Chapter Text
Clint Barton watches himself help Loki escape a collapsing research campus and almost doesn't believe it's happening. BIt's just plain surreal. He's been locked out of the loop by his own body, only to watch it act in ways that aren't him, goddamnit, aren't him and never could be.
He thinks: This is it. I've finally cracked.
"Yes," says the voice of a young girl who wasn't there a minute ago.
Clint jumps, then turns around.
The speaker smiles and waves with her fingers. From anyone else, it'd be awkward, but she's got a strange aura of friendly and dangerous. It makes the finger wave look like her best possible way of saying hello.
She has mismatched eyes and one hand holds an empty leash. Boat lights, he thinks, and she winks and the hair on one side of her head grows while the hair on the other side disappears.
"But you knew that already. Are you a sidewalk crack or a window crack?"
Clint stares. "You want to try that one again?"
"What kind of cracked? Sidewalk or window?"
"I don't know," he tells her, because it's the honest answer and she's not making a lick of goddamn sense.
"If you're a sidewalk, you'll stay that way forever," the girl says. She nods once, and blue smoke swirls through the air, spelling words he can't read. "But windows get fixed."
"Usually we replace windows when we fix them."
Which is, he realizes with a dawning horror as he watches himself help Loki out of a car, exactly what happened.
She only smiles. "Are you a sidewalk or a window? You'd better pick one. Or maybe both."
Broken forever, or broken and replaced?
"Not great options," he says. "I don't want to be replaced."
"You can be put back," the girl says. She traces a line in the air, and fish and feathers dance after her finger.
"Put back cracked?"
The girl looks a little sad as she tells him, "Mr. Mirror, you were already cracked."
"It was just a crack I could live with."
She nods excitedly. "Thank you for listening. I have to go find Barnabas now."
"Tell Barnabas I said hi."
She smiles over her shoulder, and says, "I will! I'll tell him you said—" and then she makes a noise that sounds exactly like glass breaking.
And then she's gone.
And Clint is alone with himself, Loki, and whatever Loki is trying to do.