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

[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.