freedom (reset every bone)
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Clint couldn't not obey Loki. That's why he doesn't hate him. Because a hit on the head snapped him out of it, and that's not control, you can't just snap out of control. He would shoot an arrow straight into the eyes of anyone who had controlled him, and smile.
Loki is crouched on the ground before him, bruised, bloody, not getting up, and Clint isn't shooting and he isn't smiling..
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They asked him, they still ask: knowing what she had done, how could you have given her a second chance?
And this is the answer he doesn't give: because it wasn't a second chance that I gave her. It was a first.
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Slavery doesn't need chains. Control doesn't require something so crude as a scepter. True slavery is freedom, you just chose the chains. Real control is freewill, you chose everything. You chose it and choose it, no defense from that, nothing forced. It doesn't have to be. Being controlled is having the choice and thinking it is you that chooses.
"The Red Room made you," he told Natasha. "Make yourself."
(She listened, she did it, she remade herself in her own image. It must have hurt harder than anything; she did it, and for that Clint almost loves her.)
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He'd asked Thor about the myths, casually, steering the conversation so that no one thought he was asking. When all the easy myths turn out to be true, the humorous ones, the quaint ones, the grand victories, he thinks of sewn-lips, slaughtered children, the word father and the word monster. He thinks about the Red Room.
"Asgard," he says. Loki snarls (like an animal, like a monster, like a broken thing that fears and doesn't understand.) "They made you." He steps closer. "Didn't they?"
"Nothing made me," Loki says, voice smoothing as he regains control (ha!) of himself. "This is what I am."
"A monster," Clint says and watches the helpless flinch of Loki's eyes at the unwanted truth, (the successful lie.) Watches Loki open his mouth to strike back, and his words will be sharp, will hurt, but Clint speaks first: "Make yourself."
A challenge, an invitation, a hope.
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Cranial recalibration is the dream.
Freedom is a waking that takes decades, like the slow healing of a body with every bone broke, even the stirrup bone. Yes, and giving that chance is asking this bone-broken person to stand. Why would they? It hurts. And will hurt. Hurts long before it heals.
Giving a chance is asking them to stand with broken legs on the broken bones of feet; but it is also saying you are there, (will be there), to help them up.
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