“Their mistake,” Kate shot back, sharing a knowing smirk with him. A Hawkeye that could talk was a Hawkeye that could think. Even before all this superhero stuff, Kate didn’t do well in silence. She blasted music while she studied, or more often had someone over just to talk to. Once, out of desperation while she was stuck in study hall, she struck up a very one-sided conversation with a chipmunk on the other side of the window. She didn’t trust the quiet, didn’t like how it could sneak up and surround you, sudden and smothering. It was one of the many, many reasons she was glad deafness wasn’t a shared Hawkeye quality. Sometimes she wondered if Clint talked so much because he knew exactly how overwhelming silence felt.
I do the best with what I got. That was the two of them in a nutshell. They didn’t have superpowers, they couldn’t fly or teleport, or read minds, or burst into flames. They couldn’t super-speed away or lift a car over their heads. They had to work twice as hard just to keep up, just to stay at pace with their friends and teammates. But they did the best with what they had, worked a little bit smarter, a little bit harder, a little bit more. “Maybe determination is a superpower in and of itself,” she mused, head tilted a little. “I like to think so anyway.”
She had grown up with everything, Clint had grown up with nothing. Logically, neither of them should be here now. She was supposed to be a socialite, looking for husbands, gossiping about who was wearing last season’s shoes. And from what he’d told her (not nearly as much as she would’ve liked to know), no one expected Clint to be very important either. But determination, hard work, and a little bit (a lot) of dumb luck, had gotten them here. Heroes, protecting their city, saving lives, helping their friends. She knew, without a shred of doubt, that none of it would’ve been possible without him. “Nope,” she chirped, staring right at him. The smile on her face almost hid the ferocity in her gaze. “There’s no one better. I’ve checked, run the numbers, the whole bit. You’re it, Hawkguy.” Her gaze softened with the sincerity of the sentiment.
His laugh always drew hers out, despite the macabre subject of their jokes. (Though certainly – it’d been worse before. A lot futzing worse.) She glanced up at the sky now, the stars that weren’t really their stars, and shrugged. “At least we don’t have to worry about them right now,” she said. “I mean, as much as I’d love round two of kicking their butts – hard to get at us in this place. Maybe there’s some perks to being stuck in Futzworld.”
There were only so many ways she could explain what Clint meant to her – the words to truly encompass it just didn’t exist. She’d probably spend the rest of her life trying to make up words to describe him, their friendship (which was a word that totally undersold it, honestly). He wasn’t perfect. Neither was she. But he was strong in ways she could never be, and she could sometimes temper those flaws that held him back. Being here, so close to home but so far away at the same time, it threw her. Knocked her off-balance. But she’d always have Clint to steady herself on, and as long as they could fight side by side, they’d find some way to make it. “Always,” she whispered, her head still on his shoulder. “And forever.” Normally, she would’ve added something like, you’re stuck with me, but right now, the moment was a little too fragile, the feeling in her chest a little too much.
“They are,” she said, nodding once. “They’re just a bunch of stars that somebody somewhere decided to make stories of. But I mean, that’s what people are. Just a bunch of humans thrown together, telling each other stories. And making their own,” she added, a sentiment that was important to both of them. No one got to choose their destiny. Not their pasts, not their ghosts, not the villains that couldn’t seem to stay away from their home. Not even each other – but they’d decided a long time ago to be a part of each other’s stories, and that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. “I will,” she promised, a soft smile slipping onto her face. “I’ll show you everything. There’s an archer constellation, Sagittarius. It’s easiest to see in August, maybe we’ll back in time to catch it.”
“Sometimes it bites me in the ass, too,” Clint admitted, because he had a bad habit of talking himself into corners. It was almost a reflex, talking. He’d go on and on and on until someone stopped him somehow, talk about nothing in particular just to fill the silence. Silence, in his experience, lead nowhere good. It always reminded him of his worst moments, of being a little kid laying on the kitchen floor catching kick after kick to the head, or bursting into a stairwell just in time to see Barney on the floor in a puddle of blood before the world erupted into pain as he took an arrow to each ear. (That static image of his brother just laying there stuck with him no matter how much time he put between him and the incident. Even knowing Barney had survived to be a dick another day didn’t quite ease his mind.) He wondered if it was the same for Kate, if the silence brought back bad memories of all the times Clint had refused to speak to her or anyone else. He hated thinking that, hated wondering if she had a static image of him somewhere in her head the same way he had one of Barney. She’d always deserved better than that.
He snorted at her assessment, shrugging a shoulder. If determination was a superpower, it was probably one Team Hawkeye shared. They had to be determined, had to fight like hell for every little thing in their lives. They weren’t like the kids at Xavier’s who were born to be powerful, weren’t like Steve or Tony who’d fought for their power. Clint and Kate didn’t have super soldier serum or crazy tech suits backing them up. They had a bow a piece and a quiver full of trick arrows that was mostly shared between them. “Well, we kick ass at that, then,” he told her after a beat, offering her a smile.
Some people were predisposed to be heroes. They had this overwhelming sense of good in them, the kind that meant they’d always find a way. They didn’t always end up on teams like the Avengers or the Justice League; sometimes they went on to become doctors, firefighters, soldiers. They became heroes in their ordinary sort of way, but it was still in them. It was still who they were. As far as Clint was concerned, Kate was one of those. She was always going to end up great, always going to help the people around her in any way she could. It was why she hadn’t faltered at the call, had jumped headfirst into the superhero life despite having an abundance of other options. Kate was always going to be a hero, but Clint? Clint was pretty sure he’d only become one because somewhere down the line, someone messed up. If fate was a thing, he’d somehow managed to have his swapped with someone else. Selfishly, he was glad for it. Heroism might not have been his calling, but he wouldn’t have traded it or Kate for anything else in the world. “I always knew you sucked at math, but this is something else,” he snorted, ducking his head. It meant a lot, having Kate look up to him like this. It was scary, but it meant a lot.
He followed her gaze up to the sky. He’d had trouble looking at the stars since Loki, had a hard time thinking of space without thinking of the light touch of the scepter against his chest, the haze of blue swimming into his vision, the way he could feel himself being plucked out of his own head. The Skrulls made that worse, intensified it. “You really think that? You think we could get that lucky?” Who was to say they hadn’t found themselves thrown into some sector of space where something worse than the Skrulls was waiting on them? It wasn’t like Earth had ever been particularly lucky with this shit.
Moments like this, Clint remembered what Kate had said to him in the limo after Grills’s funeral. You and me, together? Together, Clint, I think you and me are the person we both wish we could be. He’d shut his eyes then, he’d pretended to be asleep, and he wasn’t sure if she knew he’d heard her even now, but he had. He hadn’t known how to deal with it then, hadn’t known how to tell Kate that she didn’t need him to be a good person. Kate had never needed Clint at all, had proven as much when she’d run off to LA and had her own life while his fell apart in New York without her. Kate didn’t need Clint, but Clint needed her. She was what made him the person he needed to be. If he affected who she was at all, he worried it was only to drag her down, to make her worse. He swallowed, didn’t reply as her head fell onto his shoulder. A braver man would’ve told her then that she was better off without him, but bravery wasn’t among Clint’s superpowers.
“Aw, don’t get all sentimental on me, Katie,” he teased, but his voice lacked any real humor. She was right, of course. She was always right, even when she said something stupid and ridiculous. “An archer,” he repeated, a smile slipping across his features. “How about that? Guess we’re in the stars, Hawkeye.”
