in the air
The first non-human life Clint ever talks to--or that talks to him, really--is one of the circus tigers. It's amazing. Or it would have been if what it had said to him hadn't been, "I think there's only about two bites worth of you. Maybe three."
It had sounded very disappointed.
-----
Tony comes over on Tuesday morning to make fun of his empty pots and the clothes he has drying by the window because the drier in the the washroom is jammed again. Probably it's the same asshole as last time trying to force his quarter in when the tray catches instead of jiggling it back out and trying again. No matter how many notes Clint leaves about it, it's always only a few weeks later that some jackass gets it hopelessly stuck again.
It's at the forefront of his mind when Tony knocks on his door, so he jerks it open and snaps, "I called the guy. I left a note. Crabbing at me won't hurry any--Tony?"
"It's like I've been transported to the third world," Tony says, which is his usual way of showing his disapproval at the lack of an elevator in Clint's building. It's not that many floors up, but Tony is sweating under his suit which is totally his own fault. It's way too early in the day for a suit.
"We're having some technical problems," Clint says, to explain the laundry hanging in his living room, "in the basement." It's already hot anyway and even the breeze coming in through his window is hot. His stuff will be dry in no time. "Come on," he says, heading back inside and leaving Tony to close the door and trail him to the kitchen, where he leans against the counter and helps himself to coffee while Clint rummages in a low cupboard.
"Nice twigs. Is this some kind of art installation thing you're getting into? Have you been talking to Steve too much?" Tony asks, nodding at the remains of his grow-your-own potted herbs. "Pep would approve of your pots, though."
Clint grunts acknowledgement, but doesn't mention that Kate had brought them over when black plastic on the kitchen counter had started to offend her ideas of what civilized living looked like.
"Move, dog," he says, when Lucky comes over to stick his head in the cupboard, in case Clint's rustling up snacks that need sharing.
"Sidewalk chalk?" Tony asks dubiously, when Clint re-emerges with the small plastic bucket.
"You can pick your color," Clint offers, looking down at it, "it doesn't effect anything. Most of the time."
Lucky grumbles solemnly, padding away from the food-less cupboard and over to sniff at Tony's pant leg and then, when Tony reaches to pat him, his hands. Then he sneezes twice, emphatically and Tony pulls back and makes a face.
"Gross. Dog snot."
"Smells funny," Lucky announces, wrinkling his nose and making himself sneeze again. Tony makes a face.
"Your dog is rude, Barton."
"He's a dog. He cares a lot about smells, you know? You care a lot about," Clint glances at him. "Pinstripes," he finishes and rattles the bucket at him, holding it by the rim one handed.
"Fine," Tony sighs, ignoring Lucky, who's sniffing suspiciously again, trying to identify where Tony's been. Clint's guessing doing weird shit in his workshop, or Lucky wouldn't be thrown. Lucky's a damn smell detective. "I'll take red."
Clint looks back in the bucket, "Don't have it. Light colors only. You can have pink or orange. That's the closest I've got."
"Blue."
"Those're Kate's."
"It's like kindergarten arts and crafts corner around here," Tony says, but at least slides out of his jacket and lays it on the counter, "Ever heard of air conditioning, Barton?"
"Ever heard of containing your inner snob? Pick a color."
"Just--Okay. Fine. Orange," Tony says, throwing his hands up like he's giving in to the stupidest request ever. It's like he has no idea that in about ten minutes it's going to be Clint's turn to keep him from plummeting to the pavement.
"Great," Clint says, and puts one of the chunky sticks in his hand, then takes one for himself, "Bring your book. Or manual. Or whatever."
Tony rolls his eyes, but puts his briefcase on the counter and undoes the catches. It's annoying that he's organized. Or at least, that he can scrape together the appearance of being organized. Even with his tie undone and his cuffs folded over a couple of times he looks businessman slick.
It's probably because Pepper or someone dresses him. Clint might look a bit ratty now and again, but at least he can manage to pick out his own sneakers.
"And where are we going?" Tony asks, closing his briefcase again, "Downstairs to draw out a hopscotch grid?"
Clint holds up one finger to point at the roof. On a Tuesday morning, no one will be hanging out up there and if Tony fucks up, the drop might even be survivable.
-----
Clint doesn't really decide that he's Clint Barton--no Francis--and not Clinton. He just writes his name the way he always does, the way he writes it on his stuff, the way he did in school.
It's probably his first stupid mistake, redacting personal information. Clint Barton, 9, he scratches into the ground, and sits down in the sawdust to consider it, then looks back at his book. Address, it wants. It's a hard one, when the book is also warning him about getting things wrong, about changing things, by saying they're something they aren't. By saying, intentionally or otherwise, that he wants them to be something else.
He doesn't really think about Clint Barton, but he's not quite willing to call the carnival his home like that's a real thing.
He misses Iowa, but writing that in is definitely a lie, and the book is pretty clear about how dangerous lying is.
"Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?" Clint demands, and throws his stick, then has to go stomping after it, book under his arm. Then he comes back and looks over what he's written, the flowing, loopy script he's copied from the book, carefully describing himself.
Clint Barton, 9, adds a couple more lines before he draws a circle around the whole thing and closes it with the figure eight knot the book's illustration shows. Then he takes a breath and starts reading, more careful than he's ever been, making sure to not mispronounce anything.
-----
"You have been hanging around Steve," Tony says, a few minutes after Clint starts drawing the diagram, laying out information into a pattern, a formula maybe, naming and asking. It's complicated, and constructed of circles and ellipses. Clint used to think it looked like astronomy charts, but now it reminds him of stuff Bruce and Tony have drawn over multiple whiteboards in the lab. Tony maybe thinks it looks like a failed drawing until Clint starts adding words and symbols. He gets a lot more obnoxious with his backseat writing when it starts to look like physics.
"How am I reading this?" Tony demands, continuing his running commentary and watching over Clint's shoulder as he spells out the words that mean the air--oxygen and droplets of water. Dust. It's hard to name things that are intangible or made up of parts. If Clint makes a mistake and ends up killing Tony, or bouncing him two hundred miles east and into the ocean it'll be his own damn fault for not shutting up.
"If you couldn't, you should be really worried right about now," Clint says, drawing out another symbol, and, "You can swim right?"
"Why? Is that going to be relevant?"
"I hope not," he says, and points to a spot he's intentionally left empty, "Write your name, and anything important. Don't step on anything."
Tony makes a face, then has to get to at least one knee in what is probably a two thousand dollar suit to do it. Clint really, really doesn't smirk. Not even when Tony gets orange chalk dust all over himself when he unthinkingly wipes his hands off on his clothes before double checking his Starkpad.
Clint gives him space to work, going to check the brick propping the roof door open. It wouldn't be the first time he's gotten himself stuck out here, but the lock is cranky, and the last thing he wants is to have Tony listen in on him begging to be let back into his own building.
When he comes back, Tony's written Anthony Edward Stark with the flourish of a man who signs his name to a lot of things, and is adding his birthday and the little symbols that indicate Earth dates and solar years. Tony's done his homework--he doesn't have to double check his letters much, and he's not screwing anything up horribly as far as Clint can tell.
"We could have done this at the tower," Tony says, enclosing the formula that means Anthony Edward Stark in a circle and figure-eighting it closed, then wipes his face as he stands. It leaves orange streaks. "I have a roof too, you know. I could have had cooling towers or fans or something set up."
"Yeah, that's what you really want when you're spelling the air. To be blowing it around," Clint says, and draws a big circle around the whole mess of Script and symbols.
-----
Everything is very quiet when Tony reads the spell, but at the same time it's like he can hear every noise. A fly buzzing about the end of a hotdog someone's dropped on the roof, the rhythmic metallic tapping of a wire hangar against a rail--someone else as inconvenienced by the laundry machine malfunction as Clint--as a warm breeze blows through, and his own voice. Sounding somehow like it reverberates less. Like the words are falling out of his mouth into nothing, or like they're being absorbed.
And then he gets to the end of it and Clint is looking weirdly nervous and saying, "Well, that should do it," in the most anticlimactic way possible as he looks over the street. The he climbs up on the low wall that surrounds the roof top like a guard rail.
"You look like a jumper," Tony tells him, and doesn't climb up after. "You're not going to--?" and nods back at the writing and diagram on the roof, where Clint hasn't added his own name and information and hadn't read the--whatever it was. Spell.
"No," Clint says, "I set mine up a while ago," and grins. It's the grin he has when he's about to start shit with Steve, so Tony doesn't grin back. He sort of guesses that by awhile Clint means much longer ago than this morning. "My plan was to fly," Clint elaborates, and his eyes sort of narrow. Tony can't really read any of his wizardry-related expressions, "but it didn't really work out that way."
"Oh?" Tony ask, mostly dawdling. The air looks unchanged.
Clint looks down at him, then back out, like he can see something in the empty space between this building and the one across the street. "The whole business is tricky," he says, and pauses before launching into something very like what Tony had heard on the comms. Briefer. Easier. Like doing it here is less involved. It's a bit confusing, when air moves and blows and water evaporates through it, and people inhale it. When it can't be the same air. It's not like Tony's increasingly familiar acquaintance with his coffee machine, but it sounds like it, a little.
"I thought tricky would be right up your alley," Tony says, and Clint shrugs and steps out onto nothing.
Tony makes a grab for him out of reflex, but Clint's not going anywhere. Just hangs there looking back at him, and for several seconds Tony's brain interprets it as a cartoonish delayed reaction, his heart thumping as he waits for Clint to plummet. He has to tamp the panic down, but Clint never falls.
Instead he grins and asks, "Coming?"
"Whoa," Tony says, and a few seconds later, "That's just. Weirder to look at than I expected," and then, "Someone's going to see you." Clint shrugs and takes another step out. All smug and fake-casual about how impressed Tony is. He shouldn't have let that whoa slip.
"People don't see what they don't want to, usually," Clint says. It doesn't seem like enough to rely on, and Tony would really consider that more of the cross-your-fingers part of a plan rather the backbone of it, but he steps up onto the wall and feels his way out with his foot.
And then he's standing above the road, with no Iron Man suit, and no hum of repulsors, and no JARVIS. With no faceplate limiting his vision. The wind isn't exactly refreshing, but he can feel it through his shirt, and on his skin and in his hair. It's strange. Very cool, but strange.
"How far can we go?" he asks, taking another step towards Clint, careful to make sure he feels solid--solid air under his foot before he shifts his weight onto it.
"Mostly I use it to fix antennas and satellite dishes and stuff," Clint says, "One time to get a bird out of the furnace exhaust thing."
"So we're talking close range, then?"
Clint makes a noncomittal noise and looks away down the street. "Not exactly," he says, and starts heading back to his own building, "You could make it bigger, if you could deal with all the," he nods back the the pattern in purple and orange chalk, "the fuss."
The information, Tony hears, and if you can juggle the equation, the formula, the pattern, the -names-. It's fucking beautiful. Tony can juggle information with the best of them. He can definitely out juggle a nine year old Clint Barton.
"Not fair," he says, watching Clint get his feet back on something actually solid and not just temporarily convinced to be, "You've been holding out on--The universe has been holding out on me."
Clint freezes for a second, weirdly, and looks back at him over his shoulder for an un-Clint-like inscrutable moment before he steps off the wall and drops back onto the roof.
"Don't start with the not fair," he says, but in a tone too dark and serious for the sentence. It sounds like an honest warning.
"I'm kidding, Barton," Tony yells after him, still standing several stories above the middle of the street.
Clint doesn't snort or do his I'm-kidding-too cover-up smirk. "It's not funny."
Tony rolls his eyes and strolls back over, climbing over the wall with slightly less grace. "The universe chooses favorites," he says, to bug Clint, "I get it."
"Shut up," Clint says, and starts scuffing out their diagram, starting with all the figure eight closures, starting at the outer circles and working his way in, careful to obliterate each one utterly before moving to the next, then removing Tony's name with the same care, moving systematically through his personal information until there's nothing left of it but the broken-open circle that had contained it and a big orange smudge.
"Things can hear you now," Clint says, either uncharacteristically cryptic or his regular unclear self, standing in the middle of the remains of the chalk diagram, looking down at the circles and angles and symbols and the names and words that meant the air in front of his building, "and there's nothing worse than a jealous wizard."
"I didn't say I was jealous, you jack--"
"It's like a fucking bullhorn," Clint goes on, "Do you want to call attention?"
"Bullhorn?" Tony asks, "Whose attention is this that I'm supposed to be calling?"
Clint steps carefully out of the remains of the spell, as if it was anything now but a giant chalk doodle, before he says, "The--" and stops, before deciding on, "The one you don't want thinking you might be a good target to make an offer to."
"Oh. That one," Tony says, making sure to give Clint his best unimpressed look. Clint ignores it.
"That one," he says, retrieving his book and Tony's Starkpad, and kicking away the brick doorstop. Tony follows him onto the steps, and the door closes behind them with a bang and a click. The stairwell is dark and close and all the heat in the building is rising to gather in it, but Clint stops halfway down to hand the Starkpad back and say, so low it's nearly a whisper, "That One likes when it's wizards that--" he makes a vague gesture, "can be convinced."
"Is this a dark side of the Force thing?" Tony whispers back, automatically matching Clint's volume, "This Darth Vader seduction deal happen a lot?"
"No," Clint says, "But that's never stopped It from trying."
-----
The first object that speaks to him is one of the carousel animals. It's a lot more surprising than being threatened by a tiger. Clint had always kind of imagined the animals of the big cat act as feline sort of persons anyway.
(Oh, don't be afraid,) the wooden zebra says, like 'afraid' is ridiculous and out of place. Clint ducks behind it. He's not supposed to be here, but at nine the carnival is new enough that he still likes to sneak onto some of the rides and steal a couple of turns.
If it's not busy. He's not stupid enough to take the spot of a paying customer, but if it's slow and he pretends to be working, the carousel operator pretends to not see him.
"I'm not scared," Clint sniffs, more bravado than lie, and the zebra laughs. There's a sense of delight in it as the carousel starts up and the now-familiar ride music kicks into a new song. Clint always wishes the ride would go a little faster. Be a little more exciting. He leans his arms over the zebra's carved saddle. It doesn't even go up and down like the horses, just draws a solid cart with fixed wheels around in circles forever. The zebra seems thrilled about it.
"Don't you get bored?" Clint asks it, ducking as they pass the ticket booth again.
(Bored?) The zebra seems confused.
"You've been going around and around for a hundred years," Clint points out, popping his head back up to rest his chin on the saddle and absently rubs the zebra's neck like it's a real horse. The antique carousel is one of the carnival's draws even though some of the animals have been replaced with new, cheaper fiberglass.
(But it's not the same circle,) the zebra says, sounding amused, (the children are always different.)
"No they aren't," Clint says. His scoff sounds like Barney. It sounds a bit mean, and Clint's not sure he likes it.
(I've never had a wizard on board before,) the zebra returns. Clint's been on the carousel a million times, but he doesn't say so, because that was before so the zebra might actually be right. Instead, he feels along a ridge of the carved mane, where the paint is worn off and wood grain shows through, rubbed smooth and shiny. (What were you trying to do,) it asks, (behind the games?)
Clint gets onto tiptoe to whisper towards the zebra's ear, still not quite tall enough to to actually whisper into it. He feels silly about the spell now. "It didn't work."
(A spell always works,) the zebra says, (if you do it right,) and Clint makes a face, because what does a zebra that's gone in circles for a century know about it, anyway. The zebra must have sensed his doubt, because the next thing it says is, (Before this I was a tree, and trees remember. About lots of things.)
It should be dead, by that logic, just a chunk of tree corpse. Clint doesn't say so, but the zebra puffs anyway, a sound more equine than human. (I was a tree,) it says, (and now I'm something else. You were stardust and water.)
"And hamburgers," Clint adds, leaning against the zebra's side as the next song starts.