Whistling Wings

"You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies. The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way—like the hand of a child."

Zen in the Art of Archery

Eugen Herrigel

"This is bullshit," was the first thing Clint Barton said when he had stepped out of the car, walking out onto the army base and kicking at the dirt like a petulant teenager. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders curled forward, eyes on the ground. "They have access to my records, do they really need to test me on this?"

Captain Steve Rogers, wearing his tan uniform from the 40's, complete with all medals and honours (quite a bit more than he remembered were hanging heavily over his heart), crossed his arms over his chest but didn't agree (or disagree). His body was a solid wall of muscle, blocking Clint's curled in form from reporters standing behind the barbed wire fence. And then, beside them, her shoulder like a bony shield against anyone who dared to step too close, Natasha Romanoff, dressed up in jeans and a leather jacket, looked ready to blow the place up and be done with it all.

"Apparently," the captain said dryly, not even bothering to lower his voice as they walked by a group of supervisors with notepads and clipboards, chattering to themselves like a group of gossiping baboons, "Because the evaluation was done by HYDRA they believe that it might have been, what was it? An exaggeration?"

Clint snorted. "What a bunch of a—"

Before the archer could even finish the word, they were approached by the Secretary of Defence wearing a pressed suit and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looked horribly out of place among the soldiers—everyone who was wearing suits looked horribly out of place under the hot, dry sun baking the skin and dirt. "Thank you for coming out here today," he said (as if Clint had any choice in the matter. Steve and Natasha were just there to be 'friendly' support) and didn't offer his hand, looking down at the former SHIELD agents as if they all were a bit of gum stuck on the underside of his shoe that had spread from the heel to the sole. "I will be overseeing all tests to make sure there will be no mistakes."

Natasha snorted, but when the people around them looked at her she was staring back with hard eyes and cold features that made everyone (except for the Avengers) wonder if they had heard something. The Black Widow, of course, dared them to say something and, because neither Clint nor Steve were stupid, they kept their mouths shut.

Led out into the middle of what looked like a modified shooting range, Clint was given a bow—since, apparently, his own couldn't be trusted—and a quiver of arrows. He pulled one out, looked down the shaft, and grimaced in disgust, and put it back.

Beggars couldn't be choosers in this case, after all.

Natasha and Steve were led to a group of fold out chairs and, ignoring the grumbles from others, sat down in the front row, grinning up at judges who glared at them for taking their seats, and started a game of tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper from the captain's little black notebook that kept track of things he should take a look at in the 21st century.

"Agent Barton," a man said through a megaphone and the speaker screeched slightly on the T in the archer's name. His voice was nasally and his white dress shirt and grey slacks looked slightly damp as if he had been sweating while baking out there in the sun. Steve wondered if it would be appropriate to ask the man if he needed a fan before deciding that, technically, they all brought this on themselves. "When you're ready, please hit the twenty-five yard—"

The yellow target hit the ground, an arrow in the centre of the large, red bulls-eye dot.

"Next!" Clint snapped out, fingers playing with the bowstring as if it was a harp—a nervous habit he had never quite kicked—in or out of SHIELD.

There was a long moment of silence, only broken when Natasha hissed at Steve for taking her spot on the lines on the paper sitting between them.

Clearing his throat, the man with the megaphone looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand and had some trouble keeping it straight so he could read it. "The fifty—"

A second target down, this one managing to stay upright and show the arrow piercing all the way through so the tip was buried in the ground. Clint Barton turned his unimpressed eyes to the judges and announcer. Without looking, he picked a third arrow out of the quiver, settled it onto the bowstring, drew back—and nailed the seventy-five target. "You going to make this harder or am I just going to continue to sit here and pretend like this isn't a waste of all our times?"

Steve rolled his eyes and the first tic-tac-toe game ended in a draw. He drew a second one while the people around him shuffled nervously.

"Very well, Agent Barton. Please hit the two hundred yard target."

It was blue and tiny, sitting on the other edge of the firing range and obviously built for snipers, not a man with a bow. Someone snickered and both Steve and Natasha glanced up to see a woman with a smirk on her face. Her eyes were dark and cold, the bright yellow of her dress suit doing nothing to hide the rotting in her gaze while she watched Clint and expecting him to fail.

The archer looked over the bow, glanced at the target, and then turned fully to the judges. "You do realize that this isn't a longbow, right?" He held up the weapon in his hand.

No one answered.

"Well, aren't you just a bunch of funions," Clint murmured to himself and ignored the binoculars offered to him by a still sergeant. Settling an arrow onto the string, he pulled back, staring down the shaft. He waited a second, eyes on the target and tilting the arrow up higher—breath in, out, release.

"Bet you ten bucks he hits the centre."

"I'm not an idiot, Natasha."

The redhead grinned charmingly and marked an X in the middle square.

Soaring through the air, they could hear the whistling of the metal tip slicing through the sky until gravity brought the arrow down to where it slammed into the target. A few people had to raise their binoculars to see, standing up from their chairs to get a better look.

Steve placed an O in the top, left hand corner. "He hit it," the captain said, without removing his attention from their childish game.

"Bulls-eye," Natasha agreed, frowning as he blocked her from a win. "That was rude."

Waving his hand with an I don't really care motion, the blonde glanced up and met Clint's eyes. Giving Steve a broad smile and an overly exaggerated thumbs up, the archer turned to where the rest of the test was being set up—the same sergeant from before standing off to the side, six, black disks in his hands. The first one was tossed up high and the archer let it have a five second head start before knocking it to the ground (through the centre, obviously).

Steve snickered, striking down his line of three O's with a grin that was entirely too childish for Captain America. Scowling, Natasha crossed her arms over her chest like a petulant five-year-old and turned to watch the archer hit the second disk when it was thrown like a Frisbee, low across the ground.

The atmosphere changed, then—something crackling through the air as the judges and witnesses shuffled in their seats. Steve frowned, recognizing the feeling as the same one they all got before Thor struck something down with lightning.

"Bastards," Natasha cursed, but she didn't look too worried as one, two, three, four targets were tossed up into the air.

Steve watched as Clint laughed and pulled four arrows from his quiver. "That's more like it!" The archer grinned and spun around on his hell, dropping to his knee and released all of them at once.

They each hit the ground at the same time, gaping holes through the centre from where the arrows had butchered them. Clint started jumping on the balls of his feet in excitement, forgetting about the judges for just an instant, ready for another group of throwing disks. "Hey, hey, you should do that again except with, you know, ten or something—" he said to the sergeant.

"For the last test," came the harsh voice of the announcer, somehow sounding condescending over the megaphone even though the thing wiped all emotion from his tone with its occasional screeching. "You will need to hit three targets in one and a half seconds."

Again with the snickering.

Clint stopped bouncing and levelled a dark look at the people watching as if trying to make them disappear with just his hatred for them ruining his fun.

"He can do it," Steve said, his voice hard, no doubt colouring his tone and Natasha huffed, rolling her eyes.

"He's going to brag about this for days," she muttered while a machine with three arms was rolled out onto the field. Each arm had its own, small black target and, when turned on, they all spun in a circle (and, to be honest, it wasn't a very fast circle. It was a very slow, but not a snail's pace, circle with the clinking of a machine following it).

Clint seemed to giggle to himself and pulled the last three arrows from the quiver. "If I do this, do I pass?" The archer called over to the judges. "No more stupid tests?"

The Secretary of Defence gritted his teeth, but nodded. "No more tests." The timer started when Clint brought the first arrow to the bow string, the other two held between his fingers. Each one was fired off before Steve could even count, the bow twanging loudly with each snap.

The clock stopped.

1.12 seconds.

"Yeah!" Clint threw both his hands up into the air—there might have been a middle finger involved but Steve and Natasha didn't see it, everyone else was just imagining things, really. "New record!"

There's an ancient way to archery in which people could, yes, shoot off three arrows in less than a second and a half. That way was lost after the invention of gunpowder weapons and now we see modern day archery-which is slow and full of bulky movements-and wonder how civilizations who even used archery managed to win battles against those with guns.

This technique was also based more on instinct so it's really neat I suggest people go look it up and everything. Don't ask me questions about it though; I just read a book from the library. I'm also more of a spear kind of gal.

Thanks for reading and drop a review!

Gospel