Two Thousand Times One, Chapter 2
Chapter 2
The Avengers who have remained in New York are called into SHIELD to give a readiness report. It’s been pushed back a month already due to Tony’s schedule, but even with the advance notice, Bruce can’t calm himself completely with the knowledge that he’s entering SHIELD’s territory.
It’s the animal part of his brain that categorizes things that way, Bruce thinks to himself. Just instinct. All the same, walking through the door feels more illicit than crossing an international border; more deadly, too.
On one side, Tony is on a cell phone half the time, but otherwise is in good spirits, relatively. He keeps throwing asides into his patter about all the things he ought to be doing other than being here, but Bruce has learned to read between the lines, and Tony is about as happy as he can be on an average day.
On the other side, or more often drawing slightly behind them, Clint isn’t doing as well. Whenever Bruce glances at him, the archer looks disproportionately uncomfortable in his own agency, expression blank but unwelcoming and giving off a ‘don’t talk to me, don’t even look at me’ vibe.
The meeting isn’t great. The SHIELD agent they’re meeting with introduces himself as Sitwell, a mentee of Agent Coulson; that, and Clint’s sincere welcome and quiet approval should be enough to smooth things over. But something about the guy sets off those same instincts in the back of Bruce’s mind. He doesn’t let his guard down for a second while Agent Sitwell is with them, can’t ignore the deep growling below his conscious thoughts.
It doesn’t help that Tony makes it a point to be provocative. On and on about how all the information they’re passing on could’ve gone through email, and how important his time- and Bruce’s time!- is. Does Sitwell even have clearance for information on the Avengers?
It’s almost a relief when Tony gets tired and declares the meeting over. The longer they remained at SHIELD, the tenser Clint had gotten, and the more the beast in Bruce’s head had felt changed in. Bruce follows Tony out over Sitwell’s protests, feeling more tired than he has in weeks.
As soon as they get outside, Tony declares that he wants pizza. Bruce finds himself swept up in Tony’s wake, which was probably intentional on Tony’s part. Clint’s face is gray and he doesn’t look like he cares what’s happening around him. Bruce makes it a point to nudge against him as Tony’s chauffeur takes them around the city, and he thinks that Clint may start breathing easier from the contact.
When they arrive, Bruce is instantly comforted. The pizza place could exist anywhere in America, except that the interior is tiny, like most Manhattan restaurants. They find a booth, though, and Tony must slip someone something because their food is out lightning fast.
Bruce picks at his food. The day feels dark, even though it’s just a bit overcast. At his side, Clint is looking out the window. Though their sides brush in the small booth, he seems a hundred miles away. Unreachable.
Across from him, Tony is very disgruntled.
“What’s wrong with you two? You’re like a pair of thunderclouds following me around, only cuter.” When this fails to get a rise, he grumbles more.
Bruce just shrugs in response. The way Clint’s being silent, Bruce has a feeling that talking would push him even further away. At least if he remains quiet as well, Clint isn’t alone.
Eventually, Tony declares that they’re hopeless and pulls out his phone. They make it through half a pizza and a bucket of wings in the awkward air of people who know they should be conversing, but have nothing to say.
Then, Bruce feels something touch his arm. He looks down to find a napkin with tic-tac-toe board, an X already drawn in, being nudged at his elbow. There’s a hint of something in Clint’s eyes when Bruce meets them; a wry apology, perhaps, or the casual optimism of someone who’s not hoping too hard.
Bruce takes the pen he’s being offered and scratches an O.
Tony notices a few games later. The surprise that flies across his face is simple and profound. “Hey! Recalling the classics, are we? Let me play!”
“Can’t play three-person,” Clint replies quietly. It’s the first thing he’s said since “Hey” this morning.
Tony snorts. “Plebe.”
What follows is an extremely technical and absolutely stupid debate about three-way tic-tac-toe methodology. Bruce and Tony argue about how many dimensions they can add to the game while Clint scribbles on several napkins, grinning slightly every time one of the scientists comes out with something obviously ridiculous. They’ve reached the point where Tony is threatening to throw a fry across the table when Clint slides a napkin between them and sits back, arms crossed smugly.
Tony and Bruce lean in as one, shoving plates aside in mutual intellectual trances.
“Barton… I may have been wrong about you,” Tony declares solemnly. “I’ll bet you did graduate high school.”
“GED,” Clint says sarcastically, raising an eyebrow.
“This is brilliant,” Bruce murmurs, already unconsciously making notations beside Clint’s work on the napkin.
“Thanks doc, but, it’s only math.”
Bruce doesn’t hear anything beyond the elegant solution before him, but Tony laughs loudly enough to turn heads.
“Aww, Legolas, we’re gonna have to start calling you Cupid if you keep handing out love letters like this!”
Bruce doesn’t even notice the conversation going on over his head, but by the time he looks up Tony’s face is red with laughter and Clint is glowering. He touches Clint’s leg under the table, and the glower deepens as Clint looks back out the window.
Bruce smiles, though; it’s the most alive Clint has looked in a while. And when they leave, Clint smiles at him, a real, full smile, when they step outside and the sun has broken through the clouds.
~ ~ * ~ ~
He doesn’t get so much as a whisper of warning. Bruce’s instinct just go off one day, and he’s suddenly hyper-aware of the boundaries of his lab, and that someone has crossed into them. Suddenly, he knows just how long Clint has been playing on an old GameBoy on the couch, though he didn’t notice him enter, and he knows that Natasha is staring at the back of his head.
“When did you get here?” Clint asks. He doesn’t sound as welcoming as Bruce would have expected.
“Today. And I’m leaving today.” She pauses pointedly.
“Don’t worry about him,” Clint says, “he’s in a science zone, he can’t hear a word we’re saying.”
Bruce swallows. Clint knows how he is about people in his space.
“Something fishy’s going on in D.C. Rogers and Fury want you there.”
She’s terse, and succinct. Bruce’s insides tighten, though externally he appears just as relaxed as before.
“Fishy like how?”
“Fishy like I want you with me.”
There’s silence for a good minute. Bruce can’t read anything in it. For all that he’s gotten better at reading Clint, there is a whole other side to the man that he hasn’t the opportunity or the desire to get to know. Agent Barton is foreign to Bruce, distant for good reason. That’s the person Natasha knows, the one she’s no doubt reading like a book right now.
In the back of Bruce’s mind, anger simmers. Someone is trespassing on his territory.
“It’s better if I stay in New York. You might need someone at HQ. And Stark and Banner are here.”
“It’s a good strategic move,” Natasha says quietly.
“Mm.”
“And that’s not why you’re staying.”
More silence. Bruce types something. He doesn’t know what.
“Fix it,” Natasha says at last, and Clint mumbles an agreement. Natasha leaves without saying a word to Bruce.
Ten minutes later, Bruce reaches a stopping point in his work and disengages. Clint is sitting up on the couch when he turns around, watching him. He’s entirely in the moment, not hazy-eyed at all. Waiting.
“Got any opinions?” he asks.
“You knew I was listening,” Bruce states. The question is implied.
“You’re an Avenger. If something’s up, you deserve to know.” Clint’s gaze is level. There’s no hint of either familiar warmth or his oft-present distraction: he’s all business. It’s surprisingly comforting.
“What’s going on?”
“No idea. If it’s got Nat spooked, it’s not good. Let’s lay low. You get called into SHIELD, tell them you’re sick.”
Bruce doesn’t get contacted by SHIELD often, but Clint’s words are firm. His certainty and calmness comfort Bruce’s nerves, which are twitchy in the wake of the Widow’s appearance.
“What about you?” he asks.
“They already know I’m sick,” Clint says wryly. He gets up. He makes a noise like his body is old and sore, but his fingers secret the GameBoy into non-existence as deftly as a magician. “I’ll fill Tony in. See if he can manage to gather intelligence quietly for once.”
Bruce stands as well, too fast. Clint watches him warily as he approaches, hesitates, reaches out awkwardly.
Clint takes his hand and Bruce doesn’t care that it’s awkward, or that they stand like that, squared off, a foot and a half apart, until Clint nods once and lets go, walks away. It’s enough that Clint reached back.
~ ~ * ~ ~
It’s a Thursday afternoon, and they’re on the couch in the lounge watching reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. An unusual pizza, about eight feet long and a foot wide, lies demolished on the table, along with a selection of disgusting drinks from the health bar in the kitchen. A box of pastries from a bakery in Midtown has been emptied, scattering crumbs across the table and, occasionally, onto the floor.
Bruce has a hand twined with his, and another twisted through his hair, and Clint’s warm weight cuddled close. It’s been the best day he can remember in a long time.
Clint’s phone beeps, but he ignores it for a minute until he sluggishly lets go of Bruce’s hand to reach for it. A moment later, he groans.
“I’ve got to go. Friend needs a consult.”
Bruce opens his eyes; he hadn’t realized they’d closed, but as blissful as he feels, it’s somehow not an issue. “How long?” he mumbles.
“Should be quick.” Clint drops a kiss to his neck, then lingers. Bruce hums as Clint kisses higher, gently, before burying his face in Bruce’s hair. “Mm, I’ll come back quick. Promise.”
“You’d better.”
Bruce doesn’t remember anything past that, but he wakes up an hour later, and a blanket has been draped over him. His skin is tingling, tickling, almost, and it’s getting in the way of the drowsiness he’d been so enjoying.
Eventually, he’s twitching enough that he makes himself stand up from his warm pocket on the couch and shake to get rid of it. More animal instincts, for sure, because Bruce finds himself looking around the room, missing something.
What could make this go away? he wonders. Immediately, his brain returns a reply: more cuddling.
Bruce lays back down under the blanket, because no better options present themselves, and analyzes. He’s felt skin-hunger before, during the long years he was on the run. He’d gotten so used to it that it became normal, unnoticed.
But he’s spent a lot of time with Clint recently, much of it filled with touching and kissing. Even when they just eat meals together, or share the couch in the lounge to chat, they like to be close together. And when they’re close, Bruce shakes, like a kid kissing someone for the first time.
He’s sensed something of that skittishness, that newness to intimacy, from Clint as well, but from a darker place than merely long loneliness. Each of Bruce’s touches or quiet words overwrites something inside Clint. Bruce knows it from the way Clint reacts to others, like he’s steeling himself for a threat that never quite shows. He doesn’t know why Clint chose to him, months ago, decided he was trustworthy and capable enough to offer support and healing, but he’s grateful.
When Clint returns, late and tired-looking, Bruce waves off his apologies. He earns a laugh out of the SHIELD agent by tucking him under a blanket, but Clint settles into his side with a lazy smile, and Bruce’s skin stops itching at last.
~ ~ * ~ ~
A nudge to his shoulder- more like a shove- breaks Bruce out of his programming haze.
“You awake in there?” Clint says loudly. Bruce spins in his chair and finds the archer crossing his arms. “I was afraid you’d got dragged into cyberspace.”
Bruce shakes his head a little, wincing at the stiffness in his neck. He checks the time: two in the afternoon. Not bad for a work session, though… he can’t remember eating lunch. Right on time, his stomach grumbles heavily.
Clint chuckles. “Think you’re ready for a break?” he teases. He takes Bruce’s elbow to drag him to his feet, and doesn’t let go for a moment, until Bruce thoughtlessly glances down at his hand. Clint releases him quickly and takes a step back. “We could get that Indian food you liked,” he continues, shoving a hand into his pocket casually.
Bruce’s skin feels colder where Clint’s not touching it. He shivers, wishing he’d thought to wear a long shirt to the lab. But the weather report was so nice this morning…
He blinks, remembering JARVIS’s wake-up call. A moderate day, with highs in the early eighties and light cloud coverage. Low humidity. Bruce had looked out his window at the clear air and smiled, even though he hadn’t gone outside in- weeks!
“Let’s… go to the park?” he suggests, stuttering as he realizes that he and Clint have never gone anywhere together besides different rooms in the Tower and the pizza place Tony took them to after their disastrous interview with SHIELD. Normally they stick to Bruce’s lab and the communal lounge, and Bruce’s living room when he wants tea.
Clint looks like he’s having the same thoughts. “...Sure,” he says eventually, looking uncertain. “You want… hot dogs?”
“I want sunlight,” Bruce admits, more earnestly than he’d expected.
Ever since he realized why he can’t get enough of touching Clint, his time on the run has been more on Bruce’s mind than ever. It’s been so long since his life was anything more than a struggle to stay calm and under the radar. Now that he’s relatively safe at Stark Tower as a member of the Avengers, he hasn’t really let go of the old patterns, Bruce realizes. He’s stayed in the Tower, his island of safety, and can’t even remember the last time he appreciated a breeze over his face!
“Let’s go for a walk,” he decides.
Clint is taken aback by his intensity, but nods. “I’ll change into something- better.” He inspects his usual daytime wear of a black t-shirt and black pants and smiles a little when Bruce huffs.
A few minutes later, they’re on the street walking uptown. The Tower is only a few moments from Central Park, but even before their shoes hit grass, Bruce can feel his spirits rising. There’s a breeze coming from the North, and Bruce’s keen sense of smell can pick up all sorts of nature scents that he hasn’t smelled for too long. Also, hot dogs.
Clint, now properly clad in jeans and a plaid button-down, buys four hot dogs as soon as they reach the park. He loads two up with mustard and relish, and dribbles ketchup on the others, grimacing as he does so. “The ruin of a perfectly good dog.”
Bruce frowns. “Then why-”
Clint scoops up the two ‘ruined’ hot dogs and places them in Bruce’s hands.
“I just take a bit of mustard, or some red pepper if they have it.”
“Trust me doc, this is how you like it.” Clint winked, managing to smile despite a disgusted glance down at Bruce’s meal.
They head into the park. For a while, there are roads with families and joggers and bikers and cars, and Clint takes pleasure in pointing out people who aren’t dressed for the weather, or who have cute dogs. A few minutes further on there are fields where people are sunning themselves or playing frisbee. Beyond that, the crowds thin out, and there are paths through trees and tall grasses.
Bruce discovers that he has consumed both hot dogs, ketchup and all, and enjoyed every bite. He gives Clint a suspicious look, which makes the archer clutch his gut, tipping back his head and laughing to the sky. Bruce watches him, pleasantly shocked, because he’s never seen more than a hearty chuckle out of Clint.
Maybe the sun really will do them good.
They walk through a forest, where the paths are carefully tended and the wildlife fearless. Bruce can hear and smell the small animals around, the richness of the vegetation, and his basic understanding of ecology and landscape planning fills in a mental map of the area. He tells Clint about it, how many people must have put so much work for so long into making this place free and wild and effortless, and how much upkeep it requires, for nature to flourish at the heart of mankind’s devastation on its environment. He segues into the ways humans have changed even the shape of Manhattan, and ends up at global warming.
Eventually, they exit the forest, and it isn’t until someone gives the two of them an amused, sideways look that Bruce realizes that he’s been rambling about earth sciences as they walked through the Ramble. He promptly stops talking and feels a blush creep up his cheeks.
“What?” Clint asks. “So what did the climate change panel decide?” Then he squints at Bruce’s face. “Trouble?” he mutters, demeanor going cold and aware all at once.
“No!” Bruce insists. He hesitates, but putting Clint at ease is more important. “I just… forgot that where we just went is a famous cruising spot.”
After a beat, Clint starts laughing again. Bruce breathes out.
After the Ramble, they reach a long walkway filled with portrait artists and musicians, people enjoying the outdoors, or more often their phones. Since they don’t have a planned route, Bruce chooses a direction at random and Clint follows him, once again keeping an eye out for dogs and fashion faux pas. And then Clint’s sharp eye is caught by something completely different.
“I’m getting it,” he insists. Bruce shakes his head, shying away from the stall owner’s amused look. “Think there’s an Avengers discount?”
There isn’t, but the souvenir only costs three dollars, so Clint doesn’t complain. As they continue walking, Bruce glimpses once again the graphic of the Avengers reimagined as cats, and shakes his head again.
“This is amazing, I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Clint lets him know.
“It’s called taste,” Bruce murmurs regretfully.
They keep walking and come across a wide meadow with several baseball fields built on. A few have games going, and by mutual agreement Clint and Bruce find seats not too far from one, in the shade of a copse of trees. They watch the game while Clint eggs Bruce into an argument about how accurate the Catvengers and their uniforms are, or which other animals each of their teammates ought to be.
The breeze carries over the sounds of other humans being carefree, safe, enjoying their lives. Above them, branches ruffle and sway. Birds cross the wide blue sky, and a squirrel stops a few feet from their bench, looking up at Bruce as though a treat might not go amiss. A wedge of sun reaches them through the trees and Clint rolls his sleeves up past his elbows, exposing a farmer’s tan bad enough that it’s Bruce’s turn to laugh out loud, at least until he realizes that he’s already gotten burnt.
Once the baseball game wraps up, they head back to the Tower. The day has cooled off slightly and a few more clouds have blown in, bringing a bit of tension into the air that hints at a rainstorm in the near future. Bruce tilts his head back and soaks in the weakening rays, relishing the heat of his skin that speaks of nature’s punishment for such a beautiful day.
On the way back through the Ramble, Bruce takes Clint's hand. Clint snorts and snickers childishly, but doesn’t let go.
~ ~ * ~ ~
When the Avengers get summoned into SHIELD, Bruce tells them he’s sick. It’s an excuse he’s used before, knowing that everyone involved will let it go for the sake of their building’s infrastructure. Tony sends a message along that he’s busy, ignoring any follow-up, and calls Bruce and Clint to his lab.
When they get there, he’s staring at one of his screens in the air. Something in his stillness tells Bruce that this is the moment they’ve been waiting for.
“You good for this, Hawkeye?” Tony asks solemnly.
“Locked and loaded.”
“You sure?”
Clint stares at Tony with one of his half-smirks until Tony backs down. “You’re the expert. You going in suited up, or casual?”
“We got any chatter?”
“Something’s going on in D.C.” Tony waves a hand and long-distance ground photographs hover in the air. “Shots fired at the Triskelion, something exploded.”
Clint squints at the images. “Normally I’d go in plainclothed for this, but I suppose I haven’t been keeping a uniform at SHIELD lately.”
Tony grins, displaying his teeth. “Lucky you. I’ve got something new cooked up.”
While they go over Clint’s augmented gear, Bruce works at hacking a few relevant feeds that he and Tony had red-flagged weeks ago. One of them, an extensive but seemingly redundant communication channel, is alight for the first time. He points JARVIS at it, and in a matter of seconds the encrypted message is readable. “Out of the shadows, into the light?”
Tony and Clint stop talking and turn to the screen, just as the final word of the transmission is translated. “Hydra,” they read together.
“Out of the shadows,” Clint whispers. “Does that mean-?”
“Change of plans,” Tony says briskly. “No way we’re sending you in, it’s gonna be a slaughter.”
“Like hell,” Clint spits, rounding on Tony. “I’m not walking away, I’ve got friends in the New York office. I’ve got teammates there!”
“And you might find out that they’re not your friends at all,” Tony retorts. “Or you’ll have to watch them get gunned down. I’m not gonna be the guy that sends a mentally unbalanced Avenger-”
Clint takes a step forward and gets right in Tony’s face. His hands are shaking. “If you’re so worried about what Cap’s going to think of you, you can just tell him this whack job snuck out from under your brown little nose to do his fucking job.”
With that, he snatches the uniform and toolbelt Tony made for him and stalks out of the lab.
“You didn’t have to do that,” comments Bruce dryly, after a beat.
Tony turns back to his screen. “Barton doesn’t need coddling. And he’s right, those are his people in there. I’d think less of him if he didn’t go in.”
“He has PTSD.”
“You know what’s worse than trauma?” Tony snaps, spinning to face Bruce. “Dying. I’ve had that choice before, I’ll probably have it again, and I’d choose living every time. The SHIELD agents in there, Hydra’s not gonna offer them a choice.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s obligated to risk his own health-”
“And you wouldn’t go in if it were one of us? No, never mind, I didn’t mean that.” Tony shakes his head, leaning his weight on his hands on the counter and slowing cracking the knuckles. “To you it’s a logical puzzle, you’d weigh your options. To Barton- Cap- for them it’s a question of morality: our people are in danger. Simple as that.”
“And for you?” Bruce is a lot more relaxed now that he’s figured Tony’s being confrontational out of fear and concern. “Is it a logical question for you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Tony grunts.
“Because it’s the best place for you to be, for now. Are you telling me your suit isn’t as ready for action as it can be?”
Tony squints at Bruce over his shoulder. “I thought you weren’t that type of doctor,” he says suspiciously.
Bruce smirks, then cracks the knuckles in his hands. “Point me somewhere.”
“You’re on D.C. I’ll follow New York. JARVIS can handle everything else.”
The hack and scavenge the internet in silence until JARVIS pulls up Clint’s contact feeds. He’s made it into the lobby at SHIELD’s 40th Street location, and although everyone in the video feed off Clint’s sunglasses seems tense, there are no obvious signs of catastrophe.
“Agent Barton,” they hear, and Clint turns to see a young agent approaching. She reaches out and Clint’s hand appears from the bottom of the frame to shake hers.
“Agent Bayraktar,” he replies familiarly. Bruce twitches. “Why the long faces around here?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the agent says dismissively. “It’s above my paygrade. I’ll be your escort today.”
Clint follows her. They pass through security without question. Tony and Bruce both note the way a guard or two flinch at the sight of an Avenger in full gear walking through the facility.
“This doesn’t look good,” Bruce mutters. Tony grunts in agreement.
In the elevator, the SHIELD agent moves, and the video fuzzes temporarily. When it clears up, in barely enough time for Tony to squawk at JARVIS to reboot the feed, Clint has a knife to her throat.
“-destroy any bugs, I swear,” Bayraktar is saying frantically. “Clint, I’m trusting you because you’re an Avenger. Hydra is loose within SHIELD. I don’t know how high it goes, but at least to level seven-”
“How do I know you’re not them?” Clint demands.
“You don’t,” the woman replies. Her hands are up, palms forward, in the classic unthreatening pose, and she holds her chin high over Clint’s weapon. “I don’t care if you believe me. You can kill me right now, as long as you get the word out to the other Avengers.”
She stares right into the camera, right into Clint’s glasses. Bruce shivers.
The elevator dings.
“Okay Jamila,” Clint says. “I believe you.” He spins his knife into a sheath on his side and is looking forward again when the doors open.
They make it to an empty conference room before using the bug device again. Since it doesn’t knock out Tony’s bug, it doesn’t fill him with confidence, which he conveys to Clint.
“That doesn’t look SHIELD-grade,” Clint comments, nodding at the keychain-shaped tool Jamila is tucking back into her belt.
“Fresh out of R&D,” she comments, raising one eyebrow. “Lucky me.”
“Tony doesn’t approve.”
Jamila blinks. “Tony-” She takes a deep breath, and her shoulders fall. “The Avengers know?”
“We’re on it. Can you tell me anything else you know?”
While Jamila’s filling Clint in on her recon- apparently SHIELD agents make it a habit of creeping on their colleagues, in the spirit of spy-agency camaraderie, and today she’d overheard more than she bargained for- Bruce is unraveling a flurry of communications. Cold settles over his body.
“The Hub is down,” Bruce announces to a suddenly silent room. “The Vault has been opened. The Treehouse is down. The Sandbox is… gone.”
No one can reply.
“What’s wrong?” Jamila’s warm gold skin has paled to a sandy shade at whatever expression Clint is making.
“How do we get everyone out?” Clint says shakily.
“Clint, what happened?” Jamila insists.
There’s a banging on the door. Jamila spins toward the sound, but in an instant she’s composed again. She points at a vent in the corner of the room. The gaze of the camera waves from side to side dizzyingly, and Clint gestures her behind him. Jamila steps close and jabs her finger at Clint’s chest, right above the subtle, deep blue stylized A that is embroidered on the uniform of every Avenger. Her dark green gaze is as clear as it was when she told Clint he could kill her.
Clint turns and scrambles silently for the vent.
The exchange takes less than five seconds, but it’s enough time for the pounding on the door to increase. By the time Clint is in the ceiling and resting the vent cover back in place, the agents on the other side have become incensed enough to burst into the room, nearly barrelling over Jamila. There are five of them, with more visible in the hallway, and they all have either handguns or semi-automatic weapons out of their holsters.
“Where is Hawkeye?” one of them demands. He’s dressed in full tactical gear, and he towers over Jamila in her standard-issue SHIELD jumpsuit.
“Hitting the head,” she answers. “What the hell is this about?”
It’s a good performance, Bruce thinks, startled but innocent.
It’s not good enough. A second agent puts his hand to his ear, then raises his handgun and shoots Jamila through the chest.
“Stay where you are, Barton!” Tony shouts. The video feed shudders, but no sound comes through. Something moving right below the frame looks like Clint’s hand covering his own mouth.
“Spread out on this floor, search elevators and stairwells,” one of the agents barks. “There’s a window here; I want eyes on the outside of the building. We have a kill order, gentlemen. Let’s get to it.”
“You need to move, Clint,” Bruce urges quietly. “They’re going to figure it out soon. You have to get to a different part of the building.”
The camera feed shakes, but doesn’t move. In the center of the room, being ignored by the searching agents, Jamila shudders, eyes glassy, and bleeds out on white tile.
“You can’t save her,” Tony says. Bruce glances at him and sees the weight of knowledge there that Tony normally doesn’t let out. “She did what she wanted. She got her intel out. Now you have to make sure it’s worth it. Go get more.”
Bruce rounds on his friend, chest heaving, hands flying through the air in dismay, but he says nothing. Clint doesn’t need to hear them fighting, even if that was incredibly cruel. Tony makes a cutting gesture over his neck, though, and points at the hologram: Clint’s feed shows him crawling through the vents, away from the scene of his friend’s murder.
“Any idea where they’d set up HQ?” Tony asks. The silence in the lab is filled with the sounds of Clint’s quiet breathing in the claustrophobic vents, occasionally broken by shouting or gunfire. Clint keeps crawling. The camera moves up and down.
“You know how to get there, or do I need to find blueprints?”
A hand appears in the weak light and moves in a crisp pattern. JARVIS translates, “No need.”
“Are you okay, Clint?” Bruce says softly.
The hand gestures again. JARVIS says, “No.”
The hand makes a fist, which shakes, before Clint continues. JARVIS doesn’t translate that.
Eventually, Clint makes it to a grate that looks down onto a long, wide room. To one side, covered by several heavily armed agents, a crowd is on their knees with their hands on their heads. Through the rest of the room, other agents walk, take phone calls, and type on computers without concern, and occasionally stop to talk or make distinctive salutes to each other.
“Now what?” Clint’s whisper is very, very quiet.
“Now you put down the glasses, take off the button transmitter, and you haul ass,” Tony says firmly.
“I can’t leave them!”
“You’re going to plant the bugs, and we’ll have eyes and ears on whatever these Nazi scumbags are planning. If these people are in danger, the Iron Man suit can have me there in under a minute, and the Hulk will show up fifteen seconds later.”
“That could be a minute too late.”
“Clint.” For the first time today, Tony’s voice gentles. “You just saw your friend get shot. I’m taking you out.”
“You’re not my handler,” Clint whispers harshly. Spit flies onto the grate on the video feed. “And I’ve seen worse!”
“I know,” Tony agrees. “But today, we need you out here.”
“The battle is in D.C.,” Bruce chimes in. “Hill just called in for assistance on tactical analysis. The New York base won’t move on anything big before that’s settled.”
Silence. Bruce twitches with anxiety and instinctively pushes back against a rising tide of green, only to find that it hasn’t materialized. Bruce is terrified, but the knowledge that his and Tony’s quickly-spun lies and the only thing keeping Clint alive is enough to keep the Hulk quiescent in the back of his mind.
“Tell her I’m getting triple hazard pay,” Clint mutters, and the camera feed jostles.
Bruce drops his chin to his chest and breathes, before looking to Tony and mouthing ‘Thank you.’ Tony shakes his head in wonder. He’s gripping his elbows across his chest.
In the monotone of shock, Clint narrates his way out of the building, since he knows his teammates can’t see it. In return, neither Tony nor Bruce says a word when one of the SHIELD prisoners is executed.
Instead, Tony silently commands JARVIS to track down Maria Hill.
Twenty minutes later, Clint makes it back to the lab. He’s pale and his eyes are quietly despairing. He walks straight up to Bruce and squeezes him against his chest hard enough that Bruce has trouble breathing. He ignores it, though, in favor of squeezing back and searching out Clint’s scent in his neck under the heavy smells of dust and death and terror.
Tony is muttering to JARVIS in the background, for once displaying tact. Bruce loosens his grip on Clint enough to reach his ear.
“Are you okay?”
Clint huffs a hollow laugh. “Definitely not.”
Bruce holds him tighter. He’s aware that there’s very little he can do right now, and that his presence means very little in the face of Natasha’s absence and presumed danger. And if the feed of Jamila’s shooting is replaying over and over again in front of Bruce’s eyes, well… then maybe he understands a very small part of what Clint is feeling, has been feeling ever since the Battle of New York.
“I’m here,” he says.
Clint kisses next to his ear. “I know. Thanks.”
“We all ready?” Tony says loudly. A large screen pops up in front of him; Bruce cranes his neck to see it without releasing Clint. Deputy Director Hill is there, looking as put together as usual, and the blinking in the corner of the screen means she can’t see them yet.
Bruce pulls away from Clint’s embrace, slowly, not letting go of Clint’s forearms. “Are you up to this?”
Clint closes his eyes for a long moment, and when he opens them, there’s steel there again. “I’m gonna have to be.”
He lets go of Bruce and they step up to stand beside Tony.
Epilogue
Once Steve is out of the hospital, Natasha shows up at the Tower again. It’s a little crowded, what with a quarter of New York City’s SHIELD agents temporarily either held prisoner or housed on the few available living floors, but she manages to find the local Avengers in Tony’s private quarters. No one questions how she got there, even with security as tight as it is lately.
She hugs Tony and shakes Bruce’s hand warmly, summoning up an ironic but friendly smile for him out of some unknown realms. Then she nods at Clint, and they go sit down on one of the couches in the living room.
Tony sighs deeply and digs into his waffles. Bruce stares at his oatmeal and sulks.
There’s no reason to, he tells himself. This thing with Clint, whatever it was… it was good. But it was never meant to be a forever type of thing. Or even a long-term thing. In his mind’s eye, Bruce stands an image of himself next to Clint and tries to imagine them as a couple, one of those pairs that people bundle together without thinking, and- obviously, it’s ridiculous, he can’t see it.
He steals a glance at the next room, though, and the sight of Clint and Natasha embracing is, just. Natural. Fitting.
Bruce looks back at his oatmeal and tells himself that he’ll miss his teammate, his friend, and maybe the cuddles, and that’s all.
He doesn’t even manage to convince himself for ten seconds.
Natasha enters the kitchen first and starts making herself a plate. Tony’s beady eye pops up, sensing an opportunity, and they immediately start bickering in a familiar way. A hand takes Bruce’s elbow, and he’s not even surprised enough to flinch.
Clint pulls him into the living room and they stand out of sight of their teammates. “I’m going on a mission,” Clint says. “It’s for Steve. There’s a trail we’ve got to get a jump on before it goes cold.”
Bruce hasn’t been out of the loop, and he understands why Clint wants to go. He even understands why Natasha and Steve would take Clint, even after everything he’s been through.
That doesn’t mean he likes it.
“I’ll call in,” Clint continues, a strange mix of gentle and gruff in his furrowed forehead and kind hands reaching out to Bruce. “And I’ll come back. I promise.”
Bruce stares at him, trying to understand the unfamiliar emotions in Clint’s gaze, but all he can see is honesty and… something else. Familiar, but from a long time ago.
“You gave me something to come back to,” Clint says. He smiles at Bruce with that look on his face, and cups Bruce’s hands in his warm ones. “Will you still be here?”
Oh, the irony. Bruce laughs quietly. “Yeah. I will be.”
“Good,” Clint says with a grin.
Bruce leans in to kiss him, once, eyes open to Clint’s, savoring and memorizing. He leans their foreheads together for another breath. Then he steps back and lets Clint walk by him to the kitchen. He hears a few words from Tony and Natasha, the clattering of breakfast plates, and then they’re gone.
When Bruce sits back down in front of his oatmeal, Tony stares at him in that blatant way he does when he's not sure what to do about non-engineering problems. With Clint's warmth lingering on his hands and lips, it's not hard for Bruce to give him a small but sincere nod. Tony nods back, relieved of mushy friendship duties, and they finish eating in companionable silence.
Then, it's back to work.
I did, in fact, buy this at the Literary Walk in Central Park, and I don't regret it for one instant.
The Avengers who have remained in New York are called into SHIELD to give a readiness report. It’s been pushed back a month already due to Tony’s schedule, but even with the advance notice, Bruce can’t calm himself completely with the knowledge that he’s entering SHIELD’s territory.
It’s the animal part of his brain that categorizes things that way, Bruce thinks to himself. Just instinct. All the same, walking through the door feels more illicit than crossing an international border; more deadly, too.
On one side, Tony is on a cell phone half the time, but otherwise is in good spirits, relatively. He keeps throwing asides into his patter about all the things he ought to be doing other than being here, but Bruce has learned to read between the lines, and Tony is about as happy as he can be on an average day.
On the other side, or more often drawing slightly behind them, Clint isn’t doing as well. Whenever Bruce glances at him, the archer looks disproportionately uncomfortable in his own agency, expression blank but unwelcoming and giving off a ‘don’t talk to me, don’t even look at me’ vibe.
The meeting isn’t great. The SHIELD agent they’re meeting with introduces himself as Sitwell, a mentee of Agent Coulson; that, and Clint’s sincere welcome and quiet approval should be enough to smooth things over. But something about the guy sets off those same instincts in the back of Bruce’s mind. He doesn’t let his guard down for a second while Agent Sitwell is with them, can’t ignore the deep growling below his conscious thoughts.
It doesn’t help that Tony makes it a point to be provocative. On and on about how all the information they’re passing on could’ve gone through email, and how important his time- and Bruce’s time!- is. Does Sitwell even have clearance for information on the Avengers?
It’s almost a relief when Tony gets tired and declares the meeting over. The longer they remained at SHIELD, the tenser Clint had gotten, and the more the beast in Bruce’s head had felt changed in. Bruce follows Tony out over Sitwell’s protests, feeling more tired than he has in weeks.
As soon as they get outside, Tony declares that he wants pizza. Bruce finds himself swept up in Tony’s wake, which was probably intentional on Tony’s part. Clint’s face is gray and he doesn’t look like he cares what’s happening around him. Bruce makes it a point to nudge against him as Tony’s chauffeur takes them around the city, and he thinks that Clint may start breathing easier from the contact.
When they arrive, Bruce is instantly comforted. The pizza place could exist anywhere in America, except that the interior is tiny, like most Manhattan restaurants. They find a booth, though, and Tony must slip someone something because their food is out lightning fast.
Bruce picks at his food. The day feels dark, even though it’s just a bit overcast. At his side, Clint is looking out the window. Though their sides brush in the small booth, he seems a hundred miles away. Unreachable.
Across from him, Tony is very disgruntled.
“What’s wrong with you two? You’re like a pair of thunderclouds following me around, only cuter.” When this fails to get a rise, he grumbles more.
Bruce just shrugs in response. The way Clint’s being silent, Bruce has a feeling that talking would push him even further away. At least if he remains quiet as well, Clint isn’t alone.
Eventually, Tony declares that they’re hopeless and pulls out his phone. They make it through half a pizza and a bucket of wings in the awkward air of people who know they should be conversing, but have nothing to say.
Then, Bruce feels something touch his arm. He looks down to find a napkin with tic-tac-toe board, an X already drawn in, being nudged at his elbow. There’s a hint of something in Clint’s eyes when Bruce meets them; a wry apology, perhaps, or the casual optimism of someone who’s not hoping too hard.
Bruce takes the pen he’s being offered and scratches an O.
Tony notices a few games later. The surprise that flies across his face is simple and profound. “Hey! Recalling the classics, are we? Let me play!”
“Can’t play three-person,” Clint replies quietly. It’s the first thing he’s said since “Hey” this morning.
Tony snorts. “Plebe.”
What follows is an extremely technical and absolutely stupid debate about three-way tic-tac-toe methodology. Bruce and Tony argue about how many dimensions they can add to the game while Clint scribbles on several napkins, grinning slightly every time one of the scientists comes out with something obviously ridiculous. They’ve reached the point where Tony is threatening to throw a fry across the table when Clint slides a napkin between them and sits back, arms crossed smugly.
Tony and Bruce lean in as one, shoving plates aside in mutual intellectual trances.
“Barton… I may have been wrong about you,” Tony declares solemnly. “I’ll bet you did graduate high school.”
“GED,” Clint says sarcastically, raising an eyebrow.
“This is brilliant,” Bruce murmurs, already unconsciously making notations beside Clint’s work on the napkin.
“Thanks doc, but, it’s only math.”
Bruce doesn’t hear anything beyond the elegant solution before him, but Tony laughs loudly enough to turn heads.
“Aww, Legolas, we’re gonna have to start calling you Cupid if you keep handing out love letters like this!”
Bruce doesn’t even notice the conversation going on over his head, but by the time he looks up Tony’s face is red with laughter and Clint is glowering. He touches Clint’s leg under the table, and the glower deepens as Clint looks back out the window.
Bruce smiles, though; it’s the most alive Clint has looked in a while. And when they leave, Clint smiles at him, a real, full smile, when they step outside and the sun has broken through the clouds.
~ ~ * ~ ~
He doesn’t get so much as a whisper of warning. Bruce’s instinct just go off one day, and he’s suddenly hyper-aware of the boundaries of his lab, and that someone has crossed into them. Suddenly, he knows just how long Clint has been playing on an old GameBoy on the couch, though he didn’t notice him enter, and he knows that Natasha is staring at the back of his head.
“When did you get here?” Clint asks. He doesn’t sound as welcoming as Bruce would have expected.
“Today. And I’m leaving today.” She pauses pointedly.
“Don’t worry about him,” Clint says, “he’s in a science zone, he can’t hear a word we’re saying.”
Bruce swallows. Clint knows how he is about people in his space.
“Something fishy’s going on in D.C. Rogers and Fury want you there.”
She’s terse, and succinct. Bruce’s insides tighten, though externally he appears just as relaxed as before.
“Fishy like how?”
“Fishy like I want you with me.”
There’s silence for a good minute. Bruce can’t read anything in it. For all that he’s gotten better at reading Clint, there is a whole other side to the man that he hasn’t the opportunity or the desire to get to know. Agent Barton is foreign to Bruce, distant for good reason. That’s the person Natasha knows, the one she’s no doubt reading like a book right now.
In the back of Bruce’s mind, anger simmers. Someone is trespassing on his territory.
“It’s better if I stay in New York. You might need someone at HQ. And Stark and Banner are here.”
“It’s a good strategic move,” Natasha says quietly.
“Mm.”
“And that’s not why you’re staying.”
More silence. Bruce types something. He doesn’t know what.
“Fix it,” Natasha says at last, and Clint mumbles an agreement. Natasha leaves without saying a word to Bruce.
Ten minutes later, Bruce reaches a stopping point in his work and disengages. Clint is sitting up on the couch when he turns around, watching him. He’s entirely in the moment, not hazy-eyed at all. Waiting.
“Got any opinions?” he asks.
“You knew I was listening,” Bruce states. The question is implied.
“You’re an Avenger. If something’s up, you deserve to know.” Clint’s gaze is level. There’s no hint of either familiar warmth or his oft-present distraction: he’s all business. It’s surprisingly comforting.
“What’s going on?”
“No idea. If it’s got Nat spooked, it’s not good. Let’s lay low. You get called into SHIELD, tell them you’re sick.”
Bruce doesn’t get contacted by SHIELD often, but Clint’s words are firm. His certainty and calmness comfort Bruce’s nerves, which are twitchy in the wake of the Widow’s appearance.
“What about you?” he asks.
“They already know I’m sick,” Clint says wryly. He gets up. He makes a noise like his body is old and sore, but his fingers secret the GameBoy into non-existence as deftly as a magician. “I’ll fill Tony in. See if he can manage to gather intelligence quietly for once.”
Bruce stands as well, too fast. Clint watches him warily as he approaches, hesitates, reaches out awkwardly.
Clint takes his hand and Bruce doesn’t care that it’s awkward, or that they stand like that, squared off, a foot and a half apart, until Clint nods once and lets go, walks away. It’s enough that Clint reached back.
~ ~ * ~ ~
It’s a Thursday afternoon, and they’re on the couch in the lounge watching reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. An unusual pizza, about eight feet long and a foot wide, lies demolished on the table, along with a selection of disgusting drinks from the health bar in the kitchen. A box of pastries from a bakery in Midtown has been emptied, scattering crumbs across the table and, occasionally, onto the floor.
Bruce has a hand twined with his, and another twisted through his hair, and Clint’s warm weight cuddled close. It’s been the best day he can remember in a long time.
Clint’s phone beeps, but he ignores it for a minute until he sluggishly lets go of Bruce’s hand to reach for it. A moment later, he groans.
“I’ve got to go. Friend needs a consult.”
Bruce opens his eyes; he hadn’t realized they’d closed, but as blissful as he feels, it’s somehow not an issue. “How long?” he mumbles.
“Should be quick.” Clint drops a kiss to his neck, then lingers. Bruce hums as Clint kisses higher, gently, before burying his face in Bruce’s hair. “Mm, I’ll come back quick. Promise.”
“You’d better.”
Bruce doesn’t remember anything past that, but he wakes up an hour later, and a blanket has been draped over him. His skin is tingling, tickling, almost, and it’s getting in the way of the drowsiness he’d been so enjoying.
Eventually, he’s twitching enough that he makes himself stand up from his warm pocket on the couch and shake to get rid of it. More animal instincts, for sure, because Bruce finds himself looking around the room, missing something.
What could make this go away? he wonders. Immediately, his brain returns a reply: more cuddling.
Bruce lays back down under the blanket, because no better options present themselves, and analyzes. He’s felt skin-hunger before, during the long years he was on the run. He’d gotten so used to it that it became normal, unnoticed.
But he’s spent a lot of time with Clint recently, much of it filled with touching and kissing. Even when they just eat meals together, or share the couch in the lounge to chat, they like to be close together. And when they’re close, Bruce shakes, like a kid kissing someone for the first time.
He’s sensed something of that skittishness, that newness to intimacy, from Clint as well, but from a darker place than merely long loneliness. Each of Bruce’s touches or quiet words overwrites something inside Clint. Bruce knows it from the way Clint reacts to others, like he’s steeling himself for a threat that never quite shows. He doesn’t know why Clint chose to him, months ago, decided he was trustworthy and capable enough to offer support and healing, but he’s grateful.
When Clint returns, late and tired-looking, Bruce waves off his apologies. He earns a laugh out of the SHIELD agent by tucking him under a blanket, but Clint settles into his side with a lazy smile, and Bruce’s skin stops itching at last.
~ ~ * ~ ~
A nudge to his shoulder- more like a shove- breaks Bruce out of his programming haze.
“You awake in there?” Clint says loudly. Bruce spins in his chair and finds the archer crossing his arms. “I was afraid you’d got dragged into cyberspace.”
Bruce shakes his head a little, wincing at the stiffness in his neck. He checks the time: two in the afternoon. Not bad for a work session, though… he can’t remember eating lunch. Right on time, his stomach grumbles heavily.
Clint chuckles. “Think you’re ready for a break?” he teases. He takes Bruce’s elbow to drag him to his feet, and doesn’t let go for a moment, until Bruce thoughtlessly glances down at his hand. Clint releases him quickly and takes a step back. “We could get that Indian food you liked,” he continues, shoving a hand into his pocket casually.
Bruce’s skin feels colder where Clint’s not touching it. He shivers, wishing he’d thought to wear a long shirt to the lab. But the weather report was so nice this morning…
He blinks, remembering JARVIS’s wake-up call. A moderate day, with highs in the early eighties and light cloud coverage. Low humidity. Bruce had looked out his window at the clear air and smiled, even though he hadn’t gone outside in- weeks!
“Let’s… go to the park?” he suggests, stuttering as he realizes that he and Clint have never gone anywhere together besides different rooms in the Tower and the pizza place Tony took them to after their disastrous interview with SHIELD. Normally they stick to Bruce’s lab and the communal lounge, and Bruce’s living room when he wants tea.
Clint looks like he’s having the same thoughts. “...Sure,” he says eventually, looking uncertain. “You want… hot dogs?”
“I want sunlight,” Bruce admits, more earnestly than he’d expected.
Ever since he realized why he can’t get enough of touching Clint, his time on the run has been more on Bruce’s mind than ever. It’s been so long since his life was anything more than a struggle to stay calm and under the radar. Now that he’s relatively safe at Stark Tower as a member of the Avengers, he hasn’t really let go of the old patterns, Bruce realizes. He’s stayed in the Tower, his island of safety, and can’t even remember the last time he appreciated a breeze over his face!
“Let’s go for a walk,” he decides.
Clint is taken aback by his intensity, but nods. “I’ll change into something- better.” He inspects his usual daytime wear of a black t-shirt and black pants and smiles a little when Bruce huffs.
A few minutes later, they’re on the street walking uptown. The Tower is only a few moments from Central Park, but even before their shoes hit grass, Bruce can feel his spirits rising. There’s a breeze coming from the North, and Bruce’s keen sense of smell can pick up all sorts of nature scents that he hasn’t smelled for too long. Also, hot dogs.
Clint, now properly clad in jeans and a plaid button-down, buys four hot dogs as soon as they reach the park. He loads two up with mustard and relish, and dribbles ketchup on the others, grimacing as he does so. “The ruin of a perfectly good dog.”
Bruce frowns. “Then why-”
Clint scoops up the two ‘ruined’ hot dogs and places them in Bruce’s hands.
“I just take a bit of mustard, or some red pepper if they have it.”
“Trust me doc, this is how you like it.” Clint winked, managing to smile despite a disgusted glance down at Bruce’s meal.
They head into the park. For a while, there are roads with families and joggers and bikers and cars, and Clint takes pleasure in pointing out people who aren’t dressed for the weather, or who have cute dogs. A few minutes further on there are fields where people are sunning themselves or playing frisbee. Beyond that, the crowds thin out, and there are paths through trees and tall grasses.
Bruce discovers that he has consumed both hot dogs, ketchup and all, and enjoyed every bite. He gives Clint a suspicious look, which makes the archer clutch his gut, tipping back his head and laughing to the sky. Bruce watches him, pleasantly shocked, because he’s never seen more than a hearty chuckle out of Clint.
Maybe the sun really will do them good.
They walk through a forest, where the paths are carefully tended and the wildlife fearless. Bruce can hear and smell the small animals around, the richness of the vegetation, and his basic understanding of ecology and landscape planning fills in a mental map of the area. He tells Clint about it, how many people must have put so much work for so long into making this place free and wild and effortless, and how much upkeep it requires, for nature to flourish at the heart of mankind’s devastation on its environment. He segues into the ways humans have changed even the shape of Manhattan, and ends up at global warming.
Eventually, they exit the forest, and it isn’t until someone gives the two of them an amused, sideways look that Bruce realizes that he’s been rambling about earth sciences as they walked through the Ramble. He promptly stops talking and feels a blush creep up his cheeks.
“What?” Clint asks. “So what did the climate change panel decide?” Then he squints at Bruce’s face. “Trouble?” he mutters, demeanor going cold and aware all at once.
“No!” Bruce insists. He hesitates, but putting Clint at ease is more important. “I just… forgot that where we just went is a famous cruising spot.”
After a beat, Clint starts laughing again. Bruce breathes out.
After the Ramble, they reach a long walkway filled with portrait artists and musicians, people enjoying the outdoors, or more often their phones. Since they don’t have a planned route, Bruce chooses a direction at random and Clint follows him, once again keeping an eye out for dogs and fashion faux pas. And then Clint’s sharp eye is caught by something completely different.
“I’m getting it,” he insists. Bruce shakes his head, shying away from the stall owner’s amused look. “Think there’s an Avengers discount?”
There isn’t, but the souvenir only costs three dollars, so Clint doesn’t complain. As they continue walking, Bruce glimpses once again the graphic of the Avengers reimagined as cats, and shakes his head again.
“This is amazing, I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Clint lets him know.
“It’s called taste,” Bruce murmurs regretfully.
They keep walking and come across a wide meadow with several baseball fields built on. A few have games going, and by mutual agreement Clint and Bruce find seats not too far from one, in the shade of a copse of trees. They watch the game while Clint eggs Bruce into an argument about how accurate the Catvengers and their uniforms are, or which other animals each of their teammates ought to be.
The breeze carries over the sounds of other humans being carefree, safe, enjoying their lives. Above them, branches ruffle and sway. Birds cross the wide blue sky, and a squirrel stops a few feet from their bench, looking up at Bruce as though a treat might not go amiss. A wedge of sun reaches them through the trees and Clint rolls his sleeves up past his elbows, exposing a farmer’s tan bad enough that it’s Bruce’s turn to laugh out loud, at least until he realizes that he’s already gotten burnt.
Once the baseball game wraps up, they head back to the Tower. The day has cooled off slightly and a few more clouds have blown in, bringing a bit of tension into the air that hints at a rainstorm in the near future. Bruce tilts his head back and soaks in the weakening rays, relishing the heat of his skin that speaks of nature’s punishment for such a beautiful day.
On the way back through the Ramble, Bruce takes Clint's hand. Clint snorts and snickers childishly, but doesn’t let go.
~ ~ * ~ ~
When the Avengers get summoned into SHIELD, Bruce tells them he’s sick. It’s an excuse he’s used before, knowing that everyone involved will let it go for the sake of their building’s infrastructure. Tony sends a message along that he’s busy, ignoring any follow-up, and calls Bruce and Clint to his lab.
When they get there, he’s staring at one of his screens in the air. Something in his stillness tells Bruce that this is the moment they’ve been waiting for.
“You good for this, Hawkeye?” Tony asks solemnly.
“Locked and loaded.”
“You sure?”
Clint stares at Tony with one of his half-smirks until Tony backs down. “You’re the expert. You going in suited up, or casual?”
“We got any chatter?”
“Something’s going on in D.C.” Tony waves a hand and long-distance ground photographs hover in the air. “Shots fired at the Triskelion, something exploded.”
Clint squints at the images. “Normally I’d go in plainclothed for this, but I suppose I haven’t been keeping a uniform at SHIELD lately.”
Tony grins, displaying his teeth. “Lucky you. I’ve got something new cooked up.”
While they go over Clint’s augmented gear, Bruce works at hacking a few relevant feeds that he and Tony had red-flagged weeks ago. One of them, an extensive but seemingly redundant communication channel, is alight for the first time. He points JARVIS at it, and in a matter of seconds the encrypted message is readable. “Out of the shadows, into the light?”
Tony and Clint stop talking and turn to the screen, just as the final word of the transmission is translated. “Hydra,” they read together.
“Out of the shadows,” Clint whispers. “Does that mean-?”
“Change of plans,” Tony says briskly. “No way we’re sending you in, it’s gonna be a slaughter.”
“Like hell,” Clint spits, rounding on Tony. “I’m not walking away, I’ve got friends in the New York office. I’ve got teammates there!”
“And you might find out that they’re not your friends at all,” Tony retorts. “Or you’ll have to watch them get gunned down. I’m not gonna be the guy that sends a mentally unbalanced Avenger-”
Clint takes a step forward and gets right in Tony’s face. His hands are shaking. “If you’re so worried about what Cap’s going to think of you, you can just tell him this whack job snuck out from under your brown little nose to do his fucking job.”
With that, he snatches the uniform and toolbelt Tony made for him and stalks out of the lab.
“You didn’t have to do that,” comments Bruce dryly, after a beat.
Tony turns back to his screen. “Barton doesn’t need coddling. And he’s right, those are his people in there. I’d think less of him if he didn’t go in.”
“He has PTSD.”
“You know what’s worse than trauma?” Tony snaps, spinning to face Bruce. “Dying. I’ve had that choice before, I’ll probably have it again, and I’d choose living every time. The SHIELD agents in there, Hydra’s not gonna offer them a choice.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s obligated to risk his own health-”
“And you wouldn’t go in if it were one of us? No, never mind, I didn’t mean that.” Tony shakes his head, leaning his weight on his hands on the counter and slowing cracking the knuckles. “To you it’s a logical puzzle, you’d weigh your options. To Barton- Cap- for them it’s a question of morality: our people are in danger. Simple as that.”
“And for you?” Bruce is a lot more relaxed now that he’s figured Tony’s being confrontational out of fear and concern. “Is it a logical question for you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Tony grunts.
“Because it’s the best place for you to be, for now. Are you telling me your suit isn’t as ready for action as it can be?”
Tony squints at Bruce over his shoulder. “I thought you weren’t that type of doctor,” he says suspiciously.
Bruce smirks, then cracks the knuckles in his hands. “Point me somewhere.”
“You’re on D.C. I’ll follow New York. JARVIS can handle everything else.”
The hack and scavenge the internet in silence until JARVIS pulls up Clint’s contact feeds. He’s made it into the lobby at SHIELD’s 40th Street location, and although everyone in the video feed off Clint’s sunglasses seems tense, there are no obvious signs of catastrophe.
“Agent Barton,” they hear, and Clint turns to see a young agent approaching. She reaches out and Clint’s hand appears from the bottom of the frame to shake hers.
“Agent Bayraktar,” he replies familiarly. Bruce twitches. “Why the long faces around here?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the agent says dismissively. “It’s above my paygrade. I’ll be your escort today.”
Clint follows her. They pass through security without question. Tony and Bruce both note the way a guard or two flinch at the sight of an Avenger in full gear walking through the facility.
“This doesn’t look good,” Bruce mutters. Tony grunts in agreement.
In the elevator, the SHIELD agent moves, and the video fuzzes temporarily. When it clears up, in barely enough time for Tony to squawk at JARVIS to reboot the feed, Clint has a knife to her throat.
“-destroy any bugs, I swear,” Bayraktar is saying frantically. “Clint, I’m trusting you because you’re an Avenger. Hydra is loose within SHIELD. I don’t know how high it goes, but at least to level seven-”
“How do I know you’re not them?” Clint demands.
“You don’t,” the woman replies. Her hands are up, palms forward, in the classic unthreatening pose, and she holds her chin high over Clint’s weapon. “I don’t care if you believe me. You can kill me right now, as long as you get the word out to the other Avengers.”
She stares right into the camera, right into Clint’s glasses. Bruce shivers.
The elevator dings.
“Okay Jamila,” Clint says. “I believe you.” He spins his knife into a sheath on his side and is looking forward again when the doors open.
They make it to an empty conference room before using the bug device again. Since it doesn’t knock out Tony’s bug, it doesn’t fill him with confidence, which he conveys to Clint.
“That doesn’t look SHIELD-grade,” Clint comments, nodding at the keychain-shaped tool Jamila is tucking back into her belt.
“Fresh out of R&D,” she comments, raising one eyebrow. “Lucky me.”
“Tony doesn’t approve.”
Jamila blinks. “Tony-” She takes a deep breath, and her shoulders fall. “The Avengers know?”
“We’re on it. Can you tell me anything else you know?”
While Jamila’s filling Clint in on her recon- apparently SHIELD agents make it a habit of creeping on their colleagues, in the spirit of spy-agency camaraderie, and today she’d overheard more than she bargained for- Bruce is unraveling a flurry of communications. Cold settles over his body.
“The Hub is down,” Bruce announces to a suddenly silent room. “The Vault has been opened. The Treehouse is down. The Sandbox is… gone.”
No one can reply.
“What’s wrong?” Jamila’s warm gold skin has paled to a sandy shade at whatever expression Clint is making.
“How do we get everyone out?” Clint says shakily.
“Clint, what happened?” Jamila insists.
There’s a banging on the door. Jamila spins toward the sound, but in an instant she’s composed again. She points at a vent in the corner of the room. The gaze of the camera waves from side to side dizzyingly, and Clint gestures her behind him. Jamila steps close and jabs her finger at Clint’s chest, right above the subtle, deep blue stylized A that is embroidered on the uniform of every Avenger. Her dark green gaze is as clear as it was when she told Clint he could kill her.
Clint turns and scrambles silently for the vent.
The exchange takes less than five seconds, but it’s enough time for the pounding on the door to increase. By the time Clint is in the ceiling and resting the vent cover back in place, the agents on the other side have become incensed enough to burst into the room, nearly barrelling over Jamila. There are five of them, with more visible in the hallway, and they all have either handguns or semi-automatic weapons out of their holsters.
“Where is Hawkeye?” one of them demands. He’s dressed in full tactical gear, and he towers over Jamila in her standard-issue SHIELD jumpsuit.
“Hitting the head,” she answers. “What the hell is this about?”
It’s a good performance, Bruce thinks, startled but innocent.
It’s not good enough. A second agent puts his hand to his ear, then raises his handgun and shoots Jamila through the chest.
“Stay where you are, Barton!” Tony shouts. The video feed shudders, but no sound comes through. Something moving right below the frame looks like Clint’s hand covering his own mouth.
“Spread out on this floor, search elevators and stairwells,” one of the agents barks. “There’s a window here; I want eyes on the outside of the building. We have a kill order, gentlemen. Let’s get to it.”
“You need to move, Clint,” Bruce urges quietly. “They’re going to figure it out soon. You have to get to a different part of the building.”
The camera feed shakes, but doesn’t move. In the center of the room, being ignored by the searching agents, Jamila shudders, eyes glassy, and bleeds out on white tile.
“You can’t save her,” Tony says. Bruce glances at him and sees the weight of knowledge there that Tony normally doesn’t let out. “She did what she wanted. She got her intel out. Now you have to make sure it’s worth it. Go get more.”
Bruce rounds on his friend, chest heaving, hands flying through the air in dismay, but he says nothing. Clint doesn’t need to hear them fighting, even if that was incredibly cruel. Tony makes a cutting gesture over his neck, though, and points at the hologram: Clint’s feed shows him crawling through the vents, away from the scene of his friend’s murder.
“Any idea where they’d set up HQ?” Tony asks. The silence in the lab is filled with the sounds of Clint’s quiet breathing in the claustrophobic vents, occasionally broken by shouting or gunfire. Clint keeps crawling. The camera moves up and down.
“You know how to get there, or do I need to find blueprints?”
A hand appears in the weak light and moves in a crisp pattern. JARVIS translates, “No need.”
“Are you okay, Clint?” Bruce says softly.
The hand gestures again. JARVIS says, “No.”
The hand makes a fist, which shakes, before Clint continues. JARVIS doesn’t translate that.
Eventually, Clint makes it to a grate that looks down onto a long, wide room. To one side, covered by several heavily armed agents, a crowd is on their knees with their hands on their heads. Through the rest of the room, other agents walk, take phone calls, and type on computers without concern, and occasionally stop to talk or make distinctive salutes to each other.
“Now what?” Clint’s whisper is very, very quiet.
“Now you put down the glasses, take off the button transmitter, and you haul ass,” Tony says firmly.
“I can’t leave them!”
“You’re going to plant the bugs, and we’ll have eyes and ears on whatever these Nazi scumbags are planning. If these people are in danger, the Iron Man suit can have me there in under a minute, and the Hulk will show up fifteen seconds later.”
“That could be a minute too late.”
“Clint.” For the first time today, Tony’s voice gentles. “You just saw your friend get shot. I’m taking you out.”
“You’re not my handler,” Clint whispers harshly. Spit flies onto the grate on the video feed. “And I’ve seen worse!”
“I know,” Tony agrees. “But today, we need you out here.”
“The battle is in D.C.,” Bruce chimes in. “Hill just called in for assistance on tactical analysis. The New York base won’t move on anything big before that’s settled.”
Silence. Bruce twitches with anxiety and instinctively pushes back against a rising tide of green, only to find that it hasn’t materialized. Bruce is terrified, but the knowledge that his and Tony’s quickly-spun lies and the only thing keeping Clint alive is enough to keep the Hulk quiescent in the back of his mind.
“Tell her I’m getting triple hazard pay,” Clint mutters, and the camera feed jostles.
Bruce drops his chin to his chest and breathes, before looking to Tony and mouthing ‘Thank you.’ Tony shakes his head in wonder. He’s gripping his elbows across his chest.
In the monotone of shock, Clint narrates his way out of the building, since he knows his teammates can’t see it. In return, neither Tony nor Bruce says a word when one of the SHIELD prisoners is executed.
Instead, Tony silently commands JARVIS to track down Maria Hill.
Twenty minutes later, Clint makes it back to the lab. He’s pale and his eyes are quietly despairing. He walks straight up to Bruce and squeezes him against his chest hard enough that Bruce has trouble breathing. He ignores it, though, in favor of squeezing back and searching out Clint’s scent in his neck under the heavy smells of dust and death and terror.
Tony is muttering to JARVIS in the background, for once displaying tact. Bruce loosens his grip on Clint enough to reach his ear.
“Are you okay?”
Clint huffs a hollow laugh. “Definitely not.”
Bruce holds him tighter. He’s aware that there’s very little he can do right now, and that his presence means very little in the face of Natasha’s absence and presumed danger. And if the feed of Jamila’s shooting is replaying over and over again in front of Bruce’s eyes, well… then maybe he understands a very small part of what Clint is feeling, has been feeling ever since the Battle of New York.
“I’m here,” he says.
Clint kisses next to his ear. “I know. Thanks.”
“We all ready?” Tony says loudly. A large screen pops up in front of him; Bruce cranes his neck to see it without releasing Clint. Deputy Director Hill is there, looking as put together as usual, and the blinking in the corner of the screen means she can’t see them yet.
Bruce pulls away from Clint’s embrace, slowly, not letting go of Clint’s forearms. “Are you up to this?”
Clint closes his eyes for a long moment, and when he opens them, there’s steel there again. “I’m gonna have to be.”
He lets go of Bruce and they step up to stand beside Tony.
Epilogue
Once Steve is out of the hospital, Natasha shows up at the Tower again. It’s a little crowded, what with a quarter of New York City’s SHIELD agents temporarily either held prisoner or housed on the few available living floors, but she manages to find the local Avengers in Tony’s private quarters. No one questions how she got there, even with security as tight as it is lately.
She hugs Tony and shakes Bruce’s hand warmly, summoning up an ironic but friendly smile for him out of some unknown realms. Then she nods at Clint, and they go sit down on one of the couches in the living room.
Tony sighs deeply and digs into his waffles. Bruce stares at his oatmeal and sulks.
There’s no reason to, he tells himself. This thing with Clint, whatever it was… it was good. But it was never meant to be a forever type of thing. Or even a long-term thing. In his mind’s eye, Bruce stands an image of himself next to Clint and tries to imagine them as a couple, one of those pairs that people bundle together without thinking, and- obviously, it’s ridiculous, he can’t see it.
He steals a glance at the next room, though, and the sight of Clint and Natasha embracing is, just. Natural. Fitting.
Bruce looks back at his oatmeal and tells himself that he’ll miss his teammate, his friend, and maybe the cuddles, and that’s all.
He doesn’t even manage to convince himself for ten seconds.
Natasha enters the kitchen first and starts making herself a plate. Tony’s beady eye pops up, sensing an opportunity, and they immediately start bickering in a familiar way. A hand takes Bruce’s elbow, and he’s not even surprised enough to flinch.
Clint pulls him into the living room and they stand out of sight of their teammates. “I’m going on a mission,” Clint says. “It’s for Steve. There’s a trail we’ve got to get a jump on before it goes cold.”
Bruce hasn’t been out of the loop, and he understands why Clint wants to go. He even understands why Natasha and Steve would take Clint, even after everything he’s been through.
That doesn’t mean he likes it.
“I’ll call in,” Clint continues, a strange mix of gentle and gruff in his furrowed forehead and kind hands reaching out to Bruce. “And I’ll come back. I promise.”
Bruce stares at him, trying to understand the unfamiliar emotions in Clint’s gaze, but all he can see is honesty and… something else. Familiar, but from a long time ago.
“You gave me something to come back to,” Clint says. He smiles at Bruce with that look on his face, and cups Bruce’s hands in his warm ones. “Will you still be here?”
Oh, the irony. Bruce laughs quietly. “Yeah. I will be.”
“Good,” Clint says with a grin.
Bruce leans in to kiss him, once, eyes open to Clint’s, savoring and memorizing. He leans their foreheads together for another breath. Then he steps back and lets Clint walk by him to the kitchen. He hears a few words from Tony and Natasha, the clattering of breakfast plates, and then they’re gone.
When Bruce sits back down in front of his oatmeal, Tony stares at him in that blatant way he does when he's not sure what to do about non-engineering problems. With Clint's warmth lingering on his hands and lips, it's not hard for Bruce to give him a small but sincere nod. Tony nods back, relieved of mushy friendship duties, and they finish eating in companionable silence.
Then, it's back to work.
I did, in fact, buy this at the Literary Walk in Central Park, and I don't regret it for one instant.