I'm coming home

[makethatwork]

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.

Comments

[mockingjaded]

She hecka raises an eyebrow at him censoring his language for her, and there is a brief moment where she wonders if she needs to remind him that her backstory involves being forced into fights to the death at age sixteen.

She refrains.

"They got Karkat too not too long ago," she adds. "Only about twelve hours, but they make it count." She exhales.

"Oh, you know. Still waiting for my ride. For a whole six months now. Starting to wonder about when I should pick up my bags and leave the station."

[makethatwork]

"Jesus."

He shakes his head. Just. Fuck TRIDENT, on so many levels for so many reasons.

"Well," he says, "I can't help with that, but I'm willing to go on the range with you whenever, see how you're doing with the bow, give you some tips if you want. Or, y'know, just have a shoot-off." He smiles lopsidedly. "Been ages since I really had anyone to talk bows with, y'know?"

[mockingjaded]

He gets a little bit of an amused smirk out of her, no matter how dour her neutral face is at the moment. She leans back against the wall.

"You know, I never really did understand how someone growing up in a place like this ends up using a bow."

[makethatwork]

"I was a carnie," Clint says. "Uh, circus performer, sideshow star, whatever you wanna call it. My brother'n I joined up when I was a kid, I showed some talent for it, and spent the next few years doing pretty much nothing but shoot in increasingly dramatic ways."

[mockingjaded]

That's not really the backstory she had been expecting. She'd thought he was a secret agent or something.

"And then what, next stop: superhero?" she asks, slightly incredulous.

[makethatwork]

Well, he technically is still an agent, and goes on covert ops when they need his particular brand of capability for one reason or another.

But that's not where he started.

He snorts and shakes his head. "No, though I tried. First time I tried to break up a robbery, the cops mistook me for the robber. Took off 'cause I didn't really have a deep and abiding trust of law enforcement, ended up falling in with this Russian assassin named Yelena." He shrugs. "She would've been better off without me, probably, I was shit at being a bad guy. But then I realized I was pretty miserable being a bad guy, so I decided to ask Alpha Force for forgiveness and to be let on the team."

He pauses for a moment, then adds, "I was like, 20 at this point. And even dumber than I am now."

[mockingjaded]

That doesn't really make the story sound less ridiculous, but at least it explains some of where the experience came from.

"Well, look at me, I'm not even twenty yet. Maybe I can get a head start," he says dryly, before giving a more serious prompt. "Is that really how it works? You can be a criminal around here and then just ask for forgiveness?"

[makethatwork]

"Nah, J put in a good word for me. You been up to the tower and met our butler guy?" he smiles crookedly. "Guy got me my job, basically. ...As a CONDOR agent. I didn't get on Alpha Force until I was almost 25."

"Though," he adds, "If you make a good enough case to the right people, more people could probably swing it."

[mockingjaded]

She exhales in a manner that almost amounts to a laugh. Almost.

"It's not really my line of work, anyway," she says. She hasn't really been shooting for the stars here, has she?

[makethatwork]

"What is your line of work?" he asks. "Theoretically speaking, I mean. While you wait for the bums up where you're from to get off their asses and pick you up."

[mockingjaded]

"No idea," he says, honestly. "Never really had much of a plan." Not back home, anyway. And she's reluctant as hell to try to make plans here.

"No one needs the kind of skills that I have to offer here." A beat. "Besides crime fighting, anyway."