capitalh | I'm coming home

Entry tags:

I'm coming home

Who: Clint Barton and YOU
Where: Alpha Force Tower, later Trailblazer dorms
When: TODAY. ...yeah, whatever today is.
What: Clint's back from his leave and is clueless about the things he missed. Like half his team disappearing.
Warnings: none (yet)

Alpha Force Tower

Clint could use a haircut and a shave, but all in all he doesn't look too worse for wear when he clomps into the residential area of Alpha Force tower, bow on his back and dufflebag slung over his shoulder. He's fiddling with one of his hearing aids, since he'd gotten kind of used to not wearing them most of the time so it's like getting used to them all over again, but otherwise he mostly looks way more relaxed and less likely to flip out than he did in the immediate aftermath of Mockingbird and Captain Victory's deaths.

"Hey, anyone home?" he calls out. "Fi, I brought you a souvenir!"

Trailblazer Dorms

In the wake of finding out that half of his team has disappeared without a trace, Clint wasn't really sure what to do with himself. "Disappeared" doesn't mean "dead", which is a blessing, but that doesn't make him feel that much better. A shower and a shave later, he's still pretty scruffy, but he feels like he should be doing... something.

And that something, he figures, is he should check on the Trailblazer kids. He always tried to keep an eye on them, even outside of the official mentoring or training, and now he's been gone for more than half a year. If nothing else, he knows there's new kids that he hasn't met yet, and he should do that. He shows up at the dorms and just hangs out in the living area, waiting to say hi to whoever comes by.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Clint snorts. "Unless you count roughing it in the wilds of Canada and kind of accidentally exploding a Magma outpost, then no, no secret spy missions."

He comes around the couch and flops down next to her, ruffling her hair as he does. "Back in town for real. Couldn't stay away forever, and it's not like heading back east is gonna help any."

"How do you accidentally... You know what, never mind."

She snorts as he ruffles her hair, giving him a mock glare and bumping his shoulder with hers as she tries to recover a little dignity, but she doesn't really mind. It's been a while since she's had an adult treat her normally, and not like she's fragile - most old friends she's run into are so sympathetic she could choke on it.

"Yeah. Guess not. Wanna help me brush up on my archery when we have some free time? I'm a little out of practice..."

"Well, I mean, the exploding was on purpose," Clint clarifies, "but I didn't know they had an outpost there when I rented the cabin."

Fi had been the only one to manage to be both deeply sympathetic and not handling him with kid gloves, after Bobbi. If she hadn't already been his favorite teammates, she would've been after that. So, yeah, he gets it. It's part of why he's acting pretty much like neither of them are currently deeply wounded by their losses. The other part being that he doesn't really know how else to be, honestly.

He presses a hand to his heart at that admission, practically clutching his metaphorical pearls. "Padawan," he says, scandalized. "You haven't been practicing?"

"Well, I was a little distracted for a while..." she protests half-heartedly. "And I couldn't take my bow on the plane. Getting it through security and not getting it broken in the process didn't really seem worth it." She smiles faintly, apologetically. "I didn't know you'd be back any time soon."

Also bows do not factor hugely in her fighting style and she's never used one in the field, ever, but... it's nice to have the skill. Just in case.

He's incorporated a lot more hand-to-hand and close-quarters fighting to his repertoire since he trained her, thanks in large part to Bobbi. He could probably get a bow or a small crossbow worked nicely into her fighting style if she wanted it.

Not that he thinks she does, but he thinks she should.

"Excuses, excuses," he says, tsking. "We'll have to get you back up to snuff right away, then. Got some new tricks for ya, too, I think."

"What, were you trained by ninja Sasquatch in the middle of nowhere? Ancient order of wildman archers? Where are you picking up new tricks?"

Not that she doesn't want to learn them. She just has to give him a bit of a hard time - with him out in the middle of nowhere, obviously no one else has for a long time.

"No, you brat," Clint shoves her gently, laughing. "Bobbi's more--" Ah. Verb tenses. It doesn't kill the mood, but he does droop a little. "Bobbi was more skilled at hand-to-hand and close quarters. Taught me some things that I was able to work into my rotation, so to speak."

"Oh. Yeah. That makes sense." She sighs softly, a little sorry to have brought it up when it's about his dead wife, but... apologizing would just make it worse. "Agent Morse trained me for a while. It was ages ago, but she was great."

He smiles a little. Hey, it hurt to think of her, but NOT thinking about her was worse, and at least this wasn't thinking about the fights they'd had over him being an ass, or the day she died.

"She was great. Best CONDOR agent I've ever met, even kept her teasing to a minimum over the train wreck of the first op we worked together."

Rikki perks up, always up for story time from heroes or agents (which are really the same thing in her mind). "So... how big a train wreck are we talking? Please tell me it's not classified, because I need to hear this."

Clint groans a little, good-naturedly. "No, it's not classified," he admits with a sigh. Well, it might be LIGHTLY classified, but not so much that he can't tell her about it.

"Fine. How much did you hear about me ending up with these?" he asks, tapping his hearing aid.

At this point in her life, she probably knows more about CONDOR and its operation than level one agents. Some people are surprisingly willing to bend strict security for the tiny hero who practically grew up in the organization.

"Something about a sonic arrow? Or maybe an exploding arrow... I don't know, you did something dumb with an arrow and Forrest kept shaking his head over it for about two months."

"Sonic arrow, and I saved everyone's lives, thank you very much," Clint says huffily. "Fine, okay, so Bobbi and I got assigned to investigate this tech company because there was some shady stuff going on, but CONDOR didn't have enough proof to really move on them."

He leans back, reminiscing fondly. All in all, it was a pretty good op, and it makes for a hell of a story. "Took us a couple of days to get in, and when we did, we found that they'd been working on a device that sorta... it wasn't really mind control, but it used sound to drive a person into an uncontrollable rage, so bad they'd kill any one around them. Which, y'know, pretty dangerous. Uuuuunfortunately, we were made, and the guy managed to get us confined. After which he started fuc-- er, freaking monologuing." Cue eyeroll. "Apparently he was planning on staging some sort of disaster to get as many A-class heroes in one place as possible, and then turn it on so they'd all kill each other."

It was a super great plan.

Well that's scary. Not exactly a unique threat in the world of superheroes, but super disturbing to think about it ever affecting her. Or her friends. But then, that's what CONDOR's for - stopping those kind of threats before they even get close to something superheroes need to handle.

"So you did... what, exactly?"

Clint shrugs. "He was gonna test the final version on me and Bobbi. Never took our weapons and everything for maximum damage, and I didn't have anything to try to plug my ears with, so I snapped off one of my sonic arrowheads, activated it, and clenched it in my teeth."

That's the one thing that he still sort of has bad dreams about sometimes - that sound that was beyond sound, filling his skull and making his ears ache and then suddenly starting to fade from hearing even as he can still feel it rattling through his bones. He's fine with his deafness now, but at the time... it was terrifying.

"I knocked Bobbi out as gently as I could, broke out of the room they had us in, took down the jackass with the plan, and destroyed the machine. By the time I'd taken it out, I had pretty much no hearing left."

Rikki stifles a laugh behind her hand. She hadn't heard about any of this until now, and that is so disappointing. She trusted Forrest to share things like this.

"It's cute that she still talked to you after that."

"Yeah, she almost didn't..." He looks a bit sheepish. "This part did NOT make it out to most people, so if I hear anyone talking about it, I'm blaming you, but. I didn't tell her how I'd managed to block it out. And I didn't initially own up to the damage done, I thought it'd probably wear off. So after she woke up, she tried to ask me out, and I assumed she was thanking me and got out of that conversation as fast as I could."

He mostly tells this part because he knows it'll make her laugh, and given the shit they've both been through recently? He's glad he can make her smile.

"What?" She doesn't even bother stifling her laughter this time. "Why would you... No, never mind, I know exactly why."

Stupid boys and their stupid pride. Forrest got the same way sometimes, when he got hurt, trying to pretend it didn't happen and hoping she wouldn't notice... That never really worked, but he never stopped trying.

"Did she call you on it, or...?"

Good, she's laughing. He gets the feeling (from his own experience) that she hasn't been doing that often enough.

"I think she thought I wasn't interested initially," he said. "But when my hearing didn't clear up at all in a couple days, and they were bugging me to come in for a debrief, I had to own up, and they sent me to medical, and she found me there getting tested for my hearing aids. We were in one of those windowed exam rooms, so she got a notepad to hold against the window from the hallway and asked me out that way."

He smiles, to himself, thinking of her face - exasperated but fond, like they'd been friends for years. She'd been gorgeous before, but he's pretty sure that was the moment he fell in love with her. An agent - a highly skilled hardass of an agent - standing in the hallway with a sharpie and a pad of paper, asking him out through the window, smiling like she knew everything about him and loved him anyway. It's a memory straight out of, like, Love, Actually or something, and he treasures it.

"I said sure, once I got out with my aids calibrated and could actually hold a conversation, and 5 days later we got married in Vegas."

And that would be the reason this story exasperated Forrest.

"Okay, that's really cu- Five days? Are you freaking serious?"

She's just staring at him like he grew another head now. What kind of lunatic marries someone after five days? Clint Barton, is what. Now she gets why Forrest was so disapproving of the whole incident.

"...you know, he never told me that. I didn't find out you guys were married for like a year after that."

"It was nine days if you count the op and the two days I spent avoiding debrief!" he says defensively.

As if nine days is so much better than five.

"Yeah, he was pretty 'done with my shenanigans' by that point," Clint admits with a chuckle. "He did come to our party, though, after we got back from the honeymoon. And in my defense, our marriage was awesome."

Except for that big fight, but that was because he was a thick-headed, victim-blaming ass, not because they weren't compatible.

"That's not actually better. At all."

Clint, you are a role model to children. Come on, man. ...okay, maybe Rikki spent too much time around Forrest shut up it's contagious.

"At least you had good taste. Her, I'm not so sure, but..."

"She had shitty-ass taste and I reminded her of that often," Clint says. "She stuck around anyway. So I'm guessing it was either Stockholm Syndrome or she fell in love with me for some reason."

He smiles at Rikki, and it's a little doofy, a little sappy, and a little sad. It's hard, remembering Bobbi. Even the good memories. "So that's the story of how I lost my hearing, met my soulmate, and got married, all in one op."

"That's adorable. I mean, probably not a great story if you want to impress people, but there was already no chance of that with me, so..."

That's not true. She thinks Clint is very cool. But she can't just tell him that and let it go to his head.

"Don't make me noogie you, rook, I will do it with no regrets whatsoever," he warns.

"Though," he adds after a pause, "if anybody's much impressed by me, they probably haven't followed my career very closely."

I'm coming home

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