A/N: Thanks to dysprositos for beta help! This is loosely inspired (the concept) by Tim O'Brien's brilliant short story, "The Things They Carried." I was messing around with imitating style, and though I veered from the true format of that short story, it was still launched from that spot. Warnings: Mentions of child abuse, violence, and a brief allusion to suicidal thoughts.
When his parents died in a fiery car crash down the street from their house, the people from the state told seven year-old Clint Barton to pack a bag. He looked through his shaggy blond bangs at his brother, Barney, who shrugged and pointed out to the people from the state that they didn't have any bags other than garbage bags in the house. The people from the state shrugged right back and said that those would have to do.
Clint, standing there in his torn blue jeans and a faded green t-shirt, reached up and took a black garbage bag from his older brother's hand and looked around the house. After throwing a few clothes into the bag, he took from his bedroom his pillow, a raggedy stuffed bear that was missing one of its eyes, and a comic book.
The pillow was flat, had lost any fluff it had once had because Clint had been using it ever since he started sleeping on a bed. The bear used to be a bright, obnoxious yellow and had been a gift from one of those holiday charity drives. His father had hollered and slapped Clint's mother when he found out she put the boys' names in for the Christmas donation drive, but Clint liked the bear anyway, and had clutched it through the night since he was five. Barney had stolen the comic book from a nearby store, read it, and thrown it in the kitchen garbage can. Clint dug it out when no one was looking, wiped the mashed potatoes off the cover, hurried it to the room he shared with Barney and ducked under the covers to read it. He read it every night before bed, wishing for someone kind, someone he could trust, to read it to him, but heard his mother's whimpers in the next room instead of her voice in his ear.
There was a teacher at Clint's elementary school named Ms. Weston. She was short and blonde, like Clint's mother. One day Ms. Weston had given him a test that she didn't give any of the other kids, and she had beamed as she carried the results to him and told him how far ahead of his classmates he was in math. She had sparkling blue eyes and a dress covered in tiny blue flowers when she gave him the news, and she said, "Just get this permission form filled out by your parents and we'll let you go to the gifted classroom for math each day. You'll love it." He was excited, too, until she gave him the form. His father hated charity, and this sure seemed like she was trying to do Clint a favor. He knew his dad would never sign it, so Clint just nodded and shoved the form in his pocket and waited a day or two before telling her that he would feel more comfortable in the regular class. Her eyes darkened just a little, she eyed the scrape on Clint's cheek a little too closely for his comfort, and she made sure she talked to Clint every day afterward.
At nine, when Barney found Clint hiding in a closet at the bottom of the stairs of their fourth foster home, his lip swollen and bleeding and his left eye starting to blacken, he told Clint in a dark voice to round up his stuff because they were leaving. All Clint wanted to do was to run, so he asked if they couldn't just leave, but Barney told him he was grabbing a few things, and Clint followed him upstairs to add some items to Barney's backpack. He put in a couple of his t-shirts and another pair of jeans, and then he added the comic book that he'd brought from his parents' house and a sweatshirt with a picture of a forest on it that he'd stolen from a store at the nearby mall. The four foster families he and Barney had been with over the last two years had given him a few things like toy trucks and stuffed bears, but didn't want to take any of those things. They hadn't made the time he'd spent dodging fists any better.
The comic book still made him wish he had someone to share stories with, someone to tell him stories or read him stories or draw him stories, and even though Barney didn't-since Barney hated stories now that he was twelve-Clint still hoped for someone's voice to share stories with him. He still read the comic from when he was seven night after night, caring for its weathered pages and hiding it carefully under his mattress when he wasn't looking at it, even when he managed to get a new one here and there.
The sweatshirt was green with a faded gold print of trees on it, and it was warm and a little too big for him. After someone beat him up, Clint would find the nearest bathroom, wipe the blood or snot off his face and go find this sweatshirt, slipping it on and letting it envelope him in soft warmth. He wore it a lot.
There was a neighbor at the last foster house, a kind old man named Carl. He was retired and kept his lawn neat and trimmed, grew roses along the side of his house, and had a black lab named Lake who Clint loved with all his nine year-old heart. Clint would sneak out of the house as quick as he could after dinner, climbing out the window of the room he and Barney and another foster kid named Sam shared. Clint could climb anything, so he'd climb the high privacy fence that old Carl had around his yard and slide down the other side into a crouch, letting Lake tackle him and smother him with kisses. Clint knew where Carl kept a bucket of dog toys, and he'd go to it and pull out a tennis ball to throw for Lake, over and over.
Sometimes, Carl would come outside, never complaining about Clint's uninvited visits, and he'd ask Clint about school, maybe offer him a soda and some potato chips. He never asked about the black eyes or bruises on Clint's arms. After Clint's first visit to Carl, someone had called the police on his foster parents, but they covered it up and nothing had happened. After that, Carl was even nicer, letting Clint help him with lawn work or do his homework at the picnic table on the patio. When Clint and Barney snuck down the street into the night and away, Clint cast a longing look at Carl's house, but he thought maybe Carl would be okay with Clint's disappearance. Clint also thought maybe he'd like to get a dog of his own one day.
Barney carried the comic book and sweatshirt in his backpack for Clint when he took him to the circus. Barney was thirteen when he found Carson's Carnival of Traveling Wonders, and he stuck his hand under Clint's small chin, pushing it up, and said to old man Carson, "He's got a face, see? He's got a good face. You can make some work for him, sir. Just let him stay until you figure out what to do with his face," because the guy had said that Barney could stay and work but they had nothin' for his scrawny little brother to do. Old man Carson shook his head anyway and told Barney he had to split his own wages and food with Clint for a month or two until they figured out what to do with him.
He carried Clint on his meager wages and food for two years, until Clint found a bow and arrows one day and Trick caught him trying it behind the caravan. Clint picked up the name of "Hawkeye" in a headline act two months later, and Barney dropped him like a heavy stone and never carried anything for him again.
Clint left Carson's Carnival of Traveling Wonders when he was sixteen, and he carried with him a knife wound to the gut, the comic book in his back pocket, a Swiss army knife in his front pocket, and the weight of his brother's hatred in his chest. He lay in a hospital bed reading the comic over and over and over again as the doctors tried to keep the knife wound from festering and he tried to keep Barney's festering betrayal from cutting too deep. He loved that comic book. He had it memorized after nine years of carrying it around, and it felt comfortable and settled in his hands. He had covered it in scotch tape a few years ago, layered the tape protectively over the inside and outside of the front and back cover and now the mashed potato stain was encased in tape forever. He fingered the cover carefully and stared reverently at the color-splashed pages as he lay alone in the bed, ignoring the fear creeping into his chest whenever he thought of getting out of the hospital. The Carnival left him behind the morning after Trick Shot and Duquesne, with Barney watching stone-faced behind them, had stabbed him. Clint read and read, adding the voices of the characters in his head, familiar voices now, kind voices that he dreamed of uselessly when he shut the taped cover of the book and slept.
He carried the book and the knife out of the hospital a week later, and after he picked the pockets of a few people in downtown Des Moines, he brought some cash and a new t-shirt right up to an Army recruiting desk and lied about his age and birthplace, using the stage charm he always carried to convince the recruiter, who was low on his quota that week, to give him a chance. They gave him some tests and a confident nod when they saw his scores and told him he carried a natural talent for math; he nodded and remembered Ms. Weston with a fond smile.
Once Clint was through basic training and someone realized how sharp a shot he was, they threw a duffel full of standard-issue equipment at him and he tucked the comic book and knife deep inside, heading to a base not many knew about. He trained to be a sniper and became the best in his unit, finding new things to carry around, like responsibility, confidence, and guilt. He drew on his days at the circus for the first two, and drew on what seemed like a bottomless hole in his gut for the third, and found some other people like him in his unit.
Chris Malloway carried pictures of a wife and baby from back home, and Clint looked at them in wonder, knowing he wasn't even eighteen yet and seeing in the photo the kind of path that he'd never even considered. It scared him a little. Chris was young like the rest of the unit, early twenties, and he liked Clint's sarcastic sense of humor, joking with him at meals, goading him when they got the chance for some down-time video games, and making Clint burst into laughter in the middle of a mission briefing once. They both got KP duty for that one, but it was okay because Clint knew Chris was his first real friend since Carl and Lake (and Chris said he had a dog at home, too). Clint got someone to take a photo of him and Chris, and he carried it in his wallet for years, even after he had to leave.
Clint carried the best record of the unit's history after his first year in the Army, and that gave him some pride to cart around for a little while. It didn't last, though, since someone in the HR office finally fired the recruiter who'd snuck Clint in and went through all the files with a fine toothed comb. Lying for two years to the Army was apparently a bad thing to do, and Clint found himself dishonorably discharged on his nineteenth birthday, standing on a street corner in Charleston, South Carolina carrying only a backpack and one month's back pay in his wallet.
In his backpack was his knife, the photo of him and Chris, and the comic book, along with two changes of clothes, his Army jacket, and a St. Louis Cardinals baseball hat Chris had thrown at him the day he left. He also carried Chris's words that he'd said as Clint stormed out of the barracks: "You're smart, Clint. Smart enough to fool these assholes for two years and the best shot this unit's ever seen. You'll do okay."
Clint wasn't sure how, but he bought himself a train ticket and spent a couple days with his backpack and those words on a train to New York City, hoping he'd find something to do with himself there.
By the time he was twenty-six, he had lost those words of confidence from a friend, lost the hat, and lost his knife. He'd had to leave it stuck in the neck of a boss who tried to take him out in an effort to clean up loose ends of a disastrous job; Clint didn't take kindly to being considered a 'loose end.' Knifing his boss left him carrying a bad reputation, and provided the opportunity to a few who wanted to take down the infamous Hawkeye a few notches. He carried a diamond-hard glint in his blue-green eyes, a scar across his right cheekbone, and enough fake ids and cash to carry him away from the states unscathed, the photo of an old friend in his wallet and a taped-up comic book tucked into his jacket pocket.
Clint had to run, though, and he ran for a very long time, dodging bullets, trying to make enough money to live on, and he learned to carry even less. He discarded those wishes for friends, wishes for voices to read to him in the dim light of a safe room, wishes for a place to land and stay for more than a few days at a time. Running became habit, and people became faces to avoid, symbols of what he would never have.
He began to consider dropping everything, refusing to carry anything at all anymore.
That's when SHIELD appeared down an alleyway in Brussels in the form of a tall black man with an eye patch and hard face. He carried a menacing glare and an offer of something outside Clint's current flight. Clint was tired, and Nick Fury seemed to be the most genuine person he'd ever met, and he had a voice that mesmerized Clint so much that he had to shake his head when Fury stopped talking in order to clear it. Fury carried a file detailing how he could give Clint amnesty from his past crimes and wipe his military record clean if Clint would come work for him, but Clint ran again, carrying a question he'd never imagined he'd get to consider: would he like to start life over again?
Finally, he stopped running, and Fury's right hand man found him this time, another imposing presence with a mesmerizing voice. But this guy wore a suit like armor and carried the calmest, clearest set of blue eyes Clint had ever seen. Clint was carrying a weariness he thought he'd never shake, and when Phil Coulson introduced himself and restated Fury's offer, Clint nodded, climbed into a plane, and fell asleep in the presence of a stranger for the first time since he was nine years old.
At thirty-one, Clint carried five field uniforms, two SHIELD sweatshirts, two pairs of combat boots, one suit and pair of dress shoes, a shaving kit, a hand-held video game system with a few games, a drawing pad and pencil set, two novels Sitwell recommended, his comic book, the photo of him and Chris, and a flame in his heart.
Phil Coulson was Ms. Weston, Carl, Lake, and Chris Mallory wrapped up in one person, and more. He carried a hidden smile, a killer instinct, the mind of a brilliant strategist, and hope. He treated Clint with respect and trust, and Clint wanted to soak it up for as long as he could. Coulson lit the torch in Clint's heart on fire during one mission in particular. It was a year after Clint was recruited to SHIELD, and Clint had proven himself the best sniper in the organization. Coulson told him he'd picked up on their training faster and with greater ease than anyone before him, and SHIELD trusted him with a mission, just him and Coulson. It went to hell within hours of Clint choosing his vantage point, and he found himself limping down an alley with a bullet low in his shoulder and fear coursing through his veins. He made the shot required through the window, but they'd gotten a few shots off themselves, and now Clint felt his body sag with each step, and before he made it to the end of the dark, dirty alley, his legs refused to carry him any further and he fell.
When he came to, Coulson was sitting next to him on the ground looking haggard and exhausted and scared. He pressed a bundled up shirt against Clint's shoulder, and he also carried a tinge of guilt in his blue eyes. Clint swallowed and spoke, trying to get that to guilt go away. "Not your fault, sir," he said weakly, ignoring the fire in his chest and the sight of the blood soaking Coulson's shirt.
Coulson shook his head. "Bad intel is always my fault, Barton. Just stay with me, okay?" he asked, and Clint thought he heard a desperate tinge to Coulson's voice. A wave of exhaustion rolled through Clint, and he didn't think he could stay awake on his own.
"Tell me a story?" he whispered, and Coulson gave him a quick, sad smile and shook his head.
"I'm no good at stories, Barton," he said gently, but Clint needed this.
"Just talk to me, sir," he pleaded, and Coulson nodded and began to tell him about a baseball game he'd gone to with his dad as a kid; Clint listened intently, carrying Coulson's voice in his ear into darkness, and he found a longing to hear that voice as much as he could.
When Clint was thirty-three, he carried a grin and a suitcase out the door of SHIELD headquarters and took the train and then the subway to a modest apartment building where Phil answered the door with an easy smile and led Clint into their room. He put away his clothes, his books, his shoes, a new shaving kit, a couple of baseball hats, including a replacement of the Cardinals one he'd lost years ago, his suit, a bedside clock he'd picked up in Salzburg, his wallet with the photo of him and Chris, and a new kind of confidence and the start to a new life.
He carried the weight of years on the run, years of loneliness broken up by a few kind people, and the memories of hiding, running, and just getting by. He set those memories down in the bedroom of his lover, and he sat down on the edge of the bed he'd come to feel safe in over the last two years. Phil wandered in, a sweater and jeans on, his glasses that Clint loved so much perched on his nose, and he sat down next to Clint and asked what he'd like to do now that this was now their place instead of just Phil's place.
Clint reached into his suitcase, brought out the battered, almost brittle comic book and handed it to Phil. "What's this?" Phil asked, confused, but turning the pages carefully.
Clint shrugged and said, "My past." Phil looked at him and smiled, stood, and carefully, reverently, placed it in the drawer of his own night stand, and Clint relaxed, settled in, and began again, carrying his love and trust in Phil like a shield against whatever else life could throw his way, and that's really all he needed.