be_compromised | ATTF: H/C comment ficathon!

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ATTF: H/C comment ficathon!

Welcome to Friday, best bar on Earth, and another edition of ATTF, this week hosted by yours truly and

anuna_81.

While researching for hurt/comfort tropes, I came across this really interesting column on hurt/comfort, a lot of which rang true for me.

This especially:

The C in HC is not to be confused with smarm, BTW - that's a different kink, a kind of uber-comfort with only enough hurt (sometimes none) to trigger it. I like smarm, but I also like the hurt in and of itself - what another fan once called "char torture." I like comfort to come after, but I'll read stories with insufficient amounts of comfort if the hurt is done well.

I can't really explain what the appeal is. Partly it's the emotional intensity. Partly it's the jeopardy. Partly it's the angst (viva angst!). But naming different parts of the appeal doesn't really explain what or why it is.

I suspect part of it is the desire to see blatant caretaking going on between the characters, but knowing that, if they are true to character, that won't happen unless something really extreme has just occurred. So rather than force them out of character to comfort each other for a minor incident, I will produce something extreme and make the comfort in character. I will also create moments when the characters have nothing TO do but caretake - there's no more reasonable action they can take, they have to wait or hide out for some reason - so no one will tear their hair out screaming at them to stop TALKING and DO something, damn it. The characters must behave like the intelligent adults they are or it's no good.
....
Pain - like love, death, and sex - is one of the universals of human experience. We all feel it, we all have to find some way of coping with it. Whether it's physical, emotional, mental or spiritual (despair is a spiritual pain), we're all gonna run into it. HC lets us exercise (as Stephen King said, "exercise, not exorcise") our feelings of fascination and repellence regarding pain. Like a kid with a sore tooth, some of us just can't resist playing with it compulsively. It hurts, but it's a safe way to explore the hurt without actually having to feel the heights of true agony ourselves.

So here's our challenge: Leave prompts, write h/c fic and have fun! :D
When posting your fics, please don't forget to add a rating and potential triggers in the subject line. Thanks a mill!

Things to remember:
1) Always label NSFW (Not Safe For Work) stuff in the title and post under a cut.
2) Fic and artwork needs to have a rating and warnings (or you can say that you’ve chosen not to use warnings).
3) For people with annoying internet connections, say in the title if a comment is graphic/images/gif-heavy and post picspams under a cut.
4) Have a damn good time! (Because if that’s not happening then this post has clearly failed.)

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WOOOT FIRST. Also, welcome. Also, I adore h/c, especially the emotional side of it.

I'm gonna start off prompting, I guess :)

Maybe you're like me and have noticed that there is a definitive lack of hurt!Natasha fics out there. We should rectify that, don't you think? For as much as I love Clint as the damsel in distress, I would love to see him caring for Nat for a change.

I'm so bad at hurting my beloved characters. Obviously this is something I need to work on as a writer. *tackle hugs* Great topic.

Prompt time! Clint sat on a cactus. Natasha knows laughing at him is not an option, besides poor boy.

More prompts - and I wrote something like this for another fandom two days ago - Clint and Natasha locked in a freezing cold space. (I blame Castle and Beckett for loving this trope).

This is a bit OT, but reading the descripton above, I don't really understand what "smarm" is...comfort with no trigger? Then...what are they comforting?

I know Clint losing his hearing has been done in a lot of stories but I keep picturing him losing his hearing and Nat being the one who needs comforting. I guess that would be emotional pain.

Why do you do this on the ONE Friday I don't have all evening to spend mooching internet?

*plunges into the fray*

Battle Scars

Thats it

Prompt -- (this may be far-fetched, but I was really trying for something that would be emotionally devastating for Natasha) -- old Red Room documents surface and Natasha finds out she had an older sister who was taken into the program too. The sister didn't make it out of the program. Natasha remembers her as a sweet girl and they were friends -- as friendly as the girls were allowed to be anyway.

Prompt: Coulson is really tired of them coming back from missions with injuries and promptly ducking out of Medical. Fuck it, he's just making his house into a infirmary.

Or, that time Coulson came home to find his two spies licking their wounds and comforting each other.

rating: PG-13 to be safe
warnings: mentions of physical injuries, allusions to past injuries and mental trauma

Hawkeye came back to his room to find a little paper airplane stuck on his door. He sighed. It had started as his signal to Natasha that he wasn't sticking around for paperwork then gradually became their default signal they'd left head quarters, usually for who's ever apartment or safe house was closest.

"Damn it, Nat," Clint sighed, dropped his gear, managed time for a very quick shower, the water being only cold again helped with that, then took off to figure out where the wayward Widow had wandered off to.

Natasha heard the specific knock on the front door and hid under the covers more.

Clint opened the door, turned off the alarm before it could go off, then headed towards Natasha's bedroom.

Then turned around because of course she'd be stealing his bed if she wasn't feeling well.

"Nat," Clint leaned on the door frame, "you make a very sexy lump in the middle of the bed."

Nat stuck her hand out from under the blankets, giving Clint a middle finger salute.

"Mature," Clint walked over to the end of the bed and yanked the covers off.

"Jesus, Nat!" Clint hurried to get a first aid kit when he saw Natasha was still in her cat suit and looked like she'd been dropped out of a plane into some trees.

"It's not that bad," Natasha tried to get the covers back.

"If by that you're not bleeding out then yes, it's not that bad," Clint knelt on the bed and despite being threatened with all manner of bodily harm, he managed to get Natasha undressed, not like it was hard, her suit was ripped down the one side, bandaged and a few tiny sets of stitches before into his clothes.

Nat struggled to stay awake the whole time.

"You haven't asked what happened," Nat whispered as she was settled on the pillows.

"You'll tell me when you're ready," Clint tossed the kit gloves from his hands and went to wash up.

"What if I don't want to?" Natasha stole the best pillow to hug.

"Wouldn't be the first time," Clint walked back out and sat on the bed.

He ran his hand over Nat's hair, it was a little curly again and shorter.

After a good twenty minutes of Clint doing nothing but that, Natasha slowly crawled to curl up in his lap.

Clint pulled a blanket over her and resumed petting her hair.

After another bit of silence, "I got hit with some sort of beam, knocked my sight out for awhile then I got wrapped up in something with barbs."

Clint didn't pause in his stroking of Natasha's hair, he also didn't speak.

"I had a memory... from before, from when I was younger," Natasha hooked her fingers in one of the belt loops on Clint's jeans, as if to make sure he stayed put, even if he wasn't going anywhere.

"I panicked, I thought I was there, being punished," Nat whispered, "I didn't stay to be treated because-"

"Because they'd hook you up to things and make the memory worse," Clint was able to guess.

Natasha gave a little nod.

Clint didn't tell her not to think on it, they buried enough, so instead he made sure to turn on the light and just let Nat stay in his lap until the sun came up again.

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Prompt: Hurt! Natasha

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Wounds Need Time To Heal (mini-fic)