#ithlyn

Natasha frowns. Redefining personas is not something she’s a huge fan of, largely because the need to add or drop characteristics is a result of bad intel and happens in-mission, on the fly; it means someone hasn’t done their homework.

But Clint is one of the smartest people she knows, and in their years of bad ideas and blundering, when it comes to internal perspective readjustment, he’s yet to steer her wrong.

“A new Black Widow,” she says aloud. Tasting the idea.

Natasha’s look in Chapter 10: no wow of @silentwalrus1‘s fic If They Haven’t Learned Your Name, ft. Natasha’s notebook’s aesthetic.

Six months ago I said rereading this fic gave me the urge to fanart real bad. So here we are. After months of trial and error with my drawing tablet, I finally pushed myself to finish something dammit, and this is what came out. It’s horrible. I love it.

I’m waiting for my spaceship to come back to me

AHHH I LOVE THAT BIT i love natasha to bits and half of ithlyn is a love letter to her tbh. She’s a soldier as well as a spy, but she’s a REALLY GOOD SPY. 99% of being a good spy is making yourself likable and trustworthy as well as genuinely interested in people. And Natasha has a fucking unbreakable grip on herself. Her control is insane. That doesn’t mean she never has meltdowns;  it means she can choose where and how her meltdowns occur. In avengers 1 we see her explicitly using her own emotional vulnerabilities as bait - those emotions were genuine! She wasn’t faking! She was using them. 

Soldier/Widow mirror q p. 2: the thing os, Natasha was going to get fallout no matter what, but I adored out you *made it important bc she's a person not a persona *let it become a mirror of Bucky, respecting both people *turned it into a fascinating illustration of how recovery spirals and fractals back into itself *did all this beautiful musings inbetwen scenes that were also utterly honest but completely ridic. Like, intermission With Llamas, or That Damned Kayak *g*

HAHAHA WELL THE SHORT ANSWER IS “COMPLETELY ACCIDENTALLY” 

the longer answer is ithlyn is an exploration of characters who have had similar traumas and losses of identity, support structure & trust. natasha and bucky (and steve and sam!) are looking for answers to the same question, basically - who am i now? what the fuck am i supposed to do? my entire world crashed down around my ears - AGAIN - and i have to dig myself out and figure out what’s next. What choices do i make this time? what wasn’t working before? what the fuck happened, where did i go wrong, how do i make my future not look like my past? 

natasha and bucky have to prioritize their bodies in this process, in different ways - bucky because he’s basically coming off pretty intensive life support with a LOT of medical problems and has to teach himself how to deal with that, and natasha because (also like bucky) her work lives in her body and her body is the primary tool of her work. since so much of her work is also tied up in identity and interpersonal relationships, how she displays herself is a direct correlation - in her own eyes as well as others’ - to what she’s doing, who she is and what message she’s trying to send. 

they both also have very practical approaches to the whole process - partially because, again, their bodies/lives necessitate it, and partially because i think by both nature and nurture bucky and natasha are very practical people. they see their bodies as tools, and there isn’t necessarily a negative connotation there -  they both have complex relationships with their bodies and minds, and while bucky’s especially is adversarial at times, a lot of ithlyn is them working hand and hand with who they are, to the full extent of who and what they are.  

it was also important for me to depict them as characters who don’t hate themselves. they hate what they’ve done, they hate things that have been thrust upon them, but not themselves - barnes goes so far as to absolutely reject and other the parts of him that he hates, so that what he’s hating isn’t self, and he keeps it at arm’s length until he doesn’t hate it anymore. I would argue that natasha is especially comfortable in herself, body and mind, and her conflict comes from what she has chosen to do and allowed herself to go along with, not who/what she is. 

As a result, both characters never really wallow in despair or failure, and always get up when they fall down; half because they have never been allowed to quit in their lives, and half because neither of them are quitters. they are both survivors, and even if they don’t think of it in such explicit terms, they believe themselves  worthy of survival, and self-protection, and success. even when they’re down they’re not out, and they know it. they are motivated to improve and heal themselves for themselves first and foremost, and i wanted to really explore those kinds of characters + that determination - i think there are a lot of stories where people motivate themselves through others and their relationships, and that’s great! everybody does that! ithlyn has a lot of that too!  but for characters who are as narratively and physically isolated as natasha and bucky are, it was an awesome opportunity to really dig in and figure out what drives these people - these two motherfuckers who survived, alone, for decades in extremely hostile territory, and how their internal engines are powered both because of that and despite of it. 

Ohoho this is a cool throwback - a lot of early post-catws fics from bucky pov had this lyrical, quasi poetic style to them, and i loved how it was an opportunity to merge strict tactical thinking about practicalities and the kind of very ethereal, complex, undefined concepts like: who am i? what does it mean to be a person? What do i do now and why?