Clint was on a team with a guy who had an honest shot at being the smartest man in the world, a being that could access the Internet with his brain, a legend with a brain enhanced by a super serum, and an alien with more life experience than the rest of them put together.
Clint was comfortable with not being the most knowledgeable man in the room, in other words. He'd gotten this far without any of that, and he'd like to see them try to survive the enemies they had with the weapons he did.
They had their strengths. He had his. He was cool with it.
Which was why he was so surprised when Wanda, in a low moment when they were all sitting around at two o'clock in the morning, wondered if Vision was right when he said this was all their fault, that their enemies had risen as a response to the challenge they presented.
He could get Wanda saying it; she didn't know the history like they did. But he didn't get what Vision had been thinking, and he wasn't sure why none of the others corrected her.
He frowned. "You know who the first enhanced human was, right?"
"Cap- " She caught herself. "Steve."
Steve was apparently too lost in his own head to correct her, so Clint stepped in again. "No, Red Skull was the first. Steve was Erskine's attempt to fix what went wrong with Red Skull. He didn't want the Nazis to have technology we didn't. Then Bucky got enhanced because they were trying to recreate Red Skull. Hank Pym created Ant-Man," he nodded to Scott, "to fight in the Cold War. If the Soviets were going to create terrifying ghost stories about operatives, so were we. Tony created Iron Man to escape the Ten Rings. War Machine provides a counter to Tony. Vision was created as a response to Ultron, for crying out loud! Falcon took up his wings again because of Hydra. You let yourself be experimented on because your country was at war. I use explosive arrows because the competition's too terrifying not to."
Nat snorted. Clint ignored her.
"My point is, the only superheroes alive that weren't either enhanced by the enemy or created in response to what the other side was already doing are Thor and Hulk, and Thor wasn't enhanced, he was born that way. The bad guys didn't rise up to challenge us. We were created to challenge the bad guys." He'd skipped over Nat's backstory on the basis of the fact that she'd have killed him if he didn't, but she fell under the general umbrella of "enhanced by the bad guys", so it didn't really matter. He was forgetting someone, who was it? "Okay, to be fair, I don't really know how the whole Black Panther thing got started, but I don't think we can blame him for anything that happened prior to the Accords." That sounded like everyone. If he'd missed someone, he could deal with it in the morning. He was too tired for this.
The others were all staring at him. "What?" he asked defensively.
"I did not know this," Wanda said slowly. "Thank you, Clint."
The others were still looking at him like he'd said something weird. Seriously, this should not be news to them.
"You forgot Spider-Man," Nat told him.
"Spider-kid, you mean," Falcon said, shaking his head. "That could have gone so much worse than it did."
"But it didn't," Steve reminded them. "Come on, people. Get some sleep. We're going to meet it." He caught Clint's eye and nodded to him. "Good speech, Clint."
Mildly bewildered, Clint wandered off to find a perch to sleep on.
A/N: So that was . . . less of a story, and more of a rant. That's unfortunate.
Ah, well. Feel free to discuss your own feelings on that, or any other Civil War related thing.