Chapter Text
BANG.
She feels the sound rip through her, as if it’s the physical thing and not just an acknowledgement that she’s too far, too slow, too weak to be wherever the bullet is.
BANG.
He falls.
She fumbles at the arrow in her quiver, pushing against the localized drag of molasses that only seems to affect her, fingers forgetting how to nock, arms buckling at the draw, her release far too late and her aim far too short.
He falls.
BANG.
The gun screams with her as she stumbles, eyes blurring dark—Was it dark then? I don’t remember it being dark—but still managing to find the figure in the air, his turn too sharp, as late as her arrow, and he too, tumbles into gravity. She doesn’t even try for her quiver. There’s no point.
She’s on the fire escape then, in an eyeblink, a mockery of the time-molasses. It stretches up and up and up forever and all she can do is climb, expecting another shot, another falling friend. The silence stretches out instead and she climbs.
He waits at the top. Tall and imposing, the gun she’d been racing to silence for an eternity clasped firmly in his hand. “Katie. Stop this.”
This isn’t how— “Dad?”
“Katherine. Look at me. I’m right here. For once in your life, you are going to pay attention while I am speaking.”
Yeah, something’s definitely off here. Right? “Daddy?” she asks around the doubt, hating the lift of fear in her voice.
“Yes, Katie. I need you to put down the gun.”
She blinks, confused. She doesn’t have a gun. He has a gun and she has her bow, these are the choices they’ve made. Or . . . no . . . Dad doesn’t use guns. Or weapons at all. That’s you, isn’t it. You’re the violent one. She looks down and there it is, warm and natural. She’d been struggling so hard to reach it and here it is, literally in her grasp. Like it’s always been there. Maybe it has?
“Daddy, I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s not safe, and—”
“Katherine.” He steps forward. “The only person making it not safe for me is you.” But I was trying to stop this! I didn’t—this wasn’t me! The molasses-time returns then, a slow motion scramble at the edge of the roof as he tries to rescue the gun and her fingers no longer numb and fumbling, react. It feels so natural.
BANG.
He falls.
~
Kate could hear a phone ringing. Clint’s phone. Clint’s stupid, on the wall, jangling off the actual hook, old it enough that it should be ashamed not be a rotary, stone-age phone. She jammed her head further under the pillow and groaned.
She’d just managed to fall asleep. Unconsciousness didn’t come easy these days, even on Clint’s couch, which should by all rights be stupidly uncomfortable, and which had proved instead to be the only place she could convince her eyes to stay shut at least occasionally, if only at the price of some seriously fucked up dreams. Those had started on her first night on Clint’s couch, falling asleep while waiting for him to return from SHIELD, waiting for news that her dad was going to prison, waiting for whatever came next. She usually wasn’t good at waiting, but mindless tasks like washing the truly ridiculous amount of coffee mugs around the place gave her something for her hands to do while she processed.
She was done with the processing by now, she figured. And with the sleeping apparently.
She heard Clint stumble down from the loft, grumbling curses at the phone, so at least they were on the same page there. Probably Avengers business. Cap would be the type to call Clint at a time that had no right to be labeled “morning.”
Kate flopped over, accidentally kneeing Lucky, who liked to wedge himself between her and the back of the couch, and lie there, with all four feet in the air like a weirdo. He grouched at her in dog as she resettled, determined to ignore Clint's conversation. The Avengers wouldn't want her along anyway, they never did, and besides she was bad publicity right now. Toxic, thanks to her dad’s decisions, splashed all over the news.
“Kate?” Clint’s hand rested on her shoulder, and something in his tone popped the last remaining bubbles of sleep-haze she’d been clinging to. She unburied her head to glare at him.
“What, the world is ending and they actually want me in the fight?” As soon as she fired off the auto-sarcasm, she regretted it. Clint looked . . . sad? Not sad like he had been. Not the tired, resigned, stumbling through life sad that had hung around for months before finally being chased away with the help of three criminals, a couple of spies, and a building full of pissed off tenants. Oh, and her. Katie-Kate to the rescue.
But this wasn’t that type of sad. This was a different, conflicted, I-have-bad-news-and-I-hate-being-the-messenger-but-here-goes type of sad. It didn’t fit his face well. Made him look dumb.
“What?” she pressed, sitting up and yawning. Whatever it was, better known than not.
Clint sat heavily on the couch, close enough that their things touched. He rubbed the hand not resting on her shoulder over his mouth and jaw. “That was Bobbi,” he said finally. “There’s been . . .” He cast about for words, then seemed to give up on finding soft ones, because his choices punched through her like arrows through a target not built for their force. “There’s been a hit. Your dad . . . Madame Masque . . . Ivan. All of them. Everyone from the roof. In SHIELD custody. To stop them from talking, probably. They’re dead. Maria needs me to come in, ID the bodies.”
“Oh.” Kate said. It didn’t feel like enough. She should have more to say. She always had more to say. Too much, according to just about everyone who wasn’t worth talking to. So why wouldn’t words come? Or air? Breathing only took this much effort when she missed a jump and crash landed, or lost focus while sparring with America, or decided fighting five goons at once was a great idea. Those were sensible, if annoying, times to be at odds with her lungs. This—it’s not like when Mom died. Dad doesn’t get to make me feel like this. He lost that right.
Clint was watching her like he didn’t know what to do with himself, or with her, and she refused to see that expression on his face when they’d just worked his shit out. Poor Clint, never can catch a break. The thought jump-started her lungs, giving her the air to laugh, which didn’t make the look on his face any less of a conflicted mishmash, just added a layer of confusion and worry, and only made her laugh harder. “Are you okay? . . . Uh, Kate?”
“Fine!” she finally gasped and something about the absurdity of the lie made it true, in a kinda alternate-dimension-ish way.
The way she saw it, somewhere in the grand scheme of the multiverse, there was a normal Katie Bishop, who lived a normal life with normal parents and normal drama. She played cello and happened to be good at archery and fencing. She volunteered with her mom, and agreed to horrific bridesmaid colors for her sister, and if her relationship with her dad was strained, it was only because he'd left them to marry someone she'd gone to school with and yet somehow still treated Kate like a child. Somewhere, in some parallel universe, that Katie lived.
This Kate, hiccupping with inappropriate giggles, could picture her so clearly. She had it so easy. Kate hated her for it, for her stupid normal life and her stupid normal life choices. Maybe Katie’s dad was still the same, but Katie wouldn’t know it, unlike Kate, who had to go sticking her nose into places she’d decided it belonged. Katie could find out about his death from some random authority figure who refused to tell her the details, and Katie would understand, would softly shut the door of her penthouse apartment, and cry quietly on her bed, before calling her sister to make funeral arrangements. She’d give a eulogy about how her father was a complex man but she loved him and would miss him. People would cry. Tastefully.
Fuck that. Let Katie understand what “complex” really meant. Let her deal with this squirming, gloopy, ball of gunked up feelings she couldn’t breathe around. For a moment, Kate imagined herself with America’s abilities. She pictured punching a star-shaped hole in the universe and lobbed the sticky mess through it, straight at that other Katie. It hit her, squarely, because of course it did. Whatever Katie was, Kate was Hawkeye and she didn’t miss. Her imaginary star closed around the shocked, imaginary Katie, and she was back, in the middle of Clint’s apartment, with Clint sitting on the couch next to her, his hand still on her shoulder.
And she could breathe again.
“Fine,” Kate repeated in a more normal voice. “Really. He was a shitty guy who did shitty things.” She stood up, leaving behind the comfort of Clint’s couch, dog, and hand. “So, we need to go in? Make a statement? Investigate who did this?”
“We?” Clint frowned. “Uh . . . no. Well, yes, I do. You—”
“Oh, right, time for the grown-ups again, right?” Kate snapped, not letting him finish, and began rummaging through the chaos of clothes and bedding around the couch to find something still clean enough to wear. “Wouldn’t want the sidekick getting in the way.” The words snapped like a bowstring against her forearm, satisfying at first, before the heat of the abrasion set in. He didn’t deserve that. Yeah? Well neither did I.
Clint recoiled as her words slapped him, then sighed, holding up his hands. “Guess I’ve been hogging the crazy stick lately, huh?” he muttered. Kate ignored him. “It’s okay to be—”
“—I am not upset! I just want something to do, so I’m not just sitting here useless on your couch!”
“It’s a great couch to be useless on, I should know—” he tried for a grin, but neither of them really believed it.
“Clint—”
“Bobbi’s being sent back out to LA,” he continued, and Kate’s heart leapt. They did want her in on this, just at a distance from SHIELD. I can go to LA, help Bobbi— “She’s offered to drop you off in Portland.”
“Oh.”
“Huh? I thought you wanted to go to Portland? I’m kinda wondering why you aren’t in Portland already!”
Which . . . okay, so Kate couldn’t really give a great answer to why she wasn’t in Portland either. She had a standing invitation and a job waiting for her, not to mention three weird-but-cool thieves offering to teach her quite a number of questionable skills. It would be like summer camp. Kate was great at summer camp. She’d spent the majority of her summers in tents and cabins far from home, which made for a nice change from the dorm rooms in boarding schools she’d spent the rest of the years in. It was great. It will be great, she’d been telling herself for the past week of not-sleeping on Clint's couch, not-calling Hardison, not-packing up her old apartment not-being paid for by her now not-living father.
“Why’s Bobbi heading back out to LA?” she asked, rather than try for an answer to his question.
“Madame Masque’s base of operations is there. Could be her father, Count Nefaria, is involved in all of this.”
“In killing his daughter? Seriously? I mean, sure the guy’s evil, but that’s like, evil evil.”
Something in Clint froze. Not just on the surface, where Kate could see the death-grip his fingers had on his kneecaps, but deeper too, down to the very core. And okay, so he’d made enough jokes about her joining the “Shitty Parent Club” in the last few days that Kate knew her own father’s betrayal was hitting close to home for him too.
“All I’m saying is that . . .” She shrugged, waving her hands in the air as she tried to define categories of shitty parents. “I dunno, there’s spur of the moment evil, and there’s unintended crossfire evil, and then there’s actually planned evil. Which seems—what?”
Clint had stood up so abruptly his knees caught the coffee table and flipped it, sending various cups and books, and who knew what else spilling to the floor. He didn’t seem to care. “They—he—put a hit out on you.”
“What?” she repeated, so taken aback both by Clint’s words and the tight fury strung through them that she didn’t register the meaning behind them. At first.
“A hit. SHIELD has the internal recordings from their conference room.” He flung the words, each a sharp dagger thudding so close it raised the hairs on her arms. “It was proposed—they decided you caused too much trouble. Like me. The consortium voted on it. ALL of them. Understand?”
“When did you . . .”
“Few days ago.” Clint shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his pajamas, just to give them somewhere to go. He didn’t meet her eyes as he continued, “Hill recommended I keep it to myself.”
And he did because even though we’re partners, apparently that means shit when it comes to SHIELD trusting me with threats against my own damn life. From my dad. And his ‘friends’. She could feel her throat start clawing at itself again, and swallowed, shoving the thought away. Better to be mad at the living than the dead. “WHY? So I can just walk into—”
“It’s not active. The Consortium’s in ruins, the Clown is dead, you’re safe, it’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, but . . .”
“But SHIELD has deemed me not a real damsel in distress and decided I can stay in the dark.” Kate shoved down the urge to scream at Clint, whose hands had escaped from his pockets and spread, the message clear: This is out of my control.
That’s all SHIELD ever seemed to do. Shut her out or down or whatever. Even when she helped them, it had to be through back channels like Clint, Bobbi, or Natasha. Like they were responsible for Kate’s antics. Her babysitters. Her parents.
“I’m coming with you.” She made the announcement sound firm, as if she wasn’t standing in Clint’s living room, hair still a rat’s nest from a restless night, arms wrapped around the dregs of her clean(ish) clothes.
Clint raised his eyebrows at her. “No, nuh-uh, not happening.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll just get refused in the lobby? Unless you’re planning on breaking into SHIELD, which isn’t as easy as Natasha and Parker make it sound.”
Okay so maybe the eyebrows had a point there, but Kate wasn’t giving in yet, rationality be damned. “This involves me!”
“Which is pretty much the exact reason Hill gave for why you’re not allowed near it.”
“And you are?!”
“Because I’m an agent?! It’s my job?!” He threw his hands in the air. “Look, I know I’ve been a pile of suck masquerading as a partner lately, but trust me, you shouldn’t be near this. You can’t be near this. You don’t want to be near this.” Clint sighed, scrubbing at his face until whatever responsible adult demon that had briefly inhabited him fled the premises. “Fine. Don’t go to Portland. This shit is classified level 6, so it’ll be a few days to weeks before they inform anyone and definitely weeks before they release the body, but then your relatives—”
“It’s classified?” Level six meant it was very classified. Not top-top secret, but close. Much closer than Kate, The Other Hawkeye, was allowed to be. I shouldn’t know. Like the rest of my family. I should be in the dark same as them, but I’m not. Because Clint just broke protocol. To tell me.
Clint started his own rummage for clothes that could pass as clean. He paused, straightening with an audible pop. “Either someone broke into a secure facility and murdered a bunch of people without getting caught—or we have a mole. Futz, I hate moles.”
Ah. SHIELD liked sending Clint after moles. He played stupid so convincingly they almost always got sloppy around him. And he couldn’t do that with the daughter of one of the dead guys around. Kate kicked a likely looking pair of pants in his general direction. “It’s classified. But you told me.” Would it be better if he hadn’t? No. As shitty and confusing as this felt, she preferred it to not knowing.
“Well, duh. You’re my partner. Quit staring at me while I get dressed. It’s weird.”
“You’ve called me to pick you up in the middle of the street basically ass-naked, and NOW you're self-conscious?”
“Hey, I didn’t . . .”
And just like that, the not-fight they’d been having was over. Clint continued to ramble on about his new-found propriety and Kate pulled out her phone, finally sending a text to Hardison.
“When’s Bobbi leaving?”
“Two hours as of half an hour ag—What?” He demanded as Kate swore at him and began a mad scramble around the apartment to gather her stuff.
~
Clint, continuing in this weird role reversal in which he’d suddenly become a marginally competent adult, dropped her off to meet Bobbi.
He dropped her off on the sky-cycle, which made the whole thing slightly less-adult-y, even though he kept swearing he’d be taking it back to Tony’s right after. “What, drive an unidentified flying object around the skies of New York in this day and age? You kidding? Tony just gets away with it because he IS the UFO. Or IFO. Whatever.”
Kate didn’t quite believe he’d actually stash the flying machine again—SHIELD had them and they’d come in handy in Madripoor the first time she’d encountered Madame Masque so they couldn’t be THAT rare—but Bobbi shooed him off with a quip about joint custody that hit a little too close to home, not that Kate was about to admit it. She ducked into the jet to stash her meager stuff: one suitcase and her bow case. Clint had also promised to grab everything else from her apartment and stick it in storage (“I know a very roomy storage unit, great place to spend an afternoon—”) and Kate actually believed he’d do it, hopefully without too many breakages.
Bobbi, for her part, swept a careful look up and down Kate, didn’t say a single word about the circumstances, for which Kate was eternally grateful, and started guiding her through preflight checks as if she was actually expecting Kate to fly the plane, rather than just hitch a lift. Learning to fly was definitely on Kate’s list—Clint seemed to be able to fly just about anything, which meant she needed to acquire the skill on the general principle of anything he could do, she could do better—but as a long-term goal. Anything past this summer was long term, as far as she was concerned.
Still, information was information, so she reminded her brain that she’d made Clint stop for Starbucks, and it therefore had caffeine and no excuse for its sluggishness. Besides, it made for a good distraction.
Her brain, unamused by the rationale, threatened to go to sleep the moment Bobbi stopped talking, which happened to be the moment they hit cruising altitude. Half-hopeful it was being serious about the sleep thing, Kate shut her eyes but had to admit half an hour later that she’d called its bluff. No sleep for the soon-to-be-corrupted, apparently.
“You’re weirdly quiet.” If she wasn’t going to sleep, she needed to talk, and Bobbi had stopped volunteering information.
The older woman sighed, shifting in the seat next to her. “Internal debate.”
“Care to make it external?” Kate yawned and sat up straighter.
“Once I figure out the wording.” She paused to look over at Kate’s raised eyebrows of inquiry. They were powerful, her eyebrows. Lesser men quailed before them. Not that Bobbi was lesser or a man, but . . . God, Kate you have got to get a decent night’s sleep. “Between the two of us, we’ve got too many bird metaphors. I’m trying to avoid another one,” Bobbi said, thankfully dragging Kate away from her own thoughts.
“Um . . . let’s pretend I know what you’re talking about?”
“Mother hen. I’m trying not to be a mother hen.”
“Which would make me a chick . . . yeah no, I get that enough from idiot guys.”
“See what I mean?”
“About the metaphors, sure, but I think that bird’s flown the coop.” She grinned, enjoying the eyeroll Bobbi gave her.
“Shut up.”
“When you spit it out.”
“Fine, I always liked direct hits.” She took a deep breath. “You’re a project.”
“I’m a what?” She’d been expecting some harsh truth or platitude about her dad’s death, had mentally prepared the appropriate sarcastic responses, all of which were completely useless now.
“I told Hardison to find a summer project for the three of them. Not a job. Few minutes later, they’d zeroed in on you, like three children on a baby bird.”
“I thought you said no metaphors.”
“For me. I have plenty. You haven’t hit critical mass yet.”
Kate groaned. “Whatever. So why am I a project?”
“They have a thing about helping people, and—”
“Nooo, I mean, why do they need a project? I’m aware of my perceived baby bird status. Believe me. Fledgling. Can we say fledgling? It sounds better, somehow.”
“Scientifically speaking, sure.” Bobbi flicked a few toggles on the panels that didn’t seem to do anything. Probably just there for when a pilot needed to look busy. “They need a project that isn’t a job. Preferably something low on stress and violence.”
“Okay, I get that, what with Eliot taking a turn as a disco ball.”
Kate could see Bobbi’s jaw tighten, as if she didn’t appreciate Kate’s glib description. As if she didn’t say the same kinds of things about friends getting hurt on the job all the time. Finally, she continued. “About that. You were on your way as soon as you learned something was wrong. You grabbed what you needed and charged in.”
“Technically, Clint did the charging, I did the crashing. Through the window. I re-fenestrated.”
“Semantics,” Bobbi said, completely ignoring Kate’s pun. Should be a crime, ignoring that quality of pun-ishment. “You weren’t sitting in a room two blocks away weighing the life you value most in the world against the job you’d taken the night before.”
“Ah. No. I wasn’t.” She considered. “But that kinda comes with the territory, right?”
“In theory, sure. But I can promise in practice it gets a lot more complicated.”
“Oh.” She knew that, of course. But, well, they were professionals weren’t they? Hardened criminals? Parker sleeps hanging upside down off the edge of couches, Hardison can’t stop making puns any more than I can, and Eliot somehow manages to glare heart-eyes. They’re . . . softened criminals. Cookie-dough ice cream set out to thaw. If criminals were ice cream flavors . . .
Kate started upright in her seat as Bobbi continued, “And I know a thing or two about how that can turn something that used to be good into something that . . . isn’t. And won’t be. Ever again. I don’t want that. Not for them. Not for anyone, but especially not for them.”
Kate had enough of the details of Bobbi and Clint’s marriage flare-out to see where she was coming from, but still— “Are you sure you’re not being kinda . . .”
“Nosy?”
“No, you’re definitely being nosy. Paranoid, I was gonna say paranoid.”
“Sure, who isn’t? And sure, it’s none of my business, but that applies to plenty of things I’ve stuck my nose into.”
Kate wrinkled her own nose. “So I’m what, exactly?”
“I told you, a project.”
“Yeah, not sure I’m entirely comfortable with the context here.”
“Well, you’ll feel better when you stop being so willfully obtuse, Hawkeye,” Bobbi teased. “How does that work anyway? Biology is pretty clear on genetics, but inheriting someone’s personality? Seriously?”
“Nurture over nature?” Kate suggested. She grinned at Bobbi’s growl of frustration, before returning to what she’d said earlier. “A diversion. I’m a diversion.”
“Yep. Because?”
She thought back to Eliot, declaring he’d tell Parker about him and Clint, but Hardison wasn’t allowed to listen. And Hardison handing her the comm—both then, and later, when Clint and Eliot were in the basement of the strip club, involved in their pseudo-torture session. For a trio that has the others in their ears so much, they don’t always listen to each other. At least Clint has an excuse. “To get them talking?” She bit her lip. “I’m not sure I’m really qualified for that.”
“You’ve never been concerned about qualifications before,” Bobbi pointed out, far too reasonably. “And I’m not saying your role is to be a marriage counselor. God, no.”
Kate breathed a sigh of relief. All of her relationship experiences boiled down to a list of what not to do. “Then what?”
“A . . . prism, I suppose.”
“Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m not the one being obtuse, here.”
“Opaque. Keep up with the metaphors. Imagine you’ve got three intense beams of light, focused on a center point.”
“Ooookaaay? You going to add a magnifying glass in there? Roast ants?”
“Trying to avoid that, actually. A job would be a magnifying glass. They need a prism. Something that refracts that light, redirects its focus.”
“And that’s me.”
“Yup.”
“Shit.”
“No pressure.”
“Well yeah, you wouldn’t want me to shatter into a flat surface or anything.”
Bobbi gave her a Look. The kind with a capital L and very little patience with whiny teenagers. “You’re about to live with a hacker, a hitter, and a thief. They’re going to teach you those things. This? The shit I’m saying about prisms and redirection? That’s what the grifter does. The three of them can grift; Sophie—and me to an extent—taught them. But it isn’t their specialty and, here’s the important thing, Sophie used grifting techniques on them. All the damn time. It’s what she does and she’s good at it. Probably the best there is. But she and Nate are off being “retired” until they get bored, and our trio of lovebirds are coming out of the honeymoon phase. Refraction will be necessary.”
“Still going with the not-qualified line here.” Sure, she barged in and did things she was unqualified for all the damn time, but action-y stuff. Not talky-feely stuff.
“Kinda the point of a grifter, chickadee,” Bobbi said, blithe to the bone.
Kate shifted in her seat. “So what do I do?”
“This is going to sound counterintuitive, but be yourself.”
“You just said—”
“Yup. But they like you, they’d know if you acted differently, and you’ve already proven that you’re nosy and persistent. Honestly you’d probably do just fine without this whole conversation.”
“Then why have it?” Great, now I’m going to be psyched out about failing as a prism, or whatever. Prismploding.
“Because no matter what Clint does, it’s better to look before you leap, and not just trust that there’s a dumpster to break your fall. Also, it’s better to avoid falling in dumpsters, if possible.”
“REALLY? Never would have figured that out on my own.”
“Okay, my summer project for you is to learn another language.”
“Which one?”
“English, sans sarcasm.”
“Yeah. Right.” She ducked Bobbi’s half-hearted swipe in her direction and spent the rest of the flight getting a crash course (not a literal one) in the basics of flying a plane.
Whatever waited for her in Portland, at least she was leaving New York behind.