Around 3 AM, I ran across a friend’s link to “We Were Emergencies”, by gyzym, a fanficcer of some note.  (Short form: post-The Avengers, Hawkeye and Black Widow work through their PTSD; NC-17, trigger warnings, you know the drill.)  (Insert obligatory “I don’t usually read fanfic, but when I do” here.)

My short review: not really knowing these characters from anything but the movie, which I’ve seen exactly once, Natasha seems spot-on and Hawkeye talks too much.  In some of the sex scenes, way too much.  It could do with less sex, honestly, though I recognize its purpose, but anyway, y’know, fanfic, right?  I feel like the plot should feel overdone but it still works, the author sells it well, and, well, the trust issues… I can relate to.  I found it worth reading.  And you don’t usually see most characters from most superhero movies turning up in fic as subby men or genuinely dominant women and legitimately believe it’s in-character for their canon character, it’s a nice change.

In the chaos, in the wreck they’ve both been stumbling through, he’d almost forgotten this–her psychotic competitive streak and how unabashed she is about it, the way she’s just a few shades too harsh to be beautiful when she’s really at home. Natasha is a dozen people at any given moment, but underneath all that, she’s this, a little arrogant and a lot condescending, trusting not enough and far too much by turns, shining so bright that she’s blinding and scalding at once.

Around 4 AM I finished it and found, doing up some dishes, that I was basically writing something someone had mentioned to me earlier in the day.  Maybe it will show up here at some point.

Around 5 AM I finished that and sent it off and what do you know the next thing on my friends list was “Loathly” and goddamned if it wasn’t about the same damn thing we’d all been writing about.

I cannot tell you if it’s good, because it may not be. It was painful to write, and I can’t say I enjoyed doing so, and I didn’t feel like I fit back into my skin quite right afterwards.

 

[…]

Still, I think I feel on some level that if I throw it at the blog, I can be done with it, and rather like having your ears finally pop after a plane flight, I will fit between my skull bones properly again, and need not worry about it anymore.

 

If you are fond of trigger warnings, take a handful from the bowl.

 

There I am, staring at the water.

And now here I am, telling you all about this.

I’m tempted to keep going, find myself a cup of instant coffee made drinkable with too much sugar and push on, keep riding that line of exhaustion until I finish that story or fall over, whichever comes first.  Or it’ll catch me before I can even get up to get the coffee.  We’ll see.