Avengers fic: Cakewalk

[rachelmanija]

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.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No, not that one.

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's a "deprogramming him required more than just a blow to the head" story

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!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I would, for the record, be grateful for any educated suggestions as to what the deprogramming might require. :-) I know what happened to Hawkeye isn't within the realm of real psychology, but I'd like the cure to have a plausible ring, and barely even know where to start.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. The only real "de-programming" that I know of is done to people with Stockholm Syndrome or who have joined cults. But I don't think that's what you want, because the point of that is that the people themselves consciously believe their programming, and you're trying to get them to consciously reject it.

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Because I like to stick to canon where I can, I'm saying that a) the blow to the head jarred something loose, such that Hawkeye and Selvig both start oscillating between states, and then b) there's a bit we didn't see, where SHIELD's doctors injected Clint with something before he woke up. It made him temporarily imprint on the first people he saw (Natasha and Cap), and that was enough to get him through the battle, but afterward he relapses to Selvig's condition, which goes back and forth between lucidity and Renfield-hood. The rest of the deprogramming takes place post-movie.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That's a bit similar to DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), but I think the closest real-world equivalent would be really bad flashbacks, the kind where you completely lose touch with reality and return to a past experience - essentially, you are the person you were in the past.

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?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Mmm, good call thinking of it as flashbacks -- I hadn't conceptualized it that way before, but that's helpful for thinking of it in terms of triggers and such. And that turns into less a "magical cure" scenario and more a "teaching Clint to manage it so that he won't relapse" kind of thing.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, also: what cues his return to lucidity? Though that would probably be more something others could use on him than something he could use himself.

[neery.livejournal.com]

My personal pet theory of what happened to Clint is that the Teseract knocked him into an extended and intensified version of sniper focus. You know when you're doing target shooting (or an especially tricky bit of surgery, or other extremely precise and important physical tasks) there's this feeling where time sort of slows down, and you're really intensely focused on the thing you want your body to do, and nothing else really registers? I imagine working as a sniper is sort of like that.

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I had the same theory about sniper focus. And the targets became "whatever serves Loki's goals."

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I like that! Though it won't work for this particular story, since in that case he never would have made it through the big fight at the end (and I'm trying to stick to the events as seen in the movie).

[neery.livejournal.com]

I liked your theory that he was sort of imprinting on Natasha and Steve at the time - like, maybe he wasn't all back so much as just taking out their targets the way he'd taken out Loki's for him. And maybe Natasha doesn't really have time to notice that there's still something wrong with him until afterwards, when there's not so much going on anymore - because he was acting kind of off, with Loki, but not that far off. He's still got initiative and smarts, he's not all obviously mindless drone.