thank you all for the great ideas and reviews! I have a few more in the works, but this one was based off the work of Arrow as a "Service Dog". I have finals this week, so i may be slowing down my posts a little due to forcing myself to study, but we shall see!
Book 4 –Role Model—
"Is he yours?"
Clint looked up from his iPad. He hit the off switch with a finger to prevent the newcomer from reading the graphic incident reports he was working on. "Hmm?"
A woman stood across from him. According to his initial fast assessment, he could tell she was the soccer mom type with at least two kids. There was a stroller parked a little ways from them with the seat adjusted for a larger child, perhaps three or four. The baseball glove beneath it fit a larger hand. She smiled in an unassuming way, apparently trying to smooth over the awkward introduction.
"Sorry for interrupting you. I was just wondering if the dog belonged to you. Bohdi's taken to trying to chase him around. I worried if that was all right."
Clint looked around to try and locate Arrow's streak of golden retriever tail. He noticed it, struck up in the air like a flag pole as he bowed his front half close to the dirt. A boy stood across from him, mimicking the wolf-in-dog's clothing's movements. After a moment of standoff, Arrow jumped up and ran like a mad dog. The boy chased after him laughing.
He leaned back against the park bench. "No, don't feel awkward. Arrow loves kids. He doesn't get to cut loose very often, that's why I bring him around here. He's gentle too."
She indicated the spot on the bench beside him. "May I?"
Setting his iPad to the side, Clint slid over to make room. He reassessed the woman quickly. Two kids, the other was most likely the pig tailed girl bouncing in the mulch under the jungle gym. No men were around, save for Clint, so she wasn't there with her significant other that he could tell. He casually glanced at her finger and almost sighed in relief when he saw the wedding ring affixed there. At least he wasn't fending off his space from an Avenger bunny.
"I don't mean to be forward or anything." She said.
Clint tried to hide his smile. "Hey, it's nothing, really."
"Oh not that . . . what I mean is—well—I guess this isn't going how I planned it."
He waited. Many people thought, and could argue, he had very little patience for anyone, but it wasn't necessarily the truth. He couldn't imagine what this woman wanted from him and why it took her this amount of nerve to come over and speak to him.
"I work on the Fifth Floor, Mr. McMillan's department?"
He turned toward her again and scanned her face this time. Come to think of it, he did recognize her. That made his mood relax, and his guard let up a little. "Oh! Oh, yeah of course. B—Beth? Beth Holloway?"
She smiled and nodded. "That's right. I'm sorry, I know we really never talk, and I shouldn't expect you to know who I am."
He shrugged. "No, that's all right. You'd be surprised how much I actually know about the people Tony works with."
"Oh that's good." She looked away from him to check on the state of her kids. The little girl was playing with a similar aged boy, digging peculiar chunks of wood from the mulch beneath them. Bohdi and Arrow continued to make their own race course.
While she checked in, Clint perused his mental files on Beth Holloway. There wasn't much there. She was a secretary and had a talent for typesetting, advertisement, and her background was a degree from Ohio University. She married a man whose first name began with L and Clint met him once at an employee brunch four months before. In all that background he couldn't uncover a good reason for her to seek him out. He'd become slightly more public lately since leaving his agency days behind, but that only increased his Avengers fanfare marginally. Unless someone needed him to rescue something or pose for a photo with a Hawkeye-clad child, most people tended to ignore him.
"Actually, I did have a request, if it's all right?" she worked up the nerve to ask.
Clint smiled noncommittally. "I will try to help. Is it about Mr. Stark?"
"Oh no, no, nothing like that. It's actually a little personal." She turned toward him, taking her eyes off the two children for a moment. To show he was listening attentively, he rotated on the bench and set the iPad on his lap. He propped his head on his palm while his elbow rested on the back of the bench.
"You see," she started, "I saw that report a few weeks ago Dr. Banner did on the news about the ear implant he helped design."
Clint tried to hide his surprise. Of all the conversations he considered they would have, this was not on the list. Banner and Stark both went public with the device they had surgically implanted in Clint's aural cavity. After a mission robbed him of his hearing, he struggled to cope with the substandard hearing aid technology available. Most of what he tried had the fault of being uncomfortable, grainy sounding quality, or was simply inappropriate for field work. When Bruce finished the design touches, it took some convincing to get Clint to go under the knife, but he was happy he had. The procedure, recovery, and result stunned him.
"I know Stark Industries was considering global production after some more clinical trials. My husband and I . . . well, we weren't sure what we wanted to do. Our son Bohdi wasn't born deaf, but he was very ill when the whole H1N1 epidemic hit and he lost almost all of his hearing."
The archer's mouth opened in an expressive "O". "I see," he said.
"I know it's sort of a personal thing to ask, but we've been considering a cochlear implant and we're just not sure if we should wait? I've been meaning to ask you but I know we really don't know each other, and Bohdi's been having some trouble with adjusting since - since he was ill. Like most kids, the Avengers are sort of his heroes. When the news came out, I thought maybe . . . I don't know, maybe you could talk to him?"
Clint looked past her to where the boy and Arrow wrestled over a stick. Arrow inevitably won and off he ran with the object lodged between his teeth and his tongue lolling out. He could see the hearing aids as the boy cruised by. He could hear them too, a thin shrill of a dying battery that most likely the child hadn't noticed yet. A smirked danced beneath his skin. There was a time he walked around Stark Tower for two days while the team was out on a mission. He hadn't noticed one of the batteries in his hearing aids needed resetting and it made that exact same sound. Office workers could be polite to a fault. No one told him until Natasha got back and pointed it out.
"Does he know sign language?" Clint asked.
"We've all been learning. It's only been a couple months."
"It's good to learn. For everyone to learn. Mr. Stark may not show it much, but he's a good guy. He actually helped me learn it better by going to the classes with me."
She seemed surprised.
"Bohdi?" He asked.
Her head bobbed.
Clint whistled and Arrow tromped over to him, heaving hard with the stick still in his mouth. Bohdi came up with him, equally breathless and rosy cheeked. His mother motioned him closer to adjust the whistling hearing aid.
"Hello, Bohdi. Your mom's been telling me a little bit about you." Clint said. "Having fun with Arrow?"
Bohdi grimaced as his mom fussed over him. "Yeah, he's a cool dog."
"He deserves a good wearing out. I think you're doing a pretty good job at that."
The boy was shy with strangers. It wasn't a bad thing, but it showed.
"Do you know who I am, Bohdi?" Clint asked.
The boy looked at him a little closer. Clint could see an inquisitive glare in his face. He asked if Bohdi wanted a hint, and the boy did. The Avenger motioned for him to come closer. He reached his hand up and fished blindly behind the boy's ear before calling his Asgardian bow to his hand. The effect was a fantastic magician's illusion where Clint grabbed the bow from thin air.
The boy's face lit up like a child on Christmas morning. "Hawkeye!" he exclaimed. "Wow, you're really Hawkeye!"
Clint laid his bow on his lap so the boy could touch it. "That's right."
"You have an awesome dog, Hawkeye."
He couldn't help agreeing. "Yeah he's pretty cool. You know he's not just a dog, right? He can do a whole lot of cool tricks for me. You wanna see?"
Bohdi nodded.
Arrow, knowing at once he was about to perform, relinquished his stick to Clint's side of the bench. He stood, tail wagging, as he waited. Clint made a curt motion with his hand, and Arrow sat. Another and Arrow stood. A third had him rolling over, and the fourth sent him spinning in a circle.
"Hey, I know that." Bohdi said.
"What is it?"
"Sign language."
Clint agreed. "That's right. I had to teach him. I did it because I'm deaf. Did you know that?"
The boy looked away from the dog to his hero. He decided standing was too much and instead opted to sit between Clint and his mother with the top limb of the Asgardian bow on his lap. His fingers traced the black carvings on it. "I didn't know that."
"Well, it's true. I was on a very dangerous mission, top secret, working with Captain America and Iron Man. Do you know them?"
The boy moved his head with starry eyed anticipation.
"I had to do something very dangerous, but it saved our lives. Afterwards, I found out that I was deaf and I wasn't going to get better. I went to a lot of doctors and no one could fix me. It was really hard to deal with that. And I was very mad about it too. You ever felt like that?"
The boy played with the string now. He was quiet, listening, and absorbing Clint's story.
"I had to learn to do a lot of things differently. It's hard to be an Avenger when you can't hear anything. Do you know how deaf you are?"
"Seventy percent." Bohdi said. He tried to strum the string but it wouldn't move. True Asgardian weaponry.
"That's all?" Clint huffed. He sat back and slouched his shoulders. "Aww that's nothing. I'm 80. I have a hard time even hearing fire engines."
"Me too!" Bohdi exclaimed.
"Someone tried to pick on me too." Clint said, thinking back to Agent Ward. "And I'm an Avenger. Do kids try and pick on you at school now?"
The boy nodded.
"Kids are mean huh?"
The gesture repeated.
"Well I got these—" Clint removed one of his aural interfaces and set it in his palm. It was smaller than a typical hearing aid, about the size of a button battery. "Iron Man and a really smart guy named Bruce Banner made it for me. It's not perfect, but it almost sounds like it should. And guess what they did to make it work?"
"What?"
"They put a knob in my brain."
The kid's face screwed up in contention.
"Yeah! They got this little thing in there that tells me what things sound like and it works. But you know what's better than this?"
"What?"
Clint indicated Arrow. "He's my best friend. I don't like sleeping in hearing aids, do you?"
"No."
"Me neither. But I couldn't hear my alarm clock. So Arrow wakes me up. Then I couldn't hear my bat phone . . . you know about the bat phone right? That's how the city calls us in when there's an emergency in the middle of the night. Well I couldn't hear it when I was sleeping. So Arrow picks up the phone for me. And when we're out on spy missions, and we have to be real quiet, he knows sign language so we can be stealthy."
The boy's eyes couldn't possibly get any bigger than they were already. He looked down at the waiting Arrow again. "Can I tell him something?"
Clint motioned. "Go ahead."
The boy attempted to sign the word run. He spelled it out. R-U-N. Arrow lifted his ear curiously of the new signal he hadn't seen before.
"Try this," Clint showed him. "I use both my hands, I don't spell the words because sometimes we have to be real fast. So I use just one signal instead of three." He held his hands out together and with Bohdi imitating him, Arrow ran off. From a distance, the dog waited for his recall. Clint then showed Bohdi how to call him back and watched as the boy did so. Arrow raced back over. Bohdi told him to sit, and Arrow sat.
"Do you have any pets?" Clint asked.
"I've got a dog, but he isn't as cool as Arrow." Bohdi said very distinctly.
Clint laughed. "You just gotta work on it. You know, Arrow took a long, long time to teach. I bet if you taught your dog sign language, to wake you up, and help you with the phone, and the doorbell, or even tell you when you're mom is calling for you, you would have a cooler dog than any kid at your school."
The boy looked up at his mom, a spark of hope behind his eyes. It was as if the thought had never occurred to them, and more than likely it hadn't. In the wake of all they had experience lately, getting a dog to assist in rehabilitation was probably the last idea on their list.
"Of course you can." Beth told him.
"It'll be hard work." Clint added. "You should work real hard for a while, then your mom can tell me how you're doing, and maybe I can come out here and you can show me. How's that sound?"
"Yeah!"
Clint tapped the Asgardian bow and it faded to nothing again, much to the boy's wonderment. "All right, it's a deal then. You work hard now, and don't slack off. You've got a big job to do. Why don't you run and play with Arrow for a while longer?"
Bohdi grabbed the stick and, with the wolf trailing after him, he ran back across the grass and mulch to play. The younger girl still remained beneath the jungle gym with her toddler playmate digging for China.
Beth leaned over and touched his arm. "Thank you." She whispered.
Clint replaced the transmitter in his ear and shrugged the comment off. He liked this part of life. Helping kids, saving people, it was these small moments that remind him what being a hero was all about.
"When I went deaf, I was really angry. I wanted a life back that I couldn't have. They say the hearing aids work great, and for some people they do, but in my line of work it just isn't good enough." He looked over at her. "Bohdi's a good kid but there's a lot of them that aren't. He's got to have support against the bullies. He needs to be OK with himself before you can just try and fix him. The problem isn't hearing again, its realizing he's never going to be normal no matter what a doctor tries to tell you. Once him, and the people around him understand that, then I would start looking into Stark's new device."
It wasn't an admonishment but rather the cold truth of the matter. Hearing the words from a man who had been in the same position at a much older age gave her a perspective she didn't realize she needed. Looking at a child, who the world broke, made it difficult not to want to simply fix him. The Avenger's point was made.
"You're right. I never thought of it like that." She said.
"Let him work with his dog." Clint replied. "Give him something to do, something that doesn't judge or care. I'll be around, so when he's ready to show off his skills, just come find me."
They sat together, watching the boy and dog romp around in the grass as Bohdi put his sign language to the test. Arrow was beginning to catch on to the different signal style, and soon the two were communicating on that level only the Dire Wolf mastered.
"I can't thank you enough for speaking to him." Beth said, "And to me. You really are a great guy, Mr. Hawkeye."
Clint smiled. He didn't often think of himself as a mister anything. He accepted the compliment though. He was glad he decided to leave Stark Tower and run Arrow around the park. Usually trouble liked to find him, but he had to admit, this was a much better alternative.
so a little detraction from the excitement, but i hope you enjoyed it:)
