Work Text:
Now
"If I could have your attention please."
Clint's polite shout, trying to make himself heard over the chatter of three dozen talking people, barely made an impact.
The half dozen men and women nearest him glanced his way and quietened, but the volume did not change significantly enough to get the attention of the rest of the group.
All the shout accomplished was to make Clint's throbbing head and right shoulder hurt worse.
Then
Clint's back, shoulders, arms, and head ached furiously, the pain not as much flaring in and out with his movement or breathing, as he was well accustomed, but instead feeling more like spikes driven through him, demanding his attention and making it hard for him to project his voice loudly enough to be heard.
Only a few people of the assorted men and women in front of him turned to acknowledge him.
One, a man who was at least a head taller and had 50 pounds on Clint, stocky and powerfully built, snorted, rolling his eyes and turning back towards his friend to continue his conversation.
Clint was angry enough and in enough pain, after enduring a brutal mission two days before and standing for punishment from Trick Shot yesterday, for this dismissal to set off his temper.
Clint stuck his index finger and thumb into his mouth and gave a shrill whistle that made his own ears ring, and got the attention of his "students" in the basketball -court sized outdoor clearing.
These students were a rangy bunch, Clint noticed.
The guy who had rolled his eyes seemed to be a leader of some kind, with many others jockeying around him and glancing at him. He was definitely the most confident, if not the biggest.
Most leaned towards looking wiry rather than powerful, but all had quick, fidgeting hands or sharp glances or muscles visible under clothing that gave Clint some small hope that he'd be able to carry out this mission, at least, without acquiring more punishment.
Clint had an idea how to go about accomplishing the tasks he’d been set, but there was the matter of dealing with the big guy first.
"You're here for the survival and marksmanship trials for Whiteout Interests, Incorporated-" Clint began.
As he'd hoped, the big guy interrupted, speaking even before Clint could finish his planned sentence.
"You the intern or something?" The big guy asked, glancing around pointedly as his friends laughed.
Clint sighed. "And you are…?" He asked.
"Kristov, but you can call me daddy, little dziecko." Kristov's voice was a shouted sneer, and the jeering voices of his friends filled the clearing like a flock of angry birds.
The voices died down as they realized that Clint did not look embarrassed or upset, but angry.
"You done showing off or you ready to settle this?" If Clint hadn't already been so beaten up, he would have had more room in his head to come up with something clever, a goad to draw not just Kristov in, but maybe even his friends too.
Instead, Clint's affect and voice were flat and level. He didn't even react to the familiar word, "kid", in Polish. He didn't give a shit if Kristov was speaking Klingon. Clint wasn't going to fail again.
Kristov peeled out of his leather jacket and handed it to a friend before approaching.
Clint spared a glance at the tattoos on the big man's arms, but wasn't shocked by the marks he recognized.
Whiteout was one of the biggest private military contractors on the planet, and most people who wanted to work for a PMC were either vets or criminals, or both.
Looked like Kristov had been special forces and in some gang. All the better for Clint's plans.
Clint left his own sweatshirt on -- he didn't want the attention his fucked up body would surely draw.
Instead, he beckoned Kristov towards him. "C'mon cwel, I don't have all day."
Clint didn't know the precise translation of the word, but he knew it was very insulting.
Sure enough, it was enough for Kristov, after a moment of stunned silence, to give a roar of anger and charge at him.
Clint instinctively launched forward as well, not wanting to be caught flat-footed against an opponent who was so much bigger than he was.
They met roughly in the middle, but Clint was more seriously injured than he’d thought.
His duck was not low enough, and he couldn’t keep his arm and shoulder in position to fully block the blow Kristov aimed at him, despite having identified the maneuver with plenty of time.
Clint took the glancing blow to the shoulder and rolled with the punch as it slid towards his face. Luckily, his injuries were limited to his upper body, so he was able to slide his foot between Kristov’s and trip the bigger man up.
Kristov went down, but Clint couldn’t twist away before the blond man grabbed the bottom hem of his shirt.
The ripping sound was strangely loud in Clint’s ears as the bottom half of his shirt tore away.
He twisted his leg free as Kristov grabbed at him to pull him down, and snapped out a kick to get him out of range.
Kristov blocked the kick, but stayed on the ground instead of fully rising to his feet. ”Kto cię zjebał, dziecko?” His voice was hoarse, and he spat blood on the ground as he spoke, but he made no more move to reach for or fight Clint.
Clint startled at the question, and the usage of the diminutive in this new context -- “Who fucked you up, kid?”
Then Clint sneered, and peeled the rest of the way out of his shirt. “Whiteout hired me to train you, and this is their punishment for failure.” He said, and repeated the sentiment in Polish, Russian, and Spanish for good measure.
The cold air smarted on the open weals on Clint’s back, but he wasn’t worried about the water the stinging pain brought to his eyes. Every man and woman had their eyes trained on his back, or on each other, exchanging glances that ranged from impressed to nauseated.
Kristov whistled, low and appreciative.
Clint glanced down at him, to see that the big man seemingly waited permission to be able to rise to his feet.
Feeling suddenly very uncomfortable, Clint tucked his hands onto his belt and nodded.
Kristov popped easily to his feet, and offered his hand to Clint.
Clint could not suppress a flinch, but if Kristov noticed, he showed no sign of it. Clint clasped his forearm, and the big man returned the gesture before returning to his place in the circle.
Clint cleared his throat, still uncomfortable, but began to explain what he was here to teach them.
Now
Clint smiled wryly at the memory. He hadn’t intended to gain the respect of the Whiteout fighters that way, but it had been effective.
He was older now, and wiser, he hoped.
“Wise compared to what?”
They had spent so much time around each other that Clint could practically hear Natasha’s wry comment in his ear at his thought.
He snorted and shook his head. He just hoped he was a wiser dumbass now than the young dumbass he had been.
Still, Clint hadn’t escaped nearly two years in Natasha’s company without picking up things from her. She had taught him the value in flying under the radar. Clint’s unassuming height and stature more than aided him in that respect.
Despite the fact that surely most of the SHIELD agents before him had heard something Hawkeye, and all knew that Hawkeye had brought in the infamous Black Widow, he knew that none would believe him if he stated outright who he was.
Younger-dumbass Clint would have been infuriated at this thought.
Now the dramatic irony just made Clint smile as he picked out the pair of agents who had a knot of admirers surrounding them.
He made his way through the crowd to them, a man and a woman. This group looked to be Level 3 and 4 agents based on the small bars and stars on their clothing. (Clint could no longer keep track of what Level he was supposed to be. He knew that Coulson was all but the same level as Fury these days, and that Natasha kept telling him that they could go to any meeting they wanted, but that was pretty much it.)
Clint’s own clothing was deceptively simple, and much the same as what he’d worn when he’d first joined SHIELD, four years ago. Dark long sleeve shirt, dark pants, boots, all emblazoned with the SHIELD logo. The idea of wearing a name badge with his last name or call sign, as each agent here seemed to do, had never once occurred to Clint -- what kind of assassin telegraphed his own identity to anyone who might want him dead?
“Trainer here yet?” Clint asked as he brushed through the group to get to his targets.
There were head shakes and murmured answers in the negative.
Clint stopped a smile from showing on his face, but it was a near thing as a couple people seemed to want to ask who he was, and seemingly shook off their own curiosity -- Clint was the same size or smaller than many of the people here, after all.
Clint reached the gleamingly blonde and beautiful man and woman, both in trim SHEILD uniforms, Level 4 bars shiny on their shoulders, name plates reading Viper for the woman and Jackal for the man.
Their companions barely spared Clint a glance, but to their credit, each Viper and Jackal seemed to sense something from Clint. Clint saw Viper notice the knife scars on his hands, and something in Clint’s face made Jackal hold up his hand to stop the conversation around them.
“You seem the most likely of the bunch,” Clint said, borrowing some of Bullseye’s sneering New Yorker accent as he rolled his eyes in insult to the rest of the three dozen men and women in the room. “Wanna quick bet while we’re sat here waiting like chained dogs?”
Jackal furrowed his eyebrows, but before he could communicate his suspicions to Viper, the woman was giving a laugh like a crystal chandelier.
“What kind of bet?” She asked, sliding towards Clint.
She had very blue eyes, Clint saw, and a knife scar in her eyebrow. She was also at least two inches taller than Clint was, and proud of the fact by the way she leaned into him.
Clint had spent most of the last couple years of his life getting his ass kicked by 5-foot-barely-anything Natasha Romanoff, so he put less in stock by size now than he ever had. He knew he was supposed to be impressed by her confidence and unapologetic physicality, but instead he raised his eyebrow up at her. “Accuracy and precision, obviously,” he drawled at her, letting some innuendo seep into the word as he smiled at her.
Another thing Clint had learned from Natasha was that there was no reason to be ashamed of himself when other people were flaunting about. If Viper’s pleased smile was anything to go by, he’d learned the lesson well.
She nodded. “What weapon shall you use?” She gestured towards the weapon rack that had been unlocked for his training session, and the path between them and it cleared at her gesture as if she parted the Red Sea.
Clint grinned at her and gave her a bow. “Lady’s choice.”
Viper laughed and strode forward to grab a handful of kunai from the case, glee showing readily on her features as she raised her eyebrows at Clint.
Clint had more difficulty smothering his smile this time, but he managed and copied her, grabbing five kunai and standing in the bay next to hers.
The target range was a paltry fifteen feet, and Clint jingled the kunai handles in his hands to stop himself from grinning outright. He could make these throws blindfolded with one hand tied behind his back. Hell, when he was at Carson’s, he had made these throws blindfolded, and half beaten and starved.
As Trick Shot had been fond of saying, anybody could be the second greatest marksman.
Something of his excitement must have shown after all, because Viper was looking at him with suspicion as she held her first knife.
Clint made his face as full of Iowan innocence as he could muster. “Hundred bucks?” He asked, completely at his ease, offering her his hand as if he didn’t care much one way or the other. His confidence won her over with a small little smile and a handshake.
Clint nodded again at her. “Lady’s first.”
To his surprise, Viper shook her head. “Throw one at a time, WKTL rules.”
At Clint’s blank look, she elaborated: “World Knife Throwing League.”
Clint had been too long a killer when he’d learned that archery was in the Olympics, but he supposed there was a sports league for everything now, and just nodded at this information.
Viper threw, and her knife point landed neatly in the red bullseye in the center of her target.
A few appreciative whistles and calls from her friends.
Clint nodded, and threw.
There was a “Oooh,” of mock disappointment at first, until the audience realized that Clint’s target had not been the center bullseye of his target, but one of the four small blue circles in the ‘one point’ outermost ring. One at top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. Clint had been aiming for the top left circle.
Viper flashed a grimace, then threw. Her second knife embedded in the top left blue circle.
Before he threw his second knife, Clint realized that he was already bored of this game -- it wasn’t very difficult to make throws this close with this much quiet around him. He was beginning to wish he’d taken his shirt off this time, too, and picked a fight with Jackal instead of trying to be all clever.
Clever really was more Natasha’s or Coulson’s game, after all.
Clint threw his remaining four knives, one in the bullseye, and one in each of the other circles, and for fun, he reached down and threw two of his boot knives, also kunai, to either side of his bullseye strike, one to the right, one to the left of his original strike, all three neatly still point-first in the red circle.
There was stunned silence on the range.
“Fault,” Viper’s voice was nearly a whisper, but it was clearly audible in the silence.
Clint had been expecting something like this, and shrugged, nodding at his target. “My target’s dead, eliminated. Yours just has an injured deltoid and is still very capable of shooting you dead.”
Viper’s lip curled, and without warning, she had a kunai in each hand and launched herself towards Clint.
Clint had a flash of inspiration and twisted just enough to let the kunai in her left hand slice through his shirt and slice him instead of cutting a chunk out of his side.
Clint dodged out of the way of her next strike and put his foot out, tripping her and sending her sprawling across the open ground that had been made for them by the onlookers.
Clint ripped and pulled off the remains of his shirt, and wound the ripped fabric between his hands as Viper got to her feet and charged him again.
He heard gasps as his audience saw the mangled, mottled bruising that was Clint’s right shoulder and the right side of his back.
He wrapped her left arm in his shirt and twisted to pull her off balance, mostly dodging as she swiped at him with her right hand.
He grabbed her left arm and brought his knee up, and stopped himself from breaking her arm at the elbow, softening the knee strike to a touch rather than a bone-breaking blow.
There were a dozen more gasps and a few curses as their audience realized how much Clint was holding back.
Viper didn’t take the hint, and used his loosened grip to twist free and swipe at him with her right hand.
Clint rolled his eyes and twisted out of her range as she swiped at him again and came in for another pass. “This is why you don’t charge into a fight without knowing as much as you can about your opponent beforehand,” he told their audience. He had grown used to Natasha as a sparring partner, and found that he had no patience for less gifted fighters who didn’t understand when they’d been beaten.
That Natasha was the best hand-to-hand combatant Clint had ever known, he ignored. Didn’t excuse Viper from not understanding that she’d literally lost, and what she should have understood from the get-go, which his audience was rapidly learning, that she’d never stood a chance against Clint at all.
Viper screeched at the mockery, and Clint had had enough.
As she lunged towards him, Clint plucked the knife from her extended hand, grabbed her by the wrist, twisted her over his hip, and held her knife to her throat. “Yield,” he advised.
Viper struggled, but was unable, even with her greater height, to get free, and dropped her remaining knfie.
Clint let her go at once, and offered her the kunai, hilt first.
She took it, but her eyes were wide with surprise and respect. “Who are you?”
Clint smiled. “I’ve been invited to be a guest marskmanship coach today…”