Of The Wolves And The Orphans

Cut From the Same Cloth

 Hawkeye's P.O.V.

I pull the string back, feeling the familiar tension run up and down my back and core, holding the arrow in place. I lock eyes on the target, focusing on that and only that, my one goal. I release. It hits dead center. As usual.

You would think that after years of only pulling a string back and letting an arrow fly that it would become monotonous, but never for me. I would go insane without it, just like Natasha would without her spar. All those ghosts floating around in your head, you can't deal with it unless you have a stress reliever, and usually a very violent one. There is almost always a mission. Then you just create more ghosts, and then you shove them down with the rest and it's a never ending cycle until you wish you could shrivel up and die inside. But you harden up and bear it, passing the post-mission-psych-analysis like a breeze, or you would be "unfit for service" and sent home, except you don't have a home. All you know is the training gym, the intel, and the mission. It's like a drug you can't get off of, and there is no rehab for it. The twisted irony is, they don't diagnose it as a drug because they need us. They need us to do the dirty work.

I decide to focus on more congenial matters for the time being. I think of Keira. She's doing phenomenally well. She's progressing and thriving even more than I anticipated, eating her way through five languages (Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese while she already knew Latin. She is currently working on German) calculus, all the core subjects, many odd skills that are often more useful on missions than one would think (such as lip reading, sign language, body language, lock picking, which she already had been scarily proficient in from her years of theft, and explosives), military tactics, interrogation, shooting, long distance shooting, all forms of marksmanship, many types of acrobats, kick boxing, straight boxing, jui jitsu, taekwando, ninjustu, aikido, muay thai, karate, fist fighting, and one of Keira's favorites, taekkyeon, which has a fluid and dancelike movement which appeals to her years of dance. She is also memorizing maps upon maps upon maps of high security terrorist located terrain in Pakistan, Iran, Israel, she memorizes complete blue prints of buildings, able to retrace them to the T with a photographic memory, baffling the trainers. Her AI has gotten to a point of sophistication that the trainers' software is starting to not being able to control it since it is just simply smarter than their own programming. Basically saying, Keira is smarter than the trainers, and she knows it. They grapple frantically with her and Nathan's attempts to infiltrate their systems. As far as they know, they are able to keep them at bay without the kids knowing that they are paying no more attention to them as they would a gnat, but I know they know better.

This train of thought brings up a whole conversation that happened nearly seven months ago

"Agent Barton, report," I heard Hunter through the com line.

Five minutes later, I was in the geek room (deck something or whatever) with a very irate Agent Hunter.

"Barton, tell me why your new recruit and the most uncooperative, truculent, and aberrant trainee have formed a merry alliance in the realm of Sherwood duct system?" she said heatedly motioning to a computer monitor. So the spinster does have a sarcastic side, even if it's when she's angry.

I skirted around her and stared at the footage. It seemed to have come from a security camera in Keira's barrack. Hunter started the video, and I saw Keira with her desk on her lap, intently studying the information in the file before her, her dark eyebrows pulled together in concentration and the slight angle of her jaw as she unconsciously bit her tongue.

Suddenly, she looked up and I saw the all-too-familiar startled look in her eye. From the angle of the security cam, all you saw was the screen falling to the floor, but not the wall it fell from. The security cam is on night vision in the dark room, so I could easily see a person fall with the screen.