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"Agent Coulson, I have something I want you to see."
Phil glanced up at the Chief Medical Officer for their small SHIELD outpost hanging back at his door, a folder in her hands. "Dr. Whitaker, how can I help you?" he said, putting aside the folder that had held his attention.
"I've just finished collating the medical report from action..." she glanced down at the front of the folder in her hand, moving to take the seat opposite Phil's desk and handing the folder to him. "130702-01. Yesterday's shoot out, several gunshot wounds of varying severity. Zero mortality rate for our agents, two dead on their side. Two prisoners taken, one died in transit."
"I know the one," Phil confirmed, recalling the action against Charles Barton's collection of misfits. It had been a messy firefight in close quarters, and most of Barton's group had escaped in the chaos, leaving behind a few gunmen to hold the SHIELD team up. With the man being heralded as the 'World's Best Marksman', Phil had to think they got off fairly easily.
"The initial report's already filed," she continued. "As is the report on the new vests we were trialling, which I still want made available as soon as possible please."
Phil nodded easily, the field tests for the newly developed body armour had been very successful. "I've put a hurry-up on production, but I can chase it if you like?"
"Thank you," she smiled, hesitated. "But that's not what I'm here to raise."
Phil just waited, letting the CMO collect her thoughts, and spreading the thick folder open on his desk and taking out the component parts.
"The action started with multiple shooters on the other side, most of whom bugged out, leaving the two we took and one who died on the scene, probably in the first volley. It's not easy to make a timeline in action as chaotic as that one, so I can't tell you exactly when the majority of shooters - including Charles Barton - disappeared. I'm aware of his reputation, and had initially put this down to his work." Dr. Whitaker reached out across Phil's desk to open three of the personnel medical folders. There were two photographs of stitched gunshot wounds paper-clipped to the front page of each of the files - entry and exit, he presumed. "I can tell you that these three injuries all happened after he left the scene; the shooter has to be one of the two we captured. I'd put money on it being the survivor, given how immobilised the other gunman was by the time we reached him."
Phil took the files he was handed, and looked carefully over the images. Aside from differences in skin tone and surrounding scarring, he would have suggested that each of the three wounds was identical in positioning and angle - high on the right shoulder, exiting low, almost in the armpit.
"That is impressive," he agreed.
"None hit bone, minimal muscular damage given the location of the shot. He circumvented the vest, the shots were immobilising, disarming in the moment, but they'll all be back in work in two weeks. They're all right-handed shooters, but I'd like to hedge that if any had been left-handed we'd be looking at a mirrored injury. There are three more shots like this, maybe slightly messier, at the start of the fight." Three more medical files were laid out on top of the others. "This shooting is... immaculate."
"And you're saying this is isn't Charles Barton?" Phil looked over the shots again, appreciating the skill, and the relatively minimal harm to his Agents.
"I'd hesitate to say for definite. The survivor was alert but non-verbal when he came through medical, the stubborn kind of non-responsive. He seemed pretty scared for a pro."
"The young man we apprehended is Clinton Barton," he observed. "Charles' brother. Injuries?"
"One gunshot graze across his midsection, a couple of bruises from capture, nothing serious. Staff only got time to stitch him up and do a once-over before Agent Voyt took him off our hands." The Doctor indicated a thin file under the others - a medical report on the younger Barton. "I'm not sure if he was staying for the two who died, or if no one told him they were clearing out, but he was fit to run."
Phil narrowed his eyes at the one-page report. It seemed a little thin on the ground. "Was he signed out by your staff, or did Agent Voyt take him?"
Dr. Whitaker rolled her eyes, acknowledging the grand-standing Agent. "Agent Voyt requested he be released; he allowed a preliminary health check, but no photos or sampling."
Phil nodded, gathering the file back together as he stood. "I'll talk to him, try and see if I can get a look at Mr. Barton at the same time." He handed the medical file back. "If he's defending his brother, that might be leverage for recruitment."
-
Phil was half way down to the holding and interrogation area on the second floor when the elevator car stopped and let Natasha on-board. She stepped inside and stayed facing him as the doors closed behind her.
"I was looking for you, sir," she said. The 'sir' was slightly stilted, they'd been friends a long time now, and she rarely stood on ceremony, but she was obviously leaning on formality here. "I have a request."
"Go on," he replied.
"I'd like you to accompany me to holding. Agent Voyt has a prisoner in interrogation right now and I'm worried about his safety."
Intrigued, Phil asked- "Voyt's?"
"No, the boy's. He's..." Natasha stopped, closing down on the impassioned speech that Phil could hear creeping up on her and putting her formal face back on. "Agent Voyt is being heavy handed, and while he doesn't appear to have offered any physical abuse his intimidation tactics are inappropriate. I also don't think the boy's been properly assessed by medical - Voyt believes he's withholding information, I'm more inclined to believe he's non-verbal."
"Non-verbal?" Phil pressed, thinking back to Whitaker's comment.
"Not capable of, rather than withholding." Her voice softened and she pulled a face. "I watched briefly, he doesn't seem fully aware of the people around him, possibly some level of autism?"
"Shit." Phil let the doors finally open onto the right floor, and followed Natasha through the halls to holding. Natasha dragged him into an observation room, and he only took a moment to look through the one-way glass, assessing the three men in the attached interrogation room surrounding the teenager who was handcuffed to the table before flicking the intercom and recalling his Agents. As the men backed off, the kid put his head down on the table and brought his cuffed hands up to cover it defensively.
Agent Voyt was the first man through the observation room door, red-faced from shouting or some other exertion, two of the larger Agents on staff at his back.
Phil blacked out the window to the interview room, leaving Natasha to take over with the boy in private. Whether what Dr. Whitaker had inferred or Natasha suspected was true, he needed to get to the bottom of his Agents' actions first, and then deal with the potential fall-out.
That didn't take long.
"You're telling me," Phil made himself take a breath, forced it out slowly. "You decided to take a teenager, who you deemed to be a high ranking member of Charles Barton's organisation, into an interview room for twenty four hours. To not feed him or offer him anything to drink. To interrogate him - unsuccessfully, I might add - because you judged that he would be more likely to give you the information you needed under high pressure. And you did all this despite his age, and despite recurring indicators that he might be mentally handicapped?"
"That's... yeah. That's about it, sir." Agent Voyt looked cowed, incapable of meeting Phil's eye. He glanced towards the blacked-out one-way glass, and Phil wondered if he'd even acknowledged the possibility that the kid might not be able to turn over his brother. Breaking the Barton case would have been a serious win for Voyt's career, with that kind of motivation it was easy to get carried away and lose sight of what was right in front of you.
Phil held on to the ice cold composure he needed by the skin of his teeth. "Did you make an active decision to starve and dehydrate him, or was that your own incompetence?"
"It slipped our minds, sir," Voyt replied flatly.
"Incompetence," Phil verified. "Good, I'd hate to think our Agents were capable of intentional cruelty."
"I could see to the kid now, sir?" One of the other agents offered from behind Voyt. They'd started off at attention behind their superior's shoulders, but they'd been obviously distancing themselves from him since he started his report.
"You should know that the Black Widow is on base at the moment, and that it was her who informed me of the child in your interrogation room." Phil paused to appreciate Voyt going a nice pallid shade of white. "I'll take over here, but I'd like reports from everyone on my desk before shift change. Agent Voyt, I'll allow you to defend yourself at your disciplinary hearing. Any of your colleagues can speak in your defence, but I'm not sure they'll want to be associated with your behaviour today."
-
Natasha was sat in the corner of the room, blocking his view of the kid when Phil walked through the door. A polystyrene container with a plastic knife and fork piled haphazardly on top was balanced on one chair, and there were a collection of sports drinks and pop bottles tucked around the table legs. They were all open but only a couple were missing more than a mouthful.
Natasha had her own little forest of drinks, and Coulson remembered when she'd been newly an Agent of SHIELD and the only drinks she considered 'safe' were bottled, but she hadn't known which flavours she preferred. She'd been told which were the best for her to enjoy by the Red Room, drinks that would allow her to blend in, but she'd never been allowed a preference of her own.
"I'm not giving him back to Voyt," she said firmly.
"No one's giving him back to Voyt."
That seemed to reassure her, but she didn't move from her defensive position. "I'm not sure he speaks."
"Natasha," Phil said firmly.
She sighed, and pulled back, revealing the young man pressed into the corner of the room, his hands between his knees and his shoulders rounded. Phil moved to have a clear line of sight on their erstwhile prisoner, trying not to crowd his exits. He was bigger than Phil had imagined, given how much 'kid' had been bandied around in the last hour; probably in his late teens, with broad shoulders that spoke of more manual labour than his cohort.
Moving the remains of a cafeteria dinner onto the table beside the anchored handcuffs with a paperclip still jammed in one of the locks, Phil dragged the chair to the opposite corner and sat in it, giving the younger Barton plenty of room.
"I'm Phil. What's your name?" It had probably been tried, but Phil wasn't going to make a judgement based on flawed intel. The kid licked his lips, his eyes darting around the room. His cheeks were puffy and tear-stained, and he was wearing medical's scrubs.
"Did you enjoy your food?" Phil tried, gesturing at the cafeteria carry-out container. It was a simple question, something that could be answered yes/no without needing words. The kid looked to Natasha and Phil checked his own line of thinking, realising that the diminutive came more from the open look on his face, than his stature or apparent age.
He was left stumped moments later when the boy stood and crossed the room towards him. Kneeling in front of the chair Phil had taken, he pulled his shirt over his head, and Phil barely had time to take a breath to ask 'what?' before he reached with two hands for Phil's fly.
He grabbed both the kid's hands and stood them both up before he could get further than that, and Phil had to quash the swirl of nausea as the boy squirmed to free his hands. "Stop," he said firmly. "I don't want to..."
Unwilling to hurt him, Phil was forced to release his hands and he grabbed the scrub shirt from the floor before scrambling for the door, trying the handle once before hunching back down in a different corner with the shirt pressed to his chest.
"Natasha?" Phil asked, thrown.
She looked just as wide-eyed and confused as he felt. "I don't know. He didn't behave like that with me. I'd like a talk with Agent Voyt..." Her voice went cold.
"Learned behaviour?" Phil tried, crossing to Natasha and giving the kid as much space as he could without actually *leaving* the room. He didn't want to risk any suggestion that seduction was appropriate currency here. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the kid pull the shirt hurriedly over his head. "Do you think his brother..."
"I don't know," Natasha repeated, voice hard. "It occurred to me that he might not be hearing, but he doesn't seem to watch lips," she said in the moment of silence that followed. "He was distressed when I came in, I didn't want to risk excessive noise."
Phil appreciated Natasha's reminder to focus on the main problem. They needed to make themselves understood, if only to avoid another incident like the one they'd just had. "Barbera Zhu in Occupational Health has a PhD in linguistics, thesis on non-verbal languages. I'll see if she's available. He's likely to have been introduced to sign language if he's non-verbal, regardless of the reason."
Natasha nodded in agreement. "Can I take him out of this room?" she asked.
Phil considered the boy in the corner for a moment. Clinton Barton; he barely appeared in their surveillance, they hadn't had a clean photograph of him for three years, and he'd grown a lot since then. His brother's gang had slowly been tearing through the local underground network, taking out spies and informants, setting up for something big. There was something about the boy's posture that said he was well out of his depth, but if anyone was going to go for a brash and unconsidered infiltration, using his own brother no less, it would be Charles Barton.
"Not yet," he replied, voice low. "Not until we can be sure it's not a front."
-
Barbera, as Phil might have guessed, was furious at the treatment of a teenager at SHIELD's hand. Unfortunately, as Senior Agent In Charge of the outpost, she was blaming it squarely on Phil.
"Barbera, please," Phil found himself pleading, his back to the observation room where Natasha was trying to coax the kid back into the room with a bottle of lurid blue Gatorade. Barbera hadn't taken her eyes off of him, where he was stood defensively in the same corner he'd retreated to. "I'm not sure how much of this situation can be rescued. If we can communicate with him at all, at this point. Whether he signs or not, you're the only one now who's going to be able to reach him."
"Phil... You're asking me to go into an interrogation room and calm down an abused kid, so you can get information out of him?" Barbera's tone was sharp, but she'd taken a step back from the apoplectic rage she'd been in when she'd found out what had happened.
"Barbera, I know you're upset, but I'm trying to make this better."
She narrowed her eyes in Phil's direction. "You'll let me in there with him; to talk to him, not as an interpreter for your interrogation? Without surveillance? If he talks to me I won't have it being used against him."
Phil shook his head immediately. "We can't risk no surveillance - there's a chance, however unlikely, that he's just waiting for his opportunity to take a hostage or break into the site - but I'll turn off the recording, and you know Natasha and I don't sign beyond the absolute basics. We won't know what's being said."
Barbera nodded, appeased. "Well then, that'll have to do. Let's see what we're dealing with."
-
The first gesture Barbera made was a wave. Barton didn't even look up from the ground at his feet. She settled in front of the kid, a careful distance back but in his line of sight if he chose to look up. She waved again, and then fluttered her hand in his space. She got his attention with that, and a thin-lipped scowl.
Phil recognised Barbera introducing herself because she habitually signed her name as she said it. The habit had lead to the kind of association where the gesture was as much a part of her name as the letters - something it felt right to repeat, at least in some crude half-hearted way for those like Phil who didn't sign well enough to understand the exact shape of the motion, to others when mentioning her and made her name feel mispronounced without. The kid just stared, no recognition or comprehension in his gaze, and Phil felt his shoulders start to fall.
Barbera kept smiling, open and warm.
-
Over the next twenty minutes, with coaxing and slow patient signs, Barbera finally got a response. In clumsy poorly-formed signs, the kid managed C-L-I-N-T. Her enthusiasm pulled a half-smile from the kid, and he glanced warily at the one-way glass briefly before Barbera drew his attention back again. They continued, with more input from Barbera than was returned, but Phil was pleased to see him engaged in the heavily one-sided conversation.
"Okay, Phil," she said out loud, knowing the mics would pick up her voice. "I'm leaning towards hearing-impaired, looks like an abuse case. Someone's put some ground-work in, but I'm guessing it was a while ago. Probably while he was still a child - there's some state care in his file, isn't there?"
Natasha pushed the file she'd compiled while Barbera made her assessment towards Phil, her finger on the relevant dates. "Yes, for two years after the death of his parents, and then he and his brother disappeared off the grid. We suspect that was when Barton - Charles, that is - met with the Swordsman, by joining the circus that we have been able to place locally at the time, but there's no paper trail. He would have been eight, no record of medical investigation into his hearing or anything else for that matter."
"I think probably no one's spoken with him since. He's recognising more signs than he's recalling, there are a couple of nonsense signs in there, probably home-grown; he can spell his own name, but he's not even trying to read my lips."
"Is he alright?" Phil asked, hopeful now they had some kind of avenue of communication, if only a very tentative one. "Can you make him understand what happened?"
"Phil, he's spent his time here being intimidated and starved, and he has a baby's vocabulary. You want me to explain to him that his brother's a dirtbag and we were the ones that didn't mean him any harm?" Barbera cast an exasperated glare at the one-way glass.
Phil looked up as Agent Hawi stepped through the door, laptop in hand. He nodded a greeting and pointed out the audio workstation before turning back to Barbera and Clint.
"Perhaps just 'sorry'?" He was distracted from what he was going to say next as his phone flashed on the bench where he'd left it, not for the first time. Despite this seeming more pressing (and certainly more interesting) right now, he did have an entire outpost to monitor and run, and he'd been ignoring it for the last three hours. "Is there anything you need in there? I'm going to leave you with Natasha for a while."
"I'm thinking another hot meal and a more solid shirt couldn't hurt, but I'd like to get a medic down here, someone to take a look at his ears."
"Give Natasha ten minutes," Phil promised. "You've got a sound engineer here, his name's Agent Asif Hawi. Can you talk him through what you need to test the kid's hearing?"
Barbera glared at the glass again. "More torture, Phil? Really?"
There was the sound of a cleared throat before the speakers replied; "Sorry, ma'am. Agent Coulson has been called away. I'm Agent Hawi, you can call me Asif. Can you tell me what you need?"
"Hello Asif," Barbera replied, her tone softened. "I have a young man in here who we suspect might be hard of hearing, but if he's not then loud noises are going to be very upsetting and he's had a fairly upsetting day. I'm not sure what you would suggest?"
"Well, shall we start small?"
She didn't allow herself to react as what sounded like a pair of footsteps approaching from far away reverberated through the speakers hidden in the walls around her. Clint was still watching her, glancing between her hands and her face, as if waiting for her next sign. If she was right, this young man was desperately starved of communication, of personal interactions on most levels. His brother must have had some way to order him around, but it was amazing how much non-verbal communication was instinctive. 'Pick that up' and 'take it over there' were easy to grasp concepts. 'Stand there and shoot at the men attacking us' wasn't much harder.
"Thank you, that was good. Once again, but louder," she said, and smiled at Clint when his eyes dropped to her lips. That was behaviour they wanted to encourage. God, it was unlikely she'd get the chance, but to work with a non-verbal teenager with near complete language isolation would be a hell of an opportunity. And the boy had a sweet smile to make it worthwhile.
A louder, faster pair of footsteps hurried through the air over their heads, a different audio file if she wasn't mistaken. Asif obviously had a good library to hand. She smiled at Clint and his smile back was taking on a wary edge. They'd taken him out of his element here, and while he'd obviously realised she wasn't planning on treating him roughly, he was still trying to work out what was going on since she'd stopped signing.
"Okay," she said, keeping Clint's eye contact. "Something you would automatically respond to - a siren or a gunshot. Something startling, but not too loud at first please."
She started fingerspelling the alphabet as a fire engine siren started low and quiet in the distance and accelerated towards them. It was a sensible option - the generic sirens were designed with a variable pitch aimed at getting the attention of even those with frequency-specific hearing impairment. As the siren passed seemingly overhead - quite a racket at its height and then oddly distorted as the Doppler shift dragged the sound away from them - Barbera finished on Z. Clint hadn't flinched.
Moments later there was a sharp crack - gunshot, her heart racing - that was loud enough to make Barbera flinch. It spoiled the observation immediately, Clint lurching forwards, whether at the noise or her response to it. He had one hand around her wrist and his eyes were on the door, expression hard.
"Oh, sweetheart," Barbera muttered, putting her other hand on top of Clint's, where it rested. He glanced at her, but then went back to watching the door, still waiting for whatever had made her flinch. "Your brother must have found it so easy to take advantage of you."
"Was that a response?" Asif asked over the speakers.
"I think probably not to the noise. We won't know for sure until we can get him to an audiologist." She glanced back at the glass and shrugged. "I don't think Phil's broken him, though. He saw me flinch and his first instinct was protective."
"Agent Romanoff is outside the door," Asif's comment proceeded a quiet knock. "She wants to know if she can come in with a doctor?"
"Give me a moment," she said, standing and tapping Clint's hand until he let go. "I'll open the door for them," she explained as she crossed the little room. "It gives a better impression if I'm letting someone in, rather than them intruding."
With the door open, Natasha stepped back inside with a doctor on her heels. She was carrying a tray with a canteen plate on it, two hot drink cups and a bottle of isotonic drink. There was a duffle bag thrown over her shoulder.
The doctor held back by the door, but his eyes were on Clint, already studying him for injuries.
"How calm do you think he'll be with the doctor?" Natasha asked, dropping her load on the table and standing so that she could talk to Barbera and watch Clint at the same time. "Do you think you can translate?"
"I can, certainly, but I don't think he'll understand. His vocabulary consists mostly of being able to spell his own name and 'hello', 'thank you' and 'sorry'. He's been able to repeat back at me, but I'm not expecting he has much comprehension. I'd go with basic gestures and clear movements."
"Can we write instructions?" the doctor asked.
Barbera shook her head. "From first indications he's not literate, whether that's a result of lack of education or other factors, I'll leave to yourself to determine."
"Has he shown any signs of violence?" the Doctor asked.
Barbera frowned at the sudden interrogation. "Not with me."
The doctor put his bag down in front of Clint, who had backed into the corner again. "Dr. Whitaker thinks he might be the best marksman she's ever seen, from the wounds on the agents who came in. Agent Romanoff, I'd still prefer you were in the room for the exam."
Natasha nodded once, and then stepped to one side as the Doctor crouched in front of Clint.
"Hello Clint, I'm Dr. Singer," the doctor said, and tapped the badge attached to his pocket lip.
Clint glanced at Barbera, and signed a clear 'name?'.
"Clever boy," she grinned, and spelled out Singer, before adding 'doctor'. She reached out and touched Singer's stethoscope before repeating 'doctor' again, for clarification. Forcing herself to stop interfering beyond what was needed, she stepped back to give the doctor some room.
-
Barbera looked up as Phil stepped into the observation room, glancing through the window before taking the seat next to hers. Clint and Natasha were playing cards across the table in front of them, Clint now properly dressed in a pair of jeans and a grey shirt, presumably liberated from someone's locker.
"What are your thoughts?" he asked.
"Subject to follow-up by an audiological professional, he's hearing impaired leaning towards profoundly deaf. He's had some ASL instruction, and he has a small collection of non-ASL gestures which I would suggest are unique to himself and his brother, but other than that I'd say he's almost entirely language-isolated. He seems comfortable with cards, though, whether he's numerate I couldn't comment."
Phil leant back in the chair, nodding. "However he came to be with his brother's group, and whatever his role was within it, we need more information if we're going to intercept them. He'll have picked up a lot from their movements and actions. The question - Barbera," he leant forward in his seat, "Is would you take on a language-isolated kid as a project?"
Barbera tried to suppress her excitement, it wouldn't give to show her hand until she had Phil agreeing to her terms. "Do I get to write the research paper afterwards?" she asked, forcing her tone nonchalant.
Phil smiled, not taken in. "Not my call, but I can submit the publishing request."
"And you're not going to torture him anymore?" Barbera let her tone go firm, using her school-teacher voice. "If he chooses to protect his brother..."
"We will have as much discussion as I can manage."
"Hmm..." she said, not convinced by that non-committal response. "This won't be fast, what happens if you retrieve Mr. Barton before we get anything from Clint?"
"I think Natasha will probably adopt him," Phil gestured with a smile through the window to where Clint and Natasha's card game was getting heated. "But then I'm afraid you'd have to finish your paper in your own time."
Barbera looked back at the two people in the room, at Clint's easy grin. "He needs a shower and a good night's rest before we get started."
Phil's smile broadened. "I think we can do that."
-
There was something about Clint Barton, Phil was discovering, that made him remarkably easy to get along with. With Barbera's careful engineering, he found himself picking up words and phrases in sign language and looking forward to the reports on his progress. It felt so very good to have something positive land on his desk at the end of the week, something other than interrogation reports, and active mission files and medical updates. With intensive time and attention, Clint was picking up ASL vocabulary so fast that Barbera had started working on his neglected reading and writing skills within the first fortnight.
Natasha was completely gone on the kid, spending all of her free time in his company. It was perhaps a little startling for Phil to remember that their star spy, trained in the Red Room from a terrifyingly young age, was barely two years older than their young guest.
Phil and Natasha had a standing Friday night dinner appointment - barring major events and travel - and Clint had joined them for their first dinner the week after his arrival on base, and then for every one after that. It became a familiar routine, Natasha sat with her phone on the table open to an ASL video dictionary, the three of them slowly working their way through the food menu, learning the signs and trying dishes to work out what Clint liked and didn't like. By the third week they had enough vocabulary between them to understand through simple signs and gestures that his brother had always ordered for him, and that he had worked out Clint's preferences from what he ate and what he left on the plate.
For someone who'd grown up in what seemed to them an abusive and isolated environment, Clint smiled a lot, and tried everything put in front of him. Since he'd left holding in Barbera's care, he hadn't flinched or shied away from interactions and he didn't hide from them. They hadn't managed to speak about what had happened in interrogation room - Voyt's treatment or his initial reaction to Phil's arrival - but Clint apparently hadn't held it against any of them. Phil wasn't sure how to take his openness.
It was a month of not very much progress on caseload; operations stalling, leads disappearing, and Charles Barton continually evading their efforts. The remote team leader check-in every Monday morning was becoming demoralising as Fury's scowl deepened, but Phil still rated it as one of the most interesting and entertaining times in his career.
-
Phil hadn't realised quite how much time Natasha and Clint had been spending together until she got called out to oversee a weapons exchange in South Africa six weeks into Clint's stay with them, and the young man had turned up at Phil's office door mid way through the day.
Between them they had a series of easy greetings, simple questions about their days (boring, the both of them) and not a huge amount else. Phil offered his couch and after making sure Clint didn't need anything to eat or drink, returned to the hideous stack of filing and re-compiling of reports he'd been working on when Clint had come in.
He glanced up a couple of times, each time catching Clint watching him curiously, and each time Clint had dropped his gaze immediately to the tablet in his lap. He startled a little an hour later as Clint approached his desk, fingers reaching out and pulling a pen from the pot and scrawling 'I do?' in careful letters on the top of the post-it note pad. He followed up the offer by picking up the stapler and chasing Phil's fingers around the desk.
Phil chuckled and thought briefly of the gym, or the range, but this paperwork really did need completing, before it took over his desk. Checking quickly through the pile and putting a couple of the more sensitive files to one side, he showed Clint the different types of report, addendum and appendices that needed collecting, writing him a cheat-sheet of document codes and making sure Clint could match them with the documents before leaving him with the stack to sort through. He'd need to read them still, but with the busy-work done for him, he couldn't put off the tedious part.
Clint took the stack and the sheet Phil had given him, laying out the first file on the floor, spreading out each leaf of paper and slowly assembling newly sorted piles out of the chaos. Phil tried to glance up often, to check that he wasn't stuck with anything, but after the first couple of files his pace picked up and the re-collated documents were stacking up again next to him. Phil left him to it.
It was much later, six completed reports later, when Phil glanced up at an irregular clicking noise. It took him some time to realise that Clint was clicking his tongue, somehow his silence had led Phil to forget he could make noise at all, stupid as that sounded.
Clint glanced up at him, going quiet again and frowning. He gave a facial expression equivalent to a question mark, presumably at his sudden cease in the relentless paperwork, and Phil bit his lip on laughter. He managed "I hear your tongue," hoping that sticking his tongue out and pointing at it gave a clear enough expression. It wasn't a word he'd needed to sign before, and it hadn't come up in Barbera's lessons.
The sign Clint used in reply was one Phil didn't know, and he still had a confused face on, probably a question. Clint rubbed at the bridge of his nose, obviously realising Phil hadn't understood him, and tried again with "My tongue stops you working?"
He realised he was being asked if the noise was disturbing him, and short of a good answer he waved his hand 'so-so'. He worried for a moment that the gesture might have another meaning in sign language, but if it did, and if Clint knew it, it didn't show on his face. He just smirked and offered an insincere 'sorry'.
When he went back to the two piles of stationary in front of him, he did it with his tongue stuck out between his teeth. Phil just watched, and wondered why it felt like he'd known Clint forever even though he'd only met him six weeks ago. With a shake of his head, he went back to work.
-
It took two months before both medical and psych could agree on letting Clint loose with a gun on SHIELD property. On an outpost like theirs, medical was really only a small pyramid of field medics, nurses, doctors and one chief medical officer - Dr. Whitaker. Psych, as a whole, was two psychologists and a occupational health advisor, Barbera. Still, they'd managed to get into several uproarious discussions on the issue, leading more than any medical or psychological reasoning to the long delay.
In the end, it was Phil and Natasha and an empty range, all recording equipment turned off and everything they needed laid out on a locker shelf. They'd pondered ear protection, but with the audiologist's newest advice that hearing aids might be a viable option, they'd settled on protecting whatever hearing Clint might still have and laid out three pairs.
When Barbera escorted Clint in through the range doors, she had a serious frown on her face, and Clint didn't look up from her feet. His avoidance tactics, so reminiscent of his first days in SHIELD's care, weren't something they'd seen since then.
"What happened?" Phil asked before anyone else could speak. They'd expected excitement, glee, curiosity, all the emotions Clint had previously shown at being allowed into new places, given a chance to do new things. Between them, picking out guns to try and setting up clean targets, he and Natasha had almost been giddy in pure anticipation.
"He's frightened," Barbera said sharply, turning her glare on Phil as she walked into the room. "He hasn't been practising, and he thinks he'll be beaten if he doesn't perform well. He doesn't like guns."
Clint had taken up a cowering position in her shadow, shoulders rounded, eyes still on the ground. Phil swallowed a huge lump down, shock and horror warring for his attention. How could he have misread this situation so badly? Of course a child forced into gunfights would hate guns, no matter how good he was with them.
"Clint..." he said, stupidly, and then moved to try and get Clint's attention. Barbera stepped across his path, her face severe.
"Not today, Phil," she said, shaking her head. "This is a big thing and it's been a bad day all over for him. I don't know where his head is today, but this isn't..."
"Barbera," Natasha said quietly from across the room, catching both of their attentions. While they'd been speaking, Clint had wandered across the room to the weapons cages and was standing with his shoulders still rounded to his ears, pressing two fingers through the mesh against the limb of an unstrung bow.
-
The first shot, like the motion of stringing the bow and the reach-and-pull of drawing an arrow out of the quiver, looked like the most natural thing in the world. The three onlookers breathed out as one as the arrow rushed across the room and drove into the hastily retrieved archery target with a solid noise.
Clint put the bow down on the narrow ledge with reverence, took off the quiver to place on the floor beside it and walked away from the lane, tension thrumming through his body. He leant his forehead into the wall at the back, not far from Barbera, and tugged on his hair with a noise of absolute frustration and anguish.
Phil shared a look with the linguist, confused and upset in the face of Clint's distress. Natasha wandered back down the lane from her inspection of the target, safe knowing there was no one else in the range, to report; "It's in the middle ring, barely five mil from the centre."
Her grin faltered and fell when she saw Clint's position, and she stepped forwards when Clint turned and slid down the wall to the floor, moving to sit cross-legged at his feet. "Sorry," he signed, close to his chest, a tiny movement. "Sorry."
"What are you sorry for?" she asked in reply.
She had to look to Barbera at Clint's reply, who offered; "He said he hasn't been able to practise. His brother insisted on guns, and there were... punishments." She shook her head and caught Clint's attention to add something to what he'd said, and he looked truly confused as he signed back.
"Barbera?" Phil asked, settling next to Natasha and wishing he was young enough to cross his legs; his back was already objecting to the position.
"He has home-made signs for things, vague signs he's used to make himself understood, I'm trying to correct his vocabulary." She shook off the distraction. "He's waiting for a punishment, Phil. For missing the centre of the target."
"Clint," Phil gestured to get his attention and then breathed for a moment. "Do you like it?" he gestured at the bow, so carefully set aside.
Phil recognised the sign for love, nearly hidden by Clint's body. This was the first time they'd ever really come across this barrier, the signs of abuse in an otherwise happy and engaged individual, and Phil hated to see him hide away his confession of love because he was worried it would be taken away, or some punishment earned.
"Then we'll be here every day," he said, hoping Clint could see the truth in the words. "No punishment," he added, using the sign Barbera had used.
Clint dropped his head into his arms, hiding his face as his shoulders shook. Natasha moved to sit next to him, wrapping an arm around him in a level of closeness Phil had never seen her share with anyone before.
-
That Friday, they had an argument over whether Charles could be considered caring. Clint insisted over and over that his brother had cared for him, had done everything for him for all of his life, not least of which was defending him from his father as a child, and taking him from the foster home when they threatened to separate them.
When Phil had pointed out that he'd taken his brother into a fire-fight and apparently left him there, Clint said he'd just missed the call to leave; maybe his brother had expected one of the other to tell him, maybe even the guy who was already dead and his brother hadn't noticed.
When Natasha asked why Charles hadn't ever tried to learn a way to talk to his brother, or help his brother learn himself, Clint said they got along fine - they'd always understood each other.
When Phil said Charles had the money to get him checked out properly, in a way he apparently hadn't as a child, and maybe he could have been fitted for the hearing aids the audiologist was suggesting might be of use long ago, he'd gone quiet and focused on his meal instead.
-
Seven months after Clint was brought into SHIELD HQ, an appointment popped up on Phil's calendar which purported to be with Mr. C. Barton, scheduled on a guest log-in, from Barbera's terminal. Phil made sure to be in his office, and put away all ongoing work in the impatient five minutes before the scheduled time ticked over.
The intercomm buzzed a moment later, and Stephanie said; "Mr. Barton and interpreter for you, sir."
Phil fought to keep his expression neutral and professional as Clint stepped through the door, dressed in an immaculate suit and with a severe looking man Phil didn't know beside him.
Phil stood and offered his hand. Clint shook it and Phil could feel his hand trembling. "Good afternoon, Mr. Barton," he greeted.
The interpreter had already taken up a spot beside Phil's shoulder, and Phil tried to block out the distraction of the exchange as the interpreter did his job.
"Mr. Coulson," Clint replied, visibly suppressing a grin as he spelled out Phil's surname to avoid using the familiar sign-name. "I have some information for you regarding my brother's whereabouts and movements."