"So you probably know more about what Barnes is going through than anyone else," someone points out while Clint is distracted by Natasha humming a Russian lullaby over breakfast-making. He won't eat a thing she cooks, but she is beautiful.

Then he realizes what was said and frowns. "Because of Tasha?" he wants to ask, but he catches himself. No one else really knows what his partner went through. He settles for rubbing the back of his neck and mumbling, "I guess," uncertainly.

"You know," Bruce prods. "Loki."

Clint's eyebrows come up at that. He's not slow on the uptake and he couldn't agree less. He shrugs. "Not the same." He cuts off the conversation by sliding up behind Natasha and stealing her spatula.

Loki played with his mind like a smug child, and Clint hasn't forgiven it, but HYDRA destroyed Bucky's mind and it's not the same thing at all.

Clint looks at Natasha, pausing as she snatches the spatua back, laughing. Clint knows now how it feels to be unraveled, but he never became the monster someone else fashioned him into. He just housed it for a while.

No one hears Hawkeye and trembles in their boots because he's still the monster someone else designed him to be.

---

"Doesn't it bother you," the psychologist had asked, skeptical at his denial of any symptoms worse than the usual in his line of work, "all those people you killed?"

Clint looked up at her and restrains a sigh of exasperation behind his usual working expression. All those people he killed. He had killed petty crooks on behalf of other crooks, he had killed terrorists for the army and worse for SHIELD. He'd killed his own brother with an arrow through the heart, and that is perhaps the only kill he truly regrets.

Loki killed Coulson. Loki used Clint's hands and bow to kill good men and women who had worked for SHIELD, who had been Clint's coworkers and some his friends. Clint didn't kill them. He didn't dream of their dead faces screaming at him at night.

He didn't tell psych that though. The woman hadn't earned the privilege.

He simply answered, "No."

Ooooh. I love this interpretation. The comparison to Bucky/The Winter Soldier rings very true to me (and on that note, poor Bucky! I have so many feels).

Thank you! I have many feels on all three of them.

Ahahaha, did you have to bring in Barney? ;__; Okay, seriously, I really like how... soberly you have him looking at things here, and it works.

It wasn't grief he needed; it was that tight, hard coil of anger he wore after he'd been tortured or used, that battle-ready fury focused into killing what needed killing, not mourning who needed mourning. -- Oh man, the thought that that's enough of a regular occurrence that she's mapped out a pattern in his reactions to it.

I'm harsh that way, alas. I do think they'd have a pattern for that kind of thing, even if it never fell in this category for him before. And it just felt like it needed to be a sober piece, you know? Even when you keep moving, this stuff does affect you, just in a different way after a while.

OMG, I almost missed this!! This was wonderful. Matter-of-fact Clint, never easy but always honest.

And in the midst of all the reflection, and Barney and Bucky, this: Clint is distracted by Natasha humming a Russian lullaby over breakfast-making. He won't eat a thing she cooks, but she is beautiful.

LOVE.

I'm so glad you didn't miss it. I was hoping for that Clint to come through, and I'm sooo glad you liked it.

That was my favorite snippet. :grins: