Five Years Ago...

"Barney! Wait up!" A young boy of about eight cried as he tripped over his tiny feet.

He fell to the forest floor with a small grunt, landing face-first on the sodden grass and dirt. Twigs of varying sizes scratched up his bare hands and arms.

"Well," his brother Barney said impatiently, "you said you could keep up. Remember what you promised me?"

"Maybe."

Barney raised an eyebrow. He smiled, warmth filling his honey-brown eyes, and then he backtracked to his brother and lent a hand. The smaller boy took it gratefully and rose to his feet with his mud-caked sneakers.

"C'mon, Clint. We'll be fine."

Clint stayed quiet, dropping the pair of brothers into a thick silence.

Through the haze of mist and clouds around them, slivers of moonlight shown brightly. There was a gentle breeze in the air which tickled the tree branches and whatever leaves remained. The rest had fallen with the close of summer, now layering upon the ground in a mirage of brown and orange and gold.

Clint stared up into the sky. He watched as the moon, merely a waning crescent, rose higher and higher. It followed him and Barney as they trekked across the untamed land and seemed to taunt them. The moon was constantly changing, and Clint felt like he could definitely relate.

Lately, he'd been in foster home after foster home, each one worse than the last. There would always be some reason he couldn't stay more than a month at most (and that was pretty generous, all things considered). No matter how obscure it was, Clint and Barney were always scowled at and issued another temporary placement, for their social worker knew that it wouldn't last.

"Barney, look at the stars," Clint said.

"Uh-huh I see them."

"You're not looking!"

Barney reluctantly paused and squinted up. "How can you even see them? They're too small."

"But small things are the most important!" Clint insisted. "I mean, look at that one!"

"The square one?"

"No. That one!"

He took Barney's hand and pointed up at an array of stars located near "the square one". Clint grinned his biggest shit-eating grin and giggled.

Barney yawned. "It looks like a fat pear."

"I think it's a dog."

"You think everything's a dog, Clint!" Barney laughed. "That's probably some constellation, y'think?"

The younger boy frowned in confusion. After all, he only had a few years of school before somehow managing to get in a situation like this.

"I — nevermind actually..." Barney trailed off.

Barney quickened his pace, watching his brother copy him. He glanced at the cracked wristwatch he wore, the time reading that it was still in the early morning. Dawn was just barely beginning to break over the horizon, illuminating the sky with flecks of pink.

He gritted his teeth. In just a few hours, someone at the foster home would realize that he and Clint had disappeared in the middle of the night. Whoever it was would call their social worker, argue for several minutes therefore wasting precious time, then they would reach an agreement of not calling the authorities. Barney had to agree — it was definitely a good plan.

"You got the map, Clint?" He asked, once again breaking the lingering silence.

Clint nodded and stopped. He shrugged off his tattered navy backpack and pulled out a thick sheet of beige paper.

The map didn't have any colors printed on it, just appearing in black and white tones. The brothers had printed an image of the local area of their state into the paper at a library inside their town, merely a few blocks away from their old home. Barney unfolded it, smoothing the creases as he went.

"If we're here..." he wondered aloud.

"How'd you know we're there?" Clint asked loudly, pointing at the map.

"Shush, little bro."

"M'kay!"

"But if we're here, then it outta take us another day or two of travel to reach the train depot. Then we can hitch a ride."

Clint puckered his lips. "That sounds bad."

"You gotta better plan? Besides, it's not illegal if you don't get caught."

"M'kay."

Barney slung an arm over his brother's shoulder. "Now c'mon, little bro! We'll be fine."

The day dragged on, and with it, the temperature. The sun was now fully overhead. It basked the grass and the brothers with heat and a bright light that was unbearable to look at. So much for being autumn.

Barney felt his throat get dryer and dryer. However, he tried to not let Clint see him succumbing to the elements. He was the big brother here! It was Barney's job to watch over and take care of his kid brother. But sometimes he wanted to tune into the rational side of him, the oh-so persistent voice screaming, You don't have a plan! What are you going to do once you get on a train? Ride the rails?

Barney snapped out of his thoughts and glanced at Clint, realizing his lips were moving.

"What?" He asked in momentary confusion.

Clint cocked his head. "Do you hear that?"

"Dunno," Barney replied wryly. "What am I listening for?"

The younger boy stayed silent and put a finger to his lips—the universal sign for shut up. 

It took a few seconds for Barney to hear it, but then he realized that he could hear...shouting? And metal scraping? He still held the map in his shaky hands, so Barney examined where he estimated they were. The map showed nothing being nearby except for rocks and patches of forest. A street was about a hundred meters away, give or take a few, but Barney figured they wouldn't be able to hear the mid-day traffic.

A feeling of dread filled him. What if he had guessed their location wrong? Barney realized that he and Clint could be closer to their hometown of Waverly than the train depot.

He increased his pace again, grabbing Clint by the arm ("Hey!")and pulling him forwards, away from the now-unmistakable background noise. Barney felt his heart pounding in his chest at the thought of Waverly, Iowa. The town was full of bad memories, the Barton family being nothing but a mutual whisper in the wind.

"Barney!"

He shook his head. What had once felt like a cool and refreshing breeze now made Barney shiver, the frosty air making his clammy skin feel like a glacier.

"Barney!"

Barney let go of Clint's arm and took a breath. He let his legs buckle out from under him, dropping him into a sitting position on the dirt.

"Just...lemme catch my breath, Clint."

"Here." Clint unzipped his backpack and dug around inside for the bag of half-eaten saltine crackers. The green plastic reflected the sunlight, but he ignored the glow and removed the clip at the top, unfurling the bag and handing a cracker to Barney.

Barney took it and began to nibble on a corner.

"Barney?" Clint said quitely.

His brother made a small noise to show that he was listening, albeit only half-so.

"I-I'm starting to think this was a bad idea. We don't even know what we're doing! We're lost! What if we never make it home?—what if..." what if we die out here? Clint's question died on his lips. "A-and you're sick!"

Barney raised an eyebrow. "I am not sick!"

"Are too!"

"No!

"Yes!" Clint's voice grew louder, echoing through the forest and mixing in with the distant sounds of nature and the strange yelling. "Just look at yourself, sitting here in the mud w-with — I don't even know! A disease!"

Barney let out a humorless chuckle.

"Maybe we should just go back," Clint continued.

"To where? The foster home? We planned this out and you agreed to my rules, remember? We are going to ride a train, out of this stupid town. Maybe even the state."

"What about...the noise?"

"What about it?" Barney asked incredulously. "You're not seriously considering going to investigate that."

Before Clint could say anything more, or persuade his brother to follow along with a new plan, a new voice joined their chorus of arguments and questions without answers:

"Can I help you, lads?"

It belonged to a teenager, perhaps a year or two older than Barney. He had light brown hair that fell to his shoulders, framing a slender face and a thin nose between two eyes matching the color of his hair. Freckles dotted his skin nearly everywhere Clint and Barney looked. However, the bit that stuck out the most was the guy's strange accent — perhaps Australian?

Clint's eyes widened. While only seconds ago he'd wanted to have company other than his brother, he suddenly found himself wishing this stranger would just disappear.

"Um, I heard some yelling," the guy said with his Australian accent. "Are you folks new 'round here?"

"New?" Barney coughed, finding his voice again. "New to what?"

The stranger rolled his eyes at them and turned on his heel.

Clint made a move to follow him, but Barney grabbed his arm again. He mouthed to his younger brother: No. Clint hesitated, then tried to shake off Barney's tight grip.

"If it makes it any better," the stranger called back, "my bow and arrow is back at camp."

"Bow and arrow?" Barney repeated, suddenly feeling quite stupid. "Camp?"

With his brother distracted, Clint shook off Barney's hand and ran after the teenager. Part of him decided that it was a fine decision to run through a forest with a strange guy, a guy who could clearly use a weapon if necessary. The other part of Clint screamed at him to turn around and listen to Barney lecture him for ten minutes on "stranger danger", ignoring the Australian weirdo and continuing with their original plan.

Clint preferred the first option.

Barney sighed and cursed under his breath. (He was kind of glad Clint was so far ahead of him, as his words of choice were certainly colorful.)

The trio walked for awhile. Twigs and loose branches snapped under their feet. Small rocks, actually more like pebbles, had a silver glow bouncing out, the sun coating everything in its harsh light. Eventually, they emerged from the tedious amount of forest and greenery and into a spacious clearing.

Clint gasped.

Large sheets of red and white stripes lay on the ground. The canvas stretched out over the grass for at least a hundred feet, give or take a few. Next to it, Clint and Barney spotted several stakes sticking out of the ground, marking the diameter and dimensions of the biggest sheet available.

More people—the youngest looking barely Barney's age—were gathered around. One of them held a black sledgehammer and was pointing at the stakes with a determined glaze in his eyes.

The first person to notice the boys was a rather big bellied, plump, and short man. He had a top hat in his hands along with a black coat lined with gold buttons. A layer of sweat gleamed on his forehead, although Barney didn't think he contributed a lot to the project going on behind him.

The man frowned and made his way over, his black, beady eyes scanning over Clint and Barney as if they were completely alien to him.

The Australian teenager had already wandered off into the crowd, bored.

"Welcome, my friends," the plump man man said after a moment's pause, "to your new family. Welcome...to Carson's Carnival of Traveling Wonders!"

The only word that Barney heard was "traveling". He'd wanted to ride his way out of Waverly and move on. He didn't know what he was doing, nor was a plan assembled in his jumbled brain. However, maybe this was his golden ticket...

Barney looked at his brother. He looked at who he assumed was Carson. And then, he grinned without looking back.