual group, DICE. Both is good ;o)
Following his talent, he has a natural command to his voice that feels as though you're forced to hear him speak. No one can really talk over him unless their ability to do so demands it - say for example, Sonia, the SHSL Princess. Due to the nature of their talents, I think Sonia's voice and ability to command would absolutely trump Kokichi's. However, due to the aforementioned bad luck, people are compelled to not trust him - even if what he's saying is true. (Kokichi voice: oh pythia we're really in it now)
Also, you can't really tell because of all the scarring, but 15 and 19 are the ages where he stopped going outside so he's paler and paler, lol
And my last one, I love to imagine that due to his talent, he's actually intensely adept at fighting, especially dodging. In fact, I think he's even way smarter than he'd like to believe!
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