Bruce drops to his knees, taking the denim with him. And Tony -- Tony only looks at him once, before running a rough hand through Bruce's hair, the quietest, God, yes, falling off his lips before Bruce leans forward and takes his cock into his mouth.

(and you can't swallow a star, a star swallows you. the abyss fills your veins. bruce is clinging to the edge of the ocean with one hand, the edge of the universe with another, and he can't hold onto them both forever.)

"Mjolnir," Loki automatically corrected.

"That's what I said. Myeu-muh."

"How is it you can remember all of the French lyrics in Lady Gaga, but you still can't say 'Mjolnir'?"

"Oh my God, fuck off." Darcy rolled her eyes, and just like that, the tension drained out of her. There was something calming about sniping at one another. Not back to status quo; not exactly. But something deep in her gut that had been coiled tight as a spring, ready to snap, for the last few weeks relaxed as she practically watched the emotions play across his face.

They’ve called her Zasha Nikolaevich, Чёрная вдова, Chyornaya vdova, паука, Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Natasha Romanov sounds derivative, but it’s a new name for a new life. Names change, alliances shift, regimes fall, and people die.

It’s the first name she ever picked for herself.

She kisses him once on the cheek and then moves left, brushes her lips ever-so-lightly against his, and Clint thinks dizzily that he'd settle for this, would happily live out his years doing nothing but this if it meant he wouldn't have to lose her. His whole life has been an exercise in rebuilding, in picking up the wreckage that’s always left by someone leaving--he’s spent so long thinking of Natasha as solid ground, as a bedrock, that he hasn’t been able to bear the thought of what he might be without her. The truth is, he could manage it if he had to, could trudge through reality with a grim determination he hasn’t forced himself to meet halfway in years; he could reach for the kind of training everyone always hopes to avoid, climb upwards and onwards. He could manage it, but he can’t help but think it would leave him less human, somehow, would raze the years of shoddy architecture that have become his scaffolding. There are so many pieces of Natasha, of him, that have nothing to do with the ways and places they’ve touched, everything to do with salves, with old wounds, with something to hold onto. Clint’s past is a warzone in its own right, his father’s reeking breath and unfettered hands laid over with the laundry list of people who have decided him unworthy of their time; Natasha is his constant, has been for so long that it’s staggering to think about. He could manage without her, but god, god, he doesn’t want to, would do anything to avoid that moment that, until she showed up, always came eventually: a turned back, a clipped apology, so many ways to boil a whole history down into the word goodbye.

And see, this is what makes Natasha’s reactions to Bruce and the Hulk such an absolutely brilliant character choice. Because it’s not the monster she’s scared of; it’s not the physical pain that frightens her; it’s not the idea of getting smashed that freaks her out. We KNOW it isn’t—the lady JUMPS UP ON AN ALIEN SPACECRAFT, she looks at a monster easily 50 times the size of the Hulk and offers up a calm, “I don’t see how that’s a party,” she doesn’t hesitate to go beat the Loki out of Clint, DID I MENTION ABOUT THE SQUADRON OF DUDES IN IM2, WHAT ABOUT THE MORON GIVING HER EVERYTHING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AVENGERS, seriously I could go all day with what a badass she is. The Hulk doesn’t frighten her because he’s physically scary—the Hulk frightens her because he is the literal embodiment of her worst fear. Bruce Banner is always angry, because he’s always on the edge of being taken over by another consciousness, and that fate—that constant not knowing, that constant doubt, that repeat of waking up not knowing what you’ve done or why you did it or who you are—is what Natasha has been running from since that fateful day when she and Clint refrained from killing one another.

But Natasha is the only one who mines her own vulnerability. She’s the only one who makes it into a performance. And there’s something radical in acknowledging that feminine vulnerability as a performative, as something fake we are taught to expect and to mimic. That can be our superpower. We can be strong in ways men never will be because we face bullshit they will never have to face. That’s not justice, but it is power. It is strength. It’s control.

He lies now in the field, warm dirt beneath his back, cradled by the space carved by the other guy's body, corn plants broken and bent to expose the sky. His fingers graze over his skull, skim the unbroken bone that he'd tried to shatter, and he wonders at the twist of electricity, the wild dance of cells that summoned anger quickly enough to break a bullet's path. He lets his head thud back against the earth and closes his eyes against the sun, tries to ignore the breeze and the birdsong and the knowledge that he has to get up and make new decisions, has to find a place to go, to live.

Ivan’s mother, who Natasha will never call Babushka, says, “Paper has no soul—you can put anything on it.” This is true. This is what they teach her in the Red Room. This is what they teach her when they write the lies on her brain and into her body: muscle memory created from ones and zeros, a ballerina constructed out of fingers on a keyboard and wire that sparks when it gets wet. They write this on her bones and her blood runs over it. Plie. Arabesque. Avant, avant, avant.

“Tell me something true,” whispers Clint in the dark, and she is grateful, she is grateful.

“There are chambers in my heart,” she tells him, “rooms with no doors or windows.”

“No,” they say together, “true,” they say together, and Natasha whispers, “I did not need doors or windows. I burned the walls to the ground.”

The target takes six more arrows before a more slender pair of arms curl around his chest, a warm weight pressing against his back. It isn’t usually like them to indulge in sentiment, but he is falling apart and he needs this, just this one stolen-away moment.

Maria takes her job seriously. She takes her break up with Phil less so.

"You said--"

"It's been a long day," she says into his mouth, pushing him against the car. "How was New Mexico?"

"Productive."

"Good. I would really like you to fuck me."

"I can do that."

The two of you are working that day, wiping out a nest of neo-Nazis in Montana who have taken a disturbing number of steps towards building an atomic bomb, and she is in her tactical suit, and you arein your Captain America uniform.

She notices that you don't quite say -- for bringing Bucky back.

You don't ask whether she, too, has a killswitch inside her head.

Bruce's hands are knotted in Tony's hair as his cock slides between the dip in Tony's hip, building friction and there is a formula for this somewhere -- he can feel Tony writing it in his mouth with his tongue, drawin the equation over his back with his teeth, swallowing it when he comes, writing it all over again in the morning.

... sometimes he will help her up and hold her wrist a second too long and write her name with his finger. Sometimes he will brush a hair away from her face and they will share knives and hide out in the cold together because Budapest is going to be easy I swear he'd said.

I went to the morgue, you know, Alice says, sliding easily into a folding chair in their living room. It's such an arbitrary part of the process, considering. Nothing is as cut and dry as they like to make it, especially not death.

She pauses, sucks in a long, calculated breath.

You'd expect me to like it, wouldn't you? The science of the thing appealing to my... sensibilities? Oh, hardly. There's nothing appealing to me about dragging an empty sack across town, slicing it up, plumping it. Sewing the pieces back together like a prom dress.

There’s nothing to do but wait.

Except, then the WSC decides to phone in, and suddenly Nick’s having the kind of day where, briefly, he considers pointing a 9mm at a departing jet to be a sound decision.

Tony says, "I have a jet, Bruce. Where do you want to go?"

"Weren't you there the last time I was in something that flew?"

"It's fine, we'll be too busy having sex for anything bad to happen."

"Wait, what?" Bruce says.

Because Kenzi, Kenzi is with them, no arguments. Slipping one small, warm hand into Bo's and the other into Dyson's. Her eyes are so blue, bright against her black eyeliner and blacker hair. “Never fear. Awesome shield-sister is here,” she says. “And you guys are both going to so owe me, it isn't even funny. Especially if the whole demon lover experience turns out to be overrated.”

"What am I, a blushing virgin? Dudes have mouths and hands too, you know, it's not like it's a huge difference." Bo huffs in amusement, sending another burst of air over damp, sensitised skin; Kenzi makes a frustrated noise. "Come on, much longer and I'm gonna get blue ladyballs."

They don’t write rule books for bisexual threesome relationships where all the committed parties are trained government killers, so Phil isn’t sure if this situation counts as ‘ganging up’ or ‘democracy’. Since it’s how they settle almost all disputes he decides to give them the benefit of the doubt.

It's the third Thursday of the month, which means Delta Rotation — Jensen's third from the left, with Cougar curled into his back and Jolene's sweet, sweet ass nestled in his lap.

So basically, on a scale of one to oh-shit-yeah, Delta Rotation falls somewhere between beta-testing top-secret unreleased tech and getting blown while beta-testing top-secret unreleased tech. But Pooch kind of hates hanging out on the end, doing nothing but hugging Cougar's hot back, and Jensen usually ends up swapping places with somebody, so he suspects that Delta Rotation may go the way of the dinosaur.

Michael all but disappears under Steve's arms on the bike. But Steve leans with the turns and learns how to direct Michael that day, language mapped onto Michael's body with a simple touch to his shoulder or a squeeze to his thigh.

Alex puts a careful hand on Darwin's thigh-- he's man enough to admit it's more to keep himself steady than Darwin-- and looks down at his hand. His fingers are a little shiny, but Darwin's not... not dripping or anything, he's just smeared with a little bit of super-slippery stuff, something his body makes... something his body's adapting to make just for Alex, right now.

But they are. Or they have. They had all the tell tale signs of two people mucked up in a convoluted history that likely involved a lot of screaming, tears, desperate fucks against the wall – a bullet in the spine. And quiet. Carved out moments that were just theirs, those they could preserve only in memory, those they relied on to remind themselves when each forgot – oh, yes, it’s you.

Xavier and Magneto sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S- – Gina and Sean could have been their neighbors.

The eighth man's name is George. He is the same height as Erik, dark-haired, and he smells like pipe smoke. Charles bends him over the table in his apartment and kisses his way down his back, mouthing at each of the prominent knobs of his spine as he goes, until he reaches the generous curve of his ass and uses his hands to spread him open wide.

The ninth is named Nathan. He has a soft stutter and his hands are gentle in Charles's hair when Charles goes down on him, slow and deliberate and careful, bobbing his head upon his circumcised cock.

Havok: is that it?
Darwin: IDK sex happens at some point?
Havok: yes, please?
Darwin: What, now? I need to build the setting first.
Havok: w/e w/e SEX
Darwin: God.
Darwin: Hang on a minute.

Sample L48-9, 28 ml, obtained May 1 2001, with the label 'Li Sun Choo.'"

This is a very quiet dream, with a creamy taste that fills the back of Yusuf's throat and lingers there for hours. There are no complex notes, like in the dreams of a madwoman or in the dreams of someone dying, but there is a deepness there that Yusuf finds himself wanting time and time again. It is the dream of a woman who has been in a coma for twenty-three years. She has no higher brain function, and yet Yusuf was able to siphon this dream from her. It is the closest thing he has to the dreams of the dead.

Breathe, he tells you when he pulls out, and you do, heaving great gasps, mind going soft and hazy, the entire world condensed to his cock in your throat and his balls against your chin, the way his breath hitches. It’s not demanding, and it’s not fumbling, and sometimes you want sex just to be this simple; someone rocking his hips while his cock goes deeper into your throat until you’re full of it, and you realize with a start that you’re going to come.