Well, this was it.
This was the mission that was going to kill him.
There was no way out - he'd tried everything. He was trapped here; they would eat him alive. He took a deep breath, but flinched when a harsh ringing sound filled the room. It silenced and he looked out at 15 pairs of eyes staring back at him.
Well, go down fighting.
"Hi guys, my name is-" He glanced at the ID badge Coulson had printed for him. "Mr. Reid. I'm filling in for your regular teacher, just for today."
All 30 eyes stared back, skeptically.
"They can sense fear," Coulson had informed him, back in the van. "Go in with confidence and you'll be fine."
Clint pulled at the collar of his polo shirt. At least they hadn't made him wear a tie - or a fucking sweater vest - but he still didn't feel like himself. Clint had pretended to be a lot of things while undercover, but a miniature-human wrangler was well out of his range of experience. Why couldn't Coulson have assigned him serial killer duty, or drug cartel infiltration?
One of the tiny arms shot into the air. He pointed at it.
"I have to pee."
He was off to a fantastic fucking start.
Their regular teacher had left a note on the desk listing the day's activities. If he could just get through them, he could run out of here and hopefully never be around a five-year-old again. He hadn't even gone to kindergarten himself - how was he supposed to teach it?
1) Art Project - see notes
Clint rifled through the pages on the desk until he found the handout for the art project. "Okay, Tater Tots!" He clapped his hands together. "Sit yourselves down, we have an art project to do."
There was a brief scuffle as two kids vied for the same primo real estate at the head of the art table. Clint dumped out a basket of supplies and read the handout. "Okay. The theme is 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Have at it."
He hovered uncomfortably by the table, watching as the tiny mobsters descended on the art supplies like a swarm of piranhas with a dead cow. He felt like he should probably do something. What did teachers do? They guided, or something. Engaged. Okay, he could engage. He practiced a few encouraging things in his head.
A slight girl with light brown hair was bent studiously over her paper. Clint scanned his class list - Emily. He crouched down next to her. Her paper was covered with pipe cleaners bent in squiggle shapes, a pink mass drawn in marker and a large orange swirl in one corner.
"So, Emily, what do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked, aiming for "Engaging Teacher Voice" and probably hitting more of a "Terrified and Uncomfortable Adult Trying to Make Small Talk with The Host's Kid at a Party Voice."
"A psy-cho-lo-gist," she answered proudly, sounding out each syllable. Clint opened his mouth to reply but she went on. "Or a lion. Whichever pays better."
Clint stared into her serious, little face. "Good plan."
Pandamonium suddenly broke out at the other end of the table and Clint leapt to his feet, his Hawkeye reflexes whipping him around to the scuffle in seconds.
Two boys were locked in mortal combat, screeching at each other at a pitch that was almost into the dogs only zone. He grabbed each one by the scruff of his neck and pulled them apart.
"Sit."
They sat.
"What happened?"
Both kids immediately started screeching again. Clint held up a hand and they fell silent. Guess watching Coulson with the junior agents had actually taught him a thing or two. He pointed at kid #1. Alex.
"He attacked me," Alex whined.
"He took the crayon I wanted to use!" Simon wailed back.
"You cut my hair!" Alex screeched.
Clint's stomach dropped out. Uh oh. Sure enough, there was a small puddle of dark brown curls on the table next to where they'd been fighting.
"He took the crayons," Simon explained again, as if a bit off the top was the traditional retaliation for such an offence.
Clint stepped back and inspected Alex. There was a section over one ear that was noticeably shorter. It actually looked pretty good in a weird, hipster kid kind of way.
He eyed up the kid who had gone rogue with his scissors. "No more scissors for you, champ." He held out his hand and Simon handed them over, head hanging. "So what do you have on your paper?"
"I don't know." The kid pouted.
"Well, you make a pretty good hairdresser. Put that. And next time someone pis- annoys you. Try using words instead of violence." There, that was an adulty thing to say, right? He felt an intense desire to tack, "do as I say, not as I do," on to the end, but he was pretty hopeful he could get through one school day without inadvertently advocating violence.
The kid brightened up at the suggestion and started applying glue to his paper with vigour. The shorn sheep in the next chair was enjoying the cooing attention of the two girls next to him so Clint figured he'd gotten out of it okay. Maybe he could rustle up some sort of hat so his parents wouldn't notice until well after Clint had made his escape.
He sighed and scrubbed his hand through his own hair. He was exhausted already and it was - he checked the wall clock - 9:21. Geez, this day was already longer than that time he'd been tortured for 52 hours straight in a half-exploded bunker in...actually he couldn't remember where he'd been. All he could remember was electricity, a lot of screaming (probably him), a lot of swearing (also him), seeing two shiny, perfect, black shoes suddenly appear in the dirt in front of him (Coulson), more screaming (his kidnappers), and then an altogether different kind of screaming later that night when Coulson needed to prove to himself that Clint was okay (him again).
Good times.
But yeah, right now he'd rather have electrodes shoved up his nose instead of paste, but apparently, all the missions with decent kinds of torture had been taken and he was left with this. Sometimes he wished he'd just held a press conference and said "I am Hawkeye" a la Tony so they couldn't send him on these undercover missions anymore. Clint sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He glanced over at the clock again.
9:24.
Fucking wonderful.
"Mr. Reid?" a small voice asked, from somewhere down near his ankle. It took a few beats for him to remember that was him.
He crouched down. "Yes?"
"I'm done," the boy whispered, handing him a sheet of art paper.
Clint turned it around, trying to figure out which way was up. "So what do you want to be when you grow up?"
"The Avengers." His voice was so quiet now, Clint had to strain to hear it. He looked down at the page and saw there were six distinct figures carved out in colourful marker. The Hulk was obvious - a big ball of green grr. Iron Man was a red streak in the sky with what looked like very angry eyebrows. Cap's shield was the most accurate part of the drawing, a careful star picked out in the middle in what appeared to be still-damp glue. The abstract shape with a gigantic grey square and yellow edges must be Thor.
He and Natasha were pretty well indistinguishable figures in black (which was fair), though he thought there might be a bow in the hand of the one in the top right corner. Or it might be a sandwich. Either way, it was probably him.
"Which Avenger do you want to be?" he asked, his voice lowering to match the boy's without meaning to.
"All of them."
Clint chuckled. "Fair enough, no one in particular?"
The boy scuffed his shoe along the floor. "Maybe Black Widow?"
Clint shot him a brilliant smile. "She's my favourite too."
"Or Hawkeye."
Clint's heart crawled up in the direction of his throat. "Oh? Uh. Yeah, he's cool. Why do you want to be Hawkeye?" He didn't even know kids knew his codename, let alone thought he was worth being.
"Cause he can fly," the boy replied, awestruck.
"Oh." Clint's brow furrowed, not sure if he should correct him. He thought about the news footage from the battle - the only thing this kid could have seen where he would make an appearance. Most of the time he was jumping off of things and hoping to be caught. That's all flying was, right? Falling with style? And damn did Clint have style. "Good choice. I love your drawing. I'll put it in for your assignment, but we still have time, if you want to draw more."
The boy scuttled off, back to his seat and Clint stood looking at the picture for a long time, eventually sneaking a slightly blurry shot of it with his phone and texting it to Phil.
Clint flipped through the results of the project while the kids piled their crayons and construction paper back in the baskets and tucked them away. Simon "The Hairdresser" Hillson had submitted a sheet that was just a handful of Alex's hair, pasted to the page. Clint recoiled, holding it uncomfortably between two fingers. Ew. Someone should be keeping an eye on that little weirdo.
The horde scampered back to their desks, awaiting further orders, and Clint pawed through his stack of papers, trying to find his list of instructions.
"It's Wednesday." A dark-haired boy at the front pointed out, a silent well? hanging off the end of his statement.
"Yes?" Clint tried, finding the class list, but not the instructions.
"We have to clean Custard's cage, Mr. Reid." The boy - Spencer - pointed across the room to the large cage in the corner, dripping with duh .
Clint hadn't really paid much attention to the cage before, it had been still and silent the whole time he'd been here so he'd assumed it was empty, but apparently not. He glanced at the other kids and several were nodding their heads sagely. Okay, class pet, he could handle that.
"Custard, huh?"
Margo raised her hand, but then just started talking without waiting to be called on. "It's my turn to feed her and Rosey's turn to hold her."
"Uh, okay, sounds good. Why don't you show me how great you guys are at cleaning, um, Custard's cage?"
The students jumped eagerly to their feet, twittering with excitement. Clint had the impression this was usually a more controlled endeavor, but he knew exactly nothing about pet care, and it was clear they had at least some concept of what needed to be done, so what else could he do?
Margo opened the cage door while several students pulled out towels and cleaning supplies. Rosey reached in, dug around in a hammock, and extracted...a tube. A furry tube. With feet.
"What is that?" Clint blurted out.
Rosey held the tube up and it blinked at Clint. "It's Custard!"
"She's a ferret," Olivia added.
A ferret. Huh. Clint had never seen a ferret before. Custard yawned. Seemed nice enough. If a bit...tubey.
Rosey - with Custard dangling serenely from her arms - and a few of the other kids started pulling out toys and forming a circle on the floor. Olivia and Spencer led the Cleaning Crew, which seemed to have a great deal to do with towels and spray bottles.
Clint turned his back for one minute - it seriously couldn't have been any longer than that - and all hell broke loose. Spencer yelped as one of the shelves of the cage tipped out of place and at the same time delighted squawking broke out in Custard's play circle.
Clint spun and caught the shelf before it sprang loose from the cage entirely. By the time he got it re-secured, the squawking had devolved into full on squealing. He picked his way through the piles of towels to see Custard bounding along the floor in ecstasy, a piece of paper clutched in her jaws.
It was Clint's instructions.
He darted after her, but she clearly thought this was a wonderful new addition to the game. She bounced around, holding the paper just out of reach and making a ridiculous kind of chittering noise. The kids howled with laughter as Clint and the troublemaking weasel danced around the classroom.
He almost got his hands on the paper, but Custard decided that under the supply cabinet was the best spot to stage her defensive action. She slid under the cabinet, going almost as flat as the paper she held, then turned and stared at Clint with a blank expression that he interpreted as "Come at me, bro."
Clint took several calming breaths. The tube clearly couldn't be reasoned with and was too...darty to be caught in the open. He was going to have to whip out a bit of the old superhero showmanship and hope the kids weren't too shocked. Steve might have super-strength, but Clint was no noodle in comparison. Firing a bow was hard work, jumping off buildings doubly so.
He gripped the bottom edge of the cabinet. The kids fell silent. In one smooth motion, Clint lifted the entire cabinet up onto its edge, grabbed the squirming ferret, and slid the paper out with his foot, pinning it to the floor in case Custard escaped his grasp and tried to reclaim her prize.
As one, the entire class gasped a low, "woooowwwwww," as Cint replaced the cabinet on the floor.
It turned out Custard wasn't interested in escaping, but she was suddenly deeply invested in his ear. She scrabbled up his arm, digging her little claws in, then perched on his shoulder, licking her way a little too intently up his earlobe.
Clint reached up and patted her awkwardly. "Watch it," he whispered. "Keep that up and there's a secret agent who will be very jealous." He called out to Spencer and Olivia, "How's that cage coming?" and they snapped to attention.
It didn't take much longer to get her home clean and Clint kept a firm grip on Custard until her cage was proclaimed complete. Clint was pretty sure there were about three hundred more towels in there than there had been before, but he just wanted her safely stowed behind bars again so he didn't mention it. He breathed a sigh of relief when the door clicked shut.
The kids scurried back to their seats.
Sweating and abraded, Clint collapsed in the teacher's chair, the slightly chewed list clutched in his hands like a battle trophy. He looked down at it.
2) The kids will want to clean Custard's cage - we usually do it on Wednesdays - but she can be a bit of a handful so you can leave it. Let them know we'll do her on Thursday instead. Quiet reading time will be a much better activity.
Fantastic.
Thankfully the next item on the list was snack time.
The food seemed to somewhat pacify the little hooligans and once they were all settled at their tables and munching away, the tension ratcheted down. Clint pulled up a chair to the end of one of the long tables and spun it around so he could lean over the back and make sure no one was building nuclear weapons with their celery.
He took the time to practice going around the table, saying their names in his head.
"Mr. Reid, are you married?" Marceline asked, shaking her blond hair out of her face.
"Uh, no." He thought about Phil and smiled. "Not yet."
"Is it 'cause no one wants to marry you?" Oliver asked seriously.
"Of course not," Clint shot back before realizing how preposterous it was to defend his dateability to a five-year-old.
"I'll marry you," Emily offered generously. "But after Mia, she gets to marry me first."
"Who's Mia?"
"My pet alligator." She turned those large, serious eyes on Clint and his brow furrowed. She was maybe a little frightening.
"Thanks, but I actually have someone I want to marry. I just haven't asked him yet."
"Well, do it quick," the girl at the end of the table - Charlie - advised. "You gotta lock that down, you know."
"Um." Where did kids pick up this stuff? His phone picked that moment to start ringing. "I'll be one sec, kidlets. Don't eat each other."
He stood and stepped a little away from the table, keeping one eye on the rabble. "Yes?"
"How's the mission?" It was Phil. Clint smiled, turning his gaze out the window. He knew Phil wasn't in the van, he'd left to run the other side of the op - tracking the actual teacher - but he liked to imagine him there, speaking into his ear like usual.
"Great. If you like finding glitter in places you didn't know you had and getting relationship advice from five-year-olds with pet alligators."
Phil chuckled. "Was it good advice?"
"Well, I told them we weren't married and they said I should 'lock that down.' What kind of TV do these parents let their kids watch?"
"Lock me down? If that's you asking me to marry you, I'm going to be pretty irritated. Don't you want to take me back to where we first kissed and make it all romantic?" Phil drawled.
"I'm pretty sure that bunker doesn't even exist anymore, Sir. Also, we might need plastic surgery to get in the country in the first place." He felt Phil's smile over the line. "Also, no, I'm not asking you to marry me. I will make it romantic. I'm just saying, don't marry anyone else in the meantime, until I get my shit together and ask you properly."
A chorus of, "Mr. Reid just said 'shit,' "Who said 'shit?'" "You're not supposed to say 'shit,'" "My mommy says 'shit' all the time," "My mommy just says 'fuckit,'" erupted from the table behind him.
"Ok," Phil replied, either ignoring or not able to hear the cacophony of swear words bouncing around the room. "I have a few weddings to other people I suppose I'll have to cancel, but I guess I can wait for you."
"Thank you, Sir." A raisin bounced off the far wall. "I've gotta go."
"See you tonight, good luck. Remember, they can smell weakness."
"Oh, it's too late for that, they've already scented me. I'm a goner." Clint hung up and bent over to pick up the raisin, eyeing up the crowd. They all stared back innocently. "Do you really think that's supposed to impress me? You got, like what? Ten feet? I can hit the blackboard, from Custard's cage, with my eyes closed."
"No, you can't!" Olivia's mouth dropped open in shocked delight.
Okay, well that was a proper challenge if he'd ever heard one. He clapped his hands together. "Alrighty, line up at the end of the table, one raisin each - no shoving. Alex, you're our flagman - don't give me that look, you've already had your go." Clint pointed at the wall where the first raisin had ricocheted. "Don't think I didn't know that was you." Alex shrugged in defeat and marched to the other end of the table. "Alright, longest flick wins, let's go. Olivia, you're up."
Olivia took her sweet time getting lined up, then fired away. Her raisin flew over the table and landed a few feet past the table. Clint waved his hand and Alex shuffled over to mark it as the current winner.
"Next!"
Each student took his or her turn with a raisin - some sailed far, most fell short of impressive. Alex danced around each time a new record was set, taking his time lining himself up with it perfectly, in case it was disturbed by the next shot.
Finally, all the kids had their turn. Alex stood about 6 feet short of the blackboard, marking Emily as the current record holder.
All eyes turned to Clint.
He sauntered over to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk - 30 eyes widened. He quickly sketched out a target on the centre of the board, four rings and a quarter sized dot in the middle. He shooed the kids into place until they lined up along the table, or gathered around Alex watching. Thank god the school had a no phones policy because the last thing Clint needed was a video of this on youtube. Phil would never let him live that down.
Clint lined up his shot carefully, sniper's eyes calculating angles, air quality, and raisin aerodynamics. Before he fired, he slipped his gaze to the side to make sure the kids were watching and Mr. "Cause He Can Fly" was eyeing him with distressing scrutiny. Clint coughed, trying not to look to superhero-y. Closed his eyes. Then he flicked.
Bullseye.
4) A short lesson on letters. We're focusing on L-P in the alphabet. Draw the letters on the board (I like to draw an animal to go with each one) discuss how it's formed, then have the kids copy it out.
Okay, so, actual learning. Clint could do this - how hard could it be? English wasn't his best subject - being raised in a circus doesn't give you a lot of time for letter animals - but he could do it now. Plus they were five, how judgey could they be?
The answer turned out to be: very judgey, indeed.
"That is not a monkey," Simon proclaimed.
Clint stepped back and inspected it. It had...monkey-ish features.
"Sure it is." Alex came to his defence. "It has a monkey tail."
"Okay," Olivia, conceded, doubt colouring her voice. "But why does it have cat ears?"
Were those cat ears? Huh. What did monkey ears look like? How could you be sure you knew exactly what an animal looked like, for years, and then not be able to remember what kind of ears it had? What kind of bizarre human brain process was that?
In a normal mission, Clint would be able to ask his handler to describe monkey ears to him. But, of course, in a normal mission, Clint wouldn't be drawing a fucking cat-eared monkey in the first place.
"Maybe it's a special kind of monkey," Spencer offered generously.
"I have a book about monkeys," Emily supplied. Clint shot her a hopeful look. "They don't look like that."
Okay, so fuck pictionary. This had gone wildly off the rails and they still had three letters left to do. Clint wasn't even sure he could think of an animal that started with "N". There must be hundreds, but the only thing that kept popping into his head was "anaconda" and that didn't even start with "N".
"Okay! No more animals, we're just doing letters now." He threw his hands up in defeat, then started scratching out his clearest "N" while chalk dust coated the inside of his throat unpleasantly.
The whining started immediately. "Mrs. Prentiss alwaysssss does animals," Rosey sobbed. "I can't learn letters without animals!"
This was apparently the end of the world.
The whimpering rapidly crescendoed into a complete class meltdown. Cries of, "There have to be animals," "How will I know the letter without an animal?!" and, " Why do we even have to do letters at all?" filled the room.
Clint gritted his teeth and sucked in a deep breath. "We're doing letters. No animals. We just have two more to get through. Okay?"
Oliver burst into tears and Clint crushed the chalk in his fist.
"But why!"
"Because I said so!" he shouted, then smacked his hand over his mouth. Oh god, he was an adult. When the fuck had that happened? The kids abruptly fell silent and Clint collapsed into his chair, tipping his forehead down onto his desk and taking a steadying breath.
All was still and silent for a full minute.
He felt more than heard the hand shooting up into the air.
"Yes?" he whimpered.
"Mr. Reid?" The voice was quiet, but desperate. "I have to pee."