Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Aim High

Thwap!

The arrow impacted the target, the shaft flexing and the feathers ruffling with the funnel of air it channelled. I seethed; it skirted the yellow of the bullseye.

"You alright, champ?" An affable voice met with my ears.

I wrinkled my nose, then pinched the plaster back onto the bridge where it had peeled away. "These bows and arrows, they're..." I notched an arrow onto the string and drew back the ammunition with a hiss as it slithered by the arc. Using the tip as an iron sight, I fired another shot. It skewed. I tossed the bow down in chagrin and stalked away fretfully.

"Well tuned?" Coulson speculated, sauntering to my side with a clipboard clutched to his chest.

I flashed him a scornful look. "My old bow-"

"-Had a squiffy arc. A loose bowstring. Was wasting away," Coulson interjected, picking up the discarded weapon off the floor and combing it for dents and dints. A chip flaking away, he winced at the paintwork.

"I can't do it!" I huffed, sitting back on the bench and sulking.

"I couldn't do much better," Maria said from the doorway, nudging away and complacently striding my way.

"You're not expected to be a world class archer," I sneered, hunching over in defeat. "A real disappointment I must be." I scuffed the toe of my standard issue boots on the floor, I was itching with that nugatory nagging.

I denounced my past like a whore-turned-nun, but my demons still slept under my skin. They lay dormant - sometimes fooling me into thinking they were extinct - then would reemerge earth-shatteringly when I least expected it; on a seismic scale. They would stifle me like a black fog, tear the solidity of my footing into a chasm, and swallow me whole in their white hot fury.

I felt like the jester parading around as the protagonist, and I was going to be exposed as but a psuedo-saviour any day now. My dad's words, Barney's words, they ricocheted off the walls of my mind like a bullet, and I cowered.

"Your stance!" A bubbly blonde - the one I'd exchanged looks with across the canteen on my first day - called, bounding over, her curls bouncing on her shoulders. A metal baton being pirouetted precisely in each hand, she sauntered over. "The arrows are listing to the left, right?" She breathed breathlessly.

"Sorry, do I know you?" I chortled, my credibility hanging in the balance - she was going to show me up.

"Not officially. I saw you in the canteen, and I think..." She juggled with the staves; they danced in the air as they waltzed from hand to hand. "... You saw me." She hooked them into her holsters. "Bobbi Morse," she clapped her clammy palm against mine.

"Some call her Mockingbird," Maria quipped, a frosty look directed at the bold blonde. "Don't let her make a mockery of you, Clint," Maria sibilated in my ear. Green eyed envy was leaking from her radioactive glower and into her voice.

"Uh, yeah, about the arrows," I relinquished my antipathy towards Bobbi, having deemed her less daunting. "They're swerving left."

"People get into bad habits, it becomes unconscious incompetence, if your old bow used to be uncalibrated, you would've recalibrated yourself to fit the bow. Would I be right in suggesting your arrows used to fly slightly to the right with your old bow..?" She cocked a hip: her dynamic stance silhouetting her like a superhero, the dazzling lights of the training room backdropping her.

Coulson was smiling subtly as he was me integrating with the current students, and stood loyal and vigilant at my side.

She was poised and posed like Captain America on one of my dad's 'Timely Comics' comics, with their withered and wrinkled covers, rusted staples and aged ink.