hawkeye

Player's Name: Mara
Contact info: fishicopter on AIM
DW: cerebel

Character: Clint Barton/Hawkeye
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Version: Canon
Canon Point: Immediately after the Avengers movie
Age: 30s
Gender: Male


History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkeye_(comics) - includes mentions of movie!Hawkeye. I draw heavily on comics for his early background. If you'd like specification on what I use/don't use, please let me know!

Personality: The key to Clint's personality is loyalty. Fierce, intense loyalty, to whomever he chooses to be loyal to. Currently, this manifests as loyalty to Phil Coulson, to Fury, to SHIELD, and, more specifically, to Natasha Romanoff. Clint's a born soldier, and that's part of what makes him so valuable as an agent of SHIELD. He can kill, he can torture, he can steal, and he does it because of loyalty, out of devotion. Because of his loyalty, he's survived doing a lot of terrible things with his moral instinct pretty much intact -- simply because he trusts his superiors to make the overall moral calls, for the most part. Not that he trusts them automatically; Clint gives his trust to very few, but when he gives it, he gives it completely.

In terms of how this manifests: he's focused, good at following orders, good at taking specific missions. He's solitary, preferring to keep a distance between himself and the world. That gives him a clearer view. It means that he doesn't have to get involved, doesn't have to get attached. This ties back into his loyalty: by keeping himself distant and obeying orders of superiors, he's abdicating his moral responsibility, and he's giving up closeness that would allow him to feel both joy and pain.

As a kid, he was orphaned, left alone with his brother Barney. Missing a father figure, Clint stepped up into the role, protected his brother, got them both somewhere safe. They made it into a traveling circus. This was where Clint learned how to be such a trick shot. When Clint got betrayed (an event that's detailed more in the wiki) and left for dead, Barney moved on with the circus, leaving Clint alone and furious, not interested in going after his brother. This leads into his desire for distance, his emotional armor, and his pickiness when it comes to people he's loyal to.

Clint went into a downward spiral, gambling, shooting for money, getting by any way he could. This is when he came to the attention of SHIELD, and he got recruited as a special operative by the military. Here, Clint found what he'd lacked: an authority structure that substituted for a father figure, and loyalty. Took him a while to get used to it, but when he did, he quickly became one of the best SHIELD operatives ever.

And this brings us to Natasha. He was sent to kill her, but he didn't. He decided to spare her life instead, and bring her back to SHIELD. This isn't an exception to the rule of loyalty. This means that Clint was to the point where he actually trusted his bosses to be okay with him making a different call. This is him growing into full maturity as an agent who can act independently and responsibly, and still follow the guidelines of his superiors. And it's him getting to the point where he can extend that trust to someone else: Natasha.

So Clint has found a place for himself, even if it is a distant, at arm's remove kind of place. He knows where he belongs in the hierarchy. So this is where Loki comes along and fucks it all up. Loki brainwashes Clint with his scepter, and Clint experiences, for the first time, perfect loyalty. All of his desires are subsumed by Loki's, and Loki lets him do everything he can to keep the mission going. This is something that Clint has vaguely craved all his life, the deeply unhealthy solution to all of his insecurities about being abandoned and being discarded.

Of course, then Natasha smacks him in the head and readjusts his worldview. For him, this is coming down from an intense high. It sucks, because the high exploited everything in his brain, deeply violated him, and Loki is responsible for that. But it also sucks because he touched everything that he wants and it turned out to be a complete lie. A complete manipulation. At this point, Clint is questioning everything about his loyalty, questioning everything about how he works. This is what leads him to get down and dirty in the fight with the Avengers. He wants revenge. What Loki did to him is personal, and it's the first thing that gets him out of his hawk's nest and down fighting with the rest of us.

Remains to be seen how these desires are going to balance out in Clint going forward.

Fears: Primarily, being abandoned. He's been kicked to the curb by several different parental/boss figures, and each time he blames it on himself: for screwing it up, for outliving his usefulness, for letting his guard down. For making mistakes. He feels that he has to be perfect in order to justify himself being useful, and him making mistakes makes him fear that whoever's his current boss is going to drop him like a hot potato.

Tied into this: being useless. When his skills start to degrade, his usefulness degrades, and he doesn't expect anyone to hold onto him when that happens. He doesn't believe he's a particularly good person, and doesn't think highly enough of himself to think that anyone will want to keep him around. Being one of the few powerless people in a team of superheroes doesn't really help, and knowing that he was a brainwashed traitor also leaves him extremely uncertain of his own standing. SO basically the day that he starts missing shots is the day he gets really freaked out about his own future.

He's also wary of his trust -- which he gives to only a few people, but gives it wholeheartedly -- being betrayed, of finding out that the people he believed in weren't who he believed they were after all.

He would also rather be at a distance from any given emotional conflicts. He's afraid of being involved, getting stuck in bad situations again. He would rather restrict himself to close contact with the people he chooses to trust, and stay away from the rest. Forcibly entangling himself with other people in a situation he can't get away from is going to be rough on him.

Weaknesses: Physically, not much. (See mundane strengths/abilities below.) However, he is much better at a remove than close-up. He strongly prefers shooting from a distance and viewing events from a distance. He keeps his personal connections similarly removed. Forcing a sniper to fight close-up brings him out of his comfort zone, even if he's a fantastically trained close fighter too.

Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Clint is an archer extraordinaire, with an improbable and somewhat unrealistic ability to aim through all kinds of conditions. He is also a fully trained covert operative, including a facility with hand-to-hand combat, skills in a lot of weapons, talents in infiltration, security, exfiltration, and associated training and physical conditioning.

Sensitivity/Magical Ability: None.

Supply List: Custom-crafted spring-loaded bow that can compact down, quiver of arrows (20), two knives, and a primarily functional set of clothes that one would wear to, say, go hunting in the forest for stress relief after killing hundreds of aliens in downtown New York City.

Game Transfers: n/a

Sample RP post: He moves through the forest. Crisp, cold air, wind that cuts like a knife on the exposed peaks. The stone is grey and craggy, and when he pauses, for breath, he can hear the distant rush of a snow-melt waterfall. The water out here's probably clean enough to drink, but he has some tablets for it anyway. He won't want for anything.

The breeze picks up, and he moves again. He's almost silent. He learned how to be silent in places like this, where there are animals that hear far more keenly than humans, where his targets will bolt if he so much as breaks a twig.

Feels good to stretch his legs. It was a long car ride out here, straight from New York, just stopping for catnaps by the side of the road. He can't sleep very deeply. He never can, right after an op, and especially after a hard one. He knows, obviously, that Nat's following him, at a distance. There aren't any other SHIELD operatives; he would have seen them. He's not in any danger. If he starts organizing a rebel group to take down SHIELD or seems like he's about to assassinate someone important, she'll take him out.

Doesn't reassure him. Everything felt so sweet and clean when he was under Loki's spell. He's not worried that he'll slip back into that without knowing it. In fact, he's pretty sure that if he goes back to that, he'll savor it. He'll feel relieved. He'll be done with the scrambled mess that's in his head right now.

He pauses, catching a flicker of movement through the trees. A deer. Too big for him to have by himself, but he's tempted to shoot anyway, just to prove he can. Goes still, as the leaves rustle around him, and the deer flees. The arrow's still notched to the string.

Natasha's probably watching right now. He has a safety net. SHIELD still wants him back, even though --

He doesn't let himself think about Coulson. A soft swish, scratch of claws against wood, and he turns and looses the arrow, one smooth split-second movement. The squirrel drops, the arrow exactly through its eye.

He finds himself disappointed. It was too easy. He's still tense, high-strung. He can't come down.

Fights that feeling, swallows it back, and retrieves the squirrel. He'll go back to the campsite, and cook it, and stay still. If he's talented at anything, it's staying still, and listening, and watching.

I: PLAYER INFO
Name (or internet handle): Mara
Age: 22
Contact: fishicopter on AIM
Current characters in Road of 'Trode: Charles Xavier (AU)

II: CHARACTER INFO
Name: Clint Barton/Hawkeye
Dreamwidth Username: halfassed
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Age/Appearance: 32, though he looks older; kind of square-faced; very muscular, especially in the arms, cause he's an archer.
Wiki Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkeye_(comics)
Canon Point: Post-Avengers
Personality: The key to Clint's personality is loyalty. Fierce, intense loyalty, to whomever he chooses to be loyal to. Currently, this manifests as loyalty to Phil Coulson, to Fury, to SHIELD, and, more specifically, to Natasha Romanoff. Clint's a born soldier, and that's part of what makes him so valuable as an agent of SHIELD. He can kill, he can torture, he can steal, and he does it because of loyalty, out of devotion. Because of his loyalty, he's survived doing a lot of terrible things with his moral instinct pretty much intact -- simply because he trusts his superiors to make the overall moral calls, for the most part. Not that he trusts them automatically; Clint gives his trust to very few, but when he gives it, he gives it completely.

In terms of how this manifests: he's focused, good at following orders, good at taking specific missions. He's solitary, preferring to keep a distance between himself and the world. That gives him a clearer view. It means that he doesn't have to get involved, doesn't have to get attached. This ties back into his loyalty: by keeping himself distant and obeying orders of superiors, he's abdicating his moral responsibility, and he's giving up closeness that would allow him to feel both joy and pain.

As a kid, he was orphaned, left alone with his brother Barney. Missing a father figure, Clint stepped up into the role, protected his brother, got them both somewhere safe. They made it into a traveling circus. This was where Clint learned how to be such a trick shot. When Clint got betrayed (an event that's detailed more in the wiki) and left for dead, Barney moved on with the circus, leaving Clint alone and furious, not interested in going after his brother. This leads into his desire for distance, his emotional armor, and his pickiness when it comes to people he's loyal to. He'd sacrificed a hell of a lot to protect his brother, but in the end, Barney had distanced himself and pulled away. So Clint did the same, with everything.

Clint went into a downward spiral, gambling, shooting for money, getting by any way he could. This is when he came to the attention of SHIELD, and he got recruited as a special operative by the military. Here, Clint found what he'd lacked: an authority structure that substituted for a father figure, and loyalty. Took him a while to get used to it, but when he did, he quickly became one of the best SHIELD operatives ever.

And this brings us to Natasha. He was sent to kill her, but he didn't. He decided to spare her life instead, and bring her back to SHIELD. This isn't an exception to the rule of loyalty. This means that Clint was to the point where he actually trusted his bosses to be okay with him making a different call. This is him growing into full maturity as an agent who can act independently and responsibly, and still follow the guidelines of his superiors. And it's him getting to the point where he can extend that trust to someone else: Natasha.

So Clint has found a place for himself, even if it is a distant, at arm's remove kind of place. He knows where he belongs in the hierarchy. So this is where Loki comes along and fucks it all up. Loki brainwashes Clint with his scepter, and Clint experiences, for the first time, perfect loyalty. All of his desires are subsumed by Loki's, and Loki lets him do everything he can to keep the mission going. This is something that Clint has vaguely craved all his life, the deeply unhealthy solution to all of his insecurities about being abandoned and being discarded.

Of course, then Natasha smacks him in the head and readjusts his worldview. For him, this is coming down from an intense high. It sucks, because the high exploited everything in his brain, deeply violated him, and Loki is responsible for that. But it also sucks because he touched everything that he wants and it turned out to be a complete lie. A complete manipulation. At this point, Clint is questioning everything about his loyalty, questioning everything about how he works. This is what leads him to get down and dirty in the fight with the Avengers. He wants revenge. What Loki did to him is personal, and it's the first thing that gets him out of his hawk's nest and down fighting with the rest of us.

Remains to be seen how these desires are going to balance out in Clint going forward.

Reason for playing: I tried him on a whim, and he happens to fit me really well. Kind of fits a similar niche that Everett Young did in Bete Noire. Plus, I'd like to see what happens when you toss in an Avenger on the side of the pirates, given that we already have a couple on the side of the Capitol. I like the thought of him having a common history with people on the other side of a fight, especially with the distance that he tries to keep even from people who are allies.

Also I think it's funny that I'm exchanging one archer for another.

III. ARK HISTORY
Name: n/a
Age/Appearance: n/a
History: Orphaned on one of the poorer island nations, Clint (and his little sister) didn't have much choice but to join the pirates. In places like that, there's simply no economic options. There aren't any jobs, no one's teaching you trades, and the pirates are the main force injecting any life into the economy at all. Clint was strong, he was quick, and he made an awesome lookout, and the pirates welcomed him and his sister both.

A particular pirate took Clint under his wing and taught him shooting. Clint picked it up like a natural, and spent a lot of his time up in the eagle's nest on top of the ship watching for enemies, and doing target practice on the birds wheeling overhead.

Years later, Clint was that pirate's protege, apprentice. He felt he had a good place in the world, and he enjoyed his pillaging and plundering. But then his pirate ship was captured by the Capitol, which had specific data on all of them. It soon became clear that there was a Capitol spy, and it was Clint's teacher.

The pirates managed to break out of the Capitol ship's prison and took it over, in one of the most major victories for the pirates in the history of the war. Clint spearheaded that effort, and he personally put an arrow in the throat of the man who taught him. To him, it was utterly unforgivable that a man who had given him such extensive education in the evils of the Capitol, who had been one of the pirates most strenuously advocating for outright violence, had been a liar that entire time. Clint, abandoned by his parents and close only to his sister, found that he couldn't give lenience to a traitor.

Now Clint is one of the richer pirates. He still sometimes supports his sister, who lives on one of the islands. He's a renegade, a rogue, willing to kill, quick-witted and prone to puns. He blames the Capitol's stranglehold on trade for the way he grew up, and for the need to join the pirates, and so he has no regrets about plundering the Capitol's ships for items for trade.

Essentially, pirate Clint is what happens if Clint never finds someone he really truly wants to be loyal to. He's ruthless, his discipline personal and internal, and other pirates know not to mess with him.

Residence/Job: He's a pirate! He lives on a pirate ship and he has a place of his own on a pirate island, too.
Skills/Powers: Archer extraordinaire. He shoots super-cool cyberpunk arrows with shit like explosives in them too.
Resources: Whatever he can plunder.

IV. SAMPLE
Arrival: He's been awake for about twenty minutes now. Benna swears that his heart stopped beating -- legitimately stopped beating -- for about a minute and a half. She's still shaking, pale as a ghost, and she keeps bringing him whatever he asks for. She legitimately thought that she'd lost him, and that, in itself, is probably the most frightening part of this whole thing. Cyperspace is dangerous. Clint knows that. He doesn't like it that much anyway; he prefers reality, where he's got the advantage, where he can stay distant and shoot to kill.

He finishes the glass of water, sets it down, and exhales.

"You're sure it's not a wetware virus?" she asks. "Clint…"

"A wetware virus would've killed me by now." Or driven him insane. He's never heard of one that does such a weirdly subtle thing. He's not going to tell her about the vision, he decides. Why the hell would he? It's ridiculous. Benna, I dreamed that I was on Earth-that-was, oh, and Tony Stark was a buddy.

Tony Stark.

Clint's teeth subtly grit. Maybe this is a propaganda vision of some kind. Look, fight with the Capitol, fight with Tony Stark, and you'll be happier. You'll even get a girl. He'll ask around, see if anyone else has had a vision like that. It's pretty keen propaganda, to be honest. Makes him want to step into a recruiting station and sign up.

But it doesn't make him want it that badly. Still got his own mind left.

"I'm fine," he reassures her, for the eighth time. "Really."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

That night, he sails out with one of the ships headed to the Capitol blockade. Doesn't matter which ship -- anyway, most of the crews around here have heard of Hawkeye by reputation, and they're not all that inclined to turn away a guy who's that good of a shot.

He's up in the eagle's nest, feeling the hum of the engines below, listening to the flap of the sails. All the ships have both, in case of electromagnetic pulse or magical sabotage on the part of the Capitol. It also allows them incredible control over direction and speed, of course, especially when there's a wind-whistler on board.

There's no lookout up here with him. Clint is alone.

He lets his eyes trace out over the horizon, and he remembers. He remembers Nat.

Natasha Romanoff. The figure from the dream. To be honest, he'd expect that a propaganda dream would have more of a romantic tinge. Instead, it was one of trust. A trust that he's never had, not in his life. And what the hell was Loki supposed to represent, anyway? Was he just there to get Clint angry?

Clint curses, lowly. He can't get his damn mind off of this.

He just has to find Tony Stark. If he can corner the guy, get him with an arrow at his throat, then he'll be able to get some answers. Tony Stark, and the Captain.