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Silence had always been the loudest sound Francis Barton knew.
It wasn't the absence of noise—not really. It was the presence of everything else: the ghosts that whispered in the spaces between heartbeats, the phantom echoes of laughter that would never belong to him, the weight of existing when he shouldn't have to exist at all.
Silence was a living thing in Ultron's world, a creature that wrapped around his throat and squeezed until breathing felt like rebellion.
Tonight, the silence pressed harder than usual.
Francis sat alone on the rooftop of a crumbling building—one of the few structures Ultron's machines hadn't yet decided to reclaim—his hood pulled low over his face like armor that protected nothing.
Above him, the sky shimmered with impossible colors, fractures in reality itself where the multiverse bled through like watercolors on wet paper.
Somewhere beyond that cosmic canvas, in dimensions stacked upon dimensions like pages in a book he'd never be allowed to read, other versions of his parents existed.
Happy versions.
Clint Barton and Bobbi Morse—Hawkeye and Mockingbird—Mom and Dad — out there right now, carving pumpkins with children who wore their smiles.
Handing out candy to kids in costume.
Telling dad jokes that made their teenagers groan. Living the kind of mundane, beautiful Halloween that belonged to a world that remembered what normal meant.
But none of those children were him.
In all the infinite permutations of reality, across every Earth where his parents found each other and built something that resembled a life, there was only one Francis Barton.
One child born into a world where love had been a casualty of war, where his mother's last breath had been mechanical, where his father's final arrow had been fired in desperation at an enemy that couldn't feel pain.
He was the anomaly.
The singular tragedy in an infinite sea of happy endings.
Francis pulled his knees to his chest, making himself smaller, as if he could fold into the nothing he sometimes wished he was. Halloween. The irony wasn't lost on him—a holiday about masks and monsters, about pretending to be something you're not.
He'd been wearing a mask his whole life, stitched together from survival and stubbornness, playing dress-up as someone who could carry the weight of his parents' legacy without breaking.
But he was so goddamn tired of pretending.
The city below hummed with Ultron's corrupted heartbeat—machines clicking and whirring in their endless patrol, the technological parasite that had hollowed out humanity and worn its skin.
This was Francis's inheritance: a world of cold metal and colder purpose, where he led small pockets of resistance with his parents' DNA screaming through his veins, telling him to fight, survive, resist.
Always watching.
Always leading.
Always being the answer to the question no one should have had to ask: What if the heroes won?
What if the Barton kid grew up with them instead of ghosts?
What if love became a story he only knew secondhand, passed down through old Avengers files and corrupted video feeds?
What if, what if, what if—the refrain of his entire existence.
Francis tilted his head back, letting the fractured starlight wash over his face. Somewhere out there, another Clint Barton was probably making terrible Halloween puns.
Another Bobbi Morse was probably stealing candy from her kids' bags when they weren't looking.
Another version of them was tucking their children into bed, safe and warm and alive.
And he was here.
The sole Francis Barton.
The only one.
Born from his mother's last defiant breath and his father's desperate hope, before Ultron's machines tore them apart and left him with nothing but their names and the impossible task of being enough.
He wasn't enough.
He'd never been enough.
But he was here, and that had to count for something.
Even if the silence said otherwise.
Even if every Halloween reminded him of the life he'd never know, of the parents who existed everywhere except here, of the childhood that should have been his birthright but instead became his ghost.
Francis Barton pulled his hood tighter and stood, joints aching with exhaustion that went bone-deep. Below, his people were waiting. Above, the multiverse mocked him with its infinite possibilities.
And in between—in this singular, broken Earth—he kept breathing.
Because silence might be loud, but he'd learned to scream back.
Even if no one was left to hear.