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Clint Barton's parents have the regulation maximum of two children.
They weren't going to; Barney was always meant to be an only child (and he is, sort of, now). But then the International Fleet came and tested their older (only) son, and said, no, thank you, he's too malleable, his morals too easily swayed.
But we'd like to test your other child.
We weren't planning on having another, they said, and the IF said, we have incentives for that.
And so, six years after Barney, there was Clint, and now Clint is five years old (not yet quite six, but then, the IF aren't known for cutting families with potential much slack) and Colonel Hyrum Graff is standing in their living room, tapping his fingers against a glossy folder full of papers with the Fleet logo stamped in the corner of each one.
"He's ours for testing, Mrs. Barton, you know that. That was always the agreement."
"He isn't six years old yet, he's not ready," she says, alarm standing out clearly across her features. She looks to her husband to back her up, but he's leaning against the far wall of the room, bottle in hand, and doesn't care. Clint was never intended in the first place, and so what if the IF want to take him? That's what he was born for, really, isn't it?
He drinks deeply, swallows.
When Graff talks privately to Clint, he asks him what he'd miss the most. "Barney," is Clint's immediate answer, and then, more speculatively, "but that's not who's going to miss me the most."
Graff notices the use of the future tense, instead of the subjunctive, like for Clint it's already an inevitability. He notes it, but doesn't correct it, because that is exactly where he wants Clint's mind, although he's legally obligated to give the boy a choice.
"Who's going to miss you the most?"
"My mom."
He's right, of course. "Why is that?"
Clint fidgets, kicks his legs against the chair he's sitting on, looks down at his shoes so that he won't have to meet Graff's eyes. He doesn't answer, and after a while, the colonel changes tacks.
"Why don't you want to come?"
"I do."
Graff knows that already too, but more than that, he knows that wanting isn't necessarily going to be enough. It's his job to convince Clint that leaving won't mean the end of the world, for him or for his family, and he knows exactly how to lay the groundwork for it.
"When I asked you earlier whom you would miss, why did you say Barney?"
"He's my brother and he loves me."
"Of course he does. But don't your mother and your father love you, too?"
"Barney looks after me." Graff doesn't miss the implication there, but it's nothing the surveillance cameras and the monitors haven't already told him. For that matter, it's nothing that the last half hour inside the Barton household, quietly observing, hasn't told him.
Clint is intelligent enough that Graff hasn't even bothered to glance at his test results. They sent him out here with a crisp stack of paperwork and a simple sentence, This could be the kid, and he's a good soldier first and a good man second, so he hasn't asked any further questions.
He plants the final seed. "What do you think would happen here if you left?"
Right now, Clint is a distraction. He's a target for his father, and Barney is his shield, and their mother is Barney's shield, and in the end they all bear a little of it, but Clint takes most of it onto his small shoulders. If he left, then it would be just the two of them, just Barney and his mother against (one drunken man) the world.
But Barney is six years older, just starting to get his man's growth, and if he's been protecting Clint for five and a half years now, then he's had enough practice to defend their mother, too. And maybe if there is no easy target for their father's rage, then it won't come out so often or so violently; maybe if Clint leaves, he'll be making things better for the others.
Graff watches the thoughts lay themselves out on Clint's face, exactly the path he's tried to set for them. It isn't often that a plan of his succeeds so well; he's better at manipulating groups of children than individuals, and there's something about this kid in particular. Clint's not soft, not weak, like most of the kids they pick up. He hasn't had advantages so far. He's got scars under his school clothes and a determined glint in his eye that speaks to a maturity not just of mind, but of constitution as well. All of the kids they take up to Battle School are ahead of their peers, but some skills don't come from intelligence or innate personality, and Clint, at five, is already a fighter and a strategist.
"If I come," Clint says, "will you take out the cameras in the house?"
"Are you trying to make a deal?"
"Yeah," Clint says, and he sets his jaw firmly. "I'll come, but only if you leave them in."
"You don't want us to take out the cameras?"
"No," says Clint. "You keep watching. To make sure everything's okay."
"You understand we won't be able to give you any information once you're a student at Battle School," Graff tells him. "The IF passing surveillance data to a student would be… more than frowned upon."
"Just so long as you're watching," Clint says, and Graff has to admire his doggedness.
"We'll keep an eye out," he promises (lies), and so Clint nods.
"Okay," he says. "I'll come. When do we leave?"
"Right now."
There are eleven other children in Clint's launch group. Maybe half of them are American, kids whose hair is neatly cut and whose profiles speak to a happy, healthy childhood brought up in relative luxury. The other half are from all over; one serious-faced boy's dark skin and strong features give away his African ancestry, another's calm stance and polite bow belie his Asian roots. He's reprimanded for bowing. Apparently, that's nationalistic, and in the International Fleet, one salutes.
Clint does neither. It would get him in trouble, except that there are still dignitaries standing around and news channel cameras facing them and the IF are already taking away babies into battle; the last thing they want is negative publicity. So Graff brings one big hand down on Clint's head and tousles his hair, and Clint tolerates it, because there's a give-and-take here and he still hasn't quite figured out how it works.
Beside him, a red-headed boy is strapping himself in. Clint figures out the straps without much trouble, buckles them, then settles back.
"What's your name?" a boy in front of him asks, leaning over the back of the seat. He's got messy black hair, dark eyes and a mischievous expression, and Clint's not sure whether or not to like him.
"Clint," he says. It won't last long; Graff's already told him that most boys in Battle School end up with nicknames. He's looking forward to having one less trapping of his father's house surrounding him, so whatever they call him, it'll be better than Clint Barton.
"I'm Tony," says the boy, and stretches a hand down over the back of the seat for Clint to shake. "Who're you?"
The redhead looks up. "Natasha."
The voice is heavily Russian-accented, but that's not what surprises Clint and Tony. "That's a girl's name!"
"And?"
"Girls don't get picked for Battle School."
"Actually," and suddenly Graff is looming over them, and where did he come from?, "there are a number of girls in the school. It's true, they aren't selected as often, but they frequently prove to be the best of their launch groups. So watch out."
He moves on toward the bow of the shuttle, and Natasha smirks.
"Is everyone strapped in?"
Tony isn't, but he subsides back into his seat and Clint takes the opportunity to look around and see who else is on the ship. A brown-haired boy with glasses that keep sliding down his nose; two big, tall blond boys who could be brothers, except that one is speaking flawless Fleet Common and the other's words are heavily accented and somehow archaic; two boys fighting in the second-to-last row; and two more at the very back, where Clint would have chosen to sit if Graff hadn't held him up. Those two are both quiet, one surveying the shuttle the same way Clint is and the other staring off into space. Clint's not dumb enough to think he might be daydreaming (not in a launch group like this; not in a group of children hand-picked for military acuity), but he does wonder what's going through the other boy's head that's so fascinating.
There's a video and then Graff speaks to them again – something about getting along and remembering that even though they were special in their old lives, they're all on the same level now. Or something. Clint doesn't really pay much attention, though he can feel Graff's eyes boring into him on occasion. He has no need for this talk; he didn't think he was special when he was still at home in Iowa, and he doesn't think he's any more special now.
Anyway, their scores will tell them soon enough what the standard for 'special' is and who meets it.
Clint works on relaxing his muscles, in groups and then all at once, and lets himself get lost in thought as they make the shuttle trip. He can hear the boys a couple of rows back arguing again, boisterous enough that Graff travels hand-over-hand in the zero-G shuttle to give them a few sharp words. Tony snickers in front of him and says something that Natasha answers snidely, and they begin sniping over his head until he worries that Graff will stop by their seats again as well, but fortunately, they've learnt by example and are keeping the volume low enough not to be obvious. Clint doesn't care; he just doesn't want Graff to pay any more attention to him.
He knows that if the adults don't eat you alive, you become a target for the other kids. He'd rather fly under the radar.
Under the radar is safe, or as safe as anything will ever be again.
Every launch group gets a mom, Graff explains.
The boys begin to laugh, but the smiles drop off their faces when they see their 'mom,' who has a shaved head and more muscles than Clint knew a human being could carry. His name is Luke.
Luke's job is to look after them, but that means something different than it did on Earth. Before, it might have meant things like meals, help with homework, tying shoes for some of the less-coordinated children. Here, their food comes from a mess hall, they're expected to be able to handle their own classwork, and their shoes don't have laces (a few of the boys mutter darkly about why that might be, and Luke makes a face like they are not entirely off-base with their guesses). Here, looking after them means teaching them how the station's systems work, getting their information stored in the scanners, giving them a tour of the school.
"Purple, blue, purple," he says, and the boys stare at him.
He rolls his eyes. "Look," he sighs, palms the wall behind him. A strip of lights runs down the curving corridor away from them, around a corner until they can't see it anymore. "Purple, blue, purple, see? You get lost, that's how you get where you're supposed to go."
"Purple's kind of a stupid colour," Tony mutters under his breath, but Luke hears him.
"You the kind of cream puff can't handle a little purple to your self-esteem?" he asks, and Tony shakes his head. "Hey," Luke says, "you look at me when I talk to you."
Tony looks up, sullen. "No."
"No, sir."
"No, sir," he concedes, because whatever Tony was on Earth, he's six years old and all alone up here right now, and the last thing any of them wants to do is make their launch mom mad. Luke could probably break them all in half with his bare hands. (It's a figure of speech, but Clint knows that they're not kids anymore – if they ever were – they're soldiers now, and the rules are different and dangerous, and the sanctions are harsher.)
Dinner is at the mess hall, surrounded by cheerful noise, whoops and catcalls when the older boys notice the new launch group, sounds of surprise when they realize that Clint is smaller than the others and that Natasha is a girl. "Who you think you are, eemo?" they ask, whacking him on the back of the head. "Couldn't wait 'til you were six years old like the rest of us?"
"You jealous?" Clint asks, and it's a mistake. Opening his big mouth is always a mistake; hasn't he learnt anything from his father? (He has; his one-piece uniform covers the scars that prove it.)
They circle him dangerously. He wants to roll his eyes, tell them they can't be serious, the teachers would never allow a student to be threatened in the station – but even Clint is not stupid enough to speak up twice on his first day as a launchie.
"Is there a problem here?" a voice asks from behind him, and it's not a teacher, not an adult voice – another kid. He turns, surprised, and there's a boy standing behind him with a calm expression, hands behind his back and a badge on his sleeve with a snake emblazoned on it.
The other boys glance at one another, somehow chastened. They don't answer (so the boy must not garner the same kind of respect as a commander, Clint thinks), but they leave (so he's high enough up on whatever hierarchy Battle School really uses to make people do what he wants, and that's a far more useful attribute in any case).
"Thanks," Clint says.
"They always do that," the boy says. "You probably smart-mouthed at them, didn't you?"
"Just trying to make a few friends."
"Kuso," the boy returns, but amiably. "Keep out of trouble. I don't have time to come rescuing launchies all day."
"Wait," says Clint. "Who – "
"Phil," the boy says. "Asp Army," indicating the badge on his sleeve. "And I'm due in the practice room in three minutes, so unless you want to mouth off to anyone else…"
Clint shakes his head quickly, and the boy nods, turns on his heel and leaves the mess hall. The door swings on its hinges after he passes through, back, forth, back, and then there's a hand being waved in front of Clint's face.
"Wake up," says Natasha. "No sweet dreams in the dining hall."
"No sweet dreams anymore," Clint grins. "They took those all away from us. Just like they took our shoelaces and our dignity."
"Says you," she shoots back. "Some of us still have ours."
He rolls his eyes, punches her lightly on the arm (not hard; she's bigger than he is, and he's betting from the way she moves and the shift of her weight when they stand that she's also a much better fighter) and gestures to the door.
At least it looks like he might have one friend up here.
Asp Army is commanded by a tall boy named Nick – or, at least, the student files say his name is Nick. His army (and the crowd of jealous soldiers and launchies who want in; Asp is at the top of the standings and has been there for months) call him Fury. There's only one Phil on the list of names assigned to Asp, and Clint goes over his file again and again, trying to figure out how he manages to command obedience from soldiers who aren't even in his army. Kids who are older than he is, even. It takes Clint several weeks to find this out, because personal details are stored in the teachers' files and need more advanced code-breaking, but he teams up with Tony, who's unstoppable, and gets a hold of Phil's information. He's not yet even nine; Asp is his first army, and he's been with them for nearly a year.
"Why do you want to know this stuff?" Tony asks, watching Clint over the edge of his desk, which is covered in schematics for some crazy robot combat drone. Tony is in the advanced engineering classes despite his age and the fact that they've only been here a few weeks. He's not the only one; Bruce is in higher-level mathematics, Steve and Sitwell have both been moved up a level in strategy, and Wade and Natasha are doing personal combat.
Clint is getting advanced work in physics and geometry, but he's not telling anyone.
None of it really matters, anyway; the battle room is the only thing that holds any real significance for them. They were introduced to it on their second day and have been drilling ever since, flash suits once stiff with disuse and now comfortably worn around the joints, light guns once unfamiliarly-shaped with their array of buttons and now second nature to the whole launch group (except maybe for Thor, who prefers swinging his around like a sledgehammer, and Bruce, who knows perfectly well how to use his but never seems to fire it during practice sessions).
"Why don't you ever shoot?" Clint asks him one day.
Bruce shrugs. "I don't see why," he says. "Everyone is already shooting."
"If you don't shoot, you'll never get any practice."
"I get plenty of practice," Bruce points out. "I learn to move around, same as you guys do. I learn null-grav combat, same as you guys. I know how the gun works. I just don't incapacitate anyone with it."
"Don't you want to get picked for an army?"
"No one ever gets picked before they're eight anyway," says Bruce. "I just want to learn everything."
Clint grins. "Tell you what," he says, and leans conspiratorially closer. "Next practice, flash me in the foot."
"What?"
"Trust me. Just flash my foot or something, anything, whatever's closest."
"I don't want to."
"It's okay, I won't mind. I'm asking you to do it."
The next day, they're in the battle room, learning to flip themselves around stars, which are really just giant boxes positioned at random or in patterns around the zero-gravity space. Jimmy Woo figures out that it's faster if you fly around all kind of bunched-up at the knees, but that makes them ricochet off the walls in unexpected directions, so there's maybe fifty percent efficient battle formation and fifty percent ridiculous crowd of half-immobilized flash suits drifting lamely through the air. Wade, who's completely frozen, is shouting insults at Logan because he still has both arms free; T'Challa is sneaking up behind them both with light gun at the ready, aiming to flash their hoods and freeze their jaws so maybe they'll shut up.
Clint's been timing them, and they have maybe two minutes before the lights go up, the gate shuts down and they're done for the day, so he shouts over to Bruce, "Come on! Shoot me!"
"You're still undamaged!"
"There's only, like, a minute left! Get my foot or something, come on!"
Bruce bites his lip, furrows his brow, but he raises the light gun and rests his thumb on the continuous-beam button.
"Do it!"
A second later, Clint feels his left foot go rigid, ankle to knee, and lets out a whoop. He's not supposed to be happy about it – his record's going to take a hit, because he's one of the least frequently damaged launchies in his group, but Bruce is going to be in the records for the first time, and he figures that's worth celebrating.
After the battle room sounds its shutdown warning, they all gather at the entrance gate, talking and laughing; the kids who can still move round up the ones who can't, and they're all assembled in rough formation waiting for the gate to open. Bruce sends a shy smile Clint's way, offers quietly, "Thank you."
Clint shrugs, hunches his shoulders. He just wants Bruce to get a good army along with the rest of them. The other kids in their launch group are okay, but Bruce is, well, he's nice, and Clint doesn't want to see him left behind. Life would kind of suck without him in the battle room, doing his pacifist thing and helping Clint with his military history essays.
As they're leaving the battle room, he sees a familiar face in the corridor, watching their practice session play out over one of the monitors. It's Phil, Asp Army uniform spotless as ever, and as Clint walks by, the older boy catches his eye and gives him an expressionless nod.
Clint can tell it's approval anyway.
The plan works; Bruce, who is almost never damaged or incapacitated, shoots to the top of the standings because of his 100% accuracy rating, and he and Clint sit over their desks playing games during their free time and laugh at the flaws in the system. Natasha finds it less humorous, because before they pulled that trick, she was ranked first, and now she's been knocked down to second place. Clint was second and is now third, but he doesn't care. He thinks the rules are kind of stupid.
Bruce doesn't lose his place in the standings for months.
Logan is the first of their launch group to turn eight. Nobody celebrates birthdays in Battle School – most of the kids have forgotten when theirs are – but they all notice Logan's eighth because when they get back to their barracks after breakfast, there's a slip of paper on his bed.
LOGAN HOWLETT – ASSIGNED PHOENIX ARMY – COMMANDER WALTER LANGKOWSKI – EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY – CODE RED RED YELLOW – NO POSSESSIONS TRANSFERRED
After that, they start moving out fairly quickly. Steve gets picked up for Lion Army and realizes he must have turned eight as well; Jimmy Woo ends up in Tide and leaves with a nervous grin plastered on his face; Hank gets Centipede and doesn't even try to hide his jubilation; and then Bruce shows Clint a folded piece of paper in his hand.
BRUCE BANNER – ASSIGNED TIGER ARMY – COMMANDER GREER GRANT – EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY – CODE ORANGE ORANGE ORANGE – NO POSSESSIONS TRANSFERRED
Clint grabs his hand, shakes it vigorously (it feels weird to do that, not the kind of interaction they're used to at Battle School, more like a half-forgotten remnant of what life was like on Earth), wishes him luck. Bruce nods. He looks uncertain, like he can't quite understand why he's been invited to Tiger Army (third in the standings out of twenty is fantastic, highest-ranked army anyone in their launch group has gone to).
He'll be great, Clint assures him, absolutely fantastic. "Toguro," he says, "Bruce, this is great, this is, wow."
"Toguro," Bruce echoes, and there's a hint of a smile.
A knock on the side of the doorway and they both jump, but it's just one of the older students, Rhodey, with a slip of paper for someone.
"You're Clint Barton?"
Confused, Clint gives his assent. Is he being summoned somewhere? He's younger than the rest of his launch group, not even seven and a half, so surely that's not what he thought it was at first glance.
Sure enough, though, Rhodey shoves the paper in his hand, then stands back to watch while Clint unfolds it.
CLINT BARTON – ASSIGNED CONDOR ARMY – COMMANDER PHILIP COULSON – EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY – CODE BLUE RED BLUE – NO POSSESSIONS TRANSFERRED
"Uh," says Clint, "is this some kind of joke?"
"Why would I joke? I don't even know you."
"I'm not old enough to be assigned yet. And Condor Army is top of the standings." It is; they knocked Asp out last month so that now the snake army is neck-and-neck with Tiger for second place.
Rhodey shrugs. "Not my problem. You coming?"
If the assignment's real, Clint doesn't have much choice. There's no timestamp on the paper, but Sitwell tried to put off reporting to the Badger Army commander until he'd finished his classwork and ended up on drill duty for a week. Clint knows better than to try pulling the same trick.
"C'mon," he says to Bruce. "Let's get out of here."
It stings just a little when the orange-orange-orange light path runs in the opposite direction from blue-red-blue, but it's not like they care. They're soldiers now, and soldiers don't have feelings to get hurt.
"See ya," says Clint, and heads down the hall with Rhodey.
He's careful not to look back, but he knows anyway that Bruce is watching him go.
Launchies get a mom. Soldiers get a commander.
Clint gets Phil Coulson, who appears to be simultaneously both and neither. He's sprawled out on the bottom right-hand bunk by the door working on his desk when Clint arrives, which is the first unusual thing about Condor Army.
Commanders have their own quarters and aren't required to bunk with their armies, though of course, that's always an option. Phil is the only commander Clint has ever seen take it, though; most prefer the aloofness of the private rooms, status symbol that is the only material reward anyone ever earns at Battle School. There must be a room for Phil, too, but he looks perfectly at home on his standard bunk, tapping at a training exercise.
He puts the game on hold when Clint taps on the doorframe, looks up, nods. "Clint Barton, right?"
"I… I have this," Clint says by way of explanation, proffering the slightly-banged-up bit of paper in his hand. "I was assigned here."
"I know," says Phil, laying his desk aside on the pillow and rolling smoothly from the mattress to a standing position. "I requested you specifically."
There's dead silence for a second, the words ringing strangely in Clint's ears, like the echo of them isn't quite the same as the original. Phil requested him? The commander of the current most successful army in Battle School requested a greenhorn launchie with no combat experience, six months or more before he was due for assignment anywhere?
The obvious thing to ask would be why, but Clint's no idiot; the first move he makes in Condor Army isn't going to be to question his commander's decisions. Instead, he just nods. He's wondering if he should say thank you or something, but he's betting that's not a good idea either, so he waits for Phil to say something else.
"Your bunk's over there," is what Phil eventually says, gesturing to a bottom bunk near the back of the room. It's not the worst bunk in the layout (there's a short, crew-cut kid sitting on that one already, reading a book about martial arts), but it's not a great one, either; it's so far around the curve of the station that Clint won't be able to see the door from where he bunks, and it'll take him extra time to fall in for drill practice in the mornings.
"That's Hill," Phil says from behind him, making him jump just like he did the first time they met, and he turns in time to see Phil gesture to the kid in the bunk above Clint's. "She'll be your liaison for now. If you need anything, ask her. Drill starts at oh-six-hundred sharp, so enjoy your free time now, while you still can."
Clint nods, feeling like he's been little more than a yes-man all day, and Phil returns to his bunk and his desk. Instead of heading for his desk or the game rooms, Clint goes to palm himself in at the lockers, only to find that the ones here don't lock; there's just a ring on each one to be pulled, and he supposes 'privacy' and 'being a cohesive fighting unit' are somehow considered to be mutually exclusive in Battle School.
Hill notices his experimental tug and says, "It's greeyaz, I know. No one's going to poke around your stuff, though. We're pretty good about personal space in Condor."
"What makes Condor so special?"
The question makes her smile. "You'll see," she promises. "Condor isn't like the other armies."
Clint couldn't say with certainty, not after five minutes of being a member, but he's pretty sure a lot of Condor Army's differences can be traced back to the quiet boy on the bottom-right-front bunk.
Like most armies, Condor is divided into four toons. Phil assigns Clint to Maria Hill's on the first day, and he makes it almost a week before she tells Phil that if he's not reassigned, she's going to trade him out of Condor Army single-handedly.
"What's he doing?"
"What isn't he doing?" she groans. "He breaks formation. He questions authority – worse, he defies it without questioning it. He disrupts training sessions and I swear it's not humanly possible to keep a toon under control with him in it. He's not a team player, Phil."
Phil smiles a little, offers, "I'll swap him for Rand if Rhodey agrees, but we're not moving around any other soldiers. It's hard enough to keep you all in order as it is."
He lasts a little longer in Rhodey's toon, enough to fight in a couple of battles. His first time out in combat, Clint is damaged almost immediately, but because he's flying around with his legs bunched up, he takes out a couple of Rat Army soldiers before he's fully eliminated. Rhodey approves, and when they fight next (Flame, and it's the first time Clint has ever faced down any of his launchmates in official battle before), he lets Clint lead an offensive strike around the edge of a poorly-placed star.
Natasha has the dubious honour of being the first of their launch group to eliminate another in battle. Clint has the even more dubious honour of being the first eliminated by a launchmate.
After about a month, though, Rhodey presents him to Phil, shaking his head. He's too disruptive, he tells Phil, too easily distracted, and he isn't learning the formations. Phil sighs, but he moves Grimm over from his toon to Rhodey's, and takes Clint for himself. It doesn't sound like much, but Clint is stunned; he knows Ben Grimm is Phil's best toon member, and if he's willing to give that up to keep Clint in his army, well. Maybe there's something in this 'team' thing, after all.
Phil takes him aside, which Clint's expecting, and drops to one knee so that he can look Clint in the eye. "Listen," he says, and there's steel in his voice that Clint hasn't heard before. "You were labelled a disruption before I ever put in my request for you. I knew you might ruffle a few feathers, piss off some of my soldiers."
Clint wants to point out that he is one of Phil's soldiers, but wisely refrains.
"I don't care. You're good, Barton, I can tell. I want you here. But if you can't settle down, I will trade you to another army. I have a good team here and you deserve to be on it, but only if you can approach that with the respect it deserves."
There's something else hidden in the undertones of that sentence, the respect I deserve, but they leave it at that. Clint nods, sticks out his hand to show that he agrees; hand-shaking has kind of become his thing now, and it occurs to him only too late that this might be seen as disrespectful too.
Phil shakes. "Now quit being an idiot," he says. "No idiots in my jeesh."
Clint has to bite his lip to hide a surprised smile. He's been in launch groups and toons and armies before, but he's never been a part of someone's jeesh.
He doesn't ice out of Phil's toon. He doesn't ice out of Condor Army. In fact, under Phil's tutelage, Clint starts to get good. Really good. Top-third-of-the-standings-in-the-school's-best-army good, and he gets looks in the mess hall when he picks up his dinner (irritated ones from the older soldiers; admiring ones from the newer launchies; half-congratulatory, half-resentful ones from his former launchmates). He's good for a reason, too; Phil has his skills figured out by now and knows how best to put him to use. He is a careful shooter (no Wade Wilson, who makes a habit of defying every order he's ever given to go in guns blazing), but the thing about Clint is that he never misses.
Phil uses him in formations and behind stars a lot, because Clint's good at hiding and he's good at shooting, but he's also reckless enough to get flashed in the first few minutes of battle. Phil doesn't like it when his soldiers are unnecessarily compromised or lost, so playing Clint in well-defended positions is a good move. He becomes a sort of sniper, staying under cover and picking off enemy soldiers one by one, and Condor Army stays at the top of the rankings, and Clint stays in Phil's toon.
After a particularly challenging battle (Leopard Army, and T'Challa and Clint know one another's skills too well, because they match each other move for move around the room until someone from Bucky's toon finally manages to flash T'Challa's suit into immobility), Phil pulls Clint aside.
"You're working hard out there."
He is, but it's not a question, so Clint doesn't answer.
"What do you think of your standings right now?"
"I think I'm the eleventh-most successful soldier in your army, which makes me the fifteenth-most successful soldier in the school. I think I have the top accuracy rating in the system, and I think you know all this already. Why are you asking me?"
"I'm not asking you for the numbers. I'm asking what you think of them."
"I think they're pretty damn good."
"Well-earned?"
"You know they are."
"Shoot me," says Phil, pulls out a flash gun and tosses it to Clint.
"The suits don't work outside the battle room."
"I know," is all Phil says. He palms the scanner in front of the battle room gate and it opens to his touch. He must have it reserved.
Clint's tired; he's just finished a battle, stiff and sweaty, and he wants to shower, eat, feel like a human being again, but Phil flips himself off the edge of the gate, free-falling into the middle of the null-grav room, and Clint can't help but follow him, lining up his aim and taking a measured shot.
Half of Phil's suit goes dark. He thaws it immediately, using the hook in his pocket. "Again." He ricochets off a star, angling himself for a corner so that he can redirect unpredictably, but Clint has him flashed again before he makes it halfway there. "Good!" Phil approves, unfreezes himself again, and catches the corner handhold. "Now again," and suddenly he's spinning wildly through the room, rotational motion too fast for Clint to get a beam on him long enough to flash, and Clint finds himself pursuing, spinning the same way Phil is, trying to match his momentum, and then Phil's suit goes dark.
They do it for ten, fifteen minutes, Phil finding new ways to make Clint's life difficult, Clint thinking of solutions, until Phil finally catches the handhold nearest Clint's head and says breathlessly, "Hold your fire, soldier," and Clint does.
"Bucky and Danny are graduating," Phil tells him, clinging to wall handholds so that he's spread-eagled with the hook dangling at his side.
So? Clint wonders.
"Someone's going to have to replace Bucky as toon leader," Phil says. "Who do you think that should be?"
"Grimm," Clint replies automatically. He's been thinking about this for a while now, rearranging Condor Army in his head, dividing up the kids so that the toons are more balanced in terms of strength, trying to pick out the reasoning behind Phil's assignments.
"Any particular reason?"
"He's cool under fire. He gets along well with all of the other soldiers. He's been here a while."
"I give you a chance to pick the new toon leader and you don't pick yourself?"
"You want to pick me, go right ahead," Clint tells him, "but I think we both know that's a terrible idea."
"Don't you want to be a leader?"
"No," Clint answers honestly. "I want to be a soldier." He doesn't, or didn't, or maybe it's just that he assumes he can't always have wanted that; after all, he must have had dreams of some kind before Graff came to take him to the stars. It's true now, though. He wants to fight – not for the International Fleet (he doesn't owe them anything), not for Earth (why would he? he doesn't even remember it, really), but for his army and for his commander.
Phil nods. "Ben Grimm, huh?"
"You already chose him anyway."
"I did."
"So why did you ask me?"
"Condor Army's going to be down two soldiers in a few days. I'm thinking about recruiting. Got any suggestions?"
Clint does, but he keeps his mouth shut for a minute, analyzing the motives behind Phil's questions. Either he's trying to test Clint's ability to recognize talent, or there's something else Clint would be revealing with his answers. Either way, he's learning not to say everything that comes into his head right away. "Why ask me?" he repeats eventually instead.
"Just want to hear your thoughts."
He shrugs. "Natasha Romanova."
"From Flame Army?"
"Yeah." Natasha is one of the few non-Condor-Army soldiers ahead of Clint in the standings. She won't be an easy recruitment, but it'll be worth it if Phil gets her. Clint is already mentally slotting her into C toon, offsetting their distance combat strengths with her hand-to-hand skills.
"Anyone else?"
Clint thinks about Steve, who's solidly at the top of Lion Army's ranks, or Thor, who is delightfully insubordinate and yet still manages to be one of Rabbit's best soldiers. They're both good choices, and they're both going to be pretty much impossible to get.
"I was thinking Banner," Phil says, quiet voice penetrating Clint's internal debate.
"Bruce?" Clint asks. Really? Tiger Army is right below Condor in the standings, but Bruce, for all Clint likes him, is one of their weakest soldiers. The trick he and Clint once played only works if the other army isn't out to get him, and Bruce spends most of his time each battle now flashed into elimination, which does nothing for his ratings. Not that it would matter anyway; he's no more keen on firing his weapon now than he was as a launchie in battle practice.
"He wouldn't be difficult to get," Phil continues, which is true; Tiger is probably trying as hard as they can to get rid of him. He's dead weight for their fighting style, which is brash and aggressive and generally lacking in subtlety.
"Yeah," says Clint, as if the decision means nothing to him. "Yeah, Banner would be good."
Phil smiles. "Go and get dressed, Barton."
"Yes, sir."
"Good talk."
"Yes, sir."
When Ben Grimm is made the leader of D toon a few days later, he is the only one surprised by the promotion. When Natasha appears at the door of the Condor Army barracks later that same day, brand-new flash suit in her hands, no one at all is surprised. When she steps aside and Bruce Banner is behind her, a flash suit of his own slung over his shoulder, everyone is surprised, but they all try very hard not to look like it.
Bruce gets Danny Rand's old bunk, across the aisle from Clint's, and they exchange a grin while he stows his new uniform and tries to look nonchalant. Clint whispers, "Hi," and Bruce glances around the room before whispering back, "Did you have anything to do with this?"
"No, it was Phil's idea."
"Sure?"
Clint shrugs. "I'm just a soldier. It's not like I have a say."
Natasha ends up in C toon, like Clint figured, but Bruce has a harder time of it. At least Phil has more sense than to try to put him under Hill's command, but Rhodey gets tired of him quickly. "He won't fire a damn gun!" he complains to Phil, and so he's bounced from B to D to A toon, and nothing really seems to work.
One day, Phil takes Bruce aside, and Clint thinks, this is it. He's going to ice Bruce out, trade him away, get rid of him somehow, and that'll be Bruce's death sentence in Battle School, because no one's going to respect a soldier who had a shot with the best army in the school and got kicked out.
Instead, Bruce comes back a half hour later, quiet and close-mouthed, but practically vibrating with excitement. Clint can see the gleam in his eyes, the way his fingers shake when he straightens his glasses, and he beckons Clint over to his bunk to whisper fiercely, "He's giving me a toon!"
Okay, that's unexpected. There's a moment of taut silence while Clint grasps for an answer and then goes, "What? Whose toon?"
"No one's," says Bruce. "You'll see."
Sure enough, at evening practice, Phil marshals them together on one of the battle room walls and calls out a few names, eight boys who drop out of the handholds and line up against the nearest star. Clint is one of them.
"You're all members of E toon now," Phil tells them. "Officially, you're under my command, but when you're in the battle room, you take your instructions from Banner. Got that?"
They shuffle, look around at one another; Clint is the first to nod, and the first to look to Bruce for their orders.
As it turns out, Bruce is actually a rather brilliant strategist, and when he knows what's going on, has a picture of the battle in his head, he gets lost in it, throwing out hand signals and directions and crazy kamikaze plans that seem like they're going to end in disaster, but somehow never do. The first time E toon takes the enemy's gate in practice, Phil smiles; the first time they do it in battle, he laughs outright; the first time it's Bruce who flings himself through the gate, whooping like a launchie at his first victory (and, really, for Bruce, that's what this is), Clint is the one grinning like an idiot and flipping himself from star to star in jubilation.
Condor Army stays at the top of the rankings, and now you have to go twenty-nine places down in the individual standings to find a soldier who's not in Condor. Bruce is one of the twenty-nine.
Of course, it can't last. Battle School isn't designed to produce successful armies; it's built to train soldiers for a war, and so as soon as they see Phil succeeding with a soldier most commanders had given up for useless, the brass decide it's time for him to move on. He gets his orders that same night, a thick stack of full-sized pages that say PHILIP J COULSON across the top instead of CONDOR ARMY.
Clint sees them arrive, knows immediately what they mean. A new commander for the army, a new posting for Phil, and – he realizes for the first time – they won't be sharing a school anymore.
"Where are you going?" he asks, because, really, it's the only question.
"Pre-Command," Phil answers, as if there were ever any doubt.
Clint goes to sleep in a room with one too many bunks, in an army without a commander, in a school with one less ally than he had when he woke up.
Come morning, Clint is not in Condor Army anymore. They issue him a new flash suit, new uniform, Griffin Army, and he wonders why they're breaking up the unit Phil has assembled. It would make sense to disperse the knowledge between armies, but he's grown to realize that they don't think that way, and he suspects it's just because they think it's not fair to leave them together.
The last thing they give him is the standard slip of paper, except that this time, it says something different.
CLINT BARTON – ASSIGNED GRIFFIN ARMY – COMMANDER CLINT BARTON – EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY – CODE RED YELLOW GREY – NO POSSESSIONS TRANSFERRED
He has to read it a few times through before it sinks in, and when it does, he's angry. "What do you think you're doing, making me a commander?" he demands. "There are four toon leaders left in Condor and they're all better suited for command than I am."
"They're all commanders now," Graff says simply.
All commanders? They must have graduated half of Battle School to promote that many kids at once.
"You know how thrilled the rest of the school's gonna be about this?"
"That isn't my problem," is the reply. "You're a commander. I'm sure you'll find a way to deal with it."
There's no ceremony in it when he walks into his new army's barracks. "Hi," he says. "Practice at fourteen hundred hours." This is a stupid game and he never wanted to play it, all this posturing and strutting around and talking big at the other commanders (they're just kids, they were once his friends, and that the adults are trying to teach them rivalry seems pretty counter-productive).
Still, when he enters the mess hall that evening, Natasha waves at him and promises that Phoenix Army's going to kick his ass, and he answers that she can keep her emossin' army because Griffin's going to top the standings in no time, and a few soldiers from Griffin jeer in the direction of Phoenix, and then everyone's doing it, and somehow it feels like a union instead of a division.
Maybe they know what they're doing after all, Clint concedes.
He takes his cues from Phil when he commands, giving his toon leaders authority and not excepting himself from the rules. He's a member of Griffin Army, same as they are, and Phil had the right idea not disrupting team unity because of rank (which is meaningless right now anyway; Clint is not quite eleven and somehow in command of an army and his whole launch group are in command of armies and all the real commanders are gone). He sleeps in the commander's quarters, though, because he can't take the way they look up to him and down on him at the same time, like he's got some kind of magical command gift because he came from Condor Army, like the fact that the teachers put him in charge means he has a right to be there.
Griffin does all right. They hover at third in the standings, just ahead of Steve's Manticore Army, just behind Bruce and Natasha, who are vying for first place with Asp and Phoenix. Somehow, Bruce still manages not to have to fire his gun. Clint, who is really no more than a marksman anyway, admires that.
Commanding an army is supposed to be an honour; it's supposed to be exciting, eventful, maybe even a little dangerous. It ends up being none of those things, because it's just six more months of battles where Clint stays out of the way and shoots things, letting his toons handle the close combat, and then he gets his own orders, CLINTON F BARTON, only the destination is blank.
"What's this?" he asks Graff, who's standing in front of him as he reads the papers. If it's another game, they can shove it up their asses, because sending him to an army early was unfair, and sending him to command early was unfair, and he still hasn't even turned twelve yet, and now they want him gone. He's barely had time to register that he's in charge of forty kids, and they think they're going to get him behind the helm of a starship or whatever the hell this is supposed to be?
"Promotion," Graff says. "You're done with Battle School."
"Not if I don't have anywhere to go," he says, stabbing his finger at the blank spot on the forms.
"That's not nowhere," says Graff. "That's a choice."
"A choice?"
"Write your own ticket, Barton. Where do you want to go?"
He doesn't want to go anywhere. He doesn't want to stay at Battle School either, though, and he sure as hell doesn't want to go back to Earth, where he'd be just another washout, just another piece that doesn't fit into any of the puzzles anymore.
He wants to go back to his back-of-the-room bunk, to A toon in Condor Army, to Phil's command and Phil's quiet orders before battle and Phil's control of any situation that arose in his presence. He wasn't lying when he said he didn't want to lead; being a soldier in Phil Coulson's army is the thing that makes him feel most at home, most alive.
"Pre-Command," he says.
"Are you sure?"
"You saying I can't do it?"
"Clint," says Graff, and the sound of his first name in the colonel's gravelly voice is startling, "you were given carte blanche here for a reason. If you say you can do it, you can do it. I want you to be sure of why you're doing it, though."
Clint knows exactly why he's doing it.
"Pre-Command."
Graff writes it in the empty box at the top of the page, then taps something into a hand-held computer device he's got in his pocket. "Your shuttle leaves at twenty-one hundred. Don't be late."
Pre-Command School is nothing like Battle School.
Clint was hoping for some kind of familiarity, but nothing is the same – not the hierarchy of authority, not the classes, not the real-world exercises, not even the lettering on the bulkheads. Pre-Command School is not a space station; it's an outpost on a small, rocky trans-Neptunian object out in the Kuiper belt. It's uncomfortable living in a place where the corridors are straight and the gravity logical. It's strange to be able to see all four walls of his room at the same angle. It's strange to have a room, because at Pre-Command he's the lowest of the low, and yet there are no bunks and no forced co-habitation.
He wants to ask about Phil, but he doesn't. He also wants to ask about his Battle School launch group, his command colleagues, his former army teammates, but he doesn't. He's starting to get the sense that they want him a lone wolf, and that works for him.
There's little introduction to the system; they just throw him in and put him straight to work. Everyone at Pre-Command gets a mentor, and Clint's is named Buck Chisholm.
"Seriously?" he asks when he hears.
"Problem?" the man asks.
"Sounds like some kind of cowboy superhero," Clint smirks, just to feel this guy out.
"Watch your mouth," is the answer. "You're not a commander in this school."
He isn't, and it becomes readily apparent just how unsuited Clint is to this. There are classes in strategy; he's good at those, and he's already finished most of the geometry and physics they teach at this level, but when they start throwing history and politics and psychology at him, he's in over his head in no time. Buck isn't much help, either. He's a tactician just like Clint, not a paper-pusher, and subjects like person perception and automaticity and community behaviour are neither easy nor interesting. He worries for a little while that they'll ice him, but he must be good enough at the other stuff that they don't want to lose him, because what they do instead is assign him a tutor.
"Hi," says Phil Coulson when he arrives, because the universe and the IF have a strange sense of humour.
They find themselves working together more and more often. Now that Clint is succeeding in his courses, at least as much as Phil's tutoring can achieve, they start giving him more real-world situations. He learns how to issue commands, the clipped shorthand of military speech and Fleet-specific orders and abbreviations. He gets time on a simulator, commanding varied infantry configurations with a cursor, then with verbal commands; then he gets a ship, a squadron, a flotilla. He handles everything just fine, and all the while, he's wishing he were on the ships, in the infantry squads, taking orders from a calm, quiet voice in his earphones.
Clint's here by choice and he's damn good at what he does, but he's no commander, not really.
He's not the only one who knows it, either, because one day he's slaving over an essay on the application of Sun Tzu's theories to interplanetary warfare when Phil shows up behind him and starts reading over his shoulder. Normally, he'll point out where Clint has glaring errors, or he'll give Clint a nod and tell him it's not bad. This time, he just sighs.
"That bad, huh?"
Worse. Phil has a posting to Command School.
"You're a year and a half early," Clint points out.
"How old were you when you got here?" Phil asks, which is all he needs to say to remind Clint that the IF are not exactly playing by the rules with them right now.
"Great, now I have to find another tutor," Clint says, rolling his eyes. "Who's gonna help me understand the point of Pavlov now?"
"Clint," says Phil, and his tone is serious enough that Clint pushes aside his desk and the smaller tablets he's been using for references.
"What?"
"Listen to me. I'm leaving for Command School in a couple of hours."
"I know."
"What are you doing?"
"Uh… a mil-tac essay?"
"What are you doing here, Clint? You don't want to write this essay. You don't want to be here. You don't even want a command position."
Clint stares, essay forgotten.
"You need to think about what you really want."
"Why does everyone keep saying that?"
"Because it's obvious to everyone but you."
"Okay, then," Clint says, and he doesn't mean the undertone of frustration that creeps into his voice, but he can't help it, "if it's so obvious, what do I want?"
Phil shakes his head. "I'm not going to make it that easy for you. I'll see you around, Barton."
The next day, Clint puts in for reassignment.
The shuttle that takes him from Pre-Command to Tactical is the same one that drops off Steve and Natasha at Pre-Command, and they have thirty seconds to catch up in the airlocks. It's long enough for Clint to learn that Bruce is already at Navigation and that most of the rest of their launchmates are still at Battle School in command positions, long enough for them to ask about Phil, long enough for a quick, brotherly clasp of hands before Clint has to board the shuttle and some junior officer Clint has never met arrives to take the other two to their new quarters.
The pilot on Clint's shuttle promises him that he's going to love Tactical School, so Clint asks if that's where he went.
"Me?" the pilot laughs. "I'm not Battle School material. Just ferry you little geniuses around."
The words are pretty much meaningless, but their intent is good, and Clint takes them to heart. He gets a new mentor, Ross (he likes to be called Thunderbolt, and Clint's heard worse, so he goes with it; in return, Thunderbolt starts to call him Hawkeye), his own simulator station, and starts racking up the points and accolades almost immediately. This is where he belongs, has belonged all along, and it's great, it's perfect, and Clint only wonders a few times (a day) (every day) what Phil is doing now.
He doesn't regret his decision to leave Pre-Command, though. He didn't give his entire life to the International Fleet so that he could sit behind the screen of a simulator talking while other people have all the fun.
He turns thirteen at Tactical and they notice; he gets a new uniform with epaulettes and rank bars, and he asks, "Guess this means I'm not a launchie anymore, huh?"
Thunderbolt just rolls his eyes and takes him for a run in one of the good training shuttles, the kind that bristle with guns from every available surface, and they swoop over the desolate surface of a nearby asteroid in wide arcs, shooting whatever million-year-old landforms strike their fancy.
Clint definitely belongs here.
Later on, they show him the Little Doctor. It's the best thing Clint has ever seen, as long as he doesn't think too hard about what it's meant for (this is war, they're supposed to have these things, just in case). It's a bomb, to begin with, but then it turns everything around it into a bomb as well, and when Clint sets one off in the simulator, an entire fleet of ships vanishes into dust.
It's a kind of power that's terrifying.
He wants to ask them, are you sure I'm ready for this, but if he isn't, what else is he good for? If they put him in a position of responsibility over a weapon and he fails, then he's not Hawkeye like they all think he is. He's just another launchie who didn't ice out in time, just another kid who went to Tactical for lack of anywhere else to end up. If he's not ready for this, he's just a dumb kid who's been given the controls to something much too big for him.
So he's ready.
They tell him about the ansible when he turns fourteen, after another round of whooping and hollering around the asteroid belt in an even bigger shuttle. Thunderbolt watches him strangely for most of the afternoon, keeping his eyes on Clint's face, on Clint's hands on the controls, on everything but the stuff Clint is blowing up in front of them. That's not like him, and it makes Clint uneasy, so they head back to the school early, and that's when they take him to the colonel's office.
He's expecting Colonel Clarke; they've spoken before, about Clint's studies and his eventual goals and his battle tactics, so Clint is pretty familiar with the commander of the Tactical School. What he's not expecting is to see Colonel Graff in the office with him, or an unfamiliar East Indian man whose stars and bars read plainly, admiral.
Clint swallows hard. He doesn't know what their game is, and this time he's not sure he can refuse to play.
"I hear they call you Hawkeye," Graff says.
In front of the admiral, Clint has to hold back his shrug, bite down on the words he wants to say, and instead square his shoulders and say, "Yes, sir."
"I knew you would do well here."
Then why didn't you tell me? "I hope so, sir."
"Clint," says Graff, done with formalities, "this is Admiral Chamrajnagar."
The name is enough to catch Clint's breath in his throat. What is the Strategos doing on a desolate planetoid at a school for kids? It's wartime; doesn't he have to be defending the solar system or something?
What they do instead of defending the solar system is take Clint out to the hangar at the interplanetary launch pad on the surface, a place he hasn't been since his arrival. Then, they explain about the ansible – about faster-than-light communication, about commanding fleets in distant star systems from Earth, about the way the buggers talk to one another and the machines the International Fleet built to try to mimic it.
They ask him if he thinks he's done with school. He stares at them, confused. He's at school, right now, and what do they mean? If they were going to take him somewhere else, surely they would have warned him – let him get his things – told Thunderbolt, at least, and Thunderbolt would have told him. The guy can't keep a secret, not from Clint, who sees everything.
"Sir, I'm fourteen," he says, because he can't think of anything else that would make sense to say. "By normal standards, I have two years left."
"And how often have you been treated by normal standards, Hawkeye?" Admiral Chamrajnagar asks, which is a fair point.
"In that case, sir," and he takes a deep breath, because whatever the hell happens now, he'd damn well better be ready, "I'm done. At the pleasure of the International Fleet, of course."
Chamrajnagar smiles. Clarke smiles. Graff doesn't smile (he never does, but Clint knows him well enough by now to recognize the thin line that appears between his eyebrows; he's worried, and for the first time, it occurs to Clint that maybe underneath the layers of Fleet rules and regulations, Graff is a person, too).
"Your ship," says Chamrajnagar, opening the hangar door and indicating a low, hulking grey shape that gleams strangely in the starlight barely scattered by thin air.
"My ship?"
"Well, not to command, of course," Chamrajnagar explains. "Chief Tactical Officer, if you think you're ready."
"Since when do you make kids Chief Tactical Officer right out of school?" he asks, because he can't help himself.
"There's a war on, Hawkeye," Graff says grimly from behind him. "We do a lot of things we might not do in other circumstances."
The hatchway opens, and a head pokes out. When the person spots Clint, there's a hesitant wave, and suddenly Clint recognizes shaggy brown hair and hunched shoulders and crooked smile.
"I'm sure you know your Chief of Operations, Bruce Banner?" Chamrajnagar says, and Clint almost laughs at the formality. He and Bruce have been fighting together since the IF took them, so yeah, he knows his Chief of Operations, all right.
They walk beside him up to the hatchway, and then Graff claps him on the shoulder and says, "Do us proud, Hawkeye," and he whispers, "Clint," because to Graff, he can be Clint.
"I'm already proud of Clint," Graff replies. "Now show me what Hawkeye can do."
The chair at the ship's tactical station (not a simulator this time, and the controls seem so much bigger than the identical ones he's been using for two years) fits like a glove; it's custom-made, and of course the bastards knew he was going to say yes. He always thinks he's a step ahead of them, but it's never really true. He should know that by now.
When he settles in (friendly punch to Bruce's shoulder, returned in kind), he slips on his headset and says the words he's been earning since he was five.
"Barton, reporting for duty, sir."
"Good to have you aboard, Clint."
He nearly jumps out of his chair, looks around wildly at Bruce – did he know? Was he keeping this a secret?
The grin on Bruce's face says he definitely was.
"Just like old times," he says, because this is it, this is exactly what it should be.
You need to think about what you really want, Phil said, and he has, and it's this. His ship and his skills and his fellow soldiers and, most importantly, his commander.
Phil Coulson is his commander; always has been and always will be.
"Well," says Phil softly into his ear, "I guess we might have a shot at winning this war after all."