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There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death. — Kenneth Patchen
He was born in the fire. That’s what Natasha tells him when they are grown, a man and a woman sitting side by side on a filthy rooftop overlooking Moscow. They both were.
He remembers it, vividly. He remembers fingers clenched tight on his brother Barney’s arm as the car swerved wildly and their mother begged their father to drive more carefully, to pull over and let her drive. He remembers the helpless feeling of knowing that a drunk man never listened and the feeling of his hand slipping on sweat and heart pounding hot beneath his skin.
Squealing tires, the car crashes, and his vision explodes into flashes of brilliance in the dark. His mother’s screams cut off, and there’s blood dripping from cuts and worse.
He remembers the fire.
“I think I died there,” he tells her.
Natasha looks at him with that steady gaze everyone except himself seems to swear is blank. It isn’t. It’s a broad plain of compassion and the hard swallow of her own remembered pain. “We both did.”
His name is Clint Barton and he’s nothing better than a roustabout, but at least it means he’s with his brother Barney. They work the carnival together, setting up and taking down. They are sharp points and edges hidden behind hardworking limbs and supposedly blank faces. Whatever else they are or aren’t, they are brothers.
Barney tells the other roustabouts to shove off when they mock Clint for his hearing aids. He knocks Clint around a bit when he leaves them out.
But it’s so much easier to run across the high wire and fold himself into acrobatics and projectiles when he can’t hear more than the murmur of the other carnies. He wears the hearing aids for the marks. He leaves them out with throwing knives or arrows from the props trailer, breathing soundlessly with the motions as his world narrows to simple targets and his own steady hands. It’s easy to forget the fire and the shouting and all the things he came to associate with his drunken father.
Jacques Duquesne is called the Swordsman and is the most successful act in Carson’s Carnival of Travelling Wonders. He sees Clint one night practicing with props that aren’t his.
“Barton,” he barks out when the last arrow flies off the bow.
Clint sees the sharp cutting motion of Duquesne’s hand rather than hears his name. Instincts born from years of meeting the backside of his father’s angry hand have Clint reeling for cover, but Duquesne catches the back of his shirt in disgust and tells him, loud enough for Clint to hear, “Do that again.”
He does.
Barney’s eyes narrow when Clint joins the act, but he only raises his voice once over the issue. “They’re using you, Buck and Jacques both.”
“They’re teaching me,” Clint denies stubbornly. “They wanted you too.”
“They want your skills, Clint, not you.” Barney’s getting his GED and wants Clint to get his too. “This circus is a stopping point. It’s just a dot on the map to where we’re going.”
For the first time, Clint allows the full bitterness of memory to color his words. “And where exactly is that?”
Clint walks in on Duquesne counting up the money that isn’t his, the money that is Carson’s, and Barney’s words turn sideways in his head when he fights for his life, folding his body into sharp edges and points and running off the high wire until he’s falling…
They leave him for dead. Even Barney leaves him.
“I think I died there,” he tells Natasha once, crouched in a perch over nighttime Tokyo, bow in his hand, memory hissing over the comm.
Phil says nothing.
She clenches his hand and murmurs, “My mistake.”
Then Phil calls the shot and Clint forgets to ask her what she meant.
Buck Chisholm came back for him. Buck saved him. It still comforts him that not everyone in that carnival was using him or let him die.
He’s bleeding and bruised. He’s choking on his own blood, and this is the end.
“You, fool,” Barney’s last words hiss in his head. “You turned on your own mentor.”
You were right, Clint cannot find the breath to say. You were right and I realized it. Isn’t that enough? You’re my brother, my brother, my brother…
“I think I died there,” he tells Natasha once.
Clint has become used to high places. He folds himself into sharp edges and points behind keen eyes and blank faces, hands on his bow, waiting with endless patience for a shot.
He puts down crime lords and petty thieves, the crooks who deserve being put down. He sights down the string and drops a bodyguard with an arrow through his chest.
Startled brown eyes look up and see him. Startled brown eyes and Clint freezes. He freezes, he can’t breathe, he can’t…
It’s Barney.
His sights are on his brother, and he doesn’t see the danger, doesn’t see until he’s already distantly heard a muffled pop, and he falls bleeding with sharp pain blooming out of his side. He’s falling… He’d always left his hearing aids out when it came time to take the shot.
“I killed my brother,” he tells Natasha once, heaving a shattered breath after the nightmare. The flutter of red in his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. It was like killing himself. “You were there,” he says when he’s less coherent. “You saved me.”
It isn’t true, which he remembers when he’s sensible. He didn’t meet Natasha until a year later when, uncaring of anything else, he’d made a name for himself as a mercenary. She saved him them, but she was far too late to save Barney.
This is how Clint remembers Budapest.
He remembers the clench of his fingers on Natasha’s arm, slipping with sweat, demanding of her, “You’re not allowed to die, d— it!” He remembers the tremors shaking her body, the anxious, cussing wait for their extraction, the breathless endless hours pacing outside of surgery until they told him she was going to live.
He remembers Natasha taking a bullet to save him.
He doesn’t remember the clench of his fingers on Natasha’s arm, slipping with sweat, shaking with blood loss. He never does remember taking a bullet for Natasha.
“Remember Abidjan?”
He almost stops and shakes his head. He doesn’t, but his hands clench tighter around the bow as he shoots again and again at the targets on his roof.
Clint practices for hours to keep in shape, to stay sharp. Natasha often sits at the safe edge behind his back, curled up like a cat, chin tucked into the top of her knees.
He’s seen the footage of the two of them shooting back to back in the street. He still can’t determine why his memory seems to go blank there.
Natasha curls her toes, shoes making that soft scraping sound on his roof they always do. It’s as good as a neon sign to Clint that she’s bothered by his answer but unsurprised.
“I remember,” she says at last. “You almost died.”
The intel is bad. He should never have taken this mission solo. But this time, there is no Trickshot to find him when he falls from the high wire, no flutter of red hair in his eyes before he falls off a side of a building because his eyes were on his brother and not the hostiles, and no Natasha to lunge impossibly far and take a bullet in her side.
Hawkeye falls and Clint’s back hits the dirt in Abidjan’s streets. He needs to stop falling. He always dies when he falls.
He never asks why Loki’s scepter didn’t kill him when he leapt between it and Fury. Perhaps Clint Barton is just that good. Perhaps whoever owned the hands that shoved him a little further out of the way than he could jump was just that fast.
He never has to worry about his hearing aids anymore. SHIELD surgically corrected what they could and gave him internal hearing aids for the rest. He’s not so unwise to try to leave them out.
Because of that, Clint hears her when she steps behind him on the helicarrier. He turns and fires, but Natasha is fast, a flutter of red hair, a knife and teeth and a hard hitter. He knows all her moves and this fight is more for real than any they’ve ever fought before.
He sees the pain and resignation in her eyes. A part of him, the tiny part that remembers fire and blood and falling and Natasha, begs her with his mind to kill him. That same part feels relief when her knife rams home, and he’s falling, falling, falling into red.