Fic: The Child Takers

[inkvoices]

Title: The Child Takers
Rating/Warnings: 15/R (to be safe, darker than my usual), highlight to view warnings, tell me if I’ve missed any or have been unclear: *child abuse, murder, violent murder, murder of children, things that explode out of people (aliens), implied rape, implied underage sex, implied sex as a means to get close and kill someone

Comments

[anuna_81]

After all of our conversations, messages, chats and your incredibly generous comments on things that I've done and written, here I am, with my own debt. Because I owe you a debt, and it's not just comments, so let me tell you a story. They say I'm kind of good at that.

I don't remember any more what was the first Avengers fic that I've read. I do remember that this one was among the firsts, probably among first five. I was in search for Natasha, you see. I wanted to know her better because I wanted to write about her, and I landed here after I read your meta post about her; and this is where I met my Natasha. Kobayashi Natasha comes from here. Red Thread Natasha probably does too. The way you've written her, the way you explained her here is something thats tuck with me; that woman, well girl, who stalked after the man who was sent to kill her but didn't. Because he was something she couldn't control. And she was always, always in control.

I think I have picked up several Doctor Who references? And caught a glimpse of Doctor himself and that bit is just brilliant.

This bit gives me chills:

She’s always gentle with the children, letting them slide from sleep into deeper darkness, and she’s harsh with those that deserve it, but she can’t tell if that’s because she’s meant to be. She is regardless.

She’s fifteen when she finally, first, meets the one who will take her away, a child still to a world of marks and targets, underestimated, but never a child to herself, not anymore.

The bit about children? And harshness? And the fact that she herself is still a child, but never was child to herself. DEAR MERCIFUL GOD. I could write essays about just that bit right there. She might be only fifteen but she feels older than universe here, with all that darkness, and then when Clint shows up, darkness equal to her own, one who spared her instead of killing her (and dying would be freedom, wouldn't it?) how can she let him walk away?

This is my favorite part:

She sees him again when he destroys the place where she has been made, arrows through soft underbellies and bared necks. Arrows in hearts like a parody of broken love. Breathing ceases in his wake. He slaughters and lays waste with precision and she watches closely. It’s how she knows to run when the explosions start and fire cleanses what is left of the place where monsters hid.

Because it goes back to all those things that have been done to her, sort of reversed knight in shiny armor thing, only he is far cry from a knight (except a dark one) and she is no damsel. Love is for children and he sends arrows through hearts of the beasts. Parody of broken love, yes, but it also feels like justice, and Clint feels like an avenging angel.

And this? It isn’t what he says though, but the look that he gives her, as if he’s seeing more than she choses to show to the world and she wishes she could see what he sees, pull it out into the light and examine it, everything that she is underneath. If she is anything underneath.

Reminds me of red thread so much. Mind you, I didn't have this precise line in mind when I started writing it, but I suppose it's the similar characterization thing, and it makes me so happy, that you wrote this in May, and I started working on RT much later, and yet there's that same echo of Natasha who wants to learn and see who she is, what she is in both stories.

*hugs this fic and hugs you*

1/2 (because I went for it, whoop!)

[inkvoices]

I am...in shock and filled with excitement and flailing like a crazy woman that something that I wrote had this much of an impact on anyone! The fact that I in any way helped the ideas that then grew into the wonderfulness that is your fic? SQUEEEE AND FLAIL!!!

And, oh wow, huge comment of thinky thoughts! I GOT A HUGE COMMENT OF THINKY THOUGHTS *twirls you* Excuse me whilst I make grabby hands at this chance to talk meta about my own fic with someone *grins*.

There's two big things I wanted to put forward with this fic and they're tied together: children and fairytales. I remember I said in my Natasha meta a few things about making children into weapons, that taking a child that age and turning them into weapon couldn't be anything by remaking, and Natasha constantly reclaiming/remaking herself being the film version of comics voodoo, making her forever young kind of thing.

Well, there's a potentiality with children, that they can go in any direction, become anything, and with teenagers there's a certain transgressive nature to their existence, they can't be categorised (by marital status or career for example) and they're both capable of being menacing (those hoodies who could beat you up on a street corner) and being menaced (because if hoodie's family moves house, he/she has to move to). Natasha fills that transgressive role here not just because of her age, but because she is a child and yet her life has been such that she also isn't. She's also in a in-between place in other ways - she's trained to be a killer, but she can't kill the people she wants to (the ones that took her), she's not old enough to be at that party but no one looks twice, she knows things but she doesn't have experience of them, and so on. It's an echo of that first line, being between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the USSR.

Then we have fairytales. Everyone knows that they're stories for children. They're also stories that originally weren't intended for children. They have/had rape, murder, child stealers, all of the horrible things. And these tales and the rules by which children make sense of the world. So, Natasha is told about 'real world' things such as human traffickers and she applies the logic to them that they are more monsters in the dark. Which, when you have capitalists being monsters, that's one kind of story, and child killers are already in fairytales, so really the logic works.

Then I hit it with crossovers, and yes, that's the Eleventh Doctor in there *grins*. Also Cain, Abel, and Dream from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and Darla and Drusilla from Angel/Buffy. There are three sets of people who could be from fairytales themselves, imaginary and fictional, except that as fans we accept they exist in the same sense that Natasha does, so again there's a blurred line, or no line, between the real and fairytale. And she gets three opportunities to leave the life she has. That fairytale rule of three.

But she doesn't go. Because however much she doesn't know what is her and what she's been made to me, that doesn't matter. Existentialism doesn't usually bother children. What matters is that fairytale logic - she's been stolen once, she refuses to be stolen again. Again, the nature of that in-between place: as a child you can be taken, when you grow up you can refuse to be taken, but Natasha still meets these people and sees them as real, still gets these opportunities, because she is and isn't a child.

2/2 (because I went for it, whoop!)

[inkvoices]

What happens with Clint is the fairytale conclusion - the one who doesn't try to take her away she voluntarily follows. It's also children's/teenage logic really, not doing what you're told, not conforming to expectations. There's the fascination, that of all of them Clint actually came close to giving her what she suddenly realised that she wanted...and then didn't. Then, out of all of them, he is the one most like her. But then he goes further, because he's able to kill the people who took her when she couldn't.

It's kind of sad really, that Natasha has all those opportunities to leave and can't take them, because she's afraid of leaving the monsters she knows or because those monsters have made it so she can't, and she can't tell which, and in the end she walks away with Clint, another assassin, to SHIELD, to an adult and painful life. But then would an ambiguous life in the Dreaming, or running wild with the Doctor, or being a vampire/vampire's toy worked out better considering the person that she is?

There's a bit of an arc about growing up thrown in as well, from losing the capacity to dream, to taking business over adventure and knowing rather than experiencing, to sexuality, to no longer feeling like a child even when amongst people older, to realising what it is you want...to not getting it and chasing something else, finally walking away with the new. And some other stuff, but children and fairytales were the things this was built with :)

Now you've pointed out your thinking, I guess the Natashas of red thread and Kobyoshi (can never spell that lol) are trying to use the potential that this Natasha shows herself to have, to chase that thing Clint sees, that small sense of self, and to build from it? And Natasha and fairytales, Natasha and myth...Natasha and stories. (And, seriously, you need to read Deathless!) In On Names I played with a bit - the Black Widow, the myth, the legend, because she is a story, isn't she? In and of herself.

Oddly enough, that bit you picked up on at the end, and this fic, whilst looking for Natasha gave me my Clint :) It is absolutely my headcanon that he 'made a different call' because he saw a capacity within Natasha for self, for something different, for what she becomes. And the theme of him really, truly seeing Natasha is a thing for me. So much so that that's why Clint sees the nature of things in The Nature Of Dust!

So yeah, I'm really, really, really pleased that you liked this fic, and incredibly flaily that it actually influenced your own thinky thoughts, and huge thanks for letting me spew meta at you :D Hopefully it all made sense, heh, because I just got to kick back and enjoy there and it was great. *hugs you* <3