Ode to Mortality: The Reality of Death
He'd never seen death until his brother...well. The first time he really learned the value of a life-the cost of one, the weight that it could replace-was when he was working for S.H.I.E.L.D. He'd been working for them for the better part of six months before he got one of the special assignments that demanded a perfect success rate. It also demanded a dead body.
He'd seen people go down in firefights. He was sure that he'd killed a man or two when they were firing at him or one of his, but he'd never set out with the intention of ending a life before. It sat wrong in the pit of his stomach. The idea that he was going to go kill someone, not stop them, but end them. He'd seen the threats. He'd seen the numbers. He'd seen the photographs.
It was the photographs.
Not the shock of them, not really. He knew humans were evil. He'd seen it. He'd felt it, but he hadn't ever really considered that one death could put an end to so much terror for so many people.
The helicopter dropped him thirty miles from the compound, if you could call it a compound, and it would pick him-and whoever he managed to take with him-back up those thirty miles away. In the thick of the jungle, he'd learned what he was. He was a killer.
A killer that had a direction, and as he lead some fifty young boys and girls-the oldest seventeen with a belly distended in forced pregnancy-back through the undergrowth and darkness, he was more than happy to hold the title. None of them spoke English, and he only had enough of the local dialect to tell them to follow and be quiet.
It said something for how badly they wanted to leave that they did as instructed. It said more that they followed commands without question. Both made his stomach revolt as three helicopters descended into the clearing, loading up before disappearing once more into the night. One more was on the way, and Clint stood there with two little boys and a young girl.
A man had died. Clint had killed him. His body was left to decompose in the heat of the compound, only ten feet away from the mass graves of countless of young faces. Ever time Clint looked into the darkness around them, he saw those faces. Every time he blinked, he saw the other. So he kept his eyes open, trying his best to study the three kids, alive and chattering quietly to each other, that stood around him in the knee high grass.
As the last helicopter landed nearly three hours later, he startled at the hands against his hip. The little girl, her face open and hopeful, clung to his thigh, arms wrapped around it so that he had to shift his stance further apart. He laid a hand atop her dark head of hair and smiled. The sun shined out of her smiles, chasing away the dead children and the arrow protruding from a monster's eye.
He never saw any of those children again. It was S.O.P. He had done his job. He had to move forward, but he made sure that Fury put them somewhere safe, back with their families, if they had them left.
Sometimes, when he got another mission, another must-kill, he pictured that little girl's face; it was enough to chase away most doubts. The rest of the time, he forced himself to remember the graves and those little bodies, tortured and twisted but finally free in one way if not another. The only time that hadn't worked was with Natasha, years later.
She'd not proven him wrong though, so he figured that if those faces weren't enough to chase away the lingering sickness in his stomach, then he must have made the right call. He hadn't made a similar one since, and while he sometimes didn't sleep well at night, he could look in the mirror.
At least he could, until Loki. He'd put an end to people like himself, people that were killers but with purpose, people who might have saved fifty kidnapped children from a guerrilla compound in the middle of a jungle.
After, every time he looked into the mirror, he imagined himself laying beside a grave. It was massive, holding all of the bodies of those that might have been saved by the lives he'd taken. They were all dead, still and silent, and he could only see them out of one eye. The other was gone, replaced by an arrowhead that had sprouted through from the back of his skull and erupted through. He knew that scene, knew it well.
The first few mornings, he vomited until he shook and Natasha had to help him stand. He couldn't stay on S.H.I.E.L.D. grounds, and so he'd taken up Stark's offer of a place to stay until he was back on his feet. A few months later, he'd been cleared by psych and sent on another mission. He'd pulled six scientists out of a terrorist base, and they thanked him and held his hands as he helped him. He didn't say a word as they waited for extraction.
That next evening, when he washed his face and lay down to sleep, he tossed and turned, and while he couldn't sleep through the night, he'd been able to meet his own eyes in the mirror without being sick. He supposed that was as good as things were going to get anymore. It was as good as he was going to get.
That night, in the darkness, he dreamt of a middle aged man who worked at a factory. He had a strong jaw and a broad chest from hard work. He went home at the end of the day, kissed his wife and helped three children with homework. He was happy, but as he brushed his teeth for bed, his eyes never flickered over the mirror. He slept soundly beside his beautiful wife, his hand on her growing abdomen.
On the television the next morning, that man watched news reels on CNN as they told of a child soldier camp in the middle of a jungle, about the atrocities that were committed upon those children until they followed orders, about how no one had come to free them for nearly thirty years until the compound had burned down in a hail of gunfire.
Clint woke up pouring sweat and shaking. He stumbled from the bed to the bathroom, flipped the light on and forced himself to stare at his own reflection despite the burn in his retinas. His breathing evened out. His skin stopped sweating and a cool chill took up on the back of his neck. He stared himself in the face, recognizing the man from his dream there in the mirror.
There was a cost to looking himself in the mirror. There was a cost to sleeping well at night.
He was willing to pay only one of them.