sakura_no_miko

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Clint/Coulson

Warnings: violence, dealing with trauma, discussion of childhood abuse

Other notes: de-age fic, family, ensemble, magic

Length: 27k

Summary: Clint vanishes from the battle and wakes up a few blocks away from the action, and now he’s sixteen. He doesn’t know how the hell he ended up in NYC, but he knows he has to lay low. Clint’s pretty good at laying low, even as a kid, and it takes a little while for Phil and the rest of the team to figure out what happened to him, and a while longer to actually find him. They also have to convince him that they can be trusted. It’s magic, of course, but the kicker is that the spell comes with a terrible choice attached, and Clint is not in the best shape to be making choices about his own life.

My thoughts:

So, like I was saying yesterday, there are many opportunities in fic to strip away a character’s history, personality, pain. One of those ways is the de-aging fic. Some play it for comedy, some play it for drama.

This fic interested me because a lot of de-age fic is specifically kid or even baby fic. A lot of times, the character who is de-aged is more a focal point for other characters and their development–see, say, pull apart the dark, where a traumatized Bucky is suddenly tasked with caring for a toddler version of his best friend.

This fic, though, de-ages Clint to a teenager–and a teenager who already has a lot of the hang-ups his older self will have. He’s already wounded, but–

Oh, spoiler warning. Ach. I hate having to do this all the time, but I also really love discussing the whole fic.

Anyway, Clint is already becoming the man he will become, and this becomes a point of drama, because, in this case, it ends up being his choice as to whether he wants to go back to his original self, or have a chance to live a second, possibly better life from that point on. And the people around him are torn, too–his lover, his friends, people who would love to see him not have to go through a life of pain, but would also be losing the person they knew.

That hit me pretty hard. When I was a teenager, like most teens I dreamed about growing up to be, say, a famous novelist. Someone important, someone who would be in the history books. Then I grew into my anxiety and depression and suddenly the idea seemed terrifying. How could you become someone important, I thought, how, and I developed this morbid fear of knowing my future. If someone from the future came back and told me I was going to be famous, or talented, or even have a wonderful romance or awesome children, I would probably become terrified. How could I possibly live up to that? How could I become such a person? It seems so daunting.

So, definitely, this fic hit those fears right on the head. It’s also great to see the de-aged person still being at, well, an age where he can talk and think for himself, rather than just a passive/nonverbal child.

Oh, I would definitely rec As The Morning Shows the Day, which is sadly on indefinite hiatus, but features a character who is de-aged but slowly growing back up. Or, if you want something humorous, there are a couple of older kink meme fills that always make me laugh.

(Looking for more fic recs?)
Originally posted on tumblr on 12/30/14