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Most people, if they had a line, would start seeing it by middle school. It wasn’t that age-matches were essential for a successful Partnership, but an age gap of more than a decade was rare. Not all people had lines, and Clint just figured he was one of those. He didn’t have parents, but he had family -- a brother who would always be there and a place at the table at Carson’s so long as his bow arm was strong.
At sixteen, Clint learned he had neither of those -- Barney left him in the hospital and Carson’s Circus moved on without so much as a goodbye. But as much as he woke to the desolation of abandonment, he also woke to a flash of red at his wrist. A line wrapped his wrist and stretched into the distance. “Are you seeing this?” he asked of the nurse when she came in to check on him.
The nurse patted him on the shoulder. “Honey, if I could it would be quite a surprise to my husband.”
--
Darcy had grown up with a line -- a constant from her earliest memories. She figured out pretty early what whoever was on the other end of it did a good bit of roaming -- the balance of the slack n her line usually led to the north and east, but it had, at one time or another, gone through all 360 degrees of its range. A few memorable times the ine had snapped around a complete 180 in a matter of seconds, indicating whoever she was attached to had traveled halfway around the world. She imagined he -- she understood that lesbians and bisexuals were a thing but was like, 85% sure she was into dudes -- was a James Bond type jetsetting around the world breaking up drug rings and evil genius plots and saving Ecuadorian orphans from jungle dictators. James Bond/Rambo. Young Darcy might have watched too many violent films for her developmental level.
In reality she realized that whoever hung off the other end of her line was some other sixth grader who’s parents worked for the Army or something, and got dragged around the world by the obligations of their caretakers.
She could always fantasize though.
--
Clint failed at life for nearly a decade. First he failed as a homeless migrant with no social security number that he knew about and not even a junior high school level education. Then he moved on to failing at the army, and successfully washing out of the Army. Right around 26, though, Clint felt like maybe he was getting things on track -- he was rising in the fields of shady crime and assassinations, and flying around the world to do it. And sure, he felt greasy in a way that couldn’t be cleaned away, and he had nightmares that left him feeling washed out and grey, but he had more cash than he could fit in a knapsack, got as many meals as he wanted for the first time in his life, and he was self employed. For a given value of ‘employed’.
And then one day he was too slow, or maybe he didn’t really want to be faster, or maybe he was just tired, but then he was shot, and captured, and faced down by the man with the kindest eyes and a look that cut him sharp and deep, and he was offered another way.
Coulson was the first person that didn’t leave him behind. And the thing about that was, Clint had been defining himself as the sort of person people didn’t stick around for, which by default meant his options for personal identity was “rugged individualist” or “worthless asshole”. With Coulson’s stick-to-it-tivity, through, new doors were opened -- ones which he quite liked the feel of. “Team player” actually showed up in a performance review. He actually showed up for a performance review.
“Have you ever gone to find them?” Coulson asked him on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday. He was one of those rare people who could glimpse others’ lines, and caught Clint staring at it often enough to mention it. A lot of people went on a pilgrimage of sorts to find their mate, but the thought had never seriously occurred to him. He had never been the sort of person anybody wanted to stick with, let alone should stay around. He was a dangerous, volatile pile of shit, and if whoever it was had more than a few brain cells rattling around in their brainpan, they would run the other way as fast as possible.
He shook his head and picked at a cuticle. “Naaw. I been— naaw.”
Coulson didn’t push, but Clint felt a little bit flayed nonetheless.
--
The summer before Darcy began college she packed up her car and headed north and east, following the length of her tether. Her partner had been to the west for almost a year, but in the spring had moved due south, and in June had reoriented towards what she thought of as his ‘home’ location.
Darcy was a desert creature and had spent the majority of her life in the American Southwest, and had never traveled much if he was honest with herself. But she had adventure in her heard, stars in her eyes, and $300 in gas money. She drove into the thick humidity of the midwest, following her line. She checked where she could be heading on Google Maps, and secretly hoped for New York. While overnighting in a motel in Arkansas, the angle changed by about fifteen degrees, and she felt a spike of anxiety that another ramble on his part was going to dash her hopes to unite with her predestined. When she made it to the Atlantic coast and her line stretched toward the ocean’s horizon, she knew she wasn’t going to find her partner quite so easily.
“Maybe he’s Parisian,” Darcy told her mother over the phone as she stared out to sea.
“Maybe he’s a boat captain,” her mother suggested. Both of them were trying to not sound too disappointed. Her parents had met in college when her mother had gone on a madcap Spring Break search, and it was a classic story of falling in love and domestic...ness.
“I’m banking on an Emirati prince,” Darcy said.
“Ooh, good choice. Go with that,” Her mother said, sounding pleased by the idea. Darcy sighed. “You on your way home?” her mother asked.
“Yeah. I’m stopping at Graceland on my way back though.”
--
Facing down thirty-five, Clint thought that maybe he finally had his life on the right track. He was a literal hotshot in SHIELD, he had backup for whenever he got into trouble, he had an apartment under his real name for the first time in his life, and he even had a Jade plant that he’d kept alive for nine whole months.
And then the kill order for one Natalia Romanova got dropped on him. And even as it was happening he knew this was it -- this was the moment that his life spun out of control. She was the firestorm that would burn him up and leave nothing but ash.
He survived her, though, and against all odds, she survived him, and he brought her in. They kept her in Pennsylvania and sent him abroad. The official line was to deal with some Ten Rings upstart bullshit, and yes, he did spend a good bit of time demonstrating exactly how loyal his bow arm was to SHIELD, but it was also to keep him from conspiring with the infamous Black Widow.
While out in the desert searching for Tony Stark and dropping any opposition that might challenge him, he found a quiet spot within himself beneath the desert skies. At times the air felt diamond hard and clear as glass. And with that introspection came the realization that Natasha was a firestorm but she was also a signpost -- one that his life was on the right track.
His team hadn’t backed him when he went rogue to bring Widow in but when he showed up having done the deed, tehy did support him. Coulson had looked down the sight of his handgun at Clint and then Natasha, chained together at the wrist with longline handcuffs, and sighed instead of shooting. He had gone against SHIELD in a big way, and when he came back to their table instead of shunning him they had pulled out a chair for him.
He spent a lot of his time on ‘sabbatical’ in the desert wondering if maybe he would like to meet whoever was on the other end of his line. He wasn’t the safest guy to be around, or the smartest, or the nicest, but by God he was a good person and maybe whoever it was would see past the bad to his good bits.
He’d determined over the years that they lived in the American Southwest, and based on when he first saw his line, was quite a bit younger than him. And they didn’t travel much. Beyond that it was all imagination on his part. Well, there was one thing else that he knew -- that they would be in some way his match. He was a futzed up pile of weird but he’d very much like to meet that person.
--
Darcy went to college.
Darcy went to college alone.
Darcy tried to keep it on the DL that she had Feelings about going to college alone.
And somewhere in there, pretending that she didn’t have Feelings, she fell in love with Poli Sci, and learned that even if she never found the guy she knew was living his life without her, she’d be fine. She would. Her knack for gossip, her love of the soap opera of politics, and her organizational skills which, though counterintuitive, were highly effective, meant she knew she could get some job that would absolutely eat her life in the best way, and provide her with the meaning she’d though a partner might provide.
She worked as a legislative aide (which by the way was a job requiring no law degree) for the New Mexico state legislature, and found out she was pretty good at it.
In her senior year her advisor pointed out that she was short on science credits, and she hooked up with Jane Foster, and a friendship/bosshood was off and running. Jane scienced and signed papers confirming Darcy deserved her science credits. Darcy drove, and bought snacks. It was symbiosis. Then Jane ran over a fit dude, and her whole universe got a lot bigger.
--
The assignment in New Mexico was a welcome break from the globe trotting of the prior few years what with Hawkeye’s Big Ten Rings Hunt, and the Tony Stark/Iron Man fiasco. He and Natasha had been paired up for mission after mission once he got back from the desert, and he was man enough to admit she had tired him out.
Being stationary, even if it was only for a few weeks, was a nice change. He noticed a lot, working security for the unidentified hammer-like object, but he did not notice his line going absolutely bonkers, sweeping this way and that as his match ran, at times, literal circles around him.
--
“What manner of custom is this,” Thor asked, and then he just reached over with one bratwurst-sized finger and twanged Darcy’s line. Darcy yelped in startled surprise. In general nobody but the relevant pair could see lines. But nobody -- nobody -- outside a pair could touch them. A pair couldn’t even make physical contact with a line until they had met and bonded. It was not that Thor did something that wasn’t done -- it was that Thor did something that wasn’t possible.
“Have I offended you, Darcy?” Thor asked, his tone honestly curious.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“I have seen them tethering many individuals but all ignored them -- I assumed from custom. Is it forbidden for another to touch?”
It was at that moment that Darcy began to believe his “I’m a god” schtick, because that seemed like one of a dwindling few explanations to Thor.
Darcy did notice her line going berserk, but what thought she had to give to it between saving puppies, running for her life, doing her job and ALIENS, largely went along the lines of ‘everything else is futzed up of course this would be too’.
--
Tracking the trajectory of her line and imagining where her partner went was second nature. When she was shipped to Svalbard with Jane and designated the Loki tracker (in case they needed to get the fuck out of Dodge) she came to a rather disturbing thought.
“Jane I think my match is Loki.”
“What?”
“My line: it’s going all of the places he’s going but before they send me the reports.”
Jane frowned derisively like her first instinct was to mock Darcy, but she’d tamped it down. Jane didn’t have a line and never hand, and was not a fan of the romantic notion surrounding them. She was also a person primarily driven by logic. “That doesn’t make any sense -- Thor didn’t know what they were.”
“Then how do you explain this?” Darcy demanded as she shook the paper tallying Loki’s location with check marks beside each one.
“If it was Loki it would have been dragging off into space most of the time,” Jane protested.
“My meant-to-be is evil,” Darcy moaned.
“It’s not Loki,” Jane said firmly.
--
Post Battle of New York, Clint started to wear a cuff so he didn’t have to see the flash of red at his wrist reminding him that Loki had not only crushed his psyche, he had also ruined the hopes of the sap on the other end of Clint’s line. because Clint was fucked up. He couldn’t sleep. Whenever he ate he felt nauseous. The sun hurt his eyes and the dark made his heart race. He was a wreck, physically and mentally. He wouldn’t put that on someone else; you dealt with your own shit.
Clint spent a lot of time in civilian work crews in the city in an attempt to exhaust himself into rest. Natasha checked in on him once a week or so to make sure he wasn’t explicitly killing himself, and eventually bullied him into moving into Avengers ne Stark Tower.
He got better, though. Not all at once and not quickly but he saw the mystic SHIELD sent to check him out, and he slept three hours in a row instead of thirty minutes, and he kept on keeping on.
--
Darcy had a brand new job with SHIELD. She was looking forward to a legit paycheck, a professional development portfolio, and dental. She also -- and this was probably doubling her effective salary -- was assigned an efficiency apartment in Avengers’ Tower.
“You’re ours. You work for them but you’re ours, understand?” a suit told her, dangling the apartment key fob just out of her reach.
“Got it,” she assured her bossman, but then she got into the trenches and Potts’ staff adopted her in and she got friendly with teh science staff and the cleaners and the security guards and her life became the beehive of the Tower. It was hard. She’d worked for two masters before, but this felt like five masters. Maybe six.
A bit more than two months in to running from needed job to needed job, her line started going bananas. Like whiplash-style flips and turns. Whoever this guy was, he was in New York. He was close in New York. The first day this happened she figured it was a fluke. But as days passed and erratic behavior continued, she could only conclude that her partner didn’t want to meet her, or didn’t care, given their apparent proximity and the lack of even a glimpse of him. She tried to chase him down a few times but it always ended in a metaphorical dead end.
And then one afternoon she was waiting in the lobby of the Tower to pick up some visiting scientist and escort her through security and the private elevators to the lab, and her string twitched in a very specific way.
A guy quite distinct from the business folk and construction workers wheeled in on a razor scooter. He wore ragged sneakers with holes in the toes, what looked like SHIELD BDU pants, and a shirt that said “Trust me I’m an Avenger”. He took a turn around the foyer of the Tower with lazy pushes from his free foot. Darcy’s eyes drew towards this guy because her line drew towards this guy.
It followed him around as he toodled to the private elevators. By the time Darcy was galvanized to movement, the elevator doors had opened. “Wait!” she shouted. He didn’t even turn around, and the doors closed on him before her flailing could garner his attention. “Shit.”
She ran to the information desk. “That guy who came in on the scooter -- who was that?”
The one receptionist turned to the other receptionist with a confused expression. They conferred for a moment. “He lives here but I don’t know his name.”
“Yeah. I don’t know,” the other receptionist agreed with a ‘what can you do’ shrug.
“Argh!” Darcy groaned in frustration.
--
So the guy lived in the same building as her. He lived in the same building. Darcy dug her fingers into her hair and pulled it until it hurt.
“Well, they don’t call it a string of fate for no reason,” Dr. Banner said philosophically. She made sure he ate regularly, along with about half of the lab staff. The other half were sensible enough to take care of themselves. Dr. Banner had proven to be a remarkably good person to unburden thoughts to, and Darcy vented her frustrations at the closeness of her partner, but his continued ability to elude her.
For as much as she knew he was literally living in the same building as her there was a lot of square footage in Avengers Tower in which the guy could disappear, and she couldn’t remember having ever seen him prior to that time in the lobby.
“What did he look like? Do you think you’d ever seen him before?” Bruce prompted. He was focused on something else involving clear liquids and combining them in precise quantities, but he kept up his end of the conversation well enough.
“White, kinda dark blondish, medium height, kinda built...”
“You hadn’t seen him elsewhere?”
Darcy shook her head and chewed on her thumb nail. “No. Nope.”
“Anything else distinctive? Maybe we could ask JARVIS.”
Darcy smiled ruefully. “No. He was just some dork on a scooter.”
Banner’s hands froze in mid-gesture. He blinked once, long and hard.
“Oh my god you know him.”
“I...” He paused, a conflicted expression on his face. “Stay here.”
--
“I know you’re up there, Clint. JARVIS told me.” Bruce stared up at the drop ceiling in the kitchen with a patient expression. “Come down.”
“Why?” Clint’s muffled voice came through the ceiling.
“We need to talk.”
One of the recessed lighting fixtures pulled away from its housing and Clint’s suspicious face stared down at Bruce. “No.”
Bruce’s eyebrows went up. “Come on. I’ll tell you where Tony’s candy drawer is.”
“Fine,” Clint acquiesced. The thumps of Clint’s passage through the drop ceiling came across as passive aggressive for the simple fact that Bruce knew the archer could move through the ceiling soundlessly. The cabinet door over the fridge popped open, and Clint swung out feet-first. “Where is it?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” Bruce had learned that lesson the first time they’d done this. He glanced down at Clint’s wrist, and back to his face. Clint shifted uncomfortably at the scrutiny. “I found your match,” Bruce said without preamble.
Clint missed a step. Bruce had pondered, just for a second, easing into it. The fact was that Clint had a tendency towards skittishness, at least since the whole Loki, Chituari thing, and he suspected if he gave the other man half a chance, Clint would disappear to where even JARVIS couldn’t find him.
“She wants to meet you,” Bruce continued.
Clint’s hand gripped the leather cuff at his wrist, and remained silent.
“I’ll tell you where the candy drawer is after you meet her.”
Clint glanced to his wrist again. “Okay.”
--
Darcy had bitten her thumbnail to the quick and beyond by the time Bruce returned with the scooter guy from the lobby in tow. Sure enough her line grew taught and went right to him, though it faded from view a few feet from him. “Uh...” Darcy said.
Clint looked as though he was considering making a run for it. Bruce pushed him none too gently towards Darcy, and she stuck out her hand as though to shake.
“I’m Darcy.”
“Clint. Uh... Barton.” He fumbled his wrist cuff off and sure enough, they were attached.
“You are a lot older than I was expecting,” Darcy said.
Clint blanched. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s cool.”
They stood in silence, hands clasped loosely. Bruce coughed. “I was going to tell Clint where Tony’s secret candy drawer was.”
Darcy reached out and punched Bruce in the shoulder. “I thought that was mythical! You told me it was mythical.”
“Pony up, science man,” Clint demanded, kinda tired, kinda joking.
Bruce gave them the directions and smiled to himself when Darcy dragged Clint off by their still clasped hands. Clint broke into a grudging jog to keep up with her skipping steps, and as they turned a corner in the hunt for the candy repository of lore, Bruce heard Darcy ask, “So how do you know Big Green?”
“Oh,” Clint hedged. Bruce could hear their steps slow to a brief halt. “I’m, ah... Hawkeye.”
--