Chapter One
The first thing Clint Barton did was fuck up.
“I have an idea,” he said, and Nick found him several hours later in the hospital, with Coulson looking annoyed and pale faced beside him.
“Did it work?” Nick asked, because their communications went down almost instantly after Barton had spoken those words.
“Swordsman is down, Trick Shot is not,” Coulson said. “The whole circus looks like it was a scam machine in some way or another.” Coulson sighed. “There goes all the happy memories of when the circus came to town.”
“I'm trying to imagine you eating cotton candy,” Nick deadpanned back and glanced at the hospital bed. “So. Was the call worth it?”
“I'll get you the books we managed to recover from the circus,” Coulson said and that was answer enough to that question.
-0-
Several days later Barton was released from the hospital and Nick had him sent to his office. It was a little cramped, shoved in the back of some other, larger government building, but Nick was continuing the tradition of carving out more and more space for Shield.
His hands were shoved into his pockets, and his hair was a mess. “You going to kick me out, sir?” he asked and Nick blinked.
“Should I?”
“I set a building on fire.”
“You say that like it's a bad thing,” Nick said and Coulson had somehow not pointed fingers on why the building went up in flames. They were going to have a talk about that later.
“Trick Shot still got away,” the boy said. Nick had hunted down his records and he was nineteen, and what was he doing hiring nineteen year old criminals, exactly? “Even Bar—others got away too.”
“Some of them, yes,” Nick agreed and showed a sheaf of papers across his desk, a wallet with several cards, and a keychain on top of them. “The first key is to your room in what might as well be the Shield barracks. Most people have their own apartments but we have some quarters. Other keys are to some of our vehicles. The wallet has some cards—most belong to us and we will be watching them. The other is linked to your account which will start earning pay. You are on the lowest security clearance. We've already started the background checks. You, and by extension Coulson, are on probation.”
Barton started wide eyed at the pile in front of him. “What?”
“You just managed to bring down not only an embezzlement but extortion and some other shady deals with the wrong people. Your circus was also involved in smuggling. They might have gotten away but in the meantime they've lost that base of power and some of their contacts are not going to be so happy.” He let that sink in. “You're still on the lowest security clearance. Don't fuck this up. Especially since Coulson is counting on you now too.”
Barton winced. “Damn, that was low.”
Nick flashed him a grin. “You catch on quick.”
Finally, he reached forward and pulled the pile toward him. Nick shoved a pen across the desk and refused to watch him start to hesitantly fill out the paperwork. When he didn't hear the sound of writing for a while, he looked up to see Barton staring at one of the folders.
“Do you not want this?” he asked. “You can say no.”
“Will I go to prison if I do?” Barton asked, looking at Nick through the fringe in his stupid hair.
“No,” Nick said.
“But that's the thing,” Barton said. “I had no where to go and I ended up there. Now, I have no where to go and who knows where I'll end up.” He looked up, and pulled on one of his ear lobes. Nick filed that tic away for later.
“That's up to you,” Nick said. “This place, this isn't really something you walk away from. Either you're in or you need to go.”
Barton eyed the keys in front of him, tapping the end of the pen against his mouth.
“Don't do this out of desperation,” Nick added.
“What you do,” Barton said. “It's good, yeah?”
“That's the plan,” Nick said.
“Not to extort people or use them, but to actually help them?”
“Yes,” Nick said and Barton considered him intently. Nick tried to look back blandly, and not react to the scrutiny.
“Alright,” Barton said and his grin made him look too young again.
Nick almost kicked him out of the office then. Except he had made up his mind days ago.
“Get a damn hair cut while you're at it,” he added.
-0-
Barton tried was the thing. For a few weeks he kept quiet, padding after Coulson through Shield with his eyes constantly roving the halls, listening to his every word. Other agents started to joke about it before deciding that was a bad idea and stopping.
But the first field mission something blew up.
The second one he got shot.
“Are you incapable or just stupidly reckless?” Nick asked, hands tight on his desk.
Barton wouldn't meet his eyes. “It was an accident.”
“You're prone to those,” Nick said and Barton's mouth tightened.
The third mission went off without a hitch and he wore a victorious look around headquarters for a week.
“Most people aren't so proud of that,” Coulson muttered and Barton just smirked harder at him.
“Hey, Sir, you're the one who had faith in me,” he said, knocking his knuckles against the front of Coulson's shirt and Nick tried not to laugh at both of them.
After that they seemed to find some sort of pattern. Barton was still a wild card no matter what situation he was put in, but even when he came home worse for wear, the mission didn't. But even though his Shield based bank account kept growing, he didn't move out of the room Nick had assigned to him.
Most nights, he could be found at the archery range, which had been built long ago to practice hand eye coordination more than actually train archers. Nick remembered Peggy down here some nights, her graying hair pulled back from her face. She was off in England at the moment and he tried not to miss her too much.
But Barton had turned it in to something different, simply by staking it out as his night after night.
Some nights, Nick would watch him because he couldn't sleep either, and even in silence it was enough to simply be around another person in the dark hours of the night.
“Why a bow?” he asked, paperwork—always so much paperwork—spread over his lap.
“Excuse me?” Barton asked, and didn't look over. His shot didn't miss either.
“Your mentor turned out to be a maniac,” Nick said. “It's not all that practical.”
“I think it's practical enough,” Barton said and grinned at him. Nick blinked back, unimpressed. “Besides, he might have been a lying cheating bastard—”
“To put it lightly.”
“—But he was one of the first people to believe in me,” Barton said. “Besides,” and he shrugged, the motion too carefully not calculated to be anything but. “I like using what he taught me against what he taught me to use it for.”
Nick found himself grinning, probably a feral expression on his face.
“Yeah,” Barton said. “You get that.”
“You're pretty good at it,” Nick said, marking another note in the margin and approving another insane budget request.
He wished Peggy was there.
“That, sir, is an understatement,” Barton said and normally that sort of arrogance would infuriate Nick. But he thought about the bruises on Barton's ribs when he came to them, the set of his jaw and nodded.
Clint Barton would never allow himself to be anything less than excellent at this.
-0-
He also never cut his damn hair.
They were in a bombed out apartment in Northern Ireland and Nick stared too much as Barton crouched beside the window, his bow drawn as he constantly scanned the street. “Is extraction coming?”
“Should be,” Nick said.
“How about we don't try and kidnap people out of this place again,” Barton said.
“They were Hydra,” Nick sighed, because of course half of his problems seemed to come back to Hydra. “We needed their information.”
Barton rolled his eyes and Nick could see it from the streetlights. “You should try and sleep if you can.”
Nick snorted. “Whatever you say, Barton,” he said, settling down on the other side of the window. He mentally replayed the mission, where it went wrong and kept getting stuck on the look of horror and sheer annoyance on Barton's face when their target's brains were suddenly decorating the side of a building.
“If I had known I was signing up with so many insomniacs,” Barton said.
“Speak for yourself,” Nick scoffed and they looked at each other across the window, only streetlights highlighting the space between them.
It was raining, there was blood and mud on Barton's cheek and it felt like something electric had moved between them. Nick looked away first.
“There's extraction,” Barton said, ten minutes of silence later.
“Good,” Nick sighed. “Let's move on to the next mess.”
Barton snorted, and Nick filed that moment away, slotting it as irrelevant. “Do you mean clean the mess up or make another one?”
“Maybe both,” Nick admitted and Barton shook his head as he followed him.