(no subject)
TITLE: FIVE BIRTHDAYS CLINT SPENT ALONE AND ONE HE DIDN'T
OR (Why Clint Didn't Kill Natasha When He Had The Chance)
AUTHOR: rubyelf
FANDOM: Marvel
CHARACTERS: Clint, Barney, Natasha, Bruce, Tony, Thor, Steve, other assorted
RATING: PG
WARNINGS: implied child abuse
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SUMMARY: Clint's birthdays aren't ever anything special, because nobody cares. Until they do.
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NOTE: I think I've written something at some point for most of my fandom friends (if I haven't written something for you yet, let me know and I'll work on it), but I think this is the first thing I've gotten to write for monkiainen , so she gave me this prompt and I gave it a shot. Hope you like it! Unbeta'd, sloppy, and fresh off the keyboard. Lotsa love!
Five Birthdays Clint Spent Alone and One He Didn't
Pellets of freezing rain clicked against the window, and the sky outside was the same color as the bruise across Clint’s cheek as he sat looking out at the muddy yard. He wasn’t sure where Barney was. Barney could hear better than Clint, so when their father got mad and started on one of his rages, Barney got the hell out. He warned Clint if he could find him, but often enough Clint was off in some corner somewhere or up in the attic, and when their father was looking for someone to take his frustration out on, Barney couldn’t afford to take the time to look for him. Clint didn’t blame him. It was his own fault he can’t hear Barney looking for him, or his father’s feet pounding on the stairs. Half the time, he didn’t hear anything until there was a big hand dragging him backwards and a voice shouting in his ear.
He looked over his shoulder, toward the kitchen, but his mother wasn’t there. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to hope that she would make him a birthday cake. One with chocolate frosting. Or any kind of frosting. Or no frosting. Just with candles on it. Six candles seemed like a lot, but he was sure he could blow them all out in one breath. He was strong. But there was no cake, and there didn’t seem to be anyone in the house. He crept into the kitchen and began to rummage through the drawers, keeping a wary eye out in case someone came home.
Eventually he found what he was looking for: a little cardboard box of half-melted birthday candles. He dusted them off, then went and found a box of his father’s matches. He climbed up on the counter and searched the cabinets until he found a box of snack cakes. He took one, trying to rearrange them so it looked like no one had moved them, and then climbed back down.
It took some work to get all six candles stuck into the snack cake, and he burned his fingers a few times, but eventually he had them all lit.
“Happy birthday to me… happy birthday to me…”
And he blew them all out on the first try. Then he put the candles back in their box, put the matches back on the TV stand, and buried the snack cake at the bottom of the garbage before going upstairs to his room.
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The staff at the Children’s Home weren’t usually cruel. They were busy and they were tired and they had long ago run out of room in their hearts for the little faces and hopeful voices of any more orphans seeking comfort. The kids, especially the younger kids, usually got a special treat of some kind with dinner on their birthday, a little cake or a candy bar or a handful of jelly beans. Clint wasn’t going to get anything because he wasn’t going to get any dinner. You didn’t get dinner when you were in punishment, which was where he’d been since yesterday afternoon when one of the caretakers caught him trying to sneak out the gate when it opened to let the delivery truck in. Barney had been with him, but Barney was older, so his punishment was probably worse, Clint thought, as he sat in the blackness and stared at the thin sliver of light under the door. A few times he’d seen shadows pass by, but no one had stopped.
He wondered if they had ever forgotten a child in here and just let them fade away in the darkness. He wondered if their ghosts might be with him right now in this little room, and for a moment the thought was almost comforting, but he knew it wasn’t true. Barney had told him ghosts weren’t real. Dead was dead and that was that. Their parents didn’t go to heaven. They didn’t go to hell. They were just gone.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and hummed a quiet birthday song to himself before dozing off tucked into a corner in the darkness.
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Clint could hear someone shouting about why the sideshow tents weren’t up yet, and someone else was shouting back about the fucking mud. He could make out other voices, but not what they were saying. Rain pounded heavily on the roof of the camper, and Clint pulled the blankets up over his shoulders and tried to hold back the cough that would rip through his chest and leave him nearly choking. Barney had come by early in the morning, just after the trucks and campers had settled into their places, and brought him a bottle of cough syrup and a box of cereal, but by this time he was as busy as the rest of the roustabout crew, putting up tents, unloading trucks, running errands.
They were far enough south that it shouldn’t be rainy and cold. Clint knew why it was, though. It was his birthday, and his birthday would be rainy and cold no matter where he was. Those were the rules. He curled up, sweating under the blankets but too chilled to pull them off, and tried to close his eyes, but the cough dragged him awake before he was even fully asleep.
Familiar voices were arguing outside the camper. Barney and the manager, with the manager demanding to know why Clint’s ass wasn’t out getting the fucking tents up before everything got soaked, and Barney shouting back that nobody was dragging his little brother out in this weather when he was sick and that he wasn’t going to be any use to anyone if he ended up with pneumonia. Eventually they went away again, back to work. Clint shivered and took a gulp from the bottle of cough syrup and wished for sleep.
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Rainy. Cold. Again. Clint would have thought that someone would have noticed the coincidence by now, but nobody in the circus except his brother even knew when his birthday was, and he barely saw Barney anymore, not since Trickshot had picked Clint to train as his assistant while Barney was left on the roustabout crew and running rigged games on the midway.
He narrowed his eyes and let his fingers slide along the bowstring. The skin on his arm was still raw under the leather bracer his mentor had given him, but only after letting him learn the hard way first. He exhaled, steadied himself between breaths, and released. The sound of the bowstring vibrating was a tone he couldn’t hear well, but his eyes were focused on the target and the arrow buried in the middle of the bulls-eye. Damnit, why couldn’t he do that when Trickshot was around to see it?
He reached over his shoulder for another arrow, ignoring the ache in his shoulder from drawing the bow over and over again. More practice. You didn’t get your own show by missing the target. You didn’t get your name on a sign by not being perfect. You didn’t get to earn money like the top performers brought in, or get respect from the manager and the bosses, by being less than the best. He couldn’t afford to be anything but the best.
Barney had run into him yesterday and promised Clint he’d come find him today and they’d celebrate his birthday. Clint had other things to do. There was no reason to celebrate. It was just another day he needed to spend getting better, earning his place, making his mark. Making himself worth something. Making himself someone who even deserved a birthday.
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Considering what he’d been told about Moscow and about his target, he wasn’t surprised to find himself shivering even in his heavy coat as he huddled behind a narrow ledge, watching the street below. Coulson had warned him that this one wasn’t going to be easy to take out, but if the plan worked, she’d be lured out into the narrow street below him, and he had to be ready. He was only going to get one shot at her.
Some agents at S.H.I.E.L.D. got cards dropped on their desks on their birthday, maybe a donut or a cookie. Clint was young and he was new and people didn’t like him. They didn’t necessarily dislike him; he just didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t socialize, didn’t make friends. Nobody knew him. They just knew who he was, and that Coulson said he was good, and that word got around that he worked solo missions and was pretty good at them. He was the guy with the bow and the tiny hearing aid that was almost but not quite invisible and everyone knew about that.
Something moved, and he was instantly on the alert, fingers ready to draw back the bowstring. He held for a moment, making sure he had his target. It had to be her. Coulson’s description had been brief, but accurate, from the straight blond wig to the black leather boots.
He was ready to release the arrow when she turned and looked up at him. He cursed, expecting her to bolt. Instead, she reached down slowly, without taking her eyes off Clint, and pulled a pistol from its holster.
“This will get to you before that arrow gets to me,” she called up to him.
He blinked and tried to focus, but there was something about the wary, resigned look in her eyes that kept his fingers still.
“You’re the Black Widow.”
“You know who I am. Who are you?”
He hadn’t realized how young she would be, or how tired she would look. He hadn’t expected her to be so ready to die.
“Does it matter who I am?”
She shrugged. “I’d like to know the name of the person who’s going to kill me.”
He swallowed hard and closed his eyes, just for a moment. In that moment, a gunshot rang out, explosively loud in the narrow street, and the concrete a foot from his chest shattered as the bullet shattered through it. When the dust cleared and he looked down, she was gone. He slumped back to the rooftop, heart pounding, and the thought raced through his head that a master assassin like she was shouldn’t have missed that shot.
It was only later that he found out she hadn’t missed, but that was after a month spent tracking her all over Russia and through about seven other countries before they finally sat down, wary as two wildcats, over a cup of coffee in a small shop in some town they couldn’t remember the name of. She told him that she hadn’t meant to hit him. When he asked why not, she told him he’d had a chance to take her out and he hadn’t, so she’d decided to give him the same courtesy. She wanted to know why, after spending that entire cold, wet day on the rooftop waiting for her, he hadn’t done what he came to do. He told her it was because she reminded him of him.
Walking back into S.H.I.E.L.D. with the Russian agent he was supposed to assassinate wasn’t going to make him any more popular among his coworkers. But he had a feeling Coulson would understand.
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“This is stupid,” Clint said. “You can’t throw a surprise party for a spy. I’ve known about this for a week.”
“We don’t care,” Natasha said, dragging him by the arm down the hall.
“Tony’s probably drunk already.”
“Who cares? Stop complaining.”
“I hate birthdays.”
“Tough shit,” she said, and the door opened.
“Agent Barton!” Tony called, from behind the bar.
Bruce rolled his eyes and motioned to a spot on the couch. “Come sit down. He’s an idiot.”
“I’m a genius,” Tony argued.
Clint looked around. “Is that Thor? What’s he yelling about?”
“Thor doesn’t have an inside voice,” Tony said. “He’s trying to help Steve with the cake.”
Clint rolled his eyes. “There’s a cake?”
“Balloons, too,” Bruce said. “At least, there were supposed to be…”
At that moment, Thor burst in, holding a large bunch of purple balloons in each hand and grinning broadly.
“I approve of these floating devices! They are very festive! Greetings, Clint! We were afraid you would refuse to join us.”
“He didn’t have a choice,” Natasha said, giving him a sideways look.
Then Steve walked in with an unreasonably large cake. It had chocolate frosting. And a bulls-eye with an arrow in it drawn on in icing. And so many candles that Clint didn’t even bother to count them, but they were all lit, and as Steve set the cake down on the table, the glow of all those candles seemed to be warmer than just those little flickering flames could possibly be.
“Bet you can blow them all out in one shot,” Tony said.
“You realize having someone spit all over a cake before we eat it isn’t very sanitary,” Bruce muttered.
“Scrape the icing off the top of yours,” Clint said, leaning over and taking a deep breath. There might not have been quite enough candles there to make up for all of the other years there hadn’t been any, but there was enough for today.
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