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.

I felt verbally stunned into submission, I stuttered out a remission for my illiteracy before replying. "Yeah, it had a skewed arc..."

Abnegating the weapon from Coulson's hands, Bobbi bestowed the bow upon me. "I couldn't fire one of these things for shit, but..." Her ocean hues met my steely greys. "... Food for thought."

As my fingers curled around the tricky device - with its convoluted cogs, serpentine string coiled in grooves and reels, and hindering hinges - she retreated back to the mat: her batons brandished and undulating in her hands.

Maria snarled scornfully as she departed, her arms folded with ignominy and wearing a look of animosity on her face. "She always feels the need to demonstrate her superiority..." She rolled her eyes.

"She doesn't seem all that bad," I said amicably. I wasn't going to enter into an altercation with anyone else so soon. Especially as I saw her pin Brock Rumlow to the mat; he thrashed like a shark in a net before tapping out. It was an indignity I imperiously enjoyed, even as a spectator. "But obviously you've helped me so much more," I reassured Maria.

"Bobbi's one of our keenest students," Coulson said complacently. "She's very skilled. And she operates with those battle-staves like no one else I've ever seen."

Stepping back into the archery alley, I raised the bow and arrow; repositioning my feet so they were aligned with the target before I angled my shot. My talon-like fingers around the bow string and my vision narrowed to my objective like a bird of prey.

"Oh, and Hill, I need to have a word about a mission that's come up in Madripoor, it has your name written all over it!" Coulson garbled giddily.

My senses sharpened: whilst the apogee of ambience blurred into only my heartbeat and breathing, my sight tunnelled like the scope of a rifle, and my every movement was acutely calculated.

Deep breath in. Breathe out. Back muscles loosen. Fingers unfurl.

The arrow sailed through the air and soared into the centre of the target; spearing the bullseye with a slicing sound.

My lips drew into a smirk, and from across the gymnasium, I saw Bobbi smirk right back at me

Needless to say, that a companionship was born that day, and was nurtured over the course of my residence.

When Maria and my schedule wasn't perfectly aligned, I'd always seek out Bobbi. She was more than an adequate substitute.

Starting at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy was like moving highschools.

I was nonplussed by the layout of the cyclopean campus and would have to be supervised and escorted to every seminar to make sure I didn't go AWOL. I'd turn up strawberry-faced every now and then, having been confounded by the carbon-copy corridors.

I managed to cobble together a stationery set from appropriated pens and pilfered notebooks for lectures, mismatched though it was. I still hadn't quite deciphered the schedule of the timetable, and would have to pester a peer for the times every hour.

I hadn't sussed all the names and faces and avoided conversation where I could. But a few were known to me: Maria, Bobbi, Brock, Phil, Nick, Melinda - totally Phil's girlfriend, they've banged at least once I'll bet -Alexander, Gonazles, Sharon - The Commander's great niece or something - Victoria, Hartley, Sitwell, Garrett, Rollins, and Hank (who's nice enough, but still lamenting over the death of his wife and being a single father. He bangs on and on about how he'll be retiring the moment the Cold War ends - I don't think that'll be any time soon; its 1990 for fuck sake). The place is as assorted as a deck of cards, with sovereign older members with tales of World War Two and kids as simple and young as me; it's like one giant dysfunctional family: something very familiar to me.

I started to eventually get into the rhythm of things though; herding like a sheep with the rest of the flock and meandering to my next lesson with them. Most S.H.I.E.L.D. students were souls of magnanimity - with the exception of Rumlow and his S.T.R.I.K.E. division - and would give guidance if I inquired. I was the addled new kid after all.

Trials and tribulations of being a newbie aside, the school was lethal. No wonder it churned out people like Rumlow or Bobbi; the training regiment was ruthless. I would feel the exercise in my muscles the next day: strung taut as a bow, the ache whittling down to my bones. I would be pushed to my physical limits until perspiration ran in rivulets down my back and my hair was soaked with sweat.

Even the lessons were aerobics for the mind: arithmetic was acrobatics, English was exercise, and science was nothing short of suicide. I didn't have the time for extra curricular activities that others did, I wasn't keeping up with the baseline workload as it was. There was ballroom dance, language tuition, pilot lessons -- imaginative right?

So what did I do?

What does any teenager do when they get bored in class. Turn their attention to the opposite sex. And a wise move that was.

Over the course of the next month, flirting through means of kicking chairs, flicking paper and nabbing stationery, I fell into bed with Maria.

"Should I go then?" Maria said, chest still swelling and declining with unnatural breaths, her skin flushed with the hues of sex, glossy with sweat - and the scent of her evaporated perfume lingered in the air.

The sound of rushing blood still pulsed in my ears, and my breaths still felt laboured to my lungs. The duvet pasted to my clammy skin and my body feeling boneless, I emitted a breathless whine and pressed my lips together. "If that's what you want?"

With that, wordlessly, she slithered from under the sheets and slinked across the room, her skin incandescent and curves, demure. The enclave of light radiating from the lamp made her look radiant; casting dynamic shadows across her angles and painting the plains of her skin in dulcet beiges and golds. Her dark hair fell in lazy ringlets, sweat-curled, flowing in a waterfall down the dimple of her spine between the jutting peaks of her shoulder blades.

A Grecian goddess though she was, that beauty didn't belong to me. She scooped her clothes off the floor and it was curtains on the saucy show all too soon. She slipped away like a spectre and I was left with rumpled sheets, the stench of sex and tousled hair.

It was unfulfilling.

With Marcella, there had been heart-racing romance, and the touch of her lips had been like electricity, flavoured strawberry. Her skin, I respected it like authentic silk from the Far East - irreproachable - and it had felt like marble under my fingertips. Every noise from her lips I worshipped with a response from my own.

Don't get me wrong, the raunchy romp under the bedsheets with Maria was glorious while it lasted. There's nothing like the drumming of your heart to make you feel alive.

But there was no romance.

It was meaningless sex.

The aftermath? It's hollow.

You lie there, that roaring hedonistic heat extinguished, the heat escaping your body the only evidence of another's company. I felt like a doused flame.

Sex is an imitation of love; and even if you dress it up with whispered endearments, hand holding and fleeting flirtation of lips, it remains but a parody.

It isn't a fulfilling substitute.

Still I felt there was a gaping hole in chest where love was absent. The hole where wicked tongues, flying fists and loss had blown me open. And my  heart was exposed.

Sex is temporary, but love is eternal.

But that didn't mean I wasn't going to stop trying to plug that gap superficial and swallow pleasures; I was going to cram it with various things until I found the perfect fit. Because a band-aid wasn't enough to patch me up, and sutures couldn't stitch together a hole that mangled and bloody.

And if the thing that eventually corked the hole ended up being a bottle of whiskey? So be it.

A/N - I'm so sorry for the tardiness of updates lately; starting at a new school takes the life out of you, as if a new term doesn't anyway. By the time I get home from school most days I've already been on my feet for ten hours, and my body is drained as well as mind. Also I've been really uninspired because this book is in a really predictable and formulaic shape in my eyes. And A Level is ruthless; it makes GCSE look like a stroll in the park: but I do however enjoy all of my subjects, which makes the burden more bearable.

On a happier note, I've started reading 'The Martian' at JustLettingGo's recommendation ahead of the film, and it is fantastic! I was a third of the way in in only a day! I'm waving my study periods buh-bye, the book is consuming my existence. It's been too long since I've read an unputdownable book (although 'Frankenstein' was pretty good).

Dedication when I'm not dozy.