AN:/ Yeah, I kind of belaboured the point last chapter, and I'm not 100% sure what's going on in this one. Confession: I've never written a proper multichaptered fic before. It's harder than it looks! I'm glad people are enjoying it anyway =)


Sometimes, a memory will swell in Clint's mind, surfacing with a near-violent clarity, consuming the world for a moment, and he will reject it equally as strongly. Those memories always contain some action or conversation that inspires only disgust for his younger, stupider self.

But at the point when that happens, all he can do is repeat one sentence in his head in an automatic attempt to blot out the invasion (like he couldn't before):

They are nothing alike.

And he's not as sure as he wants to be that that is not true.

Clint woke in the middle of the night, the blue light on the computer oddly uncomfortable in the vanishing haze of his dream. Heaving himself out of bed was harder than it should have been, but he wasn't as worried about the heaviness of his limbs and the peculiar disconnect between his mind and his body as he had been the first time this had happened. He had a coping mechanism and everything.

Shaking his feet and hands to get rid of the last lingering effects of the unremembered dream, he quietly slipped out into the main area.

"Where, precisely, are you going?"

Clint froze in place, habit and old reflexes keeping him still as he assessed the threat. When Loki stood from the chair he'd claimed earlier in the evening, he was able to relax – Loki hadn't done anything bad, not yet.

"Glass of water," he answered in a hushed voice, mindful of the others even though they'd all had to get used to the clanking of the helicarrier and the sound of voices through the plasterboard walls.

"Your dream?"

"Yeah," he nodded, and went to go into the kitchen.

"I heard you speaking in your sleep to someone called Barney," Loki told him as he turned his back, and Clint winced.

"It doesn't matter," he said, and rolled his eyes in resignation when Loki followed him into the kitchen.

"I'll decide that. You were asking him not to leave you – why?" he asked. Clint had to give him some credit, though, because he at least made an attempt at sounding concerned. A piss-poor attempt, maybe, but an attempt nonetheless.

"None of your business."

A firm "Barton", accompanied by a hand on his shoulder that Clint could have shrugged off but had learned not to at the hands of plenty of other authority figures, was enough to stop him. He looked up at Loki.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. I'm sitting down, though."

Releasing him, Loki made an expansive gesture that Clint assumed meant 'go right ahead' and took his water over to where they'd put the chairs. He did, however, make sure to perch himself on the very edge of the chair furthest from Loki's before he started to tell him what he wanted to know.

"Barney - he's my older brother. He's not a very good brother, I guess, but he's my brother and... well, he's the only person I've got left. My parents are gone, they died in a car crash, and since then it's just been us against the world. But I've heard him talking about leaving the circus and I'm not sure he's going to take me with him this time. Not that I blame him, and sometimes I wish he'd just go and stop being so... Barney... but," he paused, fidgeting and shifting as he tried to find the words, "I really don't want him to be gone too."

Another adult in the same situation might have tried to hug him, or tell him that was normal, or make those stupid sympathetic noises that had always meant 'glad I'm not you' to Clint. Loki was not a normal adult.

"I have a man who claims me as brother," the man admitted. "I hate him. I hate him."

Clint's hand drifted towards his panic button – not that he quite believed it would work – as Loki's face twisted into a sneer and the neutral facade was peeling away like old paint.

"But," he continued, reigning himself in as he noticed this, "though I will never again accept him as such, and I will make war upon him and his until one or the other of us is dead, there will be a part of me that will bleed for my brother when he finally perishes. I know what it is to have a complex relationship with those who call themselves family."

"Right," Clint said. He wasn't exactly sure if that helped or not. "So... is he your brother or isn't he? It wasn't very clear from what you said."

"I was not born to his parents," Loki answered, and Clint could see the anger shifting in his expression. It was easy – he'd seen something similar on Barney's once upon a time. "And I did not know for many years. They only deigned to tell me when I had found out something was strange myself, and then rejected all I did for them before stealing from me everything that was rightfully mine. He is not my brother, by blood or by fostering."

"I see," was all Clint could think of to say.

"And you have finished your water," Loki reminded him, the calm mask firmly back in place in a matter of a moment. Clint nodded mutely, and put his glass in the sink.

"Barton," Loki said as he made his way back to his room. "If he stays, then he is your brother and has done his duty. If he does not, then he is still your brother but he has done a kindness to you by freeing you from his selfishness. No matter his decision, you will rise under your own power, not his."

"Pretty crappy motivational speech," Clint grinned, a little too widely. "Stick to babysitting."

Loki just raised an eyebrow, apparently taking it as the joke it was intended to be rather than an insult, and responded with a straightforward: "Goodnight."