ever dissever my soul
rating: pg
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff
warnings: injuries, past major character death
author's note: This was meant to be part of a longer piece and never quite got that far, but I feel it stands alone well enough as it is. So here you go! The title and bracketing text are from Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe.
summary: You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. - C.S. Lewis. (He constructs the truth of her, when the rendering algorithms fail to find the heart of Natasha Romanoff, from the history written in her skin.)
ever dissever my soul
The cut on her finger from slicing apples, how it bled as red as the curling peels and she laughed, leaving the knife on the cutting board to take his hand and dance on the tacky white linoleum kitchen.
The curve of her shoulder, smooth lines over her twice-broken collarbone and the weeks of careful movement and repressed frustration, the sprawled bodies of three gutted attackers and the quickness of her breath when he finally made it to her, cradling her arm in one hand and a serrated knife in the other.
These little scars, these past reminders of what they have done – sworn and vowed to do, chosen to do, carried out without remorse or guilt because it's a job (don't think of the nights spent sweating under the blanket, the writhing guilt that would consume you if you let it) – these make them what they are… but not who.
Perhaps that's what the computer doesn't understand, can't calculate for; that in the data of their actions there is no piece that will extrapolate out to understand their souls, to provide for their reasoning and their flaws. The woman they are rebuilding from molecules and memory is strong and fast and deadly, and he has kissed her blistered fingertips under alien skies, heard her laughter in the florescent-lit hangar bays, and loved her without restraint from the moment she wiped the blood from his face with a smile. If the body they are crafting layer by cell layer is flawless, is empty of this history, he knows it won't be long until she begins to write it down again.
He'll make sure her body, when the reconstruction units are done recreating it, has room for her soul.
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee