WHAT IF...: Marvel OC One Shots

| Midnight |

A one shot featuring Matias Barton, also known as Hawk, and the son and 2/2 of the twins of Clint Barton and Natasha Romanova.

Credit for his character and portrayal goes to Viv!

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       There would always be steel to uphold spines of bone, just as there would always be a weight that caused the steel to have to be there. In between what crushed and that stubborn steel, that fine-honed blade, that wraith that bared her teeth with an armor of blood before devils, there was a breath. A stilled and suspended breath of space where wails met poison, where pain met fury, where fear met its definite end, and endurance was birthed. Where steel walls were built over the ruins that laid where lines were pushed and crossed and broken. Endurance-- rather, will and its hunger and the ire that kept it fed were what made her. What birthed her, honed her, sharpened and aimed her.

       There were many things that Anastasia Baitscheva had learned to bare in all of her lives. Weights that would've crushed lesser men, weights that she balanced as gracefully as when she forced to dance until she bled and others crumbled beside her, oceans of darkness and blood where she was dropped in with sharks looking to feast. That endurance, that will, that hunger, the ability and curse to be worse than they had ever expected their creation to be, it taught her to swim with the thrashing currents— to fight, to kill, and so she fought and she killed and she killed, and she killed, until she became the vicious creature in search for blood; the blade that was always drawn first, the shield that never broke, the soldier that remained standing, breathing and bleeding when the current died down.

       It was her greatest pride, her darkest shame taking root in the necessity of it, the way it had become a game, easy as the one of steel queens, glass kings, and wooden pawns. The accolades and whispers to her name were one of her greatest feats, one of her strongest weapons. They were the very chains around her neck, the cuffs around her wrists. But in such carnage, in such darkness, in such trapped breath between what she knew and what she was, there was a willingness to bask in it that burned her veins cold, that kept her memories on a nightly, torturous loop, in some form of punishment, some form of comfort. There was nothing more twisted than that willful-- coerced, it was always coerced-- sense of belonging. Among killers, among Black Widows and the Red Room, Anastasia was constantly face to face with her shards of her reflection, every bit of it just as dark as the next.

       Until she wasn't. Until she left her reflection behind, though her demons still chased and beckoned her back. Until what she was became who she was. Until out was a real world, tangible in the fresh wind, in the dew-filled breeze atop an Iowa hill, tangible beneath her fingers like the touch of her lover.

       Belonging was a rough and rusted container that kept her prisoner. It was unshed tears, a trapped breath held in by terror, by consequences no child should have ever known. But belonging had changed when she left. It was a stranger first, leaving her a phantom among the living, and then it became a tentative friend. And then, belonging became something else.

       It wasn't what she was made for, belonging. Blending in with ease, and truly belonging were two very different things. Even if she was not made to belong, even if every cell in her body had been manufactured, manipulated, and torn apart again and again and again to ensure she never would, it came surprisingly easy, terrifyingly welcome, that fucking traitorous feeling of belonging, when she was with him— the lover that beckoned her home.

       There was no shame in belonging with Matias Barton. No cost, no game on a tilted board, it was... unbelievably easy, so much so she was nearly convinced that she had been made to belong somewhere. If not anywhere in the world of the living, she belonged in the shadows with him. In his shadows, she could breathe. Endurance was not needed, poisons and ploys they were both familiar with were of no use between them. There was no room for it anyways, among soothing caresses, calloused hands, shared secrets, and lingering lips, there was no room for what painted both their lives in shadows.