fic: should you need us
I've completed a promptathon fill before the end of promptathon, hell yeah!
Title: should you need us
Rating/Warnings: PG13 (swearing (of the f-word and lord’s name in vain variety), verbal child abuse with implied off-screen neglect and possible physical child abuse)
Length: 5282 words
Summary: “I wish the goblins would come and take you away. Right now.” Fairy Queen Natalia steals Clint away, because his brother wished it so.
Author Note: For scribble_myname’s prompt on the be_compromised Promptathon 2015: fairy!Natasha steals Clint as her changeling child/little brother/helper or whatever A fairy AU with a touch of the film Labyrinth - title, the odd line, and the labyrinth itself are from the film, but you don’t need to have seen the film to understand this fic :)
With thanks to franztastisch for beta reading!
Also here on AO3.
should you need us
Clint stands at the edge of fairyland, perched without fear of falling on a ledge that’s part of the crumbling remains of what once was a castle. Behind him the ruins fight a losing battle with vines and moss, nettles and saplings, until they are taken over and consumed by the dark forest.
In front and below the labyrinth is spread out before him.
As a boy he used to come here daily, much more cautious about his balance and footing, to look down and try to plot a path through the maze. Not to the centre; he’s already at the centre. He’d wanted to find his way out and home.
But there is no fixed route. The labyrinth changes, even as he looks at it, as it always has. They say once a person enters it changes even more, adapting to challenge the one who dares to cross. They don’t say that it’s impossible though and words are important here, so that’s something.
Clint doesn’t see the lady appear next to him. It’s just that one moment she isn’t there and in the next she is, red hair whipped backwards away from her face by the wind, knotted with leaves and berry-bearing twigs entangled in it.
“You’re thinking of leaving,” she says, voice like skin scraping on bark, and Clint doesn’t dispute it. There is no other reason for him to be here.
“I want you,” she says. “No one out there does.”
They’re hiding under the big wooden steps at the back of the house, in the dry dirt with the spiders, and it’s definitely hiding and not an adventure like Barney says. Clint can tell because Barney has his arm around Clint’s shoulders, holding him close and keeping him scrunched up small, and Barney never does anything like that when they’re just playing.
“I swear to God, this time I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him!”
The walls of this house are thin and from where they’re sat the raging of foster father number three sounds like it’s right on top of them, feet stamping so the steps above their heads vibrate with it.
Barney is trying to distract him with a book in his lap, propped up on bent knees, that he said he got from a garage sale for cheap but Clint reckons he stole it, because that’s the kind of thing Barney does these days. It’s got fairy stories in it, but not the girly kind of fairies with pixie dust and thimbles; the kind where if you don’t know the rules you get chopped up into little bits, or if they like you they whisk you away until everyone you know is dead.
On this page there’s a black and white drawing of a room full of goblins. It’s a girl’s bedroom and they’re everywhere, on the bed and peeking out of the cupboards, like ants or cockroaches. Say your right words, the goblins say, and we’ll take the baby to the castle and you will be free.
“Where’s the little shit? I won’t put up with it. Not in my fuckin’ house!”
Barney presses his hands tight over Clint’s ears, palms sweaty, as if to make everything go away, but Clint can still hear. He can hear the backdoor being shoved open and feet on the steps and his brother whispering, “I wish the goblins would come and take you away. Right now.”
The first day Clint sits on the dusty stone floor of a castle in ruins trying to spot his brother in the labyrinth below.
It’s hard to keep focused when there’s so much noise behind him, but he doesn’t want to look that way. If he looks at the goblin horde then he’ll remember all over again how strange the people who have taken him are. How none of them are human and no two of them look the same. Instead he picks targets in the labyrinth, takes careful aim, and throws stones at them, chunks of broken castle. He pretends that he actually hits his marks and that he’s helping Barney, getting rid of some of the creatures lying in wait for his brother.
The Queen sits on a wooden throne watching him curiously. She has bare feet and her long dress has holes in it and she doesn’t wear a crown, but she’s the only person here with a chair and when she gives an order everyone does as she says.
“No one is coming for you,” she tells him, sounding like she doesn’t care one way or the other. “No one has entered the labyrinth.”
Clint wants to say that Barney will come for him because Barney has always looked after him, but Barney was the one who wished him gone and Clint can’t say for sure that it was a mistake. Not when Barney doesn’t see anything wrong with other things Clint would say are mistakes, like stealing and smoking and skipping school. Clint wants to think that Barney didn’t know the stories were real and now that he does he’ll come. But he might not.
“Thirteen hours,” says the lady. “And then you become one of us. That is the rule.”
“That isn’t fair!”
“Is anything?”
Clint scrambles to his feet, wiping his gritty palms on his shorts.
“Fine. Then I’ll go through your stupid labyrinth.”
She arches her eyebrows and the corners of her lips curve upwards. It’s not a nice expression.
“Children can’t rescue themselves.”
They don’t stay in the dying castle once the thirteen hours have passed and Barney hasn’t come. Instead the crowd turns with a shout and a cheer and walks into the darkness under the trees. Clint doesn’t want to follow them, but he doesn’t want to stay here either with night falling and all the strange sounds, and he’s tired.
At the point where overgrown ruins become forest the lady stops and turns to him. He realizes that she’s waiting for him, so he moves without thinking too much about it, hurrying to catch up, somehow feeling ashamed that he’s fallen behind. He stumbles over tree roots, bruising his ankles and grazing his bare knees. When he reaches her she takes him by the shoulder, keeping him upright as they move through the trees. She’s stronger than she looks.
Light start to appear, tiny ones hanging in the branches, and then Clint can hear music getting louder and louder, and then there’s a feast laid out in a clearing and everyone is celebrating.
Clint feels strange about this, because they’re celebrating beating his brother in their stupid game of thirteen hours to get through the labyrinth and they’re celebrating that they get to keep him. Everyone smiles at him. Everyone wants to dance with him. Everyone wants to give him a gift: a conker on a string, blue paint swirled on his arms, a kiss on the cheek.
The lady guides him to the tables full of food and it smells like the best thing, but Clint remembers the stories.
“It’s leaves,” he says. “Leaves and dirt, and it’s not real. Fairies have glamour. They make things look like things that they aren’t.”
The lady smiles; sharp teeth between soft lips.
“This is real,” she tells him.
Clint’s stomach growls despite his best attempt at willing it silent.
“But if you eat anything in fairyland,” he continues, “you can never leave.”
“There is no leaving for you regardless.” She squeezes his shoulder. “No one is hungry here.”
“You’re going to make me eat?” He sticks his chin out stubbornly, daring her to force him.
“No. If you do not wish to eat I will merely make it so you are not hungry.”
She places a hand on his stomach, gentle and cool through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. It cools him straight through, like drinking a glass of ice water, and then he doesn’t feel hungry anymore. Although he still feels sort of empty. She removes her hand and Clint replaces it with his own, protective and curious.
“What did you do?”
“No one is hungry here. Although,” she adds, looking him up and down critically, “if you do not eat you will not grow. There are rules that cannot be broken.”
Time runs strange after that.
“Hello, Clint.”
She looks young, the creature he’s been sent to see, but everyone here looks like that. She has long, blond hair hanging down to her waist that’s been braided and knotted in some kind of pattern, she has tufts of feathers at her temples that bleed into her hair, and her eyes are large black pupils outlined with a thin ring of yellow. She has a staff that is a living branch of a tree; he knows that it’s alive because it grows and sprouts and changes even as she whirls it around her body.
“I’m to teach you. How not to be hit.”
She speaks in short sentences in the still moments between movements.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Mockingbird.” Clint wrinkles his nose and she laughs at him, and to be fair it does sound mocking. “Never give your real name. Don’t you know that?”
“Well Clint isn’t mine. Not my full name anyway.”
“Don’t riddle it either,” Mockingbird chides, finally coming to a halt with a thorn on her staff poised by his eye.
“What are you supposed to do then, when someone asks for your name?”
“Lie,” she suggests, taking a step back. “Or refuse. There is such a word as no.”
Mockingbird teaches him how to fall and how to run, how to hide and stay hidden, how to find the safe places, and Clint learns because all of this is useful. If she’d tried to teach him how to hit and how to hurt he wouldn’t have cared, because it doesn’t matter how good a kid is at fighting, if he tries to fight someone bigger than him he’s never going to win. This though, this is finding a way not to fight and Clint likes it.
He especially likes it when they go to the high places, to the crags of the mountains and the tops of the trees, and everything else seems small and far away.
“It isn’t so bad,” she tells him as the high up branches of a tall elm sway, “staying here.”
Mockingbird never struggles to balance, but Clint has to concentrate so that he doesn’t fall. Still, “You weren’t always here?” he asks.
She laughs. She always sounds like she’s making fun of someone when she laughs, usually him, but he doesn’t mind it.
“I had a house,” she says in a sing-song voice. “I had a mother. I had a father. I had five older brothers.”
“Didn’t any of them come for you?”
She shrugs, making the top of the tree sway even more and Clint clings to the trunk.
“None of them even realised I was missing until their time had already run out.”
“I don’t belong here,” Clint complains, when he can’t keep up, when the plants trip him up on purpose, when the pixies throw food at him that he can’t bring himself to eat. “I’m human.”
“So?” Mockingbird waits for him, offers him a hand up, and shows him how to wipe the stinging fruit pulp from his face with large dock leaves. “We all were, once.”
The Queen finds him in the castle at the edge of the forest, staring down at the labyrinth.
He still comes here every day, before the sun sets and the strange noises start. He doesn’t throw stones at impossibly distant targets anymore though; instead he aims closer, at the rock trolls that live on the cliff face that is the sheer drop on this side of the castle. The creatures make a game of it, dodging and taunting him. When he does manage to hit one his stones practically bounce off, no harm done, and the other trolls roar with laughter, an avalanche sound.
He succeeds more often than not these days. He’s had a lot of practice.
“What have you learnt?” the lady asks him as she comes to stand next to him.
Clint shrugs, fingering the stones he’s collected in his belt pouch.
“How not to be hit,” he says, borrowing Mockingbird’s words.
“And what have you taught yourself?”
Clint shrugs again. He’s taught himself plenty from watching the folk around him, but nothing he thinks would impress a fairy Queen. But then: “I can hit a target from far away, without magic.”
“Show me,” she commands.
He selects a stone from his pouch, worn smooth and round by the river he collected it from, and makes sure his balance is good before leaning forward over the edge of the crumbling castle wall to look down the drop to the labyrinth below.
“Is he feeling lucky today, is he?” shouts one of the trolls, flexing its rugged fingers where it has them jammed into the cliff face. “He can come and have a go if he thinks he’s hard enough!”
“Not as hard as us, is he?” calls out another.
“Solid head, me, rock solid!”
“Can’t smash me!”
“Come and have a go!”
They start moving around, scurrying about, leaping over each other upwards and downwards and sideways.
“The one with the red hat,” says Clint confidently and throws his stone. It knocks the troll’s hat clean off.
“He got you, he got you good!” one of them crows and then they’re all it, laughing at the hatless troll who falls backwards with a sigh to dangle by his craggy toes.
Clint looks to the lady for approval. She considers him, her head tilted to one side.
“I am in need of a huntsman,” she says and starts walking back to the forest, still talking as though the fact he will follow her is unquestionable. “I believe your aim will suit the task. You will need a weapon. It is of interest to me what you will choose.”
To get him a weapon Mockingbird takes him to The Tower.
It’s The Tower because when anyone speaks of a tower this is the only tower that they can mean. It rises up behind the trees, built into the side of a mountain, broken glass of all colours grafted onto its walls casting rainbows in the morning mist.
The fae that meets them at the entrance is on fire, but she doesn’t seem to notice, so Clint pretends that he doesn’t notice either. When she offers her hand for him to shake he takes it without hesitation and she gives him a little nod of approval. The flames don’t hurt; they do sort of tickle.
She leads them down, down, down to see the Iron Man in his cavern far below; an enormous underground space full of all manner of things and beings.
One wall is covered in wings: insect wings, fairy wings, bird wings, bat wings, gold wings, wings as far up as the eye can see. Another has shelves and ledges for books in languages Clint can’t read, ships in bottles, bowler hats, one of rock trolls sitting in a row and arguing; a whole miscellany of things, with rope ladders hanging between them all for access. A third has been made smooth for writing on and is covered in calculations and lists and notes that Clint couldn’t have made sense of even if he had been passing science when he was in school, and he thinks this isn’t that kind of science anyway.
The floor space is more open and there are lines painted on the floor that Clint supposes are some helpful code so that visitors don’t step where they shouldn’t. Like where one of the stalactites periodically crashes down from the ceiling far above, heralded by a small explosion. Or where a thing made of wood and metal and glass seems to be moving nails from one bucket to another, just because. Or where a man with a greenish tint to his skin - although that could just be the light - is stacking glass containers with smoking contents.
Clint has heard the stories of what comes out of The Tower, and it is rarely the same as what went in.
“What does the Iron Man actually do?” he whispers to Mockingbird as the fire fae leads them unerringly towards a figure at the far side of the vast cavern.
“He makes weapons. Mostly,” she says carefully. “He makes things into other things.”
“I do,” says the fae in question, turning in their direction and lifting a protective leather mask from his face to rest atop his head.
Other than the mask, he wears nothing but trousers and a leather apron tied around his waist, which is how Clint can see that the Iron Man has a hole where his heart should be and from it comes an unearthly blue light. He tries not to stare.
“What takes your fancy?” the Iron Man asks. “No, don’t tell me.”
He shoves a piece of glass into Clint’s hands, a heavy, cloudy, water-worn smooth lump, and then circles around Clint, tapping a filthy finger against his lips.
Mockingbird folds her arms and looks distinctly unimpressed at this method of assessment.
“Good arms,” the Iron Man announces with a smirk, coming to a stop facing Clint. “Now, let’s see.”
He snatches back the piece of glass, which Clint feels weirdly reluctantly to let go of, and holds it up to his eyes.
In Clint’s hands the glass has become something else. Something rounder and clearer and in its depths Clint can see something moving…
“A bow,” says the Iron Man, tucking the glass away in his apron pocket. “Classic. A bit old-fashioned, but we might be able to do something with the arrows.”
“Like what?” Clint asks curiously, letting the idea of bow sink in.
“Like explosions!” he says throwing his arms wide as another stalactite comes crashing down to their left. “For a start.”
Clint thinks about this and about some of the films he remembers seeing, back in the days when he used to watch television.
“What about net arrows? Or ones that stick a rope into a wall or something?”
“Grappling hooks?”
“Those. And boomerangs?”
“What would you want a boomerang arrow for?” the Iron Man asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I don’t know.” Clint shrugs. “To come back to you?”
“Things don’t do that here,” the Iron man says with a laugh. He claps Clint on the back cheerfully. “Give me a moon.” The fire fae clears her throat meaningfully and he amends it to, “Two, two moons. Maybe three. Give me three. And we’ll see about those arrows!”
“Why is he called the Iron Man?” Clint asks after. “Is it because people don’t like him?”
He knows iron from the stories, how it burns the folk. There is no iron here.
“He plays with dangerous things,” Mockingbird tells him, which is both an answer and no answer at all.
Clint has his bow in two moons and joins the Hunt in three.
The Hunt are the wildest of fairies, with beaks and claws, fangs and fur, and sometimes even shifting between different forms in a breath. All of them have weapons. None of them bow to the fairy Queen, although even they follow her orders.
But not when she rides with them. The only kind of orders the Hunt can be given is when and where to be set loose and who their target is to be. Once the Hunt has set forth there is no directing them and all within the Hunt are equal, even a Queen riding amongst them and even Clint, the newest of their company. They fold him into their ranks and it feels almost like having a whole family of Barneys, on the days he remembers that he used to have a brother.
They hunt on kelpies, wild water horses with foaming waves in their wake and they never drag him to the deep. They hunt on the backs of eagles, shrunk small and perched between their wings and he never falls. They hunt on the shoulders of giants to the far corners of the land and he learns their stories.
They hunt and he loves the thrill of it.
They hunt the wild beasts that prey on the Folk. They hunt the men who come to their lands by the Old Ways to do harm. They hunt those that deserve the hunting.
“He is hawk-eyed!” calls out one of the company, the one they call Falcon.
“We should feather him,” shouts another. “He would wear them well.”
Once Clint would have been frightened by their talk, but now he laughs.
It’s not that he doesn’t believe they would feather him in an instant if the mood took them, with or without his approval. More than one member of their company has woken up changed and Clint has joined in the laughter at their surprise and curses. It’s a good joke and easily reversed, but many keep the marks they’re given.
It’s that change no longer holds fear for him.
He’s older and different. He has to shave if he wishes his chin to stay smooth, his ears come to a point, his voice has deepened, and blue woad artwork adorns his skin that never washes away, patterns and words that were gifts and honours and bargains.
He wouldn’t mind feathers. Wings would get in the way though.
“I’d rather ride a hawk than be a mockery of one,” Clint shouts back and the Hunt hollers its approval.
The lady steps onto the blanket of snow and her feet leave no footprints, no impression of her passing. Hawkeye follows, cautious with how he distributes his weight, but still he leaves prints, however faint, and she laughs at his frown.
Today is just the two of them, Hawkeye and his fairy Queen, crossing into the far North.
There is always a member of the Hunt to accompany the Queen when she walks the lands, and more and more the one she chooses is Hawkeye. He has followed her to the dry places and to the quiet ones, to the mountain peaks and beneath the ocean’s waves. Sometimes she’ll disguise herself to test her people and sometimes they just don’t see who it is in front of them and always she plays with their expectations. Hawkeye enjoys being in on the joke.
Sometimes there will be a reckoning. He puts his bow to good use and she calls lightening down from the sky to live in her hands, in her skin, so that when she strikes them she strikes with all the power of this land that is hers.
Other times they will be welcomed with glorious feasting or whatever can be laid out on a table, and Hawkeye does not insult anyone by refusing their offerings. He might vaguely recall rules like do not eat fairy food but they have long since been replaced by others, like words are truths, everything must be paid for sooner or later, and beware the cold bite of iron.
A snowflake lands on his leather jerkin and Hawkeye sticks out his tongue to catch the next one. It does not taste as cold as it should.
“Let me guess, no one is cold here,” he says, teasing for all the times she has made it so no one is hungry, no one is in pain, no one is drowning.
The lady turns to him, her lips pale and cheeks pink, ice forming on her eyelashes and brows. When her lips part he can see her breath, white in the air.
“But you’re cold,” he says, half question and half accusation.
“There are rules,” she says, “but there is also, always, want. And that is a rule itself.”
They feast the end of summer on a wide beach, waves lapping around the legs of the feasting table and a warm breeze ruffling hair and wings and feathers.
Hawkeye perches on the arm of his Queen’s wooden throne, one foot braced on the seat of her chair so that her thigh presses cool against his lower leg and ankle. Occasionally she leans forward to speak and rests her arm on his knee.
Nearby a water fae forces bubbles down a fawn’s throat and drags him beneath the surface to play. On the beach the Hunt play some wild game only they know the rules of, if there are any rules at all, that mostly seems to involve wrestling and Hawkeye watches them fondly. When his muscles twitch as he idly thinks about joining them, the Queen wraps her hand around his ankle and squeezes, her grip firm.
“Not today,” she tells him.
“No,” he agrees, grinning and letting his other foot dangle in the water, “not today.”
Mockingbird comes splashing through the shallows, laughing, and pauses at the throne to bow to their Queen, and to allow the hunter called Blood who has been chasing her to finally succeed in the catching. He wraps his arms around her waist from behind and lifts her free of the ocean for a breath, water droplets sparkling in the sun. Mockingbird shrieks playfully and raps him on the head with her staff. Blood releases her and pretends injury, collapsing backwards into the surf.
Hawkeye laughs and flicks water at his fallen brother.
Mockingbird turns to him, her smile blinding.
“When you remember,” she says, “remember this.”
“When I remember what?” he asks, but she’s already running again, Blood at her heels.
“Do not think on it,” his Queen says, squeezing his ankle once more. “Not today.”
“What can I call you?” he asks her, knowledgeable enough now not to request a name.
“Natalia.” The lady smiles at him, her sharp smile; the one that makes her subjects wary. “Natalia Alianovna.”
It isn’t the language of the folk and it’s nothing at all like what he expected, but then he never expected a truth and he thinks maybe that’s what he’s been given.
Such a delicate thing and he thinks there was a time he would have gladly destroyed it, cast it down from a high place and called it fair punishment. They stole him away, he remembers.
Such a strange thing, to hear words that don’t fit here and they rattle around inside his head.
They stole him, he remembers. They stole him, they’ve shaped him to their purpose, and he can’t say how much of him is him anymore.
But still he is gentle with the gift she has given him.
That worries him.
She finds him at the edge of fairyland, looking out over the labyrinth, as she did when he was a boy.
“I want to leave,” he tells her and sending the words out into the world makes his heart ache more than he’d expected.
“Do you?” Her voice is cutting, thorns and glass shards. “The same rule applies as it always does: how badly do you want something. If you want it, you can have it. That is the point of the labyrinth. That is the point of everything.”
Clint turns to her and examines her familiar features. She is as she always has been: red hair knotted with leaves and twigs, barefoot, her long gown full of holes and places the spiders have spun webs to hold it together, skin as white as snow, eyes that hold the stars, and lightening wrapped around her wrists.
“You would just let me go?”
“Of course not,” she snarls. “I want you. I want you so that I will hold on to you until you break! Selfish is my wanting. I would not let you go for your own wellbeing; I am not kind. And that is what you want, is it not?” She leans forward, eye blazing. “To be wanted?”
Clint summons moisture to his mouth and dampens his lips with his tongue. He breathes in deep through his nose. He settles his feet, finding his centre of balance and being sure of it. And then he draws on the ending of a story that he has harboured for all this time.
“You have no power over me.”
Natalia laughs, a wild sound.
“I never have. And yet here you stand.”
She spreads her arms out, mocking, and Clint looks away.
“You made me forget.”
“Do you truly not understand yet?” Her fingers are firm as she grasps his chin and forces him to face her. “You made yourself forget.”
Clint wraps his hand around her wrist, with no care for the lightening that sinks into her skin so as not to bite him, but he doesn’t pull her away. Instead he holds on.
“Why am I here?”
“For wanting, Clinton Barton.” Her lips giving sound to his true name is the gentlest she’s ever been. “Children can’t rescue themselves.”
He shivers, his body suddenly weak and unsteady like all the water of his insides has been drained away, and Natalia steps forward, embracing him, taking his weight. Clint lets his head fall forward on to her shoulder, and is both surprised and not that he can hear a heart beating in her chest.
He remembers. He remembers so much. He remembers it isn’t so bad, staying here and remember this.
“If I stay?” he asks softly.
“You will be my huntsman. You will lead the Hunt.”
“No one leads the Hunt,” he protests, pulling back a little so he can see her face.
She smiles, sharp teeth between soft lips, the smile of a Queen who can arrange an ever-changing land according to her will.
“You will.”
She kisses him then, her lips two times pressed against the hair on top of his lowered head, a benediction.
A crowd assembles in the ruins of a castle that overlooks a labyrinth.
There one of the empty windows has been filled by water or ice or glass, or something else entirely, and in it can be seen a place not of this land. In it Clint can see a small girl hiding in some sort of closet or wardrobe, the hems of coats and dresses above her head. Then he realizes that she holds an even smaller child in her arms and is frantically trying to quiet its cries.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” a man yells. “Somebody shut that kid up, or I will!”
“I wish,” says the girl, oh so quietly, “I wish…”
Clint finds himself holding his breath. Beside him Mockingbird has her hands clenched white-knuckled around her staff. Falcon’s wings twitch restlessly, kelpies foam at the mouth, the Iron Man has a hand clasped over the hole in his chest as if it is needed to keep his insides in their place.
There is an expectant hush.
“I wish the fairies would come and take you away. Right now!”
An inhuman howl arises from the gathering and beneath it all Clint hears Natalia say, the words the truth of a fairy Queen, “We will take you, little Laura.”
One of the wild horses ploughs through the mass of people to Clint and stamps its hooves impatiently, tossing its head. He tangles his hands in its long mane and mounts. Seated higher than most of the crowd he now becomes a meeting point for the Hunt who swarm around him, a whirlwind of fury.
“My Queen.”
Clint lowers his head in a small bow to the lady on the throne, dipping the antlers that have grown where she once kissed him, and turns to ride through the labyrinth at the head of the Hunt, its walls reshaping before him into a clear, straight path.
Title: should you need us
Rating/Warnings: PG13 (swearing (of the f-word and lord’s name in vain variety), verbal child abuse with implied off-screen neglect and possible physical child abuse)
Length: 5282 words
Summary: “I wish the goblins would come and take you away. Right now.” Fairy Queen Natalia steals Clint away, because his brother wished it so.
Author Note: For scribble_myname’s prompt on the be_compromised Promptathon 2015: fairy!Natasha steals Clint as her changeling child/little brother/helper or whatever A fairy AU with a touch of the film Labyrinth - title, the odd line, and the labyrinth itself are from the film, but you don’t need to have seen the film to understand this fic :)
With thanks to franztastisch for beta reading!
Also here on AO3.
should you need us
Clint stands at the edge of fairyland, perched without fear of falling on a ledge that’s part of the crumbling remains of what once was a castle. Behind him the ruins fight a losing battle with vines and moss, nettles and saplings, until they are taken over and consumed by the dark forest.
In front and below the labyrinth is spread out before him.
As a boy he used to come here daily, much more cautious about his balance and footing, to look down and try to plot a path through the maze. Not to the centre; he’s already at the centre. He’d wanted to find his way out and home.
But there is no fixed route. The labyrinth changes, even as he looks at it, as it always has. They say once a person enters it changes even more, adapting to challenge the one who dares to cross. They don’t say that it’s impossible though and words are important here, so that’s something.
Clint doesn’t see the lady appear next to him. It’s just that one moment she isn’t there and in the next she is, red hair whipped backwards away from her face by the wind, knotted with leaves and berry-bearing twigs entangled in it.
“You’re thinking of leaving,” she says, voice like skin scraping on bark, and Clint doesn’t dispute it. There is no other reason for him to be here.
“I want you,” she says. “No one out there does.”
They’re hiding under the big wooden steps at the back of the house, in the dry dirt with the spiders, and it’s definitely hiding and not an adventure like Barney says. Clint can tell because Barney has his arm around Clint’s shoulders, holding him close and keeping him scrunched up small, and Barney never does anything like that when they’re just playing.
“I swear to God, this time I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him!”
The walls of this house are thin and from where they’re sat the raging of foster father number three sounds like it’s right on top of them, feet stamping so the steps above their heads vibrate with it.
Barney is trying to distract him with a book in his lap, propped up on bent knees, that he said he got from a garage sale for cheap but Clint reckons he stole it, because that’s the kind of thing Barney does these days. It’s got fairy stories in it, but not the girly kind of fairies with pixie dust and thimbles; the kind where if you don’t know the rules you get chopped up into little bits, or if they like you they whisk you away until everyone you know is dead.
On this page there’s a black and white drawing of a room full of goblins. It’s a girl’s bedroom and they’re everywhere, on the bed and peeking out of the cupboards, like ants or cockroaches. Say your right words, the goblins say, and we’ll take the baby to the castle and you will be free.
“Where’s the little shit? I won’t put up with it. Not in my fuckin’ house!”
Barney presses his hands tight over Clint’s ears, palms sweaty, as if to make everything go away, but Clint can still hear. He can hear the backdoor being shoved open and feet on the steps and his brother whispering, “I wish the goblins would come and take you away. Right now.”
The first day Clint sits on the dusty stone floor of a castle in ruins trying to spot his brother in the labyrinth below.
It’s hard to keep focused when there’s so much noise behind him, but he doesn’t want to look that way. If he looks at the goblin horde then he’ll remember all over again how strange the people who have taken him are. How none of them are human and no two of them look the same. Instead he picks targets in the labyrinth, takes careful aim, and throws stones at them, chunks of broken castle. He pretends that he actually hits his marks and that he’s helping Barney, getting rid of some of the creatures lying in wait for his brother.
The Queen sits on a wooden throne watching him curiously. She has bare feet and her long dress has holes in it and she doesn’t wear a crown, but she’s the only person here with a chair and when she gives an order everyone does as she says.
“No one is coming for you,” she tells him, sounding like she doesn’t care one way or the other. “No one has entered the labyrinth.”
Clint wants to say that Barney will come for him because Barney has always looked after him, but Barney was the one who wished him gone and Clint can’t say for sure that it was a mistake. Not when Barney doesn’t see anything wrong with other things Clint would say are mistakes, like stealing and smoking and skipping school. Clint wants to think that Barney didn’t know the stories were real and now that he does he’ll come. But he might not.
“Thirteen hours,” says the lady. “And then you become one of us. That is the rule.”
“That isn’t fair!”
“Is anything?”
Clint scrambles to his feet, wiping his gritty palms on his shorts.
“Fine. Then I’ll go through your stupid labyrinth.”
She arches her eyebrows and the corners of her lips curve upwards. It’s not a nice expression.
“Children can’t rescue themselves.”
They don’t stay in the dying castle once the thirteen hours have passed and Barney hasn’t come. Instead the crowd turns with a shout and a cheer and walks into the darkness under the trees. Clint doesn’t want to follow them, but he doesn’t want to stay here either with night falling and all the strange sounds, and he’s tired.
At the point where overgrown ruins become forest the lady stops and turns to him. He realizes that she’s waiting for him, so he moves without thinking too much about it, hurrying to catch up, somehow feeling ashamed that he’s fallen behind. He stumbles over tree roots, bruising his ankles and grazing his bare knees. When he reaches her she takes him by the shoulder, keeping him upright as they move through the trees. She’s stronger than she looks.
Light start to appear, tiny ones hanging in the branches, and then Clint can hear music getting louder and louder, and then there’s a feast laid out in a clearing and everyone is celebrating.
Clint feels strange about this, because they’re celebrating beating his brother in their stupid game of thirteen hours to get through the labyrinth and they’re celebrating that they get to keep him. Everyone smiles at him. Everyone wants to dance with him. Everyone wants to give him a gift: a conker on a string, blue paint swirled on his arms, a kiss on the cheek.
The lady guides him to the tables full of food and it smells like the best thing, but Clint remembers the stories.
“It’s leaves,” he says. “Leaves and dirt, and it’s not real. Fairies have glamour. They make things look like things that they aren’t.”
The lady smiles; sharp teeth between soft lips.
“This is real,” she tells him.
Clint’s stomach growls despite his best attempt at willing it silent.
“But if you eat anything in fairyland,” he continues, “you can never leave.”
“There is no leaving for you regardless.” She squeezes his shoulder. “No one is hungry here.”
“You’re going to make me eat?” He sticks his chin out stubbornly, daring her to force him.
“No. If you do not wish to eat I will merely make it so you are not hungry.”
She places a hand on his stomach, gentle and cool through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. It cools him straight through, like drinking a glass of ice water, and then he doesn’t feel hungry anymore. Although he still feels sort of empty. She removes her hand and Clint replaces it with his own, protective and curious.
“What did you do?”
“No one is hungry here. Although,” she adds, looking him up and down critically, “if you do not eat you will not grow. There are rules that cannot be broken.”
Time runs strange after that.
“Hello, Clint.”
She looks young, the creature he’s been sent to see, but everyone here looks like that. She has long, blond hair hanging down to her waist that’s been braided and knotted in some kind of pattern, she has tufts of feathers at her temples that bleed into her hair, and her eyes are large black pupils outlined with a thin ring of yellow. She has a staff that is a living branch of a tree; he knows that it’s alive because it grows and sprouts and changes even as she whirls it around her body.
“I’m to teach you. How not to be hit.”
She speaks in short sentences in the still moments between movements.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Mockingbird.” Clint wrinkles his nose and she laughs at him, and to be fair it does sound mocking. “Never give your real name. Don’t you know that?”
“Well Clint isn’t mine. Not my full name anyway.”
“Don’t riddle it either,” Mockingbird chides, finally coming to a halt with a thorn on her staff poised by his eye.
“What are you supposed to do then, when someone asks for your name?”
“Lie,” she suggests, taking a step back. “Or refuse. There is such a word as no.”
Mockingbird teaches him how to fall and how to run, how to hide and stay hidden, how to find the safe places, and Clint learns because all of this is useful. If she’d tried to teach him how to hit and how to hurt he wouldn’t have cared, because it doesn’t matter how good a kid is at fighting, if he tries to fight someone bigger than him he’s never going to win. This though, this is finding a way not to fight and Clint likes it.
He especially likes it when they go to the high places, to the crags of the mountains and the tops of the trees, and everything else seems small and far away.
“It isn’t so bad,” she tells him as the high up branches of a tall elm sway, “staying here.”
Mockingbird never struggles to balance, but Clint has to concentrate so that he doesn’t fall. Still, “You weren’t always here?” he asks.
She laughs. She always sounds like she’s making fun of someone when she laughs, usually him, but he doesn’t mind it.
“I had a house,” she says in a sing-song voice. “I had a mother. I had a father. I had five older brothers.”
“Didn’t any of them come for you?”
She shrugs, making the top of the tree sway even more and Clint clings to the trunk.
“None of them even realised I was missing until their time had already run out.”
“I don’t belong here,” Clint complains, when he can’t keep up, when the plants trip him up on purpose, when the pixies throw food at him that he can’t bring himself to eat. “I’m human.”
“So?” Mockingbird waits for him, offers him a hand up, and shows him how to wipe the stinging fruit pulp from his face with large dock leaves. “We all were, once.”
The Queen finds him in the castle at the edge of the forest, staring down at the labyrinth.
He still comes here every day, before the sun sets and the strange noises start. He doesn’t throw stones at impossibly distant targets anymore though; instead he aims closer, at the rock trolls that live on the cliff face that is the sheer drop on this side of the castle. The creatures make a game of it, dodging and taunting him. When he does manage to hit one his stones practically bounce off, no harm done, and the other trolls roar with laughter, an avalanche sound.
He succeeds more often than not these days. He’s had a lot of practice.
“What have you learnt?” the lady asks him as she comes to stand next to him.
Clint shrugs, fingering the stones he’s collected in his belt pouch.
“How not to be hit,” he says, borrowing Mockingbird’s words.
“And what have you taught yourself?”
Clint shrugs again. He’s taught himself plenty from watching the folk around him, but nothing he thinks would impress a fairy Queen. But then: “I can hit a target from far away, without magic.”
“Show me,” she commands.
He selects a stone from his pouch, worn smooth and round by the river he collected it from, and makes sure his balance is good before leaning forward over the edge of the crumbling castle wall to look down the drop to the labyrinth below.
“Is he feeling lucky today, is he?” shouts one of the trolls, flexing its rugged fingers where it has them jammed into the cliff face. “He can come and have a go if he thinks he’s hard enough!”
“Not as hard as us, is he?” calls out another.
“Solid head, me, rock solid!”
“Can’t smash me!”
“Come and have a go!”
They start moving around, scurrying about, leaping over each other upwards and downwards and sideways.
“The one with the red hat,” says Clint confidently and throws his stone. It knocks the troll’s hat clean off.
“He got you, he got you good!” one of them crows and then they’re all it, laughing at the hatless troll who falls backwards with a sigh to dangle by his craggy toes.
Clint looks to the lady for approval. She considers him, her head tilted to one side.
“I am in need of a huntsman,” she says and starts walking back to the forest, still talking as though the fact he will follow her is unquestionable. “I believe your aim will suit the task. You will need a weapon. It is of interest to me what you will choose.”
To get him a weapon Mockingbird takes him to The Tower.
It’s The Tower because when anyone speaks of a tower this is the only tower that they can mean. It rises up behind the trees, built into the side of a mountain, broken glass of all colours grafted onto its walls casting rainbows in the morning mist.
The fae that meets them at the entrance is on fire, but she doesn’t seem to notice, so Clint pretends that he doesn’t notice either. When she offers her hand for him to shake he takes it without hesitation and she gives him a little nod of approval. The flames don’t hurt; they do sort of tickle.
She leads them down, down, down to see the Iron Man in his cavern far below; an enormous underground space full of all manner of things and beings.
One wall is covered in wings: insect wings, fairy wings, bird wings, bat wings, gold wings, wings as far up as the eye can see. Another has shelves and ledges for books in languages Clint can’t read, ships in bottles, bowler hats, one of rock trolls sitting in a row and arguing; a whole miscellany of things, with rope ladders hanging between them all for access. A third has been made smooth for writing on and is covered in calculations and lists and notes that Clint couldn’t have made sense of even if he had been passing science when he was in school, and he thinks this isn’t that kind of science anyway.
The floor space is more open and there are lines painted on the floor that Clint supposes are some helpful code so that visitors don’t step where they shouldn’t. Like where one of the stalactites periodically crashes down from the ceiling far above, heralded by a small explosion. Or where a thing made of wood and metal and glass seems to be moving nails from one bucket to another, just because. Or where a man with a greenish tint to his skin - although that could just be the light - is stacking glass containers with smoking contents.
Clint has heard the stories of what comes out of The Tower, and it is rarely the same as what went in.
“What does the Iron Man actually do?” he whispers to Mockingbird as the fire fae leads them unerringly towards a figure at the far side of the vast cavern.
“He makes weapons. Mostly,” she says carefully. “He makes things into other things.”
“I do,” says the fae in question, turning in their direction and lifting a protective leather mask from his face to rest atop his head.
Other than the mask, he wears nothing but trousers and a leather apron tied around his waist, which is how Clint can see that the Iron Man has a hole where his heart should be and from it comes an unearthly blue light. He tries not to stare.
“What takes your fancy?” the Iron Man asks. “No, don’t tell me.”
He shoves a piece of glass into Clint’s hands, a heavy, cloudy, water-worn smooth lump, and then circles around Clint, tapping a filthy finger against his lips.
Mockingbird folds her arms and looks distinctly unimpressed at this method of assessment.
“Good arms,” the Iron Man announces with a smirk, coming to a stop facing Clint. “Now, let’s see.”
He snatches back the piece of glass, which Clint feels weirdly reluctantly to let go of, and holds it up to his eyes.
In Clint’s hands the glass has become something else. Something rounder and clearer and in its depths Clint can see something moving…
“A bow,” says the Iron Man, tucking the glass away in his apron pocket. “Classic. A bit old-fashioned, but we might be able to do something with the arrows.”
“Like what?” Clint asks curiously, letting the idea of bow sink in.
“Like explosions!” he says throwing his arms wide as another stalactite comes crashing down to their left. “For a start.”
Clint thinks about this and about some of the films he remembers seeing, back in the days when he used to watch television.
“What about net arrows? Or ones that stick a rope into a wall or something?”
“Grappling hooks?”
“Those. And boomerangs?”
“What would you want a boomerang arrow for?” the Iron Man asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I don’t know.” Clint shrugs. “To come back to you?”
“Things don’t do that here,” the Iron man says with a laugh. He claps Clint on the back cheerfully. “Give me a moon.” The fire fae clears her throat meaningfully and he amends it to, “Two, two moons. Maybe three. Give me three. And we’ll see about those arrows!”
“Why is he called the Iron Man?” Clint asks after. “Is it because people don’t like him?”
He knows iron from the stories, how it burns the folk. There is no iron here.
“He plays with dangerous things,” Mockingbird tells him, which is both an answer and no answer at all.
Clint has his bow in two moons and joins the Hunt in three.
The Hunt are the wildest of fairies, with beaks and claws, fangs and fur, and sometimes even shifting between different forms in a breath. All of them have weapons. None of them bow to the fairy Queen, although even they follow her orders.
But not when she rides with them. The only kind of orders the Hunt can be given is when and where to be set loose and who their target is to be. Once the Hunt has set forth there is no directing them and all within the Hunt are equal, even a Queen riding amongst them and even Clint, the newest of their company. They fold him into their ranks and it feels almost like having a whole family of Barneys, on the days he remembers that he used to have a brother.
They hunt on kelpies, wild water horses with foaming waves in their wake and they never drag him to the deep. They hunt on the backs of eagles, shrunk small and perched between their wings and he never falls. They hunt on the shoulders of giants to the far corners of the land and he learns their stories.
They hunt and he loves the thrill of it.
They hunt the wild beasts that prey on the Folk. They hunt the men who come to their lands by the Old Ways to do harm. They hunt those that deserve the hunting.
“He is hawk-eyed!” calls out one of the company, the one they call Falcon.
“We should feather him,” shouts another. “He would wear them well.”
Once Clint would have been frightened by their talk, but now he laughs.
It’s not that he doesn’t believe they would feather him in an instant if the mood took them, with or without his approval. More than one member of their company has woken up changed and Clint has joined in the laughter at their surprise and curses. It’s a good joke and easily reversed, but many keep the marks they’re given.
It’s that change no longer holds fear for him.
He’s older and different. He has to shave if he wishes his chin to stay smooth, his ears come to a point, his voice has deepened, and blue woad artwork adorns his skin that never washes away, patterns and words that were gifts and honours and bargains.
He wouldn’t mind feathers. Wings would get in the way though.
“I’d rather ride a hawk than be a mockery of one,” Clint shouts back and the Hunt hollers its approval.
The lady steps onto the blanket of snow and her feet leave no footprints, no impression of her passing. Hawkeye follows, cautious with how he distributes his weight, but still he leaves prints, however faint, and she laughs at his frown.
Today is just the two of them, Hawkeye and his fairy Queen, crossing into the far North.
There is always a member of the Hunt to accompany the Queen when she walks the lands, and more and more the one she chooses is Hawkeye. He has followed her to the dry places and to the quiet ones, to the mountain peaks and beneath the ocean’s waves. Sometimes she’ll disguise herself to test her people and sometimes they just don’t see who it is in front of them and always she plays with their expectations. Hawkeye enjoys being in on the joke.
Sometimes there will be a reckoning. He puts his bow to good use and she calls lightening down from the sky to live in her hands, in her skin, so that when she strikes them she strikes with all the power of this land that is hers.
Other times they will be welcomed with glorious feasting or whatever can be laid out on a table, and Hawkeye does not insult anyone by refusing their offerings. He might vaguely recall rules like do not eat fairy food but they have long since been replaced by others, like words are truths, everything must be paid for sooner or later, and beware the cold bite of iron.
A snowflake lands on his leather jerkin and Hawkeye sticks out his tongue to catch the next one. It does not taste as cold as it should.
“Let me guess, no one is cold here,” he says, teasing for all the times she has made it so no one is hungry, no one is in pain, no one is drowning.
The lady turns to him, her lips pale and cheeks pink, ice forming on her eyelashes and brows. When her lips part he can see her breath, white in the air.
“But you’re cold,” he says, half question and half accusation.
“There are rules,” she says, “but there is also, always, want. And that is a rule itself.”
They feast the end of summer on a wide beach, waves lapping around the legs of the feasting table and a warm breeze ruffling hair and wings and feathers.
Hawkeye perches on the arm of his Queen’s wooden throne, one foot braced on the seat of her chair so that her thigh presses cool against his lower leg and ankle. Occasionally she leans forward to speak and rests her arm on his knee.
Nearby a water fae forces bubbles down a fawn’s throat and drags him beneath the surface to play. On the beach the Hunt play some wild game only they know the rules of, if there are any rules at all, that mostly seems to involve wrestling and Hawkeye watches them fondly. When his muscles twitch as he idly thinks about joining them, the Queen wraps her hand around his ankle and squeezes, her grip firm.
“Not today,” she tells him.
“No,” he agrees, grinning and letting his other foot dangle in the water, “not today.”
Mockingbird comes splashing through the shallows, laughing, and pauses at the throne to bow to their Queen, and to allow the hunter called Blood who has been chasing her to finally succeed in the catching. He wraps his arms around her waist from behind and lifts her free of the ocean for a breath, water droplets sparkling in the sun. Mockingbird shrieks playfully and raps him on the head with her staff. Blood releases her and pretends injury, collapsing backwards into the surf.
Hawkeye laughs and flicks water at his fallen brother.
Mockingbird turns to him, her smile blinding.
“When you remember,” she says, “remember this.”
“When I remember what?” he asks, but she’s already running again, Blood at her heels.
“Do not think on it,” his Queen says, squeezing his ankle once more. “Not today.”
“What can I call you?” he asks her, knowledgeable enough now not to request a name.
“Natalia.” The lady smiles at him, her sharp smile; the one that makes her subjects wary. “Natalia Alianovna.”
It isn’t the language of the folk and it’s nothing at all like what he expected, but then he never expected a truth and he thinks maybe that’s what he’s been given.
Such a delicate thing and he thinks there was a time he would have gladly destroyed it, cast it down from a high place and called it fair punishment. They stole him away, he remembers.
Such a strange thing, to hear words that don’t fit here and they rattle around inside his head.
They stole him, he remembers. They stole him, they’ve shaped him to their purpose, and he can’t say how much of him is him anymore.
But still he is gentle with the gift she has given him.
That worries him.
She finds him at the edge of fairyland, looking out over the labyrinth, as she did when he was a boy.
“I want to leave,” he tells her and sending the words out into the world makes his heart ache more than he’d expected.
“Do you?” Her voice is cutting, thorns and glass shards. “The same rule applies as it always does: how badly do you want something. If you want it, you can have it. That is the point of the labyrinth. That is the point of everything.”
Clint turns to her and examines her familiar features. She is as she always has been: red hair knotted with leaves and twigs, barefoot, her long gown full of holes and places the spiders have spun webs to hold it together, skin as white as snow, eyes that hold the stars, and lightening wrapped around her wrists.
“You would just let me go?”
“Of course not,” she snarls. “I want you. I want you so that I will hold on to you until you break! Selfish is my wanting. I would not let you go for your own wellbeing; I am not kind. And that is what you want, is it not?” She leans forward, eye blazing. “To be wanted?”
Clint summons moisture to his mouth and dampens his lips with his tongue. He breathes in deep through his nose. He settles his feet, finding his centre of balance and being sure of it. And then he draws on the ending of a story that he has harboured for all this time.
“You have no power over me.”
Natalia laughs, a wild sound.
“I never have. And yet here you stand.”
She spreads her arms out, mocking, and Clint looks away.
“You made me forget.”
“Do you truly not understand yet?” Her fingers are firm as she grasps his chin and forces him to face her. “You made yourself forget.”
Clint wraps his hand around her wrist, with no care for the lightening that sinks into her skin so as not to bite him, but he doesn’t pull her away. Instead he holds on.
“Why am I here?”
“For wanting, Clinton Barton.” Her lips giving sound to his true name is the gentlest she’s ever been. “Children can’t rescue themselves.”
He shivers, his body suddenly weak and unsteady like all the water of his insides has been drained away, and Natalia steps forward, embracing him, taking his weight. Clint lets his head fall forward on to her shoulder, and is both surprised and not that he can hear a heart beating in her chest.
He remembers. He remembers so much. He remembers it isn’t so bad, staying here and remember this.
“If I stay?” he asks softly.
“You will be my huntsman. You will lead the Hunt.”
“No one leads the Hunt,” he protests, pulling back a little so he can see her face.
She smiles, sharp teeth between soft lips, the smile of a Queen who can arrange an ever-changing land according to her will.
“You will.”
She kisses him then, her lips two times pressed against the hair on top of his lowered head, a benediction.
A crowd assembles in the ruins of a castle that overlooks a labyrinth.
There one of the empty windows has been filled by water or ice or glass, or something else entirely, and in it can be seen a place not of this land. In it Clint can see a small girl hiding in some sort of closet or wardrobe, the hems of coats and dresses above her head. Then he realizes that she holds an even smaller child in her arms and is frantically trying to quiet its cries.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” a man yells. “Somebody shut that kid up, or I will!”
“I wish,” says the girl, oh so quietly, “I wish…”
Clint finds himself holding his breath. Beside him Mockingbird has her hands clenched white-knuckled around her staff. Falcon’s wings twitch restlessly, kelpies foam at the mouth, the Iron Man has a hand clasped over the hole in his chest as if it is needed to keep his insides in their place.
There is an expectant hush.
“I wish the fairies would come and take you away. Right now!”
An inhuman howl arises from the gathering and beneath it all Clint hears Natalia say, the words the truth of a fairy Queen, “We will take you, little Laura.”
One of the wild horses ploughs through the mass of people to Clint and stamps its hooves impatiently, tossing its head. He tangles his hands in its long mane and mounts. Seated higher than most of the crowd he now becomes a meeting point for the Hunt who swarm around him, a whirlwind of fury.
“My Queen.”
Clint lowers his head in a small bow to the lady on the throne, dipping the antlers that have grown where she once kissed him, and turns to ride through the labyrinth at the head of the Hunt, its walls reshaping before him into a clear, straight path.