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Some of you have found this already. (Good God! So this is what it's like to write in a currently popular fandom, even if not for the juggernaut pairing. I can only imagine how many people would read this by now if it was about Steve and Tony.) For those of you who haven't, I wrote a short story about Clint and Natasha (Hawkeye and Black Widow.)
Shortly after the end of the end of the movie, Nick Fury sends the two of them on a very easy mission, just to make sure everything's all right between them and Clint is fit for duty. The mission is a cakewalk. Some other things aren't. Rated PG; nothing more disturbing or explicit than is seen or implied in the movie. Cakewalk.
ETA: Oh, and if you've already read it, I have a theory about Natasha's greatest fear which was impossible to get into the story itself due to it being from Clint's POV. Ask if you're curious.
Shortly after the end of the end of the movie, Nick Fury sends the two of them on a very easy mission, just to make sure everything's all right between them and Clint is fit for duty. The mission is a cakewalk. Some other things aren't. Rated PG; nothing more disturbing or explicit than is seen or implied in the movie. Cakewalk.
ETA: Oh, and if you've already read it, I have a theory about Natasha's greatest fear which was impossible to get into the story itself due to it being from Clint's POV. Ask if you're curious.
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Love is for children
My imaginary canon that I couldn't get into the story is that when Clint was sent after her, without really being conscious of it, he gave her enough openings that she easily could have killed him. It was his equivalent of Selvig putting a kill switch into the doomsday thing - his subconscious trying to do the right thing. And Natasha noticed.
But she will never tell Clint, because she knows that no matter how much you trust someone, they can be brainwashed or tortured and betray you without ever intending to. The last thing she wants is for yet another sadistic supervillain to put her in a kill-or-be-killed situation with a friend. Also, if Clint knew that he nearly did make her worst fear come true, it would only make him feel guilty. Guiltier.
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Re: Love is for children
I like that!
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. . . especially because, dammit, I started a story of my own.
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dammit, I started a story of my own.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I look forward to reading it. Are you going to do the "Natasha gets kidnapped by brainwashed Clint" one?
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Not yet, anyway. DAMMIT BRAIN, STOP THAT.
It's a "deprogramming him required more than just a blow to the head" story -- since I feel like that's much too easy of an answer. But I'm still working on figuring out what it did require.
I like your answer over on DW, btw. I think what I'm going to run with, though, is the reverse of what you had in "Cakewalk:" that she fears watching somebody she loves be brainwashed. Since, after all, that's more or less what she's been through herself, so she understands the full horror of it.
Meant to add to the previous comment that this:
Good God! So this is what it's like to write in a currently popular fandom, even if not for the juggernaut pairing.
made me laugh and laugh. I had the same reaction, almost verbatim, when I posted "Broken by the Light" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/402832) and got two hundred hits in, like a day. For somebody who doesn't write much fanfic, and most of whose fanfic has been for itsy-bitsy Yuletide fandoms, that felt like a flood.
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AWESOME.
she fears watching somebody she loves be brainwashed. Since, after all, that's more or less what she's been through herself, so she understands the full horror of it.
Also good!
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That's pretty much the reverse of the situation with Hawkeye. (I assume, based on canon.) Or is it? What sort of residual effects were you thinking he'd have? I could probably figure out something based on that.
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What Hawkeye is experiencing might not be too different from veterans who have lengthy flashbacks where they do violent stuff because they actually believe that they're in a combat zone. [Note to observers: this is not common in real life! It's a worst-case phenomena.]
I've written a lot about flashbacks. Check my psychology: trauma, psychology: ptsd, and ptsd tags. Especially check the "PTSD User's Manual Part II." Coming out of that state is particularly awful. Also take a look at psychology: dissociative disorders.
For deprogramming, I think you'd want to look at PTSD treatments that specifically deal with flashbacks and dissociative states, and pick something that seems dramatically interesting.
If he was my client, the first thing I'd want to do would be to figure out what triggers his return to a brainwashed state. It's probably not random, there's probably more than one thing, and it's probably not all that obvious - sometimes they're more metaphoric than literal. (This is also in User's Manual Part 2). It could be an internal cue as well as an external one. (Like, some people have panic attacks if they exercise enough to make their heart rate rise.) Once you know what a trigger is, you can work with it.
At the same time, I'd want to get him to notice when he's about to revert, so he can do something to stop it. There's lots of options there. You can get people to imagine being in a safe place. You can have them orient themselves to reality by stuff like consciously noting physical features of their environment, pushing their feet into the floor, hanging on to something solid, etc. Some people use physical talismans, which might be something with personal meaning or just something they can hold on to.
Is that helpful?
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There's this bit where Loki asks Clint what the Tesseract showed him, and he says "My next target", so I think that Clint maybe got stuck in that mode, where nothing matters but the next target and how to hit it. And I think that getting back into that state the next time he tries to take someone out from a distance might trigger a return to that state, or, conversely, Clint might panic and knock himself out of sniper mode because it feels too similar to what he felt like with Loki. Both of which would massively interfere with his ability to do his job, of course.
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- Duo drowns in a jacuzzi after getting his braid sucked in, and then Heero wears it as a memorial belt.
- Duo gets raped by Deathscythe.
- Duo gets raped by a panther and gives birth to kittens.
One fic actually spawned my original PTSD posts by being so hilariously, over the top wrong about flashbacks. It was the one where Duo was sexually abused as a kid. One of the ones.
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- Oh fandom, you and your torture porn.
- Yeah, yeah, torture porn agai - WHAT.
That fandom must have been something. The Relena-bashing alone! When I watched the anime, I was expecting her to be kind of like, I don't know, a mix between early-seasons-of-Buffy Cordelia and Harmony - mean, catty, kind of crazy in the bad way. Imagine my surprise. It's not even that the fic exaggerated a canonically unpleasant personality - she's great! She's likable and sensible and competent! What the hell was that fandom on about?
It was the one where Duo was sexually abused as a kid.
Yeah, that narrows it down not at all. ;)
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The first chapter isn't badly written and has some good suspense and angst. On the strength of that, I got sucked into an increasingly ludicrous storyline in which there are all these ridiculous angsty flashbacks, Wu Fei gives Duo a fluffy stuffed dragon, all the pilots get magically transformed into toddlers and then back, and then they all retire and Duo takes up quilting and there's an earthquake and he gets impaled on a piece of rebar and that's where I gave up.
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Except for her *other* series, which has the most magnificently passive-agressive Duo imaginable - as I recall, in the first story he bathes in the river and scrounges worms or something for breakfast and gets given steaks to take home by kindly strangers because he's just that awesome, just so when he gets back and the others are all jesus, asshole, did you have to use all the hot water and eat all the food and spend all our money on steak, he can say: I ATE WORMS AND BATHED IN THE RIVER AND NOW WE CAN NEVER BE TRUE FRIENDS BECAUSE YOU HAVE MADE THESE TERRIBLE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ME.
It was, sadly, a great inspiration to many. But I do not remember the one about the kitten babies. Please do not link it.
... also, I loved your Avengers story and I am enjoying being in a jugganaut fandom *so much*. Every day I go to AO3 to look for fic, and every day *there is fic*.
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I will respect your wish to not be linked to the Duo/panther story. Here, have some quotes instead:
All at once there was a growl from nearby. One that Duo recognized. It was the panther that had been ramming him a short time ago.
[...]
At the window, they noticed that in one crib there was a small panther cub, curled up and sleeping soundly. In the next crib over, there was a baby girl with a pair of pretty black panther ears atop her head, and a long back panther tail continuing from the base of her tailbone. Her eyes were the same color as Duo's, but her pupils were slit, like those of a cat.
[...]
"Here we are." Shiva announced. She grinned at the sushi. "Thank Shinigami we live in Japan." she grinned. "It was so cool of you to move here after we were born."
"Where else would I get stuff like this to feed two half-cats without arousing suspicion?" Duo asked.
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Just for that, I will link you to the story where Asshole!Duo dumps Heero so he can marry Evil!Hilde, so Martyr!Heero goes off to have their Professor J-created baby in secret. BUT! Eeeevil!Hilde finds out, and CUTS HEAVILY PREGNANT HEERO OPEN to steal the baby and pass it off as her own!
AND THEN HEERO IS CRYOGENICALLY FROZEN FOR 16 YEARS.
Dun dun dun ...
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I really, really hope the author is twelve.
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PS
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Re: PS
Ok, now I feel guilty. In penance, here is a recent gundam wing story I actually liked.
"As the day wound down to a close and Quatre leaned in to kiss Relena's cheek before they parted ways, Relena had one more piece of advice for him. "If he ever hurts you," she said, holding onto Quatre's forearm and looking deep into his eyes, "just punch him right in the balls."
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