A/N: Hey guys! This is the first part of my rewrite of Mirror, Mirror, a fic I've been working on since 2016. Whether you're a new reader or an old one, I hope you enjoy.
The Kindness of Strangers
"Babe, you can see that I'm danger
Glamorous, but I'm deranged, yeah
Time to give in to the kindness of strangers"
– Kinda Outta Luck / Lana Del Rey
Chapter One
"Is Bikini Inspector the default entry-level position?"
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL 6
SUBJECT: #482567 [0-8-4, 0-9-5]
DATE: 10-11-2007
REPORT: Subject has been located at 40.818930, -73.928370. Activating trigger protocol #42 that was approved on 08-26-2006.
New York City Precincts #40-52 contacted; Agent #64 dispatched to recruit or neutralize.
Submitted By: Phillip J. Coulson
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL 7
SUBJECT: #482567 [0-8-4, 0-9-5]
DATE: 08-26-2006
Requesting approval for a trigger protocol. Under the proposed protocol, the following will take place upon the location of subject #482567 without further authorization:
Agent Phillip J. Coulson will be instantly informed of subject's location
All local police precincts informed of subject's location and instructed to arrest
Agent #64 deployed to recruit or neutralize
If Agent #64 is unavailable, run through all agents Level 6 clearance and above
First available agent found deployed to recruit or neutralize
Reason for request: Subject has been located numerous times, but each time has escaped location before recruitment or neutralization protocol could be approved.
Submitted by: Agent Phillip J. Coulson
Approved by: Deputy Director Maria Hill
Clint hates police precincts.
He's been the guy with the badge for a long time, but there's still parts of him that don't believe it. There's parts of him that haven't caught up to Agent Clint Barton of SHIELD, that are still Hawkeye the Circus Thief, and those parts of him feel like he's playing pretend when he pulls out his SHIELD badge, when he tells a cop to get out of his way, that he's got it handled. Like he's playing a trick and could get caught any minute.
Those parts of him are easy to ignore, usually, but they get louder when he's inside a police precinct. The criminal in him still feels uneasy, like he's in the belly of the beast, get out while you still can, you idiot, RUN—
The criminal in him sounds a lot like his older brother, actually.
Clint ignores him, like always, and sets his badge on the counter. "I'm Agent Barton I'm here to speak to Leila Whittaker this is now a federal case" he recites flatly. It's actually an international one, technically, but "federal" invites fewer questions.
The woman behind the counter shoots him a nasty look—it's always an insult, he knows, having a case that seems perfectly ordinary snatched up by the higher ups (again: part of him cannot believe that he, somehow, now counts as The Higher Ups). He also knows, though, that if any of them knew what they were really dealing with, they'd be more than grateful to have the problem taken off their hands.
The woman stands up, says "Follow me," and heads off down a hallway. He does.
When Coulson first gave him the assignment, Clint thought it was below his pay grade, because on paper it looked like a simple recruitment operation—talk to the girl, tell her she can either join SHIELD or go to prison. Same deal they gave him.
That is, it looked like that on one paper. The next paper, a summary of the girl's file, made it feel, suddenly, like a matter of public safety, and secrecy, and very much within his paygrade. Above it, even.
Well. Here he is, anyway.
The woman unlocks interrogation room #4 for him. "There you go, agent," she says disdainfully.
"Much obliged, officer," he replies carelessly, and steps inside.
Leila Whittaker looks like she did in her file—tall, solid build, olive skin and dark, curly hair—except that she looks older now, which means she's been doing a good job of staying under the radar, and that she's added two hot pink streaks to her hair, one on each side of her face, that weren't there before.
And she doesn't look dangerous, except that she carries herself the way you'd expect a human weapon of mass destruction to do so—like she doesn't have a care in the world.
After Clint read her file, he asked Coulson if they knew what abilities the kid had picked up since they lost track of her.
"No idea," was all the bastard'd had to say. "Best of luck."
Whittaker looks up at him as the door falls shut behind him.
"Are you my lawyer?" she asks sarcastically. "Cause I didn't—"
Clint doesn't bother to think of a quip, just snaps the bracelets onto her wrists before she realizes what he's doing, and then sits down and hopes to God they work.
"Sorry, you'll need those for the arraignment," he says in his best lawyer voice, before he can help himself. "Oh, look at that! I wasn't gonna do a line, but it happened."
Whittaker doesn't look amused. He stops smiling. On the plus side, the bracelets seem to be working. That, or she's decided to hold back now. Either way, they apparently haven't had the opposite effect of making her more uncontrollably powerful, so he'll call it a win for now.
The girl studies the bracelets carefully, and spends a moment or two trying to pry one off. It doesn't give. Then she stares at her hands for a moment, like she's waiting for something to happen. Nothing does.
She sighs and looks up at him. "Well?" Her voice is higher-pitched than he would've expected, almost melodic.
Clint studies her, and then leans forward. "Tell me something, kid. You could've been out of here before anyone knew you were here to begin with. Is there a reason you decided to stick around? Or are you just holding a 2-7?"
Whittaker studies him. Her face is mostly blank, but he can tell from her posture, from the slight widening of her eyes, that she's distinctly uncomfortable with him in a way that she wasn't before. She didn't know he knew.
She's still trying to get the bracelets off. She's trying to make it look like she's just rubbing her wrists out of discomfort. She probably thinks she's being subtle, and maybe it would work on someone else, but Clint's tried that trick before himself, long before he'd ever heard of SHIELD. With handcuffs instead of scifi superpower-negating bracelets, but still.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she replies nonchalantly.
"Really." Clint tilts his head to the side, annoyed, and slides her a file. "Do you know what happened in Oregon in December of 2004?" he asks. "Because I do."
Whittaker blanches at this, but otherwise keeps her poker face in place and opens the file. She flips through it for a moment, and then looks up, and for some reason, when she does, she seems more comfortable than she was moments ago—not less. It gives him the niggling feeling that there's something missing, something she knows about Oregon that he doesn't, and he hopes it's not the kind of missing detail that's going to blow up the case. The kind of detail Natasha kept close to her chest when she joined, maybe. Personal. Not strategic.
Or maybe she's just bluffing, the same way he is when he asks "Feel like cooperating now?" as if he's won.
"That'd be easier to answer if I knew who I was being asked to cooperate with," Whittaker says, sounding annoyed. "For everything you seem to know about me, I don't know much about you."
Clint leans forward. "I'm Agent Clint Barton. I'm with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
"That sounds made up."
"Okay, I'm with SHIELD."
"That sounds even more made up."
"Yeah, well…it's not, okay? It's a thing."
"You sound defensive. Do you have a badge?"
He studies her, trying to decide if it's a trick, before deciding to take the risk. He pulls out his badge and slides it across the table to her, and she picks it up and flips it open. She studies it, running a manicured finger over the embossed logo, on the right, and then her eyes shift to the left.
"Agent Clint Barton. #64. Hawkeye." She glances up at him, and smiles for the first time—well, it's more of a smirk, but it's something. "You're named after a character from M*A*S*H?"
"I mean, technically, that Hawkeye was named after a character from—"
"Last of the Mohicans. I'm aware." She slides the badge back over to him. "At least it doesn't say bikini inspector."
"Nah, they promoted me from bikini inspector years ago."
She smiles a little bit more, the corners of her wine-red painted lips twitching up just a tiny bit more. Despite everything he knows about her—everything she's done, and everything she's capable of—he finds himself taking a shine to her, just a little.
"I still don't know what you want," she points out.
"Maybe if you weren't so busy interrogating me about my job, we'd have gotten there by now."
"I mean, we are in an interrogation room."
"Yeah, but—" he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, and then looks back at her. "I'm here to offer you a deal."
She stares at him, like, okay? Are you gonna elaborate? So he does.
"You can either spend the rest of your life in a specially designed cell that'll cut off your abilities—"
"That sounds illegal—"
"Or," he continues, annoyed at her interruption, "you can join SHIELD and help us take down people like you."
For some reason, her eyes light up.
"People like me," she repeats.
"People with abilities. People using those abilities to cause trouble."
Whittaker tilts her head, looking intrigued. "And why would you want a troublemaker like me working for you?"
"Takes one to beat one. Plus, it's not like we know of any fine upstanding citizens who can do what you do."
"So the offer is, I can use my skillset to help your shady-as-fuck X-Files department, or you'll take them away?"
"Take the x—oh. Your—oh. Yeah, that's the offer on the table."
She studies him for another moment, and then shrugs. "Okay."
"…okay?"
"Sure." She leans back in her chair. "Do you guys have health insurance?"
"Um. Yeah, we get health insurance." The ease with which she accepted his offer—she seems genuinely relaxed now, not the faux cavalier attitude she'd brought into the start of their conversation—has him fighting the impulse to shift uncomfortably in his chair, to ask her why. He brushes it off. "You don't end up using it a lot, cause they give you a mandatory check-up after every mission, and sometimes before, and you kinda have to figure that if SHIELD's best and brightest don't notice that you have like, an asshole tumor or whatever, then you probably don't have one—but, that's not my conversation to have. We'll have someone debrief you before you sign anything—at least, they did with me; I'm not sure what the protocol is for…" he gestures vaguely in her direction. She smirks.
"Well, thanks for the heads up, Hawkeye. Is bikini inspector the default entry-level position?"
He shoots her what he means to be a glare, but he thinks comes off as more of an exasperated half-smile, half-grimace. "Extraction's waiting three blocks away," he tells her. "I have a car outside. Try to act natural."
"I'll do my best."
Five Days
Four Months
Three Years
And Sixteen Hours Later
"So. Why do you want to join SHIELD?"
Agent Coulson's office is cold, and dim, and windowless, and looks nothing like an office. If anything, it feels more like an interrogation room, and maybe that's what this is. Leila's never had a real job interview before, but her understanding of what they're like doesn't line up with this.
She taps her fingers on the table. The obvious answer is that they threatened to lock her up if she didn't, but she feels like she'll get further if she doesn't seem like she's being held against her will. And of course, saying that she's here for the greater good, because she wants to keep people safe, is not an option, unless she wants to seem blatantly transparent. It's borderline ass-kissing, really.
Which, unfortunately, leaves option number three: the truth. Or part of it, anyway.
She sighs. "Before SHIELD…contacted me—" she pauses reflexively, waiting for him to correct her on how she actually joined SHIELD; he doesn't.
"…I was having trouble finding other people like me. People with powers."
"Right. We've been calling them 'gifteds,' by the way."
Leila knows this—it was touched on at the academy—but she takes the opportunity to air her grievances with it anyway. "Gifteds?" she asks, drawing out the last letter. "Like plural? Like it's a noun?"
"Yes. Great grammatical skills."
"Who decided that?" Leila continues. "Did any 'gifteds' get a vote in choosing the name? Because if not, that seems kind of unfair. Hey, what about calling us mu—"
"I feel like we're getting off topic here."
"Right." Leila relaxes again, slouching against the back of her chair. "The point is, my power doesn't work without other people's powers, and it's not like there's like, a facebook for 'gifteds' or whatever. So when Barton told me I'd get to help find and catch people with powers…I thought this seemed like a good opportunity."
"Hm. And why do you want to find more gifteds?"
"To explore new abilities." It's not a lie, technically.
"Mhm. And why do you want to explore new abilities?"
"To expand my horizons." It is a lie, and she says it easily. "I have a zest for life. Have you ever gone skydiving?"
"Can't say I have." It's unsettling how unflappable he is. He has to realize she's fucking with him, but he doesn't seem bothered by it at all. "And to clarify, the fact that Agent Barton threatened to lock you up without the use of your powers had nothing to do with it?"
"I'm actually not convinced you guys can do that—technologically, or legally." The bracelets had seemed intimidating in that interrogation room, but she's since come to understand that they're not as infallible as Barton had led her to believe. Point-One SHIELD, she supposes.
"SHIELD is an international organization, we aren't bound by U.S. regulation."
"Then how come like 90% of you are American?"
"One of our founders was English."
"And another one was Russian. I know. I did go to spy school, you will recall. And almost everyone I met there was American."
"Are you sure?" Coulson replies. "Maybe some of them are just good at pretending."
"Why would they want to pretend?"
Coulson smiles. "You're the field agent. You tell me." And with that, he slides a badge across the table. "Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Whittaker."