He likes women. He liked women from the first awkward, fumbling night when a young lady crept into his room after the circus and he became a man. Or something like that, certainly an embarrassing sweetness that made him giddier and more eager than ever to flash a few smiles while on the floor of the circus. He likes women like he likes archery; they're smooth like the release of the arrow, sharp eyes, bullseye when they smile. So he's a sap, but at least he's an honest man—maybe that was the problem. He broke away, wild and somehow still hopeful even after his master was a crook and his brother had forsaken him, still so confident. You'd think that would be a benefit. Not really.
You can't be soft and optimistic and proud and try to fight crime too, it doesn't work. He thought it would but the dirty streets and the violence—they all crawled inside of his head and ate him from the inside out. He had no family to go home to, the circus a loveless disease, no wealth to drown in, no women but the ones he found smoking under streetlamps. And though he tried to do well, he fumbled and found himself on the wrong side of prison bars instead. The police mistook him for a common crook and though he ran from that identity he couldn't stay that way for long; grit and nastiness penetrated his thoughts and for a while it became so much easier to play on that side of the line, taking money to do jobs that may or may not have fallen in his moral code. Who cared? Things slipped inside him and settled there silently. She woke them up.
Her name was Natasha. She was beautiful and sharp and so brilliant that when she pulled him close and sweetened his mind with suggestions he was gone. Bam, baby, gone. They fought and stole and killed a bit, her gorgeous smiles and his smirks smearing the city a little worse with every passing night. He wanted her every day because when she was around things were electric, things were better even as they got worse. She taught him to use technologically enhanced arrows (something he can't live without now) and he taught her a little bit about the gullibility of love-struck men. When they tried to break into Stark Tower and steal tech, she disappeared and he ran dry of that lifestyle. Clint had no choice but to forge a better path from his degradation (and heart-break).
And then there was the Avengers; authority, team work, and Stark (hey man, you're not still upset over that little fiasco, are you?). Fuck that shit. He hated the rules and the obligations; he hated himself shifting from young and hopeful to a full grown dark horse with a bad attitude who hits on everything with breasts. Damn, how proud his mom would be! Tony sneered about not working well with others, but they all knew that was a Clint thing. Isolated up hundreds of feet above railings or industrial buildings or political officials' houses. Skulking out in the dark for men he used to be; Clint Barton, the one-shot-wonder pouting alone with his bow and arrows.
And Natasha came around, in between her rounds with the handsome heroes out on the west coast, they had something great Clint wanted to believe but it was all missions and sex and that awoke something dark again, the silent serpents in the back of his head. When he heard brother died Clint thought he'd rot away inside altogether, but then he met her and things shattered so completely there wasn't anything he could joke about with the guys at HQ.
They called the sultry blonde Mockingbird, but he preferred to call his Barbara, Bobbi.