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ysabetwordsmithI wrote this story for the 2013 Asexy Valentines Fest over on ![[community profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
asexual_fandom. It's a gift for aceofannwn who wanted some Avengers fanfic.
Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: Dubious consent regarding the use of rude images of women, and Natasha's boundary issues due to her traumatic training. Passing descriptions of canon-typical violence. Mentions of sexual activity involving Clint and Natasha, not with each other, and not in blow-by-blow detail. No other standard warnings apply.
Summary: Someone is passing around lewdly rendered pictures of women. This makes Hawkeye very unhappy, so he decides to do something about it.
Notes: Angst. Objectification. Men being stupid. Friendship. Teamwork. Family of choice. Hawkeye is aromantic sexual. Natasha's innate orientation is obscured by her past; currently she does not pursue either sex or romance out of her own desire. Both of them desire close, long-term bonds of nonsexual nature although they are not always sure how to express that.
This part holds most of the sexual discussion as Clint considers his orientation, and Natasha, and their relationship, and how all that drives his feelings about the current situation. If you dislike reading even oblique discussions of sex, you can skip this, and Part 1 + Part 3 will still mostly make sense as a story about Clint dealing with dirty pictures.
"The Hawkeye Initiative" Part 2
The thing was, Clint didn't like seeing women mistreated that way. It bothered him deeply. He had discovered this -- somewhat to his surprise -- while figuring out his own sexuality. He felt that respect made up an important part of romance. Although he was aromantic himself, he still recognized the power in it and wished that people would not treat it so carelessly. It wasn't just romance, either. If you didn't respect people, it undermined all your relationships: romantic, sexual, professional, familial. He had painful personal examples from most of those.
The more Clint thought about this, the more it bugged him. He knew how easy it was to develop bad habits -- you started treating people a certain way, and it got harder and harder to stop, even if you wanted to. He had learned how to pick up girls from his brother. That had not been a good thing. It had taken years for Clint to break some of those patterns, once he realized how destructive they were to him and everyone else. That caused problems of its own.
If you were sexual but not romantic, and you wanted to form permanent bonds but not ones based on lust, that tended to confuse folks. They didn't know what to do with you. That made it hard to get laid. Clint sort of needed to get laid, at least occasionally. He looked on sex like any other bodily need, such as eating, for example -- it was sometimes enjoyable, sometimes just a thing that needed doing. He preferred to do it with people he knew and liked, but that wasn't always possible. So he resorted to one-night-stands or professionals. Such arrangements worked reasonably well for him.
Natasha was different. To her, sex was a weapon. She used it to destroy people, and it proved far more devastating than a knife or a gun. She never responded sexually to anyone except on a mission, or some other situation when she stood to gain something by using it to manipulate people.
Neither did she date. Natasha seemed to have no interest in romance, or if she did, she never expressed it. "Love is for children," she often said, though her actions sometimes hinted otherwise. Clint knew she loved him; she just wouldn't mention it, and it wasn't the kind of love that unobservant people sometimes imagined between the two of them. Clint loved her right back; he just wouldn't mention it, because it would make her uncomfortable. That hurt, a little, but better him than her.
Natasha was ... confused about sexuality, outside of mission context. (Clint couldn't blame her for that. Sometimes figuring out sex felt like trying to reverse-engineer one of Tony's machines without benefit of the instruction manual.) Oh, she could fake it brilliantly. Nobody ever doubted that she felt or was whatever she wanted them to think of her. She just couldn't turn that knowledge around and apply it to herself. Whatever her original orientation might have been, it was obliterated during her training. Even free, she tended to avoid looking inside herself, because she didn't like what she saw there. That was no way to learn about the nuances of your own sexuality.
Her background spilled over in other areas, too. Natasha's boundaries had been removed along with her orientation. That meant she often didn't understand that certain things were wrong, or why they were wrong, or how they could hurt people. She relied on her handler to tell her what was right and wrong. On a mission, she might let men call her all kinds of filthy names, or fuck her, or even think they were raping her. Outside of a mission, she might strike back if harassed, but more often she simply ignored it and let the perpetrators get away with it.
Clint hated the fact that Natasha put up with such nonsense because she didn't think it mattered, or worse, didn't think she mattered, enough to put a stop to it consistently. It bothered him that her decision to lash out, play along, or ignore was always based on what she could gain from the situation, not what was wrong with the situation.
He hated it, because he was her partner and she was his. Clint and Natasha were bound together by something deeper than love or marriage. They'd fought together, saved each other's lives, saved the world together. They relied on each other. They trusted each other in ways that neither of them trusted anyone else. They were two halves of one perfectly honed weapon, fitting together like bow and arrow. He wasn't about to let some jerkoff with a camera fetish mess with that.
Clint knew what it was like to be remade. He understood what it was like to be without boundaries, to have them all scooped out and thrown aside like seeds from a gutted pumpkin. He was just lucky that he'd gotten his boundaries back. Natasha had done that for him, had pounded his walls and his rules and his self back into his head when he couldn't do it on his own. What had been done to her was nothing as short or simple as what had been done to him, and it couldn't be fixed with a quick kick in the head. There were other ways to manage a cognitive reboot, though, and even if they were a lot slower that wouldn't stop Clint from taking care of his partner. Maybe he couldn't give her back all her boundaries, but he could at least show her where some of the lines were.
Clint had an idea what to do. He just needed to talk to someone else who believed that women should be treated better than they usually were, and ask for help.
[To be concluded in Part 3 ...]
asexual_fandom. It's a gift for aceofannwn who wanted some Avengers fanfic.Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: Dubious consent regarding the use of rude images of women, and Natasha's boundary issues due to her traumatic training. Passing descriptions of canon-typical violence. Mentions of sexual activity involving Clint and Natasha, not with each other, and not in blow-by-blow detail. No other standard warnings apply.
Summary: Someone is passing around lewdly rendered pictures of women. This makes Hawkeye very unhappy, so he decides to do something about it.
Notes: Angst. Objectification. Men being stupid. Friendship. Teamwork. Family of choice. Hawkeye is aromantic sexual. Natasha's innate orientation is obscured by her past; currently she does not pursue either sex or romance out of her own desire. Both of them desire close, long-term bonds of nonsexual nature although they are not always sure how to express that.
This part holds most of the sexual discussion as Clint considers his orientation, and Natasha, and their relationship, and how all that drives his feelings about the current situation. If you dislike reading even oblique discussions of sex, you can skip this, and Part 1 + Part 3 will still mostly make sense as a story about Clint dealing with dirty pictures.
"The Hawkeye Initiative" Part 2
The thing was, Clint didn't like seeing women mistreated that way. It bothered him deeply. He had discovered this -- somewhat to his surprise -- while figuring out his own sexuality. He felt that respect made up an important part of romance. Although he was aromantic himself, he still recognized the power in it and wished that people would not treat it so carelessly. It wasn't just romance, either. If you didn't respect people, it undermined all your relationships: romantic, sexual, professional, familial. He had painful personal examples from most of those.
The more Clint thought about this, the more it bugged him. He knew how easy it was to develop bad habits -- you started treating people a certain way, and it got harder and harder to stop, even if you wanted to. He had learned how to pick up girls from his brother. That had not been a good thing. It had taken years for Clint to break some of those patterns, once he realized how destructive they were to him and everyone else. That caused problems of its own.
If you were sexual but not romantic, and you wanted to form permanent bonds but not ones based on lust, that tended to confuse folks. They didn't know what to do with you. That made it hard to get laid. Clint sort of needed to get laid, at least occasionally. He looked on sex like any other bodily need, such as eating, for example -- it was sometimes enjoyable, sometimes just a thing that needed doing. He preferred to do it with people he knew and liked, but that wasn't always possible. So he resorted to one-night-stands or professionals. Such arrangements worked reasonably well for him.
Natasha was different. To her, sex was a weapon. She used it to destroy people, and it proved far more devastating than a knife or a gun. She never responded sexually to anyone except on a mission, or some other situation when she stood to gain something by using it to manipulate people.
Neither did she date. Natasha seemed to have no interest in romance, or if she did, she never expressed it. "Love is for children," she often said, though her actions sometimes hinted otherwise. Clint knew she loved him; she just wouldn't mention it, and it wasn't the kind of love that unobservant people sometimes imagined between the two of them. Clint loved her right back; he just wouldn't mention it, because it would make her uncomfortable. That hurt, a little, but better him than her.
Natasha was ... confused about sexuality, outside of mission context. (Clint couldn't blame her for that. Sometimes figuring out sex felt like trying to reverse-engineer one of Tony's machines without benefit of the instruction manual.) Oh, she could fake it brilliantly. Nobody ever doubted that she felt or was whatever she wanted them to think of her. She just couldn't turn that knowledge around and apply it to herself. Whatever her original orientation might have been, it was obliterated during her training. Even free, she tended to avoid looking inside herself, because she didn't like what she saw there. That was no way to learn about the nuances of your own sexuality.
Her background spilled over in other areas, too. Natasha's boundaries had been removed along with her orientation. That meant she often didn't understand that certain things were wrong, or why they were wrong, or how they could hurt people. She relied on her handler to tell her what was right and wrong. On a mission, she might let men call her all kinds of filthy names, or fuck her, or even think they were raping her. Outside of a mission, she might strike back if harassed, but more often she simply ignored it and let the perpetrators get away with it.
Clint hated the fact that Natasha put up with such nonsense because she didn't think it mattered, or worse, didn't think she mattered, enough to put a stop to it consistently. It bothered him that her decision to lash out, play along, or ignore was always based on what she could gain from the situation, not what was wrong with the situation.
He hated it, because he was her partner and she was his. Clint and Natasha were bound together by something deeper than love or marriage. They'd fought together, saved each other's lives, saved the world together. They relied on each other. They trusted each other in ways that neither of them trusted anyone else. They were two halves of one perfectly honed weapon, fitting together like bow and arrow. He wasn't about to let some jerkoff with a camera fetish mess with that.
Clint knew what it was like to be remade. He understood what it was like to be without boundaries, to have them all scooped out and thrown aside like seeds from a gutted pumpkin. He was just lucky that he'd gotten his boundaries back. Natasha had done that for him, had pounded his walls and his rules and his self back into his head when he couldn't do it on his own. What had been done to her was nothing as short or simple as what had been done to him, and it couldn't be fixed with a quick kick in the head. There were other ways to manage a cognitive reboot, though, and even if they were a lot slower that wouldn't stop Clint from taking care of his partner. Maybe he couldn't give her back all her boundaries, but he could at least show her where some of the lines were.
Clint had an idea what to do. He just needed to talk to someone else who believed that women should be treated better than they usually were, and ask for help.
[To be concluded in Part 3 ...]
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-09 08:14 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2013-02-09 08:35 am (UTC)Thank you! I'm glad you found it so fascinating.
>> I'd sort of considered the stuff relating to Natasha's sexuality before, but not the stuff about her having trouble understanding where boundaries are and why - yet it absolutely makes sense. <<
Starting from the basis of canon, there are many different ways to interpret how Natasha thinks and feels about what-all has happened to her. She has excellent acting skills, so what she shows is almost always a deliberate projection, rather than an automatic broadcast of what's going on underneath. That makes it easy to aspect the character on the inside, without straying from the outward portrayal of her behavior patterns as already established.
In this case, I went with the scooped-out approach because it's such a tight parallel with what happened to Clint. Natasha spends a lot of time going through the motions, doing things by rote. Clint wants more than that for her, and it really bugs him when people treat her like meat.
I had a good time getting inside their heads for this.