Clint Barton: Hawkeye (cant_miss) wrote in avengers_logs, @ 2019-04-01 19:43:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | -backdated, -complete, -narrative, clint barton |
Who: Clint Barton
What: Memories
When: backdated, late March
Rating: Green.
The clapboard and barnwood was meant to give a feeling of lived in warmth, a vintage worn-in sensibility. It was polyboard mostly, finished to look like real wood. The veneer was an excuse for charging $25 for burgers that didn't even come with sides. Clint remembered when the place was actually lived in. Dark wood stained with too many spilled drinks and always sticky. The kind of place where nobody knew your name even though people sometimes wrote their names in marker on the tables or used their keys to scratch them in.
Steve seemed scandalized to hear about Clint hustling darts but back in his twenties and his New York SHIELD days, Clint had come to this nowhere bar in Brooklyn to do that. He'd filled a go bad beneath the floorboards of his loft with wrinkly bills taken off drunks playing darts and pool at this bar, decades before it changed its name and started serving aoili burgers to tourists shopping for antiques.
Laura had worked behind the bar. She'd been a grad student when he met her, all eyeliner and combat boots, paying her rent with tips. At the time, Clint never thought it would have gone as far as it did. Clint would vanish on a job and then he'd come back to the bar and look for her face. Clint would be in Prauge or Istanbul or Bogota with Natasha, thinking about Laura's face. Somehow she didn't run for the hills when she found out about his job. It only made sense for Laura to move into his loft when her lease expired. Then Cooper happened and they got married, then Lila, then Nathaniel.
It was was a life. A good life. Clint had loved it. Then it was gone.
The worst part of being in parallel universe was how unfair it all was. A string of Clints had come through. Natashas also seemed to come and go with no rhyme or reason.And yet no Laura. No Cooper. No Lila. No Nathaniel. Why not him? Take him into dust or into the cold unfeeling void or whatever it was. The universe could have him. Just bring his family back.
But they were gone. The same way that dive bar where he met Laura was gone. Clint was here and everything else was a memory.