[fic] Dating (S)Kills, Felicity Tell, Destinations and Lies, Coconuts Don't Make Water
Title: Dating (S)Kills
Fandom: The Avengers, Captain Marvel
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Pairings: Carol Danvers/Jessica Drew
Characters: Carol Danvers, Jessica Drew
Word Count: 544
Summary: Carol, Jess, fake dating. It goes about as well as you expect.
Author’s Notes: prompt from my friend Kari
“Put your arm around me or something.”
Carol squinted. “What?”
“This looks awkward and we’re supposed to look like we’re on a date. So put your arm around me, Danvers.”
“Nothing looks more awkward than you talking out of the side of your mouth, Drew.”
They were on the boardwalk, which admittedly wasn’t a place Carol had expected to visit when she’d woken up that morning, but the first truth one faced as an Avenger was that one could end up anywhere. Perhaps Rae Fitchel was small potatoes for the Avengers to handle, but one more villain off the street was a good idea in Carol’s opinion.
Which was why she and Jessica were on a date, in a manner of speaking. The picturesque little restaurant that they’d needed to infiltrate to spy on Fitchel hadn’t struck either of them as a place where girlfriends could go get a sociable, platonic drink. So some fast-talking on Jessica’s part had happened, followed by some steely-eyed glares on Carol’s, and then the date had truly begun.
Two hours later, some things were very obvious to Carol: of the two of them, one of them was very, very bad at dating. Or maybe both of them were.
“Would you just put your arm around me already?”
“You weren’t this pushy before we started dating,” Carol said, smirking at her best friend as she dropped an arm across Jess’s shoulders. “It feels weird to be doing this without one of us being injured.”
“Are we supposed to talk about injuries on a date?”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“You go on more dates than I do.”
Carol gave her friend a look. “When do I have time to do that?”
“I figure you can actually fly, that gives you a lot of spare time.” Jessica paused, tilted her head. “Though, of the two of us, you’re one cat closer to being the crazy cat lady, so maybe I should revise that opinion.”
“You’re mean,” Carol said. “I don’t think I want to date you anymore.”
Jessica went tense all over. “Well, you’re in luck because I think we just got made.”
Carol turned her head to look. Sure enough, Rae Fitchel was racing down the boardwalk, shouldering aside innocent bystanders in her hurry to get away. “Date’s over,” she said.
“Thank god,” Jessica replied. They exchanged one look, and then took off running after Fitchel. Not wanting to fly yet, Carol kept to the ground-or she did until Fitchel pulled a gun. Carol solved that problem by cold-clocking her before she could cause any problems.
Jessica grinned and didn’t bother to catch the body. “That was kind of fun,” she said, leaning down to cable-tie the woman’s wrists together. “Wanna go on a real date sometime?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Is it going to be more fun than our fake date?”
Jessica gave her a mournful look. “Your doubt hurts me, deep inside.”
“Just call it in,” Carol said, “so I don’t have to fly this idiot in myself. I’m going to do a fly-over, see if there are any others here.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder and took off.
“I notice that wasn’t a no,” Jessica called, and Carol laughed as she flew off.
Title: Felicity Tell
Fandom: Arrow, The Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Warnings: Drunkenness, some violence
Pairings: Felicity Smoak/Oliver Queen, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Characters: Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 1204
Summary: Felicity comes into Verdant one night to find two surprises waiting for her...and they’re both drunk.
Author’s Notes: This is a sequel to my fic Bad Altitude. Well, really, it's the third in a series. The second part has yet to be written.
Felicity wasn’t sure what to find when she walked into Verdant, but it certainly wasn’t Oliver Queen holding a blowtorch in one hand and his bow in the other. The weirdest part, though, was that he wasn’t Hooded up: he was wearing jeans and an SCU sweatshirt worn soft with age, and his feet were bare.
Which was a little gross to Felicity, given what sorts of things went on in Verdant, but she wasn’t going to judge-much. Besides, the much-shorter man (with the amazing biceps) standing next to Oliver was barefoot, too. He was not holding a blowtorch, but he did have a bow. Oliver’s was old-school and lovingly carved; Clint Barton’s was the height of technology, with a scope and a sight that Felicity had no idea how it worked.
“Uh,” she said, looking at the two of them.
Oliver put the blowtorch down. “Felicity! You made it! No, stay there, and catch.”
Reflexes from training with John were the only reason she caught the apple. “Worried about me not getting enough vitamins?” she asked, slowly. “Because as sweet as that is, they make these great vitamin gummies that are much more efficient about it.”
“No, no, no, we’re doing the William Tell part of the competition and we need a volunteer.”
“Natasha threatened to break our scapulas if we asked her,” Clint said helpfully.
“William Tell?” It took her a couple of seconds to place the reference and then Felicity’s eyes widened. “Uh-uh, not happening, no way, no how. I am not going to be placing an arrow on my head for you to show off to your archer buddy, Oliver-I really need to learn your middle name, I’m just realizing that-Queen.”
For good measure, she dropped the apple in her purse as she approached them.
Oliver actually pouted. “I’m not showing off.”
“He’s not,” Clint agreed. “His aim’s too far off.”
“I’m not the one who hit the eight hundred dollar bottle of vodka earlier.”
“I meant to hit that bottle. It’s just plain wrong for alcohol to be that expensive. Unnatural.”
Oliver scowled at Clint for a second before focusing on Felicity again, which made her narrow her eyes. She hadn’t seen that look on his face in quite some time. “You don’t trust me,” he said, frowning at her.
“Maybe I just don’t want apple in my hair.”
“At least she didn’t threaten to break your scapula,” Clint said. “That’s love, right there.”
Felicity didn’t bother to blush. Ever since he’d picked them up on Purgatory, Clint Barton had been taking little digs at the pair of them and their not-quite-sure-about-status relationship. She liked the archer, for the most part, but she really didn’t like his penchant for bringing awkward things up in conversation when she was perfectly good at doing that all on her own.
And then it hit her what the blowtorch had been for. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
Oliver only broke out the flaming shots when he was really and truly wasted, after all.
“No,” Oliver said, as Clint said, “Yes.”
The taller archer gave his friend a betrayed look.
“Look, I wasn’t gonna lie to her. Natasha’s due back any second and she’ll rat us out like the heartless commie bastard she can be.”
“I heard that, Barton,” Natasha Romanoff said. She came in from the back room, where she’d no doubt been using the Foundry. Clint grinned and blew her a kiss, which made her roll her eyes. “Good evening, Felicity. I needed to borrow your computers.”
“Yeah, sure, that’s fine,” Felicity said distractedly. She looked at Oliver. “How drunk are you?”
“Drunk enough that his aim’s off,” Clint said.
“Is not.”
“Is-”
Oliver grabbed the apple out of Felicity’s purse, tossed it high, and pinned it neatly to the ceiling with an arrow. “You were saying?”
“Gosh, that’s going to be really fun to explain to the cleaning staff,” Felicity said.
Clint, however, squinted at the arrow in the ceiling. “Did you actually mean to hit that spot?” he asked, his tone conversational.
“Yes, why?”
“Because you’re probably going to want to call-” As if on cue, a shower of sparks exploded of the ceiling around the arrow, making Felicity yelp and dive for cover. The two archers just watched it in bemusement. “-an electrician. Huh.”
The lights flickered once, something groaned, and the bar went black for twenty seconds before the back-up generator kicked in.
“You didn’t think to put a stop to this?” Felicity asked Natasha.
“Oh, I did, but they seemed determined to drink and there wasn’t anybody here they could actually shoot until you came, so I figured it was okay.” Natasha followed her into the back room, where the breaker box for the club was stored. Felicity had a feeling that her night was going to involve finding a very tall ladder and seeing if there was a way to fix the damage Oliver had done on the ceiling, but maybe it could be fixed by just flipping a switch. “Clint needed to unwind, and I think, so did your archer.”
Felicity could admit that he had. Ever since they’d gotten him back from the island again-well, SHIELD and the island, truthfully-things hadn’t managed to normalize quite back to the place they were before everything had gone to hell. But they were getting there. Slowly. Very slowly.
Too slowly for John, actually, who’d given Felicity a disgusted look and had stomped out of the Foundry the night before, muttering that the two of them just needed to get over it or bang or something already-not that Felicity was repeating that to Oliver any time soon.
“I like that unwinding means sharp objects and blowtorches,” she said. “I mean, sharp objects other than their abs and biceps because holy crap and-oh, crap, I was not ogling your man, I swear.”
Natasha made a noise that, coming from anybody else, would have been a snort.
“Oliver has nice arms, too,” Felicity said, which was more than pointing out the obvious, she felt. Oliver had nice everything. “So I was really talking about both of them, even though I’ve never actually seen Clint’s abs. I imagine they’re pretty nice, though.”
“They are adequate,” Natasha said. Felicity gave her such a droll look that the redhead laughed and conceded the point with a nod of the head. “Need any help with that?”
“No, it’s electrical, it’s fine.” Felicity cracked open the breaker box and got to work. “Kind of my milieu. What brings you to town?”
“It’ll keep.”
“Until?”
“Until we sober up.”
Felicity flicked turned off the power to the problematic grid and the rest of the lights sprang to life. “But we’re not drunk,” she said.
“Yet.” Apparently satisfied that the problem was fixed-it wasn’t-Natasha hooked an arm around Felicity’s neck. “Come, Flicka, we have much to catch up on. Hopefully Barton didn’t break all of that eight hundred dollar vodka, I’ve been wanting to try some of that.”
“Eep,” Felicity said, and let herself be pulled along.
Title: Destinations and Lies
Fandom: The Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Warnings: References to violence
Pairings: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 596
Summary: Clint Barton picks up a hitchhiker.
Author’s Notes: This was a prompt from _samalander.
The redhead was the most interesting thing Nebraska had ever produced, in Clint Barton’s opinion. When he swung his old Ford over to the side of the road, where she’d been walking with her thumb out in a lazy, unhurried way, she didn’t startle or do anything but give him an unimpressed once-over.
It made Clint like her right away.
“I can take you as far as Lincoln,” he said, and she nodded as though she’d expected nothing less.
She climbed into the passenger seat and he offered her a hand. “Clint,” he said.
“Nadia.”
“What brings you to these parts, Nadia?”
She moved a shoulder. It felt like an entire speech.
“Guess that’s off-limits. You pick the music.”
“I prefer the quiet.”
“That a hint?”
“Not a very good one, apparently.”
Because she seemed amused rather than scornful, Clint grinned and swung back onto the highway. He had no idea where he was going, really. He’d left Carson’s Traveling Circus behind two weeks before and had spent the time in between going from town to town, looking for work. He had an old, battered bow in the trunk, sixty bucks in his pocket, and no idea what to do next (well, he had some ideas, and most of them involved not repeating the incident in Topeka where he’d nearly gotten his eye blacked by truckers with ’roid-rage. As it was, he was lucky that his ribs only felt partially on fire today).
“So what do you do, Nadia?” he asked after ten miles of the quiet Nadia preferred.
She looked at him blankly. “I kill people.”
Even though he figured it was a joke, a frisson of something traveled up and down his spine. He forced a laugh. “That makes me feel real confident about picking you up on the side of the road, I gotta tell you.”
“I only kill people that I have been paid to kill. Nobody has paid me to kill you.”
“Aw, c’mon. Not even a face this charming?” Clint asked, gesturing toward his face.
She smiled back. “Being charming is supposed to have an opposite effect than making people want to kill you.”
“While you may have a point, I pride myself in being different.”
“And irreverent,” Nadia said.
“And when you’re not killing people, what do you do?”
“Sometimes I dance.” Nadia shrugged once more. “What about you?”
He thought of the bow, and the circus he’d left behind, and his entire life stretching out in front of him. He was eighteen and from everything he’d seen on TV, you were supposed to have the world at eighteen. All he had was a busted up Ford and some bruised ribs. “I dunno,” he said. “Haven’t decided.”
“Let me know when you decide.”
“Does that mean you’re staying on past Lincoln?”
“No, but maybe our paths will cross again. I travel a lot.”
“To kill people.”
“You have to go where the people are,” Nadia said, sounding entirely sensible about the whole thing. It made Clint laugh again, and change the subject to music, though Nadia remained as quiet about that as she did about baseball and anything else he brought up. Even so, he enjoyed himself in that stretch between the border of Nebraska and Lincoln. He didn’t mean to drop her off at a Mobil station, but he turned his back and then she was gone, vanished like she’d never been there at all.
Their paths crossed twelve years later, and he realized that the only lie she’d given him on that road trip was her name.
Title: Coconuts Don’t Make Water
Fandom: Orphan Black, New Girl
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some language
Pairings: Nick Miller/Jess Day
Characters: Sarah Manning, Alison Hendrix, Jess Day, Nick Miller, Unnamed Clone
Word Count: 417
Summary: Alison and Sarah drink at Nick Miller’s bar. Well, Alison drinks. Sarah chaperones.
Author’s Notes: A prompt from the awesome sabra-n!
“So do you guys have, like, twin telepathy or something?” the woman with the glasses and the fringe asks, and Sarah wants to hate her, but she looks genuinely fascinated.
Alison snorts. Sarah maybe thinks letting her have that fourth glass was a bad idea, no matter how much easier Alison is to be around when she’s drunk-sometimes. “Telepathy?” she asks, and she only slurs a little. “With her?”
“Oi, sitting right here,” Sarah says, and forgets she’s not supposed to be British if she’s twins with Alison.
The woman blinks at the two of them, but before she can evidently comment on Sarah’s slip, the bartender-who has been flirting with Fringey McGlasses all night, and there’s definitely some heat there-comes back. “Just to be clear, you said twins, right?” he asks.
“Who’s asking?” Alison asks, looking like she’s going to put her dukes up.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I could’ve sworn you said twins, but maybe you said triplets and I’m probably drunk.” The bartender pauses. “I’m drunk a lot. Don’t judge, it’s not like you need a lot of sobriety to handle this bar. We only have two types of beer on tap, and I broke the one for the light beer, so…”
Sarah feels every sense go on alert. They left Cosima in San Francisco. But maybe the bartender is seeing triple. Or maybe not. She scans the bar, wondering if Cosima has come down to Los Angeles and has made the mistake of coming to find them in public. Twins are a weird enough occurrence. Triplets are a little harder to pull off.
People remember triplets.
“Wait, I had a light beer earlier,” Alison says, frowning like that’s actually her biggest problem and not the chance of them being blown. “Are you saying that I drank all of those calories?”
“You really shouldn’t lie to customers like that, Nick,” Glasses says. “Some people might be on diets or they might just really like light beer.”
The bartender snorts. “Who likes light beer?”
“Schmidt.”
“Doesn’t count, he drinks coconut water."
"So?"
"So coconuts don’t make water, Jessica, and that makes him a freak of nature.”
“Join the club,” Alison slurs, and Sarah spots her.
Oh, shit, it’s not Cosima.
Maybe Alison’s more finely tuned to Sarah’s emotional state than Sarah previously gave her credit for or maybe she just feels Sarah tense up because she sits up and looks toward the door of the bar. “Oh, good Christ,” she says, “it’s another one.”
“Another what?” Glasses asks.
Sarah decides maybe it’s time to pay Alison’s tab-preferably before the clone of herself standing by the door and wearing the Save Ferris T-shirt and purple hair spots either of them and they have some very awkward explaining to do in front of Nick the Bartender and his companion, Glasses McFringe.
Fandom: The Avengers, Captain Marvel
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Pairings: Carol Danvers/Jessica Drew
Characters: Carol Danvers, Jessica Drew
Word Count: 544
Summary: Carol, Jess, fake dating. It goes about as well as you expect.
Author’s Notes: prompt from my friend Kari
“Put your arm around me or something.”
Carol squinted. “What?”
“This looks awkward and we’re supposed to look like we’re on a date. So put your arm around me, Danvers.”
“Nothing looks more awkward than you talking out of the side of your mouth, Drew.”
They were on the boardwalk, which admittedly wasn’t a place Carol had expected to visit when she’d woken up that morning, but the first truth one faced as an Avenger was that one could end up anywhere. Perhaps Rae Fitchel was small potatoes for the Avengers to handle, but one more villain off the street was a good idea in Carol’s opinion.
Which was why she and Jessica were on a date, in a manner of speaking. The picturesque little restaurant that they’d needed to infiltrate to spy on Fitchel hadn’t struck either of them as a place where girlfriends could go get a sociable, platonic drink. So some fast-talking on Jessica’s part had happened, followed by some steely-eyed glares on Carol’s, and then the date had truly begun.
Two hours later, some things were very obvious to Carol: of the two of them, one of them was very, very bad at dating. Or maybe both of them were.
“Would you just put your arm around me already?”
“You weren’t this pushy before we started dating,” Carol said, smirking at her best friend as she dropped an arm across Jess’s shoulders. “It feels weird to be doing this without one of us being injured.”
“Are we supposed to talk about injuries on a date?”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“You go on more dates than I do.”
Carol gave her friend a look. “When do I have time to do that?”
“I figure you can actually fly, that gives you a lot of spare time.” Jessica paused, tilted her head. “Though, of the two of us, you’re one cat closer to being the crazy cat lady, so maybe I should revise that opinion.”
“You’re mean,” Carol said. “I don’t think I want to date you anymore.”
Jessica went tense all over. “Well, you’re in luck because I think we just got made.”
Carol turned her head to look. Sure enough, Rae Fitchel was racing down the boardwalk, shouldering aside innocent bystanders in her hurry to get away. “Date’s over,” she said.
“Thank god,” Jessica replied. They exchanged one look, and then took off running after Fitchel. Not wanting to fly yet, Carol kept to the ground-or she did until Fitchel pulled a gun. Carol solved that problem by cold-clocking her before she could cause any problems.
Jessica grinned and didn’t bother to catch the body. “That was kind of fun,” she said, leaning down to cable-tie the woman’s wrists together. “Wanna go on a real date sometime?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Is it going to be more fun than our fake date?”
Jessica gave her a mournful look. “Your doubt hurts me, deep inside.”
“Just call it in,” Carol said, “so I don’t have to fly this idiot in myself. I’m going to do a fly-over, see if there are any others here.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder and took off.
“I notice that wasn’t a no,” Jessica called, and Carol laughed as she flew off.
Title: Felicity Tell
Fandom: Arrow, The Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Warnings: Drunkenness, some violence
Pairings: Felicity Smoak/Oliver Queen, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Characters: Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 1204
Summary: Felicity comes into Verdant one night to find two surprises waiting for her...and they’re both drunk.
Author’s Notes: This is a sequel to my fic Bad Altitude. Well, really, it's the third in a series. The second part has yet to be written.
Felicity wasn’t sure what to find when she walked into Verdant, but it certainly wasn’t Oliver Queen holding a blowtorch in one hand and his bow in the other. The weirdest part, though, was that he wasn’t Hooded up: he was wearing jeans and an SCU sweatshirt worn soft with age, and his feet were bare.
Which was a little gross to Felicity, given what sorts of things went on in Verdant, but she wasn’t going to judge-much. Besides, the much-shorter man (with the amazing biceps) standing next to Oliver was barefoot, too. He was not holding a blowtorch, but he did have a bow. Oliver’s was old-school and lovingly carved; Clint Barton’s was the height of technology, with a scope and a sight that Felicity had no idea how it worked.
“Uh,” she said, looking at the two of them.
Oliver put the blowtorch down. “Felicity! You made it! No, stay there, and catch.”
Reflexes from training with John were the only reason she caught the apple. “Worried about me not getting enough vitamins?” she asked, slowly. “Because as sweet as that is, they make these great vitamin gummies that are much more efficient about it.”
“No, no, no, we’re doing the William Tell part of the competition and we need a volunteer.”
“Natasha threatened to break our scapulas if we asked her,” Clint said helpfully.
“William Tell?” It took her a couple of seconds to place the reference and then Felicity’s eyes widened. “Uh-uh, not happening, no way, no how. I am not going to be placing an arrow on my head for you to show off to your archer buddy, Oliver-I really need to learn your middle name, I’m just realizing that-Queen.”
For good measure, she dropped the apple in her purse as she approached them.
Oliver actually pouted. “I’m not showing off.”
“He’s not,” Clint agreed. “His aim’s too far off.”
“I’m not the one who hit the eight hundred dollar bottle of vodka earlier.”
“I meant to hit that bottle. It’s just plain wrong for alcohol to be that expensive. Unnatural.”
Oliver scowled at Clint for a second before focusing on Felicity again, which made her narrow her eyes. She hadn’t seen that look on his face in quite some time. “You don’t trust me,” he said, frowning at her.
“Maybe I just don’t want apple in my hair.”
“At least she didn’t threaten to break your scapula,” Clint said. “That’s love, right there.”
Felicity didn’t bother to blush. Ever since he’d picked them up on Purgatory, Clint Barton had been taking little digs at the pair of them and their not-quite-sure-about-status relationship. She liked the archer, for the most part, but she really didn’t like his penchant for bringing awkward things up in conversation when she was perfectly good at doing that all on her own.
And then it hit her what the blowtorch had been for. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
Oliver only broke out the flaming shots when he was really and truly wasted, after all.
“No,” Oliver said, as Clint said, “Yes.”
The taller archer gave his friend a betrayed look.
“Look, I wasn’t gonna lie to her. Natasha’s due back any second and she’ll rat us out like the heartless commie bastard she can be.”
“I heard that, Barton,” Natasha Romanoff said. She came in from the back room, where she’d no doubt been using the Foundry. Clint grinned and blew her a kiss, which made her roll her eyes. “Good evening, Felicity. I needed to borrow your computers.”
“Yeah, sure, that’s fine,” Felicity said distractedly. She looked at Oliver. “How drunk are you?”
“Drunk enough that his aim’s off,” Clint said.
“Is not.”
“Is-”
Oliver grabbed the apple out of Felicity’s purse, tossed it high, and pinned it neatly to the ceiling with an arrow. “You were saying?”
“Gosh, that’s going to be really fun to explain to the cleaning staff,” Felicity said.
Clint, however, squinted at the arrow in the ceiling. “Did you actually mean to hit that spot?” he asked, his tone conversational.
“Yes, why?”
“Because you’re probably going to want to call-” As if on cue, a shower of sparks exploded of the ceiling around the arrow, making Felicity yelp and dive for cover. The two archers just watched it in bemusement. “-an electrician. Huh.”
The lights flickered once, something groaned, and the bar went black for twenty seconds before the back-up generator kicked in.
“You didn’t think to put a stop to this?” Felicity asked Natasha.
“Oh, I did, but they seemed determined to drink and there wasn’t anybody here they could actually shoot until you came, so I figured it was okay.” Natasha followed her into the back room, where the breaker box for the club was stored. Felicity had a feeling that her night was going to involve finding a very tall ladder and seeing if there was a way to fix the damage Oliver had done on the ceiling, but maybe it could be fixed by just flipping a switch. “Clint needed to unwind, and I think, so did your archer.”
Felicity could admit that he had. Ever since they’d gotten him back from the island again-well, SHIELD and the island, truthfully-things hadn’t managed to normalize quite back to the place they were before everything had gone to hell. But they were getting there. Slowly. Very slowly.
Too slowly for John, actually, who’d given Felicity a disgusted look and had stomped out of the Foundry the night before, muttering that the two of them just needed to get over it or bang or something already-not that Felicity was repeating that to Oliver any time soon.
“I like that unwinding means sharp objects and blowtorches,” she said. “I mean, sharp objects other than their abs and biceps because holy crap and-oh, crap, I was not ogling your man, I swear.”
Natasha made a noise that, coming from anybody else, would have been a snort.
“Oliver has nice arms, too,” Felicity said, which was more than pointing out the obvious, she felt. Oliver had nice everything. “So I was really talking about both of them, even though I’ve never actually seen Clint’s abs. I imagine they’re pretty nice, though.”
“They are adequate,” Natasha said. Felicity gave her such a droll look that the redhead laughed and conceded the point with a nod of the head. “Need any help with that?”
“No, it’s electrical, it’s fine.” Felicity cracked open the breaker box and got to work. “Kind of my milieu. What brings you to town?”
“It’ll keep.”
“Until?”
“Until we sober up.”
Felicity flicked turned off the power to the problematic grid and the rest of the lights sprang to life. “But we’re not drunk,” she said.
“Yet.” Apparently satisfied that the problem was fixed-it wasn’t-Natasha hooked an arm around Felicity’s neck. “Come, Flicka, we have much to catch up on. Hopefully Barton didn’t break all of that eight hundred dollar vodka, I’ve been wanting to try some of that.”
“Eep,” Felicity said, and let herself be pulled along.
Title: Destinations and Lies
Fandom: The Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Warnings: References to violence
Pairings: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
Characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff
Word Count: 596
Summary: Clint Barton picks up a hitchhiker.
Author’s Notes: This was a prompt from _samalander.
The redhead was the most interesting thing Nebraska had ever produced, in Clint Barton’s opinion. When he swung his old Ford over to the side of the road, where she’d been walking with her thumb out in a lazy, unhurried way, she didn’t startle or do anything but give him an unimpressed once-over.
It made Clint like her right away.
“I can take you as far as Lincoln,” he said, and she nodded as though she’d expected nothing less.
She climbed into the passenger seat and he offered her a hand. “Clint,” he said.
“Nadia.”
“What brings you to these parts, Nadia?”
She moved a shoulder. It felt like an entire speech.
“Guess that’s off-limits. You pick the music.”
“I prefer the quiet.”
“That a hint?”
“Not a very good one, apparently.”
Because she seemed amused rather than scornful, Clint grinned and swung back onto the highway. He had no idea where he was going, really. He’d left Carson’s Traveling Circus behind two weeks before and had spent the time in between going from town to town, looking for work. He had an old, battered bow in the trunk, sixty bucks in his pocket, and no idea what to do next (well, he had some ideas, and most of them involved not repeating the incident in Topeka where he’d nearly gotten his eye blacked by truckers with ’roid-rage. As it was, he was lucky that his ribs only felt partially on fire today).
“So what do you do, Nadia?” he asked after ten miles of the quiet Nadia preferred.
She looked at him blankly. “I kill people.”
Even though he figured it was a joke, a frisson of something traveled up and down his spine. He forced a laugh. “That makes me feel real confident about picking you up on the side of the road, I gotta tell you.”
“I only kill people that I have been paid to kill. Nobody has paid me to kill you.”
“Aw, c’mon. Not even a face this charming?” Clint asked, gesturing toward his face.
She smiled back. “Being charming is supposed to have an opposite effect than making people want to kill you.”
“While you may have a point, I pride myself in being different.”
“And irreverent,” Nadia said.
“And when you’re not killing people, what do you do?”
“Sometimes I dance.” Nadia shrugged once more. “What about you?”
He thought of the bow, and the circus he’d left behind, and his entire life stretching out in front of him. He was eighteen and from everything he’d seen on TV, you were supposed to have the world at eighteen. All he had was a busted up Ford and some bruised ribs. “I dunno,” he said. “Haven’t decided.”
“Let me know when you decide.”
“Does that mean you’re staying on past Lincoln?”
“No, but maybe our paths will cross again. I travel a lot.”
“To kill people.”
“You have to go where the people are,” Nadia said, sounding entirely sensible about the whole thing. It made Clint laugh again, and change the subject to music, though Nadia remained as quiet about that as she did about baseball and anything else he brought up. Even so, he enjoyed himself in that stretch between the border of Nebraska and Lincoln. He didn’t mean to drop her off at a Mobil station, but he turned his back and then she was gone, vanished like she’d never been there at all.
Their paths crossed twelve years later, and he realized that the only lie she’d given him on that road trip was her name.
Title: Coconuts Don’t Make Water
Fandom: Orphan Black, New Girl
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some language
Pairings: Nick Miller/Jess Day
Characters: Sarah Manning, Alison Hendrix, Jess Day, Nick Miller, Unnamed Clone
Word Count: 417
Summary: Alison and Sarah drink at Nick Miller’s bar. Well, Alison drinks. Sarah chaperones.
Author’s Notes: A prompt from the awesome sabra-n!
“So do you guys have, like, twin telepathy or something?” the woman with the glasses and the fringe asks, and Sarah wants to hate her, but she looks genuinely fascinated.
Alison snorts. Sarah maybe thinks letting her have that fourth glass was a bad idea, no matter how much easier Alison is to be around when she’s drunk-sometimes. “Telepathy?” she asks, and she only slurs a little. “With her?”
“Oi, sitting right here,” Sarah says, and forgets she’s not supposed to be British if she’s twins with Alison.
The woman blinks at the two of them, but before she can evidently comment on Sarah’s slip, the bartender-who has been flirting with Fringey McGlasses all night, and there’s definitely some heat there-comes back. “Just to be clear, you said twins, right?” he asks.
“Who’s asking?” Alison asks, looking like she’s going to put her dukes up.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I could’ve sworn you said twins, but maybe you said triplets and I’m probably drunk.” The bartender pauses. “I’m drunk a lot. Don’t judge, it’s not like you need a lot of sobriety to handle this bar. We only have two types of beer on tap, and I broke the one for the light beer, so…”
Sarah feels every sense go on alert. They left Cosima in San Francisco. But maybe the bartender is seeing triple. Or maybe not. She scans the bar, wondering if Cosima has come down to Los Angeles and has made the mistake of coming to find them in public. Twins are a weird enough occurrence. Triplets are a little harder to pull off.
People remember triplets.
“Wait, I had a light beer earlier,” Alison says, frowning like that’s actually her biggest problem and not the chance of them being blown. “Are you saying that I drank all of those calories?”
“You really shouldn’t lie to customers like that, Nick,” Glasses says. “Some people might be on diets or they might just really like light beer.”
The bartender snorts. “Who likes light beer?”
“Schmidt.”
“Doesn’t count, he drinks coconut water."
"So?"
"So coconuts don’t make water, Jessica, and that makes him a freak of nature.”
“Join the club,” Alison slurs, and Sarah spots her.
Oh, shit, it’s not Cosima.
Maybe Alison’s more finely tuned to Sarah’s emotional state than Sarah previously gave her credit for or maybe she just feels Sarah tense up because she sits up and looks toward the door of the bar. “Oh, good Christ,” she says, “it’s another one.”
“Another what?” Glasses asks.
Sarah decides maybe it’s time to pay Alison’s tab-preferably before the clone of herself standing by the door and wearing the Save Ferris T-shirt and purple hair spots either of them and they have some very awkward explaining to do in front of Nick the Bartender and his companion, Glasses McFringe.