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When Kate is a little girl, she likes to look up at the stars. Her father owns a boat, and when he drives it on cool summer nights, she reaches her hands up towards the sky and tries to catch one in her fingers. Years later, when her father hasn't thought to bring her much of anywhere for a decade or more, Kate climbs up to the roof of her apartment building and extends her hand upwards.
It's Kate's mother who teaches her to name the stars. Kate's strongest memory of her before she died is being with her on the boat, listening to her whisper their names and stories. Kate's favorite constellation is Sagittarius, the archer. His bow has been drawn for tens of thousands of years, ready to protect the sky from whatever comes. She remembers that when her mother first pointed him out to her, she thought he looked more like teapot than an archer. Nowadays, she judges his posture.
The best parties are the ones held outdoors at night. Then, when she's a little bit buzzed on a rich boy's veranda at two in the morning, the sound of music pumping in her ears, she can always look up at the sky. That's all Kate needs really: a cute dress, deafening bass, and Sagittarius overhead.
Clint says that archery is about focus. He likes that the moment before he lets the arrow go is one instant he can be in control.
Kate says archery is about motion. You can't regret the way the arrow flies once you've let it go. All you can do is reach for another.
The Young Avengers is the first team Kate's ever been a part of. She didn't play well with others in school, and archery and martial arts aren't exactly team sports. But she finds she likes having a place where she fits. She gets used to Eli's focused intensity, Cassie's wild determination, Billy's dreams, Teddy's kindness, Tommy's reckless joy. Nathaniel, she never quite understands, but Cassie cares about him, so that's enough. Deep in her gut, she knows they're a bunch of kids playing with power they were never supposed to have, but she pushes that feeling down and shoots her arrows faster, harder. When she was little, she always thought that you had to get permission to be a superhero, that someone came to your house and gave you some sort of letter saying you'd been chosen. Now, she plants her feet and chooses herself.
Kate has the same story as a million other girls, girls who have been hurt, but the words stick in her mouth whenever she tries to talk about it. So she hikes up her skirt, shoots her bow, and stands shoulder to shoulder with her friends - who have their own hurts, after all. Everybody's got an origin story.
Taking the name feels natural, like the next line in a book she had no hand in writing. Besides, no fucking way are people calling her Hawkette. She may not have the slightest clue who she is yet, but it definitely isn't Hawkette or Hawkingbird or any of a dozen other knockoff names her friends suggest. She's Kate, and if there's one thing that she can be sure Kate is, it's Hawkeye. She knows now that you don't become a superhero by waiting for somebody else to tell you it's okay to be something. Later, though, when she's standing next to Clint for the first time and watching him take shot after perfect shot, she wonders if she really understood what that meant.
Eli is special, even if she knows right from the start that it's one of those relationships doomed to never quite get off the runway. He keeps his uniform sharp, his gloves crisp and white. Everything in his world is organized into just and unjust, broken and whole. Out of all of them, Eli seems like the least lost, the only one who really knows what he's doing running around playing hero, and why. When it turns out that he's just as messed up as any of them, that his strict distinctions have a habit of falling apart underneath his hands, Kate's not sure what to do except remind him she'll be there for him. And he already knows that.
Kate wants to make Eli laugh, to get him drunk and run around with him in the park until both their clothes are wrinkled and filthy. Instead, they go on few stiff dates, and then he's gone. He needs some time, he says, but Kate's not sure that he's coming back. Every once in a while, she calls his old number, just to hear his quiet, serious voice on the answering machine. She doesn't tell anyone she does this, not even Billy. Afterwards, she always goes to the archery range and shoots targets until her arms ache.
Cassie is dead, everything she wanted splayed out on the asphalt with her. She died a hero, but that doesn't make her any less in the ground. Kate shoots her bow and goes to a hundred parties and dogsits for Clint Barton, who isn't dead. Not anymore, at least. Doesn't seem fair, Kate thinks, that there's a way out for some people and not for others.
Sagittarius burns in the sky.
Life's pizza, Lucky, losing Words With Friends with Billy over the phone, and occasionally shooting at a couple of assholes in tracksuits. Then there's Noh-Varr, who's handsome and exciting and an alien, for fuck's sake, and, hey, how many human beings have a one-night stand on spaceship before the age of twenty? Okay, so it lasts a little longer than the one night. He kind of reminds her of an older, slightly less hyperactive Tommy, which is awkward. But he likes to dance, and he's funny, which is good enough for her.
It doesn't make much of a difference to Kate when Billy's botched spell turns every adult on the planet against them, except for the sinking realization that another year or two and she might have been one of them. She wonders if she'll feel any different when she crosses that line. Clint's the only adult that Kate trusts, but he's never felt like much of a grownup. Maybe that's the secret, she thinks: that no one ever really grows up. No one ever really knows what the hell they're doing. It's a less comforting thought than she would have expected.
The team's different now, the spots once held by Eli and Cassie wordlessly filled by strangers. They don't talk about either of them these days, even when the hissing creature shows up wearing Eli's shape. Kate's hand closes over her phone in her pocket, planning to call Eli up, just to make sure that's not really him underneath the old mask, but she remembers with a pang that she doesn't have his current number. Even his old number, with the answering machine of his voice, has been disconnected now. So she watches the thing cock its eyeless head and whisper denial, and when it flees into the multiverse she follows it. She finds she misses Tommy's stupid jokes and incomprehensible fasttalking.
David isn't bad. She does get the feeling that he looks at her and knows things about her, which creeps her out more than it should. Maybe that's why he wears those stupid sunglasses all the time - so that people can't look in his eyes and tell how much he knows. Most of the time, though, Kate can pretend he's just a regular nerd and not a depowered mutant supergenius. It helps that he doesn't talk about it much either. He's never mentioned Billy and Tommy's mom to anybody on the team, and nobody says the word "M-Day." Kate's not sure if that's maturity or immaturity, but she's grateful for it. Kate doesn't do guilt, she doesn't do blame, and she doesn't look back. That's what you have to learn when you shoot a bow. Once it flies, the arrow is out of your hands.
"Why the hell do you need an arrow that comes back to you after you shoot it?" she asks Clint. He gives some bullshit answer and reminds her for the hundredth time to "respect the gear."
The thing with Noh-Varr drops into that weird in-between relationship space, and Kate wishes she had someone to go to for advice on how to handle it. Somebody older, who doesn't fuck up all his own relationships given the slightest chance (looking at you, Mr. Barton).
America Chavez tears holes in the fabric of the universe with a stomp of her foot (though Kate has a feeling that the kick is just for show, that America could open up the world with a touch, a word, a thought), and they chase the thing-that-is-not-Eli into the light. There's a dimension where the stars hang oppressively close in the sky, as if they're about to fall out of their places and crash, burning, into the ground. Kate spends minute after minute staring at the sky.
"We've got to keep moving, princess," America says.
"It's still there," Kate murmurs. America follows Kate's gaze to one of the constellations above them.
"It looks like a teapot," America says. She puts her hand on Kate's arm and they fall into the divide together.
They see a world where people have no heads and a world where everyone has three. They eat Korean barbecue and pancakes and get caught up in a tornado made of wine. Kate tries to keep track of it, to mentally catalog each universe as it passes by, but before long they all start to blur together. She keeps her hand on her bow and her sunglasses in her pocket. The glasses help punctuate the bad jokes she makes when things get really bad.
Another night on another world, and Kate looks up to locate Sagittarius, only to find Billy's face instead. Loki seems to delight in telling him the news that he's a thing so special you have to put a the before the word. America doesn't seem surprised, but then again, America never seems surprised by anything. She just puts her feet on the table as if Loki has imparted some mildly interesting fact about the weather. Kate wonders how she does that, how she can walk into any room in any universe and look like she's exactly where she belongs.
Billy retreats behind that ridiculous cloak of his, and Kate can see the feelings twisting in him but has no idea how to help him. This isn't a problem she can shoot. Billy and Teddy start sitting six inches apart instead of three.
Kate used to assume everyone else on the team had their life together more than her, but she keeps being proven wrong.
"We're out of coffee," Kate says.
"'We?'" Clint repeats.
Dr. Sanders once told Kate that she'd never get going if she kept starting over. Kate used to tell Dr. Sanders that therapy was bullshit. Sometimes, she needs to leave things behind, to grab a dog that isn't hers and drive three thousand miles to a city she's never seen before. Shoot the arrow, Katie. Watch it find its way home. Billy is special; he'll change the world whether he likes it or not. Kate's different. Kate will change the world even if she has to scratch and claw her way through it. She has certain expectations for what the world is going to give her, and damn if she's not going to see them met. Clint likes to say it's because she's spoiled, and she's not arguing with that. Kate Bishop is a spoiled brat with two dozen razor-sharp projectiles slung over her back and the skill to put one of them through somebody's eye. That's what makes her a contender.
Kate has thick callouses on the first two fingers of her right hand from pulling back a bowstring. She wakes up in the middle of the night with her fingers curled and ready.
The first time Kate picks up the Soul Bow, she wonders how she ever used anything else. Its weight is balanced in her hands, and the energy string crackles with joy when she pulls it taut.
"It combines the energies of the Negative Zone with your own psionic energy to power itself," Noh-Varr explains, moving to put his arm around her waist and guide her grip.
"Whatever," Kate says, and the bow glows in response with bright pink-purple heat. Matches her outfit and everything. She cocks an arrow and her mind fills with flight paths, with trajectories and angles and force. Her hands itch to shoot.
The battle against the Mother is a blur of combat and fear and half-guilty joy. When they crash through the ceiling, Kate's reminded of another fight in another lifetime, when Eli and Billy and Teddy appeared from the glass at Susan's wedding and she thought ...Ok. I guess this is my moment. People from the past come out of the woodwork, all snarls and fists, and Kate wonders how people as young as they are have managed to acquire so many exes. It's an achievement, really. The fight rages, life and color splattering the white nothingness around them. She shoots the Soul Bow and feels like this is just where she belongs. Ok. I guess this is my moment.
Afterwards, when Tommy has been returned and Billy and Teddy have saved the world with a kiss, Kate looks up at the sky and gives a familiar figure a salute. Tommy's too busy trying to grind on her to notice.
A cute dress, deafening bass, and Sagittarius overhead.
At the party, America doesn't dance. She just lounges against the bar, popping her gum and looking thoughtful. There isn't a moment where America doesn't look cool and collected, even in the middle of a fight, but Kate thinks of her default plan, punch everyone, and decides she knows better than to believe that. She considers bringing that up to America, but figures that making a wisecrack and calling her princess is enough for now.
Later, when Kate's in LA trying to unravel mysteries and protect her friends and evade Madame Masque and buy groceries and take care of her stupid cat, she wishes the solutions were that simple. She wonders what America is doing, what dimension she's gliding through. She wonders about Clint, hoping and fearing at the same time that he's okay without her. Getting beat up isn't so bad, but getting caught up in the middle of something bigger than her with no idea what to do, eating her own overconfident bullshit words - that sucks. Doesn't mean she won't do it again, though. Kate Bishop doesn't learn. She's a brat that way.
After all, how hard can it be?
Write that on my tombstone, Kate thinks.
It's only been a few years since the opportunity to be a superhero came crashing in Kate's life, but she doesn't bother wondering what would have happened if she hadn't taken it. That option doesn't exist, never did. No way is Kate going the way of her sister - getting married young, going to society parties and charity auctions in conservative Prada - or her father - retreating into work and throwing money at every problem that presents itself. Kate's been calling herself "practically an Avenger" since the first time she picked up a bow, and she figures that if she repeats it often enough and loud enough, it'll become true. She'll be something more, better. Better to run headlong into trouble and let it slap you in the face than hide in your room for the rest of your life. More fun that way.
America shows up a couple of weeks into Kate's stay in LA, wearing the same hoodie-and-shorts combo she was wearing when Kate first met her. She leans on Kate's doorframe, eyes scanning over the dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the loose arrows covering the table.
"Heard you were in this neighborhood, princess," America says, "Feel like breakfast?"
They make out over waffles and bacon and get themselves kicked out of the restaurant. Kate half expects America to stay, but all she does is wink and take off off into the sky. Watching her disappear into a flash of blue light, Kate has the thought that America doesn't need Kate in order to get her clothes dirty. She smiles to herself as she pedals back home.
It's night when Kate finds out about the kill order on Clint, but Sagittarius is nowhere to be seen in the sky. She stares at the phone as if she can will what she sees to change, but it doesn't. Clint: stupid, for doing whatever he did to make this happen. Kate: stupider, for not realizing that he would need her. It's one of those moments where the arrow has been cocked and the bowstring pulled back without her even noticing, and now the only option she has is where and when to shoot.
The drive back to New York takes three days, Lucky in the passenger seat and the radio blaring to drown out Kate's worry. She talks to Clint's brother on the phone, who says Clint's okay but mentions something about hearing loss when Kate asks to talk to him herself. Kate settles for texting Clint frantic messages in all capital letters, things like I'M COMING HOME OK and DON'T DO ANYTHING I WOULD DO.
Clint's response lights up her phone when she's gulping down a McDonald's hamburger at a rest stop at one in the morning.
Don't you mean "don't do anything i wouldn't do"?
NO. DON'T DO ANYTHING I WOULD DO.
that sounds like advice i should be giving u
SHUT UP
Kate drives until the road starts to blur in front of her and she has to pull over and rest. She curls up in the backseat with one arm around Lucky and the other on the bag that contains her battle staves, just in case somebody sees a girl sleeping in a car alone and decides to try something. Kate looks at the stars through the windshield and thinks of Cassie, who dreamt of being an Avenger just like Kate did.
"Not without you, giant girl," Kate said, and she ate those words, too.
This time, things are different. At dawn, Kate puts the top down and floors it down the highway, letting the wind whip through her hair.
Kate Bishop, teenage brat who thinks she can shoot.
Kate Bishop, Young Avenger, PI, professional runaway, Hawkeye-not-the-hawkguy.
Kate Bishop, six years old and looking at the stars.
Sagittarius is in the sky somewhere, even if Kate can't see it, eternally lining up a shot that will never be taken. Kate drives as fast as she can get away with, leaving LA in her rearview mirror, and she decides that it's a shame. You don't aim your bow unless you're ready to shoot and deal with the consequences.
Clint says archery is about focus. Kate says that archery is about motion. About adapting to minuscule changes the instant they happen. Fuck the stars.
Put your foot on the gas.
Pull the bowstring back.
Keep shooting.