[fic: the avengers]

[trysts]

no light in this valley
the avengers. au. clint barton. ensemble. 30 miles to water, 20 miles to wood, 10 miles to hell and I gone there for good ~7630 | pg13


i. the lawman comes to town

It was a good way to end a bad year, Clint figured.

He dragged himself about fifty paces back, the sun so hot in its perch in the sky that the blood that splattered across the sand seemed to sizzle and steam. His knees buckled and he fell, face first, and laughed at himself.

The canyon sprawled, dull reds and browns. Didn’t feel like there was much of anything except heat and more heat out here, just sun that burned away every little piece of you until you were bleached white, like half-bent tombstones that lined the trail to Oregon Country. He never thought he’d yearn for snow.

His fingers closed around clumps of dried, dead weeds and he flipped himself onto his back. He pushed a hand above his eyes, to shield his face from the blaze of the sun. The blood looked black under the light.

No gun, no water. Just cavernous, gnawing desert and sun. And nothing to show for it. Not even the woman.

Clint Barton laughed, and felt the blood squelch down at his side, where the bullet had pierced him. How many men had this place swallowed whole, how many bones would he find beneath the dusty ground if he had strength to dig, or cared to? And how many would care that he joined the number?

Not many, he figured and laughed again, near hysterical.

A good way to end a bad year, he thought.

1858 was a bad year.

John Brown’s body wasn’t molding in its grave, but it was getting there. America-America was posed, bracing, for a fall, right into the cradle of civil war. A house divided, said the straw that broke the camel’s back. And he was right.

1858 was a bad year, but 1859 wasn’t shaping up to be much better.

Three slaves went missing, down in the Rio Grande. Bleeding Kansas was like a stain, a pox, on the South and one good little push was all they needed for mob mentality to bloom behind their retinas. The whole valley was primed for scorched, salted down to its roots.

One last chance, Barton, they tell him, and he swore he could feel it, the gold of his badge rusting and curling inward. Or not. Maybe it had always been like that. He’d always walked around like the chip on his shoulder weighed him down. He was the sort that made everything curdle with a touch.

One last chance, they said. What they meant was, don’t fuck it up.

A little nothing town, a blip on the map of the Valley. Stark’s End, they called it, because a man dragged his family 80 miles west for the promise of gold and died underneath an indifferent sun. His boy had a bit more sense than that, and he built the town over his father’s bones.

Stark’s End didn’t have much in the way of law. The mayor was iron-fisted they said, and dealt out good old frontier justice when it pleased him from the barrel of his repeating rifle. There’s a sheriff now, but he followed the tradition and was quicker to shoot than to speak. Law wasn’t something solid, way out west, it was more like ruts, groves, broken into the dusty ground. There were lines that you never crossed, and if you crossed them you got shot.

But Pinkerton Agent Clint Barton rode into town, covered in trail dust and Colt swung low over his hips. Stark’s End was his last chance, and somehow that seemed fitting. 1858, and down in the Rio Valley the lawman came riding into town.

1858 was a bad year.

He presented himself to the mayor, like a foreign dignitary went to a king. The mayor relaxed with boots up on the porch of his weathered house, tilted to one side from the heavy winds. The brim of his hat was pulled low over his eyes, and he watched Clint lazily as he approached, boots clumping up the wooden steps.

Anthony Stark didn’t look much like a man quick on the draw, but everyone heard the stories, and the repeating rifle rested innocuously against the back of his chair.

“Mayor Stark,” Clint said, legs spread in something akin to a battle stance, hands shoved into loops of his chaps. “Agent Barton.”

“I know who you are,” Tony Stark said, standing. He didn’t look particularly impressed, arms crossing over his chest. “And like I told the last Pinkerton boy that rolled on through, my town doesn’t know anything about Hammer’s missing,” he stopped and sneered the word, “slaves.”

“If that’s the case, me asking a few questions won’t hurt none,” Clint said levelly.

“Asking questions’s the same as asking for trouble, but don’t let it be said Tony Stark stood in the way of the law.” He spread his hands out, open and flat, a gesture of placidity. “If I were you though, I’d make my stay short, and sweet.”

Clint felt the corners of his mouth kick up in a half-smile. “You don’t know much about me yet, Stark. But I don’t do anything sweet.”

They lounged in bed, and he kissed a lazy trail up the curvature of her spine, where the stays of her corset have been pulled back. Outside, the golden sun blazed.

When his mouth touched the curled edges of her blood-red hair-the only color in the whole damn valley, her red hair-she turned and captured his face between her palms, so much smoother than you think-for a woman so deeply rooted in the Valley, way out west, where the sun dried up all the wells and the herd grew gaunt with hunger.

“High noon,” she drawled. Frozen winters in far-off places lace her voice. Lubimyy, she said, lover. “How very dramatic of you, Agent Barton.”

“I love a good show.”

“Do you love a good romance?” she asked. He fingers move along his jawline. A little pressure, thumb to the esophagus, and he’d be a goner. He liked that he knew she could do that to him. “Your naked lover asks you not to go.”

“Your man,” he said and doesn’t add-am I yours? Was I ever?-“is a man of the law, darling.”

She frowned. “And if the law’s wrong?”

His Colt rested against her nightstand, covered in a lacy fringe. He stood to retrieve it, and his pants. “Guess we’ll find out.”

“I might not be here,” she told him, “when you get back.”

It’s the only time he hesitated, fingers hovering over the cool, icy metal of his gun. Winter in the desert, he thought. Aw, Mrs. Romanoff knew how to play him so well; like that finely tuned piano she kept downstairs, he plucked and preened at her attention, sung whatever tune she wanted to hear, and the thought of losing it, of losing her, stung like a hot pucker to his insides.

He said, “Guess I’ll find out.”

Twisting, she tossed the heavy quilt aside and flounced off, gloriously naked. All that was left of her was the heavy scent of her, smoked wood in winter and frozen lakes. But the desert’s on her too, grainy sand gritting against her soft skin, like a sunburn, like flesh rubbed raw. Like salt on his wounds.

His badge was tucked just beneath the pillow, where her head had been. He picked it up and buttoned it onto his vest.

“Guess I found out,” he said to the empty air.

Sooner or later, if you come to stay for longer than a handful of hours, you wind up at the Black Widow. It’s not the name that the saloon started with, but it’s the name that stuck. Like most things way out west, it’s weathered, beaten down, tilted almost sideways, spun on its side. Dust and dirt have eroded away its paint, if it ever had paint, but inside it was lively, bright. The piano there was finally tuned, and always in use. Cards shuffled beneath the ditty, brandy sloshed over the sides of thick rimmed glasses.

It was a typical scene, out passed the Mississippi if you cared to look.

But the woman was different.

Mrs. Natasha Romanoff was not the first madam of a bordello he’d ever met, but she was the prettiest Clint had ever seen-and his bed of choice tended to be whatever empty room the saloon of whatever town he was in could afford him. He expected an older woman, widowhood sitting heaving on her shoulders while the harsh desert heat carved its space out in her face. Instead, she was pretty, lithe, slender, dipping and diving through the crowds like a ballerina he once caught on stage up in on Broadway, limber, flexing limbs and confidence in her step. Her dress was dappled green, silky, and fringed in lacy black. Garters winked at her rouged knees.

Clint’s preferred spot was whatever shadowed corner he could kick a chair in to and he was just settling in when a hand shot up Mrs. Romanoff’s backside. She took it in stride even as the atmosphere seemed to still, the piano tapering off, the men at the bar turning.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Romanoff said, not sounding it, “not interested.”

But the fella wasn’t taking that for an answer, and Clint knew what violence tasted like, like a viper coiled to strike. He was standing, but there was already a gleaming Colt pressed to the man’s temple with meaningful intent.

“You heard the lady.” The wide brim of his hat shadowed his eyes in a harsh, dark line. He was tall, broad. Clint didn’t know him yet, but he would. “Best for everyone you do what she says.”

“Thank you, Steve,” the widow said.

“Half-breed son of a bitch,” was not the right answer.

A knife sliced through the air, cutting just the tip of the man’s ear. He yelped, blood splattering across the collar of his shirt. Mrs. Romanoff only raised one arched, dark brow. “If I were you,” she drawled in a husky, deep voice that made a man think of dark bedrooms and soft lips, counterpoint to the violence that simmering just beneath her surface, “I’d clear out by dawn.”

With a controlled sort of serenity, the man added, “I’d do what the lady says.”

Clint sunk back down into his hair, while the saloon returned to its natural low roar of movement. The man went back to his drink after Mrs. Romanoff gave him a friendly pat on his shoulder.

He kept his eyes on the widow.

ii. thirty miles out

Harsh lands bred harsh people. Clint had seen it firsthand-in Kansas, in Kentucky, in Louisiana, and now here in the heart of Texas. Tea gardens cannot be grown beneath the blazing sun and trail dust. The only thing that sprouted here were weeds, but you had to admire the weeds and their tenacious determination to survive, to thrive, to push upward and absorb whatever the sun cared to give.

Harsh lands, harsh people. They’d kill a man, with reason enough. The law was only a vague thing here, like a dream half-remembered. There was no layered foundation of history, here, a constant reminder of why they were. There was only the need to survive.

But weeds had their own sort of loyalty, roots twining around each other in a bramble of briars and thorns. Mess with one, you’re messing with them all, and pull out as many as you like-they’d probably grow right back, twice as strong.

He heard it from one of the little saloon girls, about the sheriff’s wife. About a Mr. Donald Blake that got a little friendly, expect it wasn’t friendliness at all since Miss Jane (that’s what they called her, because she was simply Miss Jane, the friendly sort, who followed her wayward son of a husband to this hole in the earth, where the sun baked mud into clay and grass into ash) hadn’t been all that willing to forge a companionship.

That was all they said, though. Mrs. Romanoff caught them gabbing and sent them off, and sent Clint a meaningful look that shot a lightning bolt of adrenaline straight up his spine. Which was new.

He got the whole story from a Miss Pepper Potts, the only school teacher for miles. She had a New England crass to her, but a southern warmth, and she had abolitionist stapled across her forehead. Clint’s opinions about the state of the Union were his own but the recent years had taught him one thing-abolitionists tended to start the fires he was sent to put out.

“The kind of questions you’re asking,” she told him, seated like a prim and proper society miss on her porch. Water condensed on her clear pitcher of cheery yellow lemonade. “You’re liable to get yourself hurt.”

“Most things I do are liable to get me killed, Miss Potts,” he replied. “That’s how I know I’m doing them right.”

She smiled, and a tendril of ginger hair curled crisply in the heat against her temple. “Well, let me answer this one-you don’t want the sheriff catching wind of your asking.”

You mess with one weed and you mess with them all. Donald Blake had been given to sunup to clear out, but come the morning he was still there and his eyes were still straying.

Thirty miles they dragged him, the sheriff and the mayor. Twelve more miles than what they figured, the sheriff had said. Dragged him thirty miles out into the valley, till there wasn’t much left drag. Then they turned ‘round and buried the body proper.

It was a warning. And most took it seriously.

“You’ll come to find, Agent Barton,” Miss Potts said, “the people here look after their own.”

It didn’t take long for Clint to figure out he was bedding down in a hub of anti-slavery sentiments. Morality was all well and good, but not when it invited the sort of slaughter Clint had seen up in Kansas.

He kept his thoughts about the plantations and the slaves and the masters to himself. He was an agent of the law, and the law said it was legal. He didn’t let himself think much more about it.

But Stark’s End was like a stubborn little toe, curling inward, twisting, rebelling against the host body-riots had been started by less.

“You ever done the right thing because it was the wrong thing?”

Clint smiled, bloody teeth and near broken jaw, kneeling down in the dusty ground, but not cowed. His Colt gleamed black, a hard, sharp light underneath the desert sun. Close enough to see the inlayed gold on the handle, but too far to reach.

“The wrong thing is the wrong thing is the wrong thing,” he chanted. The kick to his head made him feel fuzzy, unreal. Or it could have been the heat itself, making the air ripple like a lake before his eyes. “It’s wrong until it’s right, and it’s only right when the law says it is.”

“I will hand it to you, Agent Barton, you possess more wherewithal and loyalty than I’d give you credit for.”

“Gee,” Clint said. “Thanks.”

Still so unimpressed with him, Mayor Stark said, “Well, let’s finish this.”

A pendulum swung before his eyes, one side inscribed with life, the other with death. Ironically, life was red, blood red. Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Maybe I won’t be here when you get back. God, he hoped not. He’d hate to be the reason a pretty lady kept waiting.

The pendulum turned on its head.

Oh no, it was just the sun on the gun and the gun turning to point. This has been such a bad year.

The sheriff pulled the trigger.

“You come in here every night, but you never order anything,” Mrs. Romanoff observed. “If there’s something you want that we don’t have, just let me know. I’ll see about getting it.”

“Awfully friendly to an outsider, Mrs. Romanoff.”

She shrugged. “Money is money. I’ve learned not to be picky.” She inclined her head. The purple feather woven into her blood-red hair winked at him. “I’ve heard you’re bedding down with your horse. No need. We’ve got rooms here, and if you’ve a need you’ve only to say. One of the girls will no doubt be happy to see to them.”

He tapped two fingers at the junction of his elbow, tilting himself backwards on two chair legs with the heel of his boots on the table. The dark brim of his hair cut a line through his vision, but she remained unobstructed from his view.

“And you, Mrs. Romanoff?”

A woman well used to propositioned, it seemed. She only laughed. “I’m not for sale,” she explained.

“That wasn’t what I was asking.”

The quick quirk of her brow, the only hint of emotion playing along the cool, pretty lines of her face, showed him she was intrigued despite herself.

Justin Hammer wasn’t a big name plantation owner, but he was making a hell of a racket. Three slaves went missing off his plantation just on the border of Texas and Arkansas. He was convinced they were heading toward Mexico, cradled in the bosom of traitors-which was to say abolitionists, because the two were one in the same down south.

The problem was he was convincing a crowd of it too. Mob mentality was a bloody thing. Missouri and Kansas would attest, and still were attesting.

Pinkerton had no reason to send Clint Barton out west. He wasn’t their best agent, wasn’t even a decent one most days. They had no reason, except there was no else. All good men were already out, and Clint Barton had one last shot to make up for a tarnished record.

Brash, his superiors would say, doesn’t handle orders well, shoots before thinking, doesn’t think mostly.

One last chance, he was told but he knew what they meant. Don’t fuck this up.

“You looking for trouble?” Mayor Stark asked the day after Clint’s interview with Miss Potts.

“Why look for it?” Clint volleyed back. “It tends to find me without much help.”

He figured he was looking at some right now. This town was layered, elements piled on top of each other, some there to merely distract. He was going to need to peel them all back, find skeleton of the place. Carved into the bones, he imagined, was his answer.

“What I want to know is if we’re gonna need to have a talk.”

They dragged the body thirty miles out into the valley, till there wasn’t much left to drag, Clint thought.

“Dunno,” he replied. “My mood and disposition changes from day to day. Might just wake up tomorrow and decide to be a general pain in every orifice you got, Mayor Stark.”

There was a begrudging respect there, at a man who wouldn’t back down. They didn’t call Anthony Stark the iron-fisted mayor for nothing. He carved his will out into the land and into the people. He protected his own, and destroyed whatever threatened them.

“I’ll keep my horse saddled then,” he said.

Steve Rogers was something of a local legend, a local hero, and Clint was surprised by it, at first, because the man had Apache-blood running thick through his veins. There was some debate about the origins of Steve Rogers, about his name, but there was a simple understanding of him-Indian father, white mother, and no side willing to claim him.

But he was a bit like a shield around the town. Indian Territory was up a ways still, but the Indians recognized no boundaries, and no lands. Before the white man had shown up and said this is mine and this is yours, there’d only been endless rolling plains, and buffalo.

White folk, Clint recognized, were a bit like the sun too. So hot they burn most things away. Manifest Destiny, the politicians up east called it. Right to kill, Clint translated it to.

But Steve Rogers kept the town safe from straying bands of Indians. He had their respect, and the town’s. It was an odd, heavy sort of relationship-neither said you are mine, but both accepted him when he cared to step into their plains of existence; though Clint wondered what he did when he wasn’t here or there. Did he simply stop being?

Bounty hunting was big around these parts, though as far as Clint knew he’d never returned a slave back to the plantation he escaped from. Bandits were his prey, mostly, and go far enough west you’d come across tales of a half-breed gunslinger winning a draw or two.

Two weeks in, Steve Rogers rode back into town. His general habits were, leave without warning, come back in a similar fashion.

This time, he came back dragging a man behind his horse. Blood caked his eyes, and his lips, and were puffy in the dry heat.

Clint had some questions, but he figured they’d keep for now.

iii. frontier justice

The Black Widow was open near about all night, though the girls retired come the dawn, either with a man or without.

“Does Pinkerton have a celibacy vow I don’t know about?” Mrs. Romanoff asked, setting down beside him and handing him a glass of throat-burning whisky. Her saloon was famous for it, but more for its vodka-if you could afford it; most couldn’t. “On the house,” she added.

“I generally don’t like to pay for it,” Clint said evenly. “Sex, I mean.”

“Doesn’t it get lonely?”

“That’s what my hand’s for.”

She laughed. “You’re the third agent to roll through here, but you’re the most interesting by far.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said seriously.

“You haven’t asked me any questions, though. Don’t think a bordello madam would know anything about missing slaves?”

Clint only smiled. “I think you know more about them than just about anyone else here, excepting the mayor and the sheriff.”

“But you haven’t asked me anything.”

“Maybe I’m saving the best for last.”

“You’re a charmer.”

“It’s fine of my few finer qualities,” he agreed. “Pinkerton doesn’t always agree, but I’ve always subscribed to the theory of catching more flies with honey, rather than vinegar.”

She took a sip of her whisky, with the practiced ease of a woman who’d done it before, many times, and would do it again, many times.

“And you, Mrs. Romanoff?”

“My charms are many.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’m sure you can,” she purred.

“How’d a fine lady like you end up in a place like this anyway?”

“I’m Russian,” the lady explained. “We took a boat, the general way. But to be more specific-in Russia, you either ate well or you didn’t eat at all. My husband thought coming over here would mean a new life, a better life, eating will, you see. I suppose some would say death is a form of new life, but I’ve never been very religious. He’s buried not far from here, and the rundown little shanty he dreamed of turning into a saloon I took and made my own.”

“Did you love him, your husband?”

“Love is for children,” she replied evenly.

Clint rocked back on the legs of his chair. She was the only splash of color in the town, it seemed, flavoring the place with her accent and her catlike bottled green eyes. There was power in her, a sort of restrained thing, that she keeps simmering just below the surface. She was winter, with a summer heart.

“Do you believe in love, Agent Barton?”

“Sure,” he said. “But hell if I’ve come across it.”

Later, when she took him by his hand and led him up to her rooms, the drapes pulled tight to block out the heat and light of the sun, where it was just her sweet-smelling skin and her thick curls splayed out in his palms, where it was just him and her, and their voices and breaths and bodies mingling together, Clint had the sinking sensation he found it.

The sheriff stood tall, a big blonde-giant, with his legs braced in a battle stance and his arms crossed. His colt hung in his hand, beguiling in its inaction.

Steve Rogers slid from his horse, a big black beast, as the mayor came down from his porch. He untied the man strung up to his saddle, and forced him to his knees.

“This the man?” he demanded.

Natasha Romanoff moved like a waif from his side, arms wrapped protectively around a tall, stick-thin woman with a waterfall of black hair that fell across her face. Clint had seen her ‘round the saloon, scrubbing at the tables, but he knew she wasn’t one of Natasha’s girls.

“Thunder-Heart Woman,” Natasha said gently, one hand rubbing gentle circles between the woman’s bony shoulders, “is this the man who raped you?”

The woman glanced at up, to the bloodied man kneeling in the dirt. Her chin moved. “Yes,” she said thickly.

Sheriff Thor approached them, one booted foot kicking the man face down in the dirt. The whole town circled them in a ring, even the women didn’t cower. The sheriff’s wife, Miss Jane, stood with arms interlocked with Miss Potts, who watched pale and bloodless, but watched.

“I don’t take too kindly to that in my town,” the sheriff said. His gun gleamed silver in the sunlight. “Mayor, who do you propose we proceed?”

Mayor Stark glanced over at Miss Potts and nodded. She came forward, brushed passed him, and gathered the trembling Thunder-Heart Woman in her arms, and bore her away from the crowd. They closed around her like a tight cage.

“How long he been marching in the valley?” he asked.

“Ten miles out, and ten miles back,” Steve Rogers answered.

“He won’t last another thirty. We could always hang him.”

“Hanging him takes too long,” Sheriff Thor said. His broad shoulders moved in a restless motion. Clint recognized old money sitting heavy on him, in his ivory-laced accent, in the way he stood. He wasn’t hunched, or braced for a fight, like the men he’d seen born and forged by the west. “I’ll shoot him and be done with it.”

“You could lock him up, let me take him up east when I go for a trial,” Clint suggested, for appearance’s sake. Laws didn’t work down here the way it worked east. If it wasn’t something solid, firm, graspable then it wasn’t the law. People out here could not survive with the promise of the intangible. Justice had to be swift and instantaneous, and unyielding.

“Suppose we let you take him, Agent Barton, and he gets a trial-a white man that raped a Indian woman,” Mayor Stark said, “what do you think will happen to him?”

Natasha watched him evenly, the product of a place where you ate well or not at all. She never told him, but Clint knew mostly she’d been the not at all sort.

“Not a hell of a lot,” he replied. The man looked up at him with blood-swollen eyes, red-rimmed with hope.

“No,” Steve Rogers said succinctly.

Thor leveled his gun.

“No,” Clint said. He stepped forward. “I’ll do it.” He pulled his Colt out, the solid, black steel handle a familiar weight and texture. His thumb moved across the golden inlayed hawk there.

“You a decent shot, Agent?” Mayor Stark asked.

“I’m a regular crack shot. My superiors’ will tell you I never miss.” It was the one good thing on his record. Clint Barton, never misses. “Not that it matters, at this range.”

And it didn’t, not at that range. The blood splattered out in an arch, muddying the ground, like a mismatched trail right up to the mayor’s boots. Natasha Romanoff never looked away, hands balled into fists at her side. The sheriff looked something akin to impressed, though his arms never uncrossed.

“Someone go find Doctor Banner,” Mayor Stark said. “Let’s get this carcass out of my town.”

Clint holstered his gun and stepped over the body. “I need to talk to you,” he said to Steve Rogers.

“I was only in town to finish up the job,” Steve Rogers said neutrally. He pulled his hat low over his face with two fingers. “I got business up in Indian Territory. We’ll talk when I get back.”

Somehow, judging by the tone, Clint figured the bounty hunter didn’t think he’d be around that long.

High noon didn’t roll around with the sort of fanfare you’d think. The big clock tower in the center of the town chimed, and people mulled about with their business. If they noticed the Pinkerton agent walking up to the mayor’s house, they didn’t say much of it.

The mayor wasn’t on his porch, but Clint didn’t bother knocking on the door. He simply kicked it open and stepped inside.

Anthony Stark puffed on a cigar.

“I told you had until high noon,” he said. “Where are they?”

“Long gone, Agent Barton. Did you really figure I’d turn them over?”

“No,” Clint admitted, with respect. His gun slid quietly from its holster. “But you and I are gonna have to ride aways east. This is obstructing justice, Mayor Stark.”

“Whose?” Stark asked.

The kick to the back of his knees sent him stumbling, and the kick to his face sent him reeling. He coughed up blood, felt the metallic bite of it on his teeth and rolled to his side. His gun skidded out of his reach, and the sheriff’s boot bit down hard on his wrist.

Mayor Tony Stark crouched over him. “Unfortunately for you, Agent Barton, I kept my horse saddled.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Dr. Banner said when Clint stopped by the clinic.

“Three missing slaves from Justin Hammer’s plantation, it’s pretty big news. The man’s willing to pay well for them, if they’re found and returned. A doctor could set up a real nice practice, up east.”

He noticed the man’s hand shook-with nerves or restrained anger, Clint wasn’t sure. But if this town was a link, a layered barbed wire, then he thought he might have found the kink.

“Slaves,” Banner sneered. “They’re people, Agent Barton.”

“Not according to the law.”

“And if the law’s wrong?” Banner demanded.

He crossed his arms cover his chest, stood braced. His stomach rolled, the way it had when he’d been sent down to oversee moving some of the Indians onto their new land, when he’d gone to the Hammer Plantation.

“Then you walk yourself up to Washington and do something about it.”

“Does it bother you at all, Agent Barton? To be nothing but a mindless soldier, being told to jump and having to ask how high?”

Yes.

He inclined his head. “Wars are won with soldiers, Dr. Banner, and I don’t know if you’ve taken your head out of the sand long enough to notice-we’re pretty damn close to a war.”

“And whose side will you be on?”

“Say what you will, but my job is to uphold the laws of the Union and until my president tells me otherwise, I’m going to see those slaves back to Justin Hammer.”

Rage flashed, hot and green, in his eyes but the doctor turned away, disgusted with what he saw.

“I knew a man, Agent Barton, bravest man you’ll ever meet. Saved my life more than I could count, got me out of trouble, kept the town afloat when I was in my worse moments, but if I asked your laws they’d tell me he wasn’t a man at all-all because of the color his skin. He was worth ten Justin Hammers and then some, but they wouldn’t even give him his name. James Rhodes, more man than you and I and they let someone own him. How’s that for a law?”

They bound his hands and he stumbled along behind them. “It’s still the law, Mayor. You breaking it won’t change it.”

“But it’ll make me feel damn better about calling myself a man,” the Mayor said evenly.

Sheriff Thor tied one end of the rope to the horse’s saddle. Clint felt fear like a sharp knife straight to his gut. He thought of Natasha, and the wake of her exit. I might not be here when you get back. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Gonna drag me thirty miles out, till there’s not much left to drag?” he demands.

“No. Despite appearances, Agent Barton, Thor and I don’t dislike you. You got a sense of justice right up your spine. A man can respect that.” He nodded to Thor, who left to saddle his own horse. Tony Stark mounted him. “But we’re still going for a ride, we three.”

iv. way out west

He dragged himself as far as he could until his arms gave out and he had to lay on his back, face toward the sun. It blackened in his vision, the fiery edges spreading out in a corona.

“A good way to end a bad year,” he said.

In the distance, he thought he might have heard a horse.

Natasha curled like a cat on his chest. No. Maybe cat was the wrong word. Panther, might be more appropriate. Some big, sleek feline with power humming like an old ballad under her skin.

She traced a pattern up along his chest. Her blood-red hair tickled his naked shoulder.

“You never asked me,” she said.

He smoked a cigarillo. They were a sometimes-habit, but with Steve Rogers gone and Bruce Banner shaking, and the pieces of this puzzle clicking together, Clint found the hankering for them strong.

“Maybe I never wanted you to have to tell me.”

Her nails bit in his chest. “Ask,” she said.

So he did.

Across the backside of Mayor Stark’s horse, hands bound in front him, legs dangling, Clint said, “You really think, smuggling a few slaves out of the country is going to help, is going to solve anything?”

“No,” Mayor Stark answered with a careless shrug.

“War will, though,” Thor added from his horse canting beside them.

Clint laughed. “I don’t know how to break it to you fellows, but you’re in the heart of Texas. When-if-the war gets brewing it’s not going to be on any side that has anti-slavery on its list of pros.”

The sheriff looked at the mayor, the mayor looked at the sheriff, like they were in on some joke that floated above Clint’s hand, unattainable.

“We’ve gotten good at guerilla warfare, haven’t we?”

Mayor Stark’s smile was sharp, hot, like the sun in the desert, like coil of a rattlesnake, like a cactus raised stubborn in the ground.

“Sure as hell we have.”

He stopped by the sheriff office in the morning, laid his badge on the desk. Thor only looked at him, chin inclined.

“High noon,” he said. “You give me those slaves and I’ll leave here without any trouble. You don’t turn them over, and I’ll take you in, and Mayor Stark and Dr. Banner, and I will spend the rest of my days hunting down Steve Rogers.”

“Natasha Romanoff isn’t on that list,” Thor observed.

Clint didn’t bother answering that.

“Ah,” Thor said and then, “Do you really believe you’re doing the right thing, Agent Barton?”

He thought of blood-red streaks on black backs. Clint Barton had seen his share of horrors too. “The law says it is, that’s enough for me.”

Thor only looked at him with something akin to pity.

“You don’t take a hint do you, Barton? Or a warning. You should have dragged yourself north, to the road, and waited until a coach picked you up and you forgot all about this place,” Mayor Stark said. Thor stood behind him like a monolith to violence.

“I’m stubborn like that,” Clint said. His voice was still dry, hoarse, from hours without water in the dead heat. But he approached them anyway. He was damned stubborn like that.

Mayor Stark leveled his rifle straight to his chest. He pulled the hammer back. There wasn’t a thread of hesitation in his eyes. He’d pull the trigger.

“This is going to make a hell of a mess,” he said, sounding put out.

“I’m sure Dr. Banner will clean it up,” Clint said.

But she snaked between them like a shadow, silent as a gentle breeze, and laid her knife across the mayor’s throat. Even Thor hadn’t seen her move, and he stood now with his arms hanging down at his side, mouth open.

“I wouldn’t,” Natasha said flatly.

The Underground Railroad generally went north, but occasionally dipped south. Mexico is not a place to hang your hat, currently, but it’s still a sight better than being slave on a plantation.

This is how it started: James Rhodes saved Tony Stark’s live some years back, but that wasn’t enough to earn him his freedom from Justin Hammer so James had up and disappeared-him, his wife, and his two kids; right out from under Hammer’s nose. Tony Stark had paid Steve Rogers, in the beginning, for protection and then secrecy, but Steve Rogers had a goodness in him, and the idea had bloomed between them both, like a desert flower.

Steve Rogers had tasted injustice, when he had traveled under a different name but the same sun. He’d watched the white man come and take half his people’s land, and he’d watched men and women and children labor under whips and sun and harsh masters’ eyes. The bile and hate had congealed deep in his chest, until each step he took was laden and full with potent rage.

Dr. Banner tended to the wounded, had been brought in by Mayor Stark himself when he’d made his first and only trip east, to try to show Congress the injustice of the America’s habits.

And in a little room above the Black Widow Natasha Romanoff hid them from the lawmen when they came riding into town.

It was all Pinkerton Agent Clint Barton needed.

He woke up wrapped in the scent of Natasha Romanoff. For a moment there was only blind pain, burning through him like the sun had beaten down on him out in the desert-was he buried, six feet under? The sheriff and the mayor, they always buried the dead.

And then Natasha’s slender hand swept across his brow, where the sweat collected in a shallow pool. His side ached, like a rib had been torn out.

“Well damn,” he said. “I was pretty sure I’d earned myself a front-row seat in hell, but this is a heavenly sight.”

Natasha’s laugh washed over him, cool and husky. He wanted to ball up inside it, make it his home. Her room was dark, the curtains drawn tight, like a cocoon. He wondered what he’d be, when he awoke, what metamorphous was occurring right now under the surface of his flesh. In the desert out west, you changed. It changed you.

Then he worried that the sun had fried his brain to a fine pulpy liquid.

“We’ll all go to hell eventually, Agent Barton,” Natasha said, “But I managed to shoo the reaper away for another day.”

Her fingers made another pass across his forehead. He caught her wrist and held it there. She was wearing a corset, and not much else. A purple feather flapped against the side of her head, her lips rouged and her cheeks pink.

“Thought you weren’t going to be here when I got back,” he said.

After a moment she said, “I said I might not be. Suppose today was your lucky day, Barton.”

He swallowed. His throat felt dry, papery, like parchment crinkled when it was left out for days on a windowsill. “Guess it was.” Quietly, he added, “I thought you didn’t believe in love.”

She leaned over him, winter-cool lips ghosting over his bruised cheek. “You’ll make a believer out of me, won’t you Agent Barton?”

“Ma’am, I’ll make it my life’s work,” he swore.

“Go to sleep, Clint,” she told him, the first time she said his name. “1858 isn’t a good year, but 1589 isn’t shaping up to be much better.”

He visited Justin Hammer’s plantation in Arkansas just before heading westward. The air had been sticky, hot, and made the crisp white of his shirt plaster to his chest. Justin Hammer hadn’t been doing much better, kept patting at the beads of sweat above his lips with a damp cloth. It was a wonder the man was even out here.

“Tell them there’s a reward, a decent one,” he said. “They’re my best workers. I need them back, for the harvest.”

A bug, some sort of desert beetle, scuffled alongside his boot. Clint crushed it before saying, “Yes, sir.”

The songs started up then, a dirge of a tune, and Clint swore he felt it wedge in his breastbone, ruminate there like a bullet between broken bones. He felt like throwing up, but kept his eyes on Justin Hammer.

“That damn song,” Hammer snapped. “Drives me insane.” To his foreman, he ordered, “Find the one who started it and whip him, would you?”

The law, Clint rallied himself and turned away from the screams when they started.

“He got you good, didn’t he?” Mayor Stark shook his head, as much as he could with Natasha’s blade pressed so intimately to the flesh of his neck. “I thought our Russian widow was impervious to the messier emotions.”

“He’s not a bad man,” Natasha said.

“No,” Mayor Stark agreed, “but he is an idiot.”

“Then I guess he’s my idiot.” Her knife dug in closer, and a little line of blood rolled down the column of his throat. “Now, put your gun down, Mayor. I’d hate to have to explain this to Pepper.”

The repeating rifle kicked up a cloud of dust and dirt as it thudded to the ground. Clint twisted at his hip, angled his gun as Thor moved.

“Don’t,” he suggested.

Thor didn’t.

“Now what?” Mayor Stark demanded. “We gonna stand here to till kingdom come?”

“No.” Clint ripped off the badge clipped to his vest. He tossed beside the rifle. “That seems pointless, since by now Steve Rogers must have the men well cross the border, huh?”

“Men,” Thor parroted.

“Just because I follow the law doesn’t mean I agree with it. But the law is the law.”

Mayor Stark grinned. “Not this far out west, Agent Barton. Here, we forge our laws.” He arched his neck, and looked at Natasha. She gave a brief, clipped nod and her knife disappeared somewhere in the voluminous folds of her skirt.

“You want a medal or something?” Clint demanded.

“If you got one on you…”

“Fresh out.”

“Too bad. I like shiny trophies. Makes me feel important.” Mayor Stark looked over at Thor and said, “I know Rogers is your sometimes deputy, but how do you feel about a permanent addition?”

Thor looked at Clint. “He’s short,” he announced, like he just noticed.

“You’re just fucking tall,” Clint volleyed.

“Boys,” Natasha said patiently.

“Besides, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be stripped of my authority.”

“Good,” Mayor Stark said. “It means more room for your new shiny gold star.”

Thor sighed. “We’re gonna have to refit the uniforms. Take them in.”

“Isn’t Jane good at that?”

“I can do it,” Natasha said.

“What the fuck,” Clint said succinctly. “You shot me yesterday.”

“We’re all adults here. We can get passed that.” Mayor Stark reached up and palmed the thin cut at his neck. “Look at this. It’s going to scar. Aren’t we even?”

“Only if you let me shoot you,” Clint snapped. Natasha slid closer to him, a hand on his arm. He felt like he was dried out, like the bones of a body left out to bleach in the sun. She put water back in him, put him back together, and held him there.

“Guess I’ll forever owe you. I don’t like getting shot.”

He didn’t say yes, exactly, but it hovered there between them. Where the hell else was he going to go anyway? And somewhere in the back of his mouth was the taste of the bile that rose up to choke him at Justin Hammer’s plantation.

But his side still hurt like a bitch and he wasn’t agreeing to anything until it stopped aching, stopping reminding him they shot him.

Natasha laid her head at the small of his back.

“Why did you start up with Stark anyway?” he asked.

She shifted, soft silky hair moving like a sheath across his skin. “I owed him a debt. There are too many men out here that would try to take advantage of a woman on her own.”

His hand laid still on the pillow. It curled into a fist. But out here we make our laws, he told himself.

“Would you have done it?” he asked, even as he told himself he wouldn’t. He’d seen her that day, glorious and red in the sun with her knife at the mayor of her town’s throat. It had been like finding ice in the desert. And Clint had known he’d break a thousand laws for her, if he had to. “Slit his throat?”

Her mouth coasted along his spine.

“Yes,” she answered. “I would have.”

Clint nodded, accepted it, and accepted her. He never had much of a home, or much of a life, but he thought that maybe way out west he could start forming one, forging one. Just like everything else down in this valley. Just like a weed.