Chapter Text
He had been seven when it started.
One last blow to the ears and suddenly there was nothing – none of the incessant humming that he had come to find comforting, find safe. Only silence. Then his father’s fist connecting again and Clint heard a wave of HURT SMASH BREAK PAIN, his father’s knuckles crashing into his arms where he lay shielding his ears. It was so loud, so incredibly loud. And then silence.
Clint lay there, sobbing silently. Everything he did was silent now. He could feel the floorboards shifting underneath his chest as his father moved away. Felt the slam of the door vibrate against his collarbone and reverberate around his bones. But not a noise penetrated his cocoon. He could still remember the feeling though – however abruptly it had come and gone – a relentless throbbing of rage.
He lay there for hours.
When someone finally came, he didn’t recognise them. The police-officer’s hands were gentle as he lifted Clint off the floor but Clint still shied away from the torrent of ANGER BOREDOM LONELY that echoed round his ear-drums, a discordant hum of empty space coloured by anger. Fought to get out of the man’s grip, away from the terrible sounds which intruded into his sterile little bubble. The police officer didn’t let go, held on to the squirming boy, but as his hands shifted onto fabric the nose quietened and Clint let himself be dragged along, deaf to everything but the discordant hums which drifted through his ears and grated along his skull. Each bone began to let out its own little howl of complaint to match, groans silent to everyone but him as his body began to shriek from the beating – a pain which the murmur of EMPTY EMPTY EMPTY echoing through the policeman’s hands did nothing to quell. Clint began to cry.
…
Two days later Clint, along with his brother Barney, were taken to a group home 70 miles away. Both boys held themselves carefully, gritted teeth against the pain which still ached in their bones, but Clint was also silent. The doctor’s had pronounced him deaf, but with no sign-language or lip-reading no one was sure whether he understood them. They had tried explaining it through writing but Barney had just looked at them like they were stupid and told them he couldn’t read. That was why their father hit him in the ears he explained, he was dumb. So the doctor’s had written a note in his file, recommended that someone made sure he was taught both ASL and to read and write and allowed the two boys to be taken away.
Clint knew his ears had gone wrong. He suspected that the piece of paper they had tried to show him had been telling him that. But he still didn’t know why the doctors where suddenly so noisy. Every time their cool, impersonal hands touched him he could feel them screaming at him HUNGRY BORED KIDS SHAME PAIN TIRED coupled with hundreds of emotions that he didn’t know, hot cold feelings that crawled in his gut and made him want to hide, angry itching emotions that growled under his skin. Even Barney was screaming, a chorus of HURT SMASH BREAK PAIN that made Clint flinch away, even though it simmered and boiled in a manner dissimilar to the riot of his father’s yell.
So Clint withdrew, deep inside his head, flinching away from the hands, always the hands. Once at the home he avoided the kids, the group activities, the woman with her kind smile and the man with the grin of a shark – whose arm as it wrapped its way around Clint had sent waves of the uneasy hot feeling crashing across him. That one even Barney was scared of, Clint could feel it.
They had put him in lessons. Once a week, they sat him down and pointed at pictures, a cloud, a pig, a dog – they made funny symbols with their hands and pointed out words, making strange large motions with their mouth. Clint wanted to understand, stared desperately at the symbols – committing them to memory – until he could hear he wouldn’t be able to ask why everyone was screaming at him, what they were saying.
Eventually he learnt. And as he learnt he retreated.
…
Phil Coulson was going to get promoted to level 6. He had caught Hawkeye.
He had taken over the operation after months of failed extractions, attempts to offer the mercenary jobs, attempts to take him out. Previous to him, they had all failed. Hawkeye was incredible, some of his jobs were legendary about SHIELD, he was just an enforcer after all, a gun for hire amongst the mobs, but his shots, his shots. When Fury had first tasked a team with bringing him in or taking them down nobody had heard of Hawkeye, but as they tried and failed yet again to bring in the assassin his legend had grown.
For their first attempt they had sent a probationary agent, Grant Ward, in to talk to Barton. Gonzales had been running point on the investigation and had figured, buy the kid a burger, sit him down, offer a roof over his head and a clean sheet and the kid would be theirs. Figured they could always threaten him afterwards. Problem was, while the rookie initially did well, target narrowing his eyes but agreeing to sit down, allowing him to order food, grimacing uncomfortably but laughing it off when a waitress bumped into him, he seemed unresponsive half the time. Halfway through the meal Ward’s hand had brushed against his and suddenly the kid had been up and running. Ward had pursued but lost him when the kid had flipped off of a building and vanished. Gonzales labelled the kid mentally disordered. Problem was, when he initiated the second phase of the investigation the kid seemed to already know where the sniper was waiting with his darts, hitting his own target without ever appearing in the other sniper’s scope. Following that failed mission, after the failure of anyone in the team to find the perch the sniper had used, Gonzales was pulled off the mission.
Maria Hill was given him next, her skill for planning ops leading her to devise a string of operations which were initially designed to catch the kid and later to end him but when the kid wasn’t two steps ahead and therefore impossible to find he remained totally unpredictable. On one memorable occasion he actually fled the scene despite the fact he could not have possibly known that the agent he had bumped into was indeed an agent as the woman in question was eight months pregnant at the time and was on her way to meet Maria for lunch – not for the basis of the op. Eventually Maria was promoted onto bigger and better things and Barton’s case was passed on to a never-ending string of handlers whose frustration only increased as the boy became more and more famous in the criminal underworld for his incredible shots and impossible kills. Hell, none of the handlers had even worked out why the bow and arrow.
It was Agent Blake that had made the breakthrough on Hawkeye’s case – connected his use of the name and the bow to a circus act in Carson’s travelling circus and from there to two runaways whom the police had traced there. He had discovered the reason for the archer’s seeming uncaring about what the death threats one irate agent had yelled after being duct-taped to a tree, quite possibly the reason he stared quite so hard at every agent he came into contact with. Hawkeye was Clinton Barton. Clinton Barton was only nineteen. And Clinton Barton was deaf.
Of course many of the agents who had worked the case didn’t believe this. Gonzales in particular having snorted at that assertion but when the time came for Blake to hand off the case Coulson was already starting to make plans. And now a soaking wet, heavily bleeding Hawkeye was lying in their medical ward, cuffed to the bed.
…
Clint was scared. Terrified honestly. He had been cuffed both around the wrists and the ankles to a hospital bed, view of the room blocked out by a crowd of doctors and nurses who laboured to remove the bullet from his leg. His system, shot through with morphine but still screaming for space, for fear, for running, crashed with pain and he jerked back and forth, held down by a multitude of hands whose messages of FEAR ANGER HAPPY CONTENT AROUSED battered at him as Clint sought refuge in his own head, building little barriers for the emotions and desperately throwing away the words which rolled over him…
‘…dangerous bringing him in here could hurt someone what if Julie well after John I wouldn’t care but the principle of the matter and the resting agents hey what do you think you are doing hold still god its just like…’
It seemed like his life had been and gone before the hands receded, left Clint to lick his wounds and rebuild his mind – separating out the imposter emotions from his own fear and pain. When he could remember his own thoughts again he worked himself up to looking around. He had been moved at some point in the swirl of noise and now he was in a plain white room with an IV, heart monitor and a very solid looking door. Like a magic trick, as soon as he had noticed it, the door clicked open.
Coulson’s first thought on looking at the now captured Hawkeye was that he looked a very sad sight indeed. In a hospital gown his limbs stuck out with sharp edges that spoke of not enough food. Coulson could see mottled bruises and scars, which coloured and discoloured his skin in lumps and clusters. The boy himself looked, well, like a boy. Defiant, injured and afraid. The only part of him that still looked as lethal as the boy’s reputation were those eyes, sharp piercing eyes which pinned him where he stood with their accusatory gaze – ‘You did this to me’ – they screamed.
The man with the blank face just stood and stared. Then he sat and stared. As hard as Clint looked he couldn’t see any emotions on the man’s face. He just sat there, perfectly passive, perfectly flat. Clint would have said the man was silent, but then everything was to him. Clint stared back, stomach curled in anticipation of something. Anything. He began to wish that the man would touch him just so that he knew what was going on. He could wait for hours on a sniper’s perch but he needed to know what was going to happen, needed something to focus on.
…
Four hours later and the man had finished talking. Clint didn’t break his stare. To his credit, neither had the man – now introduced as Agent Coulson. ‘Well Mr Barton?’ the suit asked. Frowning, reaching up to re-tuck a loose bandage. Clint schooled his face waiting to stop the flinch in its tracks. It never came. He could feel Coulson, a warm low voice in his ears, but unlike the other voices, it didn’t shout. Instead, all Clint received was a quiet and distant amusement, joy, sadness, pity, regret, love. Coulson withdrew his hand, sat there waiting with a cool expression, but Clint was still marvelling in the warm calm that populated the man, a gentle tune which thrummed along with his own thoughts instead of smothering them. Clint looked up, and said yes.