Avengers (2012): "Good to Be Home"

[cybermathwitch]

Title: Good to Be Home
Author/Artist: Koren M. (cybermathwitch)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, there'd already be a Black Widow/Hawkeye movie.
Pairing: none overt, several background if you squint
Rating: Teen 13+
Warnings: language
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 1,946
Summary: Darcy tries going to visit her parents for the Fourth of July, and proves the old

Comments

[cybermathwitch]

::Facepalm:: Just realized none of the italics made it over when I posted it here. That's fixed now, if that's something you tend to look for/read for... er. That's not quite the right way to phrase it, but I can't think what is. Oh well.

Ooooh. I listened to this with the accompanying song playing in the background, and wow, sudden feels that I did not know I had!

This is one of those "did it as a one-off" things that was mostly to try and externalize (and therefore deal with) some stuff I've been dealing with re: my family for years. None of the conversations or moments are directly taken from anything, and I've never had the nerve to actually look at my mom and tell her how I feel about the world she tries to live in (though I've come close a few times) - but I definitely have that same sense of living in a completely different reality than my biological family. Or some of them, at least. I love them, I want to see them and spend time with them, but it's stressful because I feel like I have to pretend. (I have similar feelings about/around my coworkers if we go out after work, too. Particularly lately when everyone has been talking about things like 50 Shades and I'm sitting there all like "no, sorry, haven't read it" and thinking to myself "I've written racier fic than that. I can tell you where to find more explicit, and better, stuff than that.")

What a great way to contrast these two worlds then to look at them through Darcy's eyes? The strength of the emotions, the conflict and cohesion and this sudden connection to almost-complete strangers with the Avengers (loving all the snippets/glimpses of their 'home' life, by the way) against how shallow and mild her 'real' home life is. And how Darcy demonstrates how she herself has been changed - that was absolutely brilliant there, calculating the jump and her punches and refusing to live without meaning.

The moments at home were the real draw for me, I think. They're what I really wanted to write about, and I love Darcy as a POV character because she's the "normal" person viewing these extraordinary people. I have this rock-solid headcanon idea that Fury tries to give the Avengers to Maria, who's basically like "I will brief them on classified info, but I am not a babysitter... also do you really want to keep doing all the Helicarrier paperwork yourself? Because that's a thing." and Fury deciding that Darcy (after seeing how she deals with Jane and Eric and Thor) is the best person to "manage" the Avengers. And she grows up to sort of be Coulson 2.0, only Darcy-er. (This photo might've influenced this idea... I imagine it to be her after several years doing this job.)

observation about how the world almost ended and everyone is still carrying on as normal is a really interesting as well as apt one. After great upheavals or revelations, people tend to retreat to what they know, to let the astonishing reality glaze over and become distant. For some people it's all too much to handle, and for others they have no apparent need to change their lives. But for the people who understand what they have... Maybe it's easier for Darcy, constantly surrounded by these movers and shakers, than it is for the average Joe who isn't reminded on a daily basis how strange and fantastic the world can be. Hm.

Oh yeah, it's absolutely easier for her -she's had to face it, and look at what's really going on. She's been on that crux of "what's really important to me?" And... in some ways, I think she knows that her family will never have those same realizations - she certainly doesn't really wish the kind of events that tend to bring them about onto her family - but at the same time, I don't think they've *ever* seen or let her be who she really is, they love her in spite of herself and not because of it, and that grates on her.