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THIS ROUND IS NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS.
ROUND SEVENTEEN WILL OPEN ON SUNDAY THE 17TH.
ROUND SIXTEEN
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DISCUSSION POST
PROMPT FORMATTING:
Alphabetize pairings. They will be archived that way!
LIST OF REQUIRED WARNINGS: ableism, abuse, bestiality, bullying, ( Read more... )
He finds himself twitching when he tries to go to sleep, fingers jerking as if they were trying to handle arrows.
The next mission is still a wash. He misses twice.
-----
"Have a fuck-up balloon to go with your fuck-up balloon," Parrish says, leaning in his doorway and on a crutch, batting the thing into the room with his free hand. Clint blink blearily and rubs his head. It hurts like fuck.
"Well," he says, grumpy and slurring a little, "I did miss twice."
-----
Phil hands him a file, and Clint opens it slowly. Cautiously. Phil gives him a funny look, but there's nothing inside it but the usual typed-up version of his report and a space for him to add corrections and sign off on it. The usual post-it says sign here. Clint doesn't really need the direction, but paperwork makes him nervous, so Phil's continued adding it.
"Three out of three crap-ups," Clint says, relieved at the lack of disturbing missives, and draws a line through the space marked additions/corrections, "We have a fuck-up hattrick."
"You missed," Phil tells him, and rests his chin on folded hands, not steepling them like a villain the way Fury does. Clint twitches and doesn't look up. Pretends to be involved with scribbling his signature.
"You missed twice."
Clint finishes scrawling Barton, just as Phil says that and his hand clenches on the pen. He leaves a drag of ink after the N. "I know," he says, and, "I put in the hours. I don't know--"
"You need to wake up, Clint," Phil says, and Clint jerks his head up from printing Clint Barton under his signature.
"What?" His voice is a terrified, breathy gasp, even to himself. He clears his throat and repeats, "What did you say?" in a more normal tone. Phil's head tilts a little.
"It's not all about practice hours," Phil clarifies, "Putting in whole days isn't going to help. I think you might need some time."
"I don't need time--" Clint starts, but Phil says, "You're an exceptional agent--"
"Oh, for god's sake." Clint snaps, "Just give it to me straight."
"Clint," Phil asks, gently, "What's going on?"
Clint frowns and doesn't say, I think something's wrong with my head, and after a few minutes of silence, Phil hands him his copy of the report and waves him out.
-----
When he gets back to his room, the first thing Clint does is hang up his jacket.
The second thing he does is pull his report back out and flatten it against the inside of his closet door. The scrape of ink after the N in Barton looks a lot like the one after wake up wake up wake up.
Clint crumples the report and slams the closet door.
It's his own handwriting.
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Please, he finds, scrawled in the margin of his mission notes, wake up.
It's too late to do anything about it, so he blanks his expression and hands it to Sitwell anyway. Sitwell doesn't even seem to notice.
-----
Mission four. Clint misses once. Natasha isn't there to watch him puke all the way home, sick from gas that was released in the lab compound they'd been infiltrating. He's not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. He's pretty sure he'd careened into a wall when the disorientation had hit, and she's sure to have a thing or two to say about it and his head hurts too much to be in the mood for a lecture.
"Fuck up," Clint tells Parrish, who is putting pressure on his thigh, to stop the bleeding.
"Don't worry," Parrish says, easy going like he's not in any pain at all, "at least you'll get a balloon."
-----
Wake up, Clint finds on the napkin that comes with his lunch tray. The ink has bled on the thin paper, leaving spidery halos around the letters. He spills his water onto it and watches the letters run into shapeless ghosts of themselves. When Nat comes, he smiles at her and asks, "Come to spring me?"
"Yep," she says, "so you can leave your balloon with Parrish before all the helium goes out of it."
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