Johnny & Clint | Late Monday Morning

[x-hawkeye.livejournal.com]

After a game of Ultimate, Clint asks Johnny to teach him how to do a backflip.


Clint dropped onto the bleachers near the basketball court and laughed. "Man, that was awesome - the way you made that last catch. I wish somebody'd been here with a camera or something."

Johnny nodded from where he stood. "I think it was the part where I did the flip and then caught the ball mid air."

"How did you do that? The flipping thing, I mean. That is ridiculously cool," Clint said, still grinning.

He shrugged in reply. "You just do this," he said and demonstrated, jumping as high as he could and curling his legs over when he reached the highest point of the arc and landed back on the asphalt. He paused for a moment thinking and then said "The guys in my parkour club had to learn it in a couple of steps, though. I think I know what they did, but," he eyed the ground, "we might need some mats? The ground's too damn hard and I don't want to like, break you."

"Ha," Clint said, laughing. "Yeah, having a healing factor would be handy for learning things like that. Wanna head to the gym? Cause man, I gotta try that."

"Awesome. Let's go!"

With the mats set up in the gym, Johnny looked over at his new student. "There's two bits to a backflip, okay? Not freaking out when you fall backwards and then actually doing it. But you need to be able to handle falling and rolling backwards first."

"Like falling the right way and stuff in self-defense, only backwards?" Clint asked, tilting his head to the side. They'd worked on things like that, sort of. He'd done more stuff with Logan, of course, but not really anything like falling.

Johnny nodded. "Exactly. So... do you think you can do this?" He stood on the little step next to the mats and tipped over backwards, rolling when he landed and came back up onto his feet. "I mean, without flailing because..." He shrugged. "I mean, there's a mat, so you can't hurt yourself or anything."

Clint eyed the mat, then shrugged and said, "I can probably do it. It's the falling backwards that's kind of gonna wig me out, though." He stepped up onto the step and let himself tip back. It wasn't as bad as all that, though he did tense up before impact. Mostly, he just had to keep telling himself the mat was there - this was no worse than those trust exercises he'd had to do during freshman PE last year. At least he was guaranteed nobody would drop him.

Johnny grinned. "Dude. Nice work. Want to try that one or two more times before we try an actual flip? You probably don't need all the weenie steps in the middle that the others had." He reached out and gave Clint a hand up.

"Cool," Clint said, laughing a little. He managed to not tense up at all on his third fall, just letting himself sort of land with a oof. "Okay," he said, standing up and brushing himself off out of habit more than anything else. "What's the next thing that's not a weenie step?"

While he'd been doing that, Johnny had been setting up the thicker, softer mats and another step next to them. "Stand here," he said. "Jump as high as you can and then - flip over backwards. It shouldn't matter if you land on your ass because there are mats. You'll be fine. I learned on asphalt and I'm fine."

"So it's basically like doing a backflip off the side of a pool or something," Clint said, nodding. He'd done that plenty of times before. Just... there'd always been water. Now there were mats. Standing up on the second step, he took a slow breath and flexed his fingers before forcing his shoulders to relax. This was going to be fine, just like over the summer at the pool.

Five seconds later saw Clint laid out on the mat, blinking up at the ceiling. He'd made it about halfway through the flip before crash landing. "Ow." He probably needed to actually execute the flip faster. Maybe. "Seriously, ow. I think I crushed my own shoulder." He wheezed a little, but wasn't really any worse for wear.

Johnny's danger sense had flared as Clint had flipped. "Oh shit! Dude. Are you okay?" He helped Clint up and looked anxiously at his shoulder. "I think you're okay. You can move that, right?"

Moving his shoulder around in slow circles, Clint nodded. "Yeah, I'm good." He stretched his arm out over his head and winced a little, but there'd be no lasting damage. He'd just be sore tomorrow. "Alright, so... yeah. Let me try that again."

"Good. Do it faster this time, okay?"

"Okay," Clint said, glad his thought had been right so far as speed was concerned. It was just a matter of doing it fast enough this time. Standing up on the step again, he frowned just a bit, then closed his eyes. He could remember where Johnny was standing, he could remember where the other mat and step were - he had a really good sense of where everything was. So he tried again, jumping and attempting to flip backwards.

Clint got most of the way through it this time, his feet hitting the mat before he overbalanced and fell on his ass.

"Whoa! Dude! Bro! Dude! That was freaking awesome. You actually landed on your feet on your second go. Want to try it without the step, just on the sparring mats? I mean, these thick mats are really spongy. It's hard to get a good landing on them, and you're picking it up super fast. Like, freaky fast." The sparring mats left the floor slightly padded. It really didn't hurt that much when you faceplanted on them.

"Let me try it again off the step. I barely managed to hit that before falling over..." Standing up, Clint brushed himself off again and headed for the step. Several tries later, he felt confident enough to walk to the sparring mats. "I'm not sure I can get enough lift to manage this just off the floor..."

"I think you can. You've got more incentive to do it properly on this floor..." Johnny said and trailed off, looking at Clint curiously. Nah, it wasn't one of his powers. But they'd only been working on the flip for like, half an hour. Topaz and the guys in his old parkour group sure as hell wouldn't have been at this stage this quickly and nor would Matt or most of the freaking X - men. "Look, this is just a hunch and well, I'm probably wrong, but do you have like, I don't know, a bit of super agility in addition to your freaky-ass eyes?" he asked.

Clint paused and frowned a little. "I dunno. Logan made me do some tests. He and Mister Summers think I've got some spatial awareness thing. Would agility go along with that?"

"I dunno. Maybe? If I was a full X-Man, rather than just a trainee, I'd take you to the Danger Room and have it throw shit at you. See what you do. I don't know how we'd test it, other than that." Johnny shrugged. "It's like, you're learning this stuff super fast but, no offence, you're also not quite in my league so... How do you even test someone for that?"

"Well, Logan and Mister Summers have been testing my spatial awareness in the Danger Room. I'd assume that if they wanted to test the theory that I might have enhanced agility or something, they'd run me through basic agility sessions and compare my results at the end to other people's." Clint shrugged. "I could ask Mister Summers."

Johnny nodded eagerly. "Good idea. Tell him that I said I'd pair you on the obstacle courses and things, if it turns out that you do have it."

"Cool," Clint said, holding out his fist so Johnny could bump it. "Now let's see how much incentive this floor actually gives me."