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Clint Barton is six years old when his parents die in a car accident.
He's eight when he and his older brother join up with Carson's Traveling Circus after bouncing from foster home to foster home, and a bow is placed in his hand for the first time. Eight when he realizes he has a gift, that this is something he is good at, that hitting a target dead center comes so very easily to him. Eight when two men at the circus, Buck and Jacque, look at him and see dollar signs.
They're not the only ones, though.
He's ten when he gets back to his trailer after another performance to find a man and woman waiting for him. They ask him his name, confirm that he's himself. And then they don't say another word—they simply grab him. He tries to fight, but his skills lie in long-range weaponry, not hand-to-hand. He tries to scream, but there's a hand over his mouth and the pinch of a needle in his neck.
Everything goes black.
When he wakes up (for good, instead of vague flashes of moving towards the surface only to be shoved back down again by another needle), he's in a small room with metal walls, lying on an uncomfortable bed. His clothes have been changed; he's no longer in his purple and blue performance costume, instead wearing a black shirt and black pants that make him think of hospital scrubs, but with thicker material. He is alone.
He's scared, of course he's scared. He doesn't know where he is, doesn't know what's happening, can't help but picture all the worst case scenarios. Buck and Jacque always painted a really gruesome picture of what would happen if the authorities got their hands on him, and Clint doesn't think the police just straight up kidnap kids but he doesn't actually know.
He's scared. He wants his brother, even if Barney's been more and more distant lately. He wants his mom, even though she's been dead for four years now, killed by his father making the dumb decision to drive drunk. He really wants his bow, always feeling more steady with it in his hand. He's ten years old and he's alone and afraid he doesn't know what to do.
So he curls up on the bed, arms wrapped around his knees, and tries to not cry.
He doesn't know how much time passes before someone shows up, but show up they do. It's an unfamiliar man, not the one who kidnapped him, with a severe expression and cold eyes. He says something in a language Clint doesn't understand, and then sighs, like this is a great inconvenience to him.
In English, he says, "Welcome to the Red Room, Clint Barton. Your talents are going to be put to a greater purpose than silly tricks for audiences."
Clint stares at him, wide-eyed. "W-what do you mean?" he asks, voice trembling. "What purpose? What's the Red Room?"
The man makes an irritated noise. "We'll have to break you of that habit. Weapons don't ask questions."
Clint swallows heavily, a stone settling in his gut. He's too afraid to say anything else. He wants his mom.
"Sleep," the man commands. "Your training begins in the morning."
And then he's gone, back out the thick metal door. It locks behind him with a loud, ominous click.
It takes a long time for Clint to fall asleep, anxiety keeping him awake, and the sleep he does get is fitful at best.
The Red Room, it turns out, is a Russian organization with the purpose of training children to be soldiers, spies, assassins, sleeper agents.
Clint is in Russia. A Red Room agent saw his performance and decided to abduct him and add him to the program. He keeps repeating those facts to himself over and over again, trying to make them make sense. It's just—insane. This has to be an elaborate nightmare. He has to wake up soon. There's no way he's—he's actually—
The man—whose name, Clint learns, is Vasily Karpov—wasn't kidding about not liking questions. He's in charge of Clint's training apparently, and takes to hitting Clint any time he asks something. It's—hard. Clint's always been what his mom called 'an inquisitive child', which he thinks is a fancy way of saying he's curious about a lot of stuff. And how could he not want to know what the hell is going on?
But Clint's not unused to being hit by adults who don't like something he says. His father did it, and then Buck and Jacque, too. Cint knows how to survive.
So he keeps his mouth shut, locks all his questions and observations inside. He watches, and learns, and does his best to not get hurt.
It doesn't take him long to discover that's an impossibility. Karpov and the other trainers seem to consider it a crucial part of his training. They beat him black and blue, whip him when they think he's failed at something, smack him at the slightest of imperfections.
He gets a lot of those hits during his language lessons—the physical stuff comes far easier to him than the school shit, but they don't seem to care about his reasoning of not having attended any school consistently for the past four years of his life, not at all for the last two. The logic of that doesn't matter. All that matters is that he's not as smart as they think he should be.
He tries to compensate for it in physical training. He excels without any trouble at the weaponry lessons, and those days are always his favorite. Karpov never expresses anything as positive as pride, but he doesn't call Clint a waste of time or punish him in any way, so they're good days in his book. Days he can be proud of.
There are other boys training in Red Room, too, and they're pitted against each other a lot. Those competitions are responsible for a lot of Clint's humiliation, especially in a classroom setting but on the sparring mats, too (they've been training far longer than he has), and it makes him angry. Makes him want, very desperately, to be better.
So, he trains. He works hard. He does his best to meet the impossible standards of his trainers, to withstand the beatings and borderline-tortures, to rise above the taunts and insults of his fellow trainees. Clint not unused to being underestimated. He keeps his head down and just keeps going forward.
He survives. Even if sometimes it feels like a very near thing, he survives.
Clint has been with the Red Room for maybe a year and a half when he meets Aleksander Lukin.
The man is terrifying, even by Red Room standards, which Clint doesn't quite understand considering the man isn't an agent in the same way the rest of them are. He's a general, not even close to the level of physical training even Clint has by this point. But he's the head of the Red Room, and he has a way of looking at you that terrifies you down to your core. Clint stands before him in line with the other trainees and keeps his eyes fixed ahead and tries to not crumble as he's examined, appraised.
Cuts from the program are happening today. It isn't a secret what's going to happen to the ones who have been declared not up to the standards of the Red Room, and Clint is so very afraid. He hates this place with a burning passion, but he...he wants to live. He wants to live, and he's come so far. He doesn't want them to think he's a failure. He wants to succeed, wants to do something right.
It's a weird mix of emotions, and he doesn't understand how he can feel it all at the same time. But he feels it nonetheless.
"Our resident American," Lukin says disdainfully. He says it in Russian, just like how everyone speaks here, and thankfully Clint's been picking more and more of the language up. It's kind of his only option, with everyone speaking it. Besides, he always gets hit for using any English. "I hear you've managed to showcase some unique skills."
Clint's chest swells with pride, even as a sick feeling settles in his gut. He wants them to be proud of him. He wants to run very far away from them all.
"Yes, Sir," Clint replies, because that's the only answer his superiors ever want. He keeps his eyes straight forward. They always think it's disrespectful to meet their eyes unless they specifically tell him to.
Lukin makes some sort of acknowledging noise, and then moves on to examine the next trainee. Clint releases a slow breath, some tension melting from his frame. It feels better, without Lukin's gaze on him. This whole situation is still fucked, but it's—better, with him moving on.
At the end of the day, four boys are cut from the program, all of the rest of them allowed to continue on in the torturous hell that is the Red Room.
Clint is so fucking relieved that he's one of them.
Clint is thirteen when he meets Natalia.
He'd known, in a distant sort of way, that there was another section of the Red Room that had female trainees, but the two groups never had any interaction until one day when they decided to meld them and pit them against each other. A test of some sort, he guesses, but doesn't bother trying to figure out the reason too deeply. Red Room will always do what Red Room wants—what he thinks about it doesn't matter.
The girl he's paired up with has red hair and a sharp look in her eyes, a blank mask firmly in place. Clint wonders if that's what he looks like, too.
She takes him down, hard. It's the most impressive thing Clint's seen in a while, and he can't help but think it's extremely badass.
He stops thinking it's so cool when Karpov whips his back raw for embarrassing him. But he can't forget Natalia. Not because she beat him, but because of one very simple, insignificant thing she did: she helped him up.
Maybe that shouldn't be a big deal, but in a place like this, it is. She took him down, clearly scored an unequivocal win, and then reached out to offer him a hand. He can't remember the last time someone did something simply—nice. He genuinely can't.
They get paired up again. He does better this time, ready for her, but she still beats him. She offers her hand again and he takes it and asks to go ahead. She beats him again.
But after that time, he really is ready for her.
Clint's always been good at analyzing his opponents, figuring out their styles and what they favor faster than his fellow trainees ever had. And Natalia is damn good, Natalia moves like water and adjusts her approach in a single moment, but she has her habits. Everyone does.
She still beats him, the next time they fight. But the fight lasts a long while.
And the time after that, they end in a draw.
Natalia smiles at him. It is tiny, a small twitch of the corner of her mouth, but it's everything in a place like this. And Clint can't help but grin back at her.
He gets a backhand from a trainer for that, and is assigned to run laps until he can't move his legs anymore, but he thinks it was worth it.
It feels less worth it when the whole interaction apparently means he's not allowed to see Natalia again.
(He knows that's not supposed to bother him, but it does.)
Clint is fifteen when he's sent on his first mission.
He's supposed to steal something, and he does it, getting in and out without notice, bringing it back to his trainers like a dog hoping for a treat. Karpov says, "Well done, Agent Barton," and Clint rides high on that monumental praise for the rest of the week.
They start sending him out more and more until it's a regular thing. There are whispers that he's a front runner for the title of their top agent, that the 'coveted' title of Wolf Spider is between him and another trainee named Nikolas Constantin. Clint's always gotten along fine with Niko, at least as well as any of them get along with each other when they're in constant competition, but the news that they're both being considered seems to turn Niko against him.
Niko gets angrier and angrier, more unsteady. He really was one of the best Red Room had, but his greed and ambition are so clearly turning him into something...not good. Clint understands it, of course he does. Being considered the best is what Clint wants, too, because it means a much easier life in this place (not that that means a life anywhere close to easy). But Clint has been too focused on surviving to ever let ambition take control.
When Clint is handed a gun and put in front of a human tied up and beaten to hell, he knows this is a test. He's supposed to kill this man. He's supposed to.
It's not like Clint didn't know what they were training him for. Hell, they've done enough simulations of assassinating people that there was zero chance of avoiding his purpose, it was actively part of his training.
But it feels...different, when it's a living, breathing person in front of him. No matter how realistic the simulations were, he always knew they were just that. But this...this is actual murder.
He hesitates.
Karpov narrows his eyes and barks out, "Agent."
Clint lifts the gun and pulls the trigger. It hits the man's forehead dead center, and he drops instantly to the ground, dead.
Clint has to swallow down his bile. He...he did that. One word from his trainer and he shot a man.
It absolutely terrifies him.
Karpov examines him, and then tells an agent standing nearby, "Bring in another one." Clint's stomach drops, and Karpov's gaze swings back to him. "This time," he says dangerously, "you will do as you're told the first time you're told, or you will not like the consequences."
No, Clint knows he won't. But he already feels like he's going to be sick—how is he supposed to do it again?
Another living, breathing target is put in front of him. This time, when Karpov tells him to shoot, he does it immediately.
"Good," Karpov says, and Clint hates himself for how good the approval feels.
That night, once he's in the (relative) privacy of his room, he throws up in the toilet. He gives himself five minutes to shake, to feel the panic and anguish, and then he pulls himself back together. What he wants doesn't matter. He's a weapon. He works for Red Room. He...it's fine. It's fine that he doesn't know who those men were, what crimes they committed in the eyes of Red Room. None of it matters.
He kills more people for his masters.
They send him out on assassination jobs, and he follows through. They start calling him 'Wolf Spider'. He doesn't know where Niko is, hasn't seen the other boy in...a while, but he doesn't ruminate on it. If the guy was stupid enough to unravel, then he met his expected end. There's no use mourning it.
Clint is nineteen when he gets captured.
He spends the entire time he's being put in a secure room and locked down cursing himself out inside his head. The punishment when he gets back to Red Room is going to be so painful.
They—whoever they are—leave him alone to stew for a few hours, and then a bland looking man with a bland suit and bland smile enters the room, sitting down across from Clint. He seems to fit in perfectly with the boring, pure white walls that surround them. A nice prison cell for sure, but a prison cell nonetheless.
"Hello," the man greets. "I'm Phil Coulson. It's nice to meet you, Mr. Barton."
Clint doesn't react to the use of his name, even if his pulse spikes for a moment. They know who he is. How do they know who he is?
Coulson doesn't look bothered by Clint's lack of response. "You know, it's always interesting to me when we learn about non-Russian Red Room agents," he comments. "I suppose it's something to be complimented, not caring about citizenship, only talent, but then, it sort of undermines their whole thing about Russian superiority, doesn't it?"
Honestly, Clint's had the same thought in the past, but it rankles a little coming from someone else. He doesn't like hearing an implied insult to Red Room. He...doesn't quite know why, since he insults Red Room inside his head all the time, but it still makes him want to hit Coulson for daring to speak badly of them.
"I'm assuming they're the reason you vanished from Carson's Circus?" Coulson asks, though he doesn't seem to actually expect a response.
They know who he is, they know about Carson's, how do they know all this? What the fuck is happening?
"You don't have to be this," Coulson says, and his tone is easy-going but his eyes are intense. "I know it feels like Red Room is everything, that you have no choice, but you do. You can choose to not be what they made you anymore. They stole you, forced you to be something you never wanted to be. Why don't you try to figure out what you do want to be?"
Clint smiles a little, sharp and amused. "You have no idea what you're talking about."
Something shifts in Coulson's body language, something that makes him seem a lot less bland. It sets Clint's instincts on edge.
"I do," Coulson disagrees casually. "You're not the first Red Room agent I've met; I know quite a lot about their practices. I know they take children and abuse them into being their perfect little weapons. I know you are conditioned into loyalty until the idea of disobedience is probably painful to even think about. I know they treat you like an object for them to wield instead of a person." He pauses, tilts his head. "You are a person, Clint, not a weapon."
Clint glares at him. He doesn't like how unsettled these words are making him feel. "Go peddle your bullshit to someone else," he says, but he doesn't sound as convincing as he wishes he did. Coulson's words crawl under his skin, twist in his gut. It's disgusting. "I'm not interested."
Coulson examines him. "Not yet, maybe," he says, and then stands up. "I'll see you tomorrow, Clint."
Sure enough, Coulson comes back the next day.
And the next, and the next, and the next.
Clint makes two escape attempts over the course of the following month, and is caught both times. He has to grudgingly admit that this place—which he learns is called SHIELD, an American agency—is pretty good at what they do.
Coulson keeps coming. He speak to Clint about anything and everything. Clint can't remember the last time someone talked to him like this, like he's...like he's a person. All his communication for the last nine years of his life has been orders and punishments and scraps of praise every year or so. And yet here Coulson is, talking to him about the book he's reading and the latest terrible action movie out in theaters and even the hijinks of his fellow agents.
It doesn't make any sense to Clint. It makes him feel like garbage, and he doesn't even know why.
A month and a half in, Clint asks Coulson a question about the mission he's currently describing (in vague details, of course). He goes rigid instantly, prepared for a hit, for disgust, to be put in his place.
But Coulson smiles and answers his question, and he doesn't comment when Clint's eyes sting with tears.
Two months in, Clint accepts Coulson's offers to see what there is outside of the Red Room.
(Turns out, SHIELD is a lot better to the agents under their employ. What a fucking wild concept.)
Clint finds, as the months pass, that he likes SHIELD.
When they give him missions, they explain every facet of it. He knows why they're stealing whatever they're stealing, or rescuing whoever they're rescuing, or killing whoever they're killing. They don't just order him to do something with no further information. He gets to know everything.
That curiosity he had as a kid starts rising back in him, and, since he's allowed to ask questions, he asks a lot.
He's also allowed to say no.
That concept, more than any other, is very hard for him to grasp. It takes him a year before he can actually bring himself to test it out, staring at the ground and murmuring a No when he's assigned a kill he doesn't agree with.
He expects the rug to be ripped out from under him. He expects Coulson or Fury to roll their eyes and tell him he's an idiot for thinking he actually has a choice in the matter.
But the pair of them simply share a glance, and then Coulson says, "Okay."
Just like that. Just that simple.
True to what Clint's come to expect from these men, neither of them mention the way Clint's breathing gets a little thick with tears he's holding back by sheer force of will.
Clint is twenty-two and has been at SHIELD for nearly three years when the mission he's handed has a familiar target.
The red hair is brighter than it used to be, and she's nine years older than the last time he saw her, but it is unmistakably Natalia. His latest target is the girl who gave him her hand to bring him to his feet and smiled at him when he got good enough to fight her to a draw. SHIELD has determined that she is too dangerous, too much of a threat, and is sending him to kill her. A Red Room agent to catch a Red Room agent.
They don't think he knows her. They're under the impression that the boys and the girls were kept completely separate. They don't know about that month of training sessions the two groups spent together. They don't know what she means to him.
Maybe it's silly, to be so attached to someone he met maybe ten times. But it was—important. It is important. It was a stand out event for both of them. It meant something, god did it mean something. And he...he really doesn't think he can kill her.
He knows he can say no to this mission. Coulson might be a little disappointed to not have someone intimately familiar with the Red Room going after her, but he'd agree without a word. But then he'd just give the mission to someone else. Someone else would go kill Natalia.
So Clint can't turn it down.
He goes on the mission, pretends like nothing is amiss. He pretends like his heart isn't pounding out of his chest, like anxiety hasn't made a home for itself under his skin. Like this is any other mission. No big deal.
And then there she is, beautiful and alive and so very familiar, and at the other end of his bow. No one's ever gotten this close to her, before. Coulson was right that they needed a Red Room agent to have a chance of taking down one as skilled as Natalia, the infamous Black Widow.
She simply looks at him. She doesn't move. Her gaze slides over his bow, his arrow, and then up to his face. She recognizes him, too, he can tell, even if she doesn't say anything.
One corner of her mouth ticks up, infinitesimal. It makes his breath catch.
He's supposed to shoot. Natalia has been the best from the very first day, and is an extreme threat. She could bring governments to their knees. It's a good call, to take her out. It's a justified call.
He makes a different one anyway.
Lowering his bow, Clint takes a small step forward. Something guarded rises in Natalia's gaze, a wariness to her posture that wasn't there when she was staring down a weapon aimed to kill. She doesn't know what's happening. Clint's broken the script.
"Wanna know where I've been since I left Red Room?" Clint asks, and what a fantastic phrase that is. Left Red Room. What an insane idea, once upon a time. Probably still is, for Natalia.
Natalia's eyes go a little wide, a rare show of emotion, before her blank, placid mask slams back into place. "Where?" she asks, tone flippant like the answer doesn't matter at all.
"Somewhere you want to be, too," Clint says, and it's a promise, a beg for her to trust him.
Natalia considers him for a long moment, and Clint holds perfectly still. In his ear, his mission handler is demanding answers, but he ignores him easily. All that matters right now is Natalia.
"Alright," Natalia says slowly, and Clint's heart surges. "You have five minutes, Barton."
Clint grins at her, and Clint can see her breath catch. He wonders if she's remembering the same thing he is, that day so very long ago when they both got something Red Room never would allow.
"That's all I need," Clint says, cocky and confident, and the hint of a smile on Natalia's face in response really makes it worth it.