Time to go

Fuck the Universe

The street lamps on the streets were just flickering out as Clint shakily counted the envelopes on his desk one more time. He knew they were all there, he knew that one wasn't going to vanish in the five minutes since he last counted them, but he couldn't stop thumbing over the stack time and time again, checking for some sort of error.

On his wrist, his watch buzzed, alerting him it was now time to get dressed. Time to get ready for the mission. Time to go.

After pulling on his gear, Clint paused, sparing a glance back at the desk where the envelopes were lined up like little white tombstones.

One more time, Clint told himself, sitting back down at the desk. Then I'll be ready to go.

Spreading the envelopes out on the desk, Clint reached for the thinnest enevlope and turned it over in his hands. It was for his brother Barney. He didn't have much to say to him, after so long it didn't feel like there were any words to bridge the canyon of guilt that seperated them, but he knew he had to say something, he had to give himself, and Barney, closure.

In the end, Clint could only come up with one thing to say to his last blood relative:

Dear Barney,

I understand now why you did what you did to me when we were children, and I wish I could've understood it sooner. I didn't deserve the hand dealt to me in life, and now I know you didn't deserve the one you got either. I loved you, Barney, and I know, at one point in our lives, you loved me. That's enough for me. I hope it can be enough for you.

Your brother, Clint

The next enevlope he selected was one that he was a little surprised he even wrote. The address, penned across the front in painstakingly slow penmanship, read Carson's Carnival of Travelling Wonders. After much debate, Clint decided that he needed to send this one, that he needed to bring all his lies into the light. He owed them that much. Zach and Aries and the rest of the troupe had taken him in when he was a shadow of the man he had been and built him back into something worthwhile. They had shown him how to accept himself, and all he had done was lie to them. Now he was done lying. He didn't care if this letter broke every confidentiality oath he ever took, he was telling them everything. 

Everything except for what he was about to do. Clint couldn't bear to put more weight on anyone's shoulders.

The next few he added to the pile without hesitation, knowing that the messages inside where as good as they could be.

To Bruce, a thank you for all the times he stitched him up. To Steve, an apology for being such a shitty avenger. To Tony, a thank you for all the gear and for all the jokes. To Kate-

He paused. This one was harder. Kate was like a sister to him, a young, snarky, infurating sister. Their relationship, at the best of times, was shaky, but that's how most of Clint's relationships started out. When he first met Kate he knew that she was the kind of person who he wanted to be around for the rest of his life; a person he'd be happy to mentor, someone he'd be proud to share the name Hawkeye with, but he always thought that they'd have more time to get to know each other. How do you say goodbye to someone you aren't done getting to know? How do summarize the feelings you have for a person if they haven't been forged into reality by time?

The answer is you don't, you can't. Clint realized that after his third draft of his letter to the younger Hawkeye. He didn't know her as long as he's known Natasha, so he couldn't draw on years of memories to say goodbye, but he couldn't write an almost inpersonal letter like the one he wrote to Bruce.

In the end, he didn't write a letter; he wrote instructions.

Dear Katie,

(You can't get angry at me for calling you Katie, I'm dead, so ha, I win.)