Author's note: This was written for thorin-is-a-cuddler on Tumblr, who gave me the prompt for this about... two weeks ago? Three? Embarrassingly long anway - but anyway. I've never really written either Clint or Steve before and I probably made them (especially Steve) more cliché than in character buuut I tried. Anyway. Me shuts up now.

Sometimes, Clint did wonder about the wisdom of choosing to fight alongside a group of superheroes with a bow and arrow as his weapon of choice. There were moments in which a sane person would look at the situation at hand, look at Clint and his arrows, look back at the situation, and simply say, no, this really does not seem like a good idea.

This was probably one of those moments.

"Sorry!" Clint swore and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid having a load of scrap metal (previously, a robot, but that phase of its life had passed) land on his head. When Iron Man started dropping dead robots out of the sky, one should best avoid being out on the streets below him, which at least the civilians seemed to have gathered well enough. It was just Clint among heaps of metal and debris and an overturned car or two, and still Tony managed to aim straight at him in the middle of all the collateral damage.

"You could at least try to sound like you're actually sorry," he grumbled back over the comms as he emerged from his roll into a crouch. Predictably, he went ignored. Iron Man was shooting at robots two streets away already, high above him. He was glad at least the number of flying murderous tin cans was more or less manageable, since only two of their team could actually fly themselves, and one of them dropped out of the sky if he didn't clutch his sparkly hammer.

How the hell they ever got things done was anyone's guess, really. Clint certainly didn't know.

Peeking out from behind a piece of wall that originally belonged about 30 floors higher and connected to the rest of the building, he spotted two of the damn things preparing to … do something he didn't want them to do, whatever it was, it seemed to involve blasting a hole through the wall of another building – was that a bank? Was this about money? What the hell – anyway, they shouldn't be blowing holes into it.

Clint rose from his crouch, fingers playing with the settings on his quiver behind his back. "Hey, Tin Men! The Wizard's palace is the other way!"

They turned, one after the other, their optical sensors regarding him coolly and without an ounce of feeling. That was the problem with robots, Clint thought while he watched his arrows, timed just right, explode in their faces. Who built machines without bothering to program them with a sense of humour and basic pop culture knowledge? No fun fighting opponents who didn't appreciate his wit.

At least it couldn't take much longer anymore. He hadn't heard the Hulk roar angrily at anything for a while now, and Thor's lightning had pretty much died down. Probably not without ruining a few people's weather forecast, but whoever wasn't used to that by now had no one but themselves to blame. Anyway, Clint had just about had enough by now, so if they could just be done with it and return to base to hopefully not spend half the night figuring out who was behind all this crap this time, that'd be great.

Except, of course– "Fuck. Guys, we have a problem! Shit, why-"

Tony's voice came cussing wildly through the comms at the exact same moment Steve said, "I think that was it," only to cut himself off at Tony's interruption. "Iron Man! What's going on?"

"Remember how I said earlier that there gotta be more robots and there were definitely more of them when they started rampaging and where did the others swan off to? Yeah, I found the rest of them – fuck dammit get off me you flying piece of trash – there's three or four over at 82nd, there are civilians involved, anyone nearby better get their ass over there right now while I take down these – okay, buddy, I don't think you're flamethrower is gonna make a difference here-"

"I'm on the way, but it'll take a moment." Natasha's voice effectively layered itself over Tony's string of expletives. "Thor'd be faster but I think he fried his comm earlier. Anyone –"

"I'm on it." Clint had broken into a sprint and rounded three corners by the time Tony had finished his explanation. Now he stood pressed against a wall, head poking out from behind his cover just enough so he could see what was happening. "There's four of them, they've cornered a group of people, maybe seven? One's still a kid – no, five robots, one is doing something with a vehicle of some kind, looks like it can fly, probably? I dunno, might be a hostage situation or something, but they don't seem to be hurting the civilians, maybe I could-"

"Hawkeye, stay under cover as long as they're safe." That was Cap, the sharp order cutting straight through Clint's rapid report. "Widow and I are on the way, don't take them on on your own." As though he hadn't been fighting the damn things by himself just fine for the last half hour or so. Clint bristled a bit and opened his mouth for a snappy reply, only to hiss a curse as the scene before him changed.

"Shit. Their robomobile's ready, they're gonna kidnap these people and the kid's about to make a run for it – I'm going in, I've got-"

"Hawkeye, I said-"

"Clint, wait-"

He ignored the voices telling him to stop and instead leaped out onto the street, hoping that these robots' reactions were as faultily programmed as the last ones' had been. "Hey there, assholes!" he yelled, the words scraping against his throat. The machines, bless their master's apparent idiocy, all turned their attention towards him as one.

Clint didn't waste his breath on any clever insults, just nocked an arrow, fired, nocked the next. From the corner of his eye, at the fringe of his focus, he saw the kid who'd been about to run take her chance; two, three of the others, who had already been halfway to being bound on the vehicle, followed suit. Good.

Then one robot started firing the instant before an arrow knocked its head out, and there must have been more of the beasts hiding somewhere nearby because something was coming up behind him as well, and suddenly everything was very loud and very fast, and Clint wasn't certain if dropping to the ground was a strategic decision on his part or a result of the sudden pain spiking through his ribs. A second later, a different kind of pain set his leg on fire, and he figured vaguely that maybe he'd just stay on the ground for now no matter how he'd ended up there. The sun was going down anyway, and it was as good a place as any for a nap.

Not even Steve, who was shouting his name somewhere far above him, was allowed to keep him awake.

Consciousness was slow to return, so slow, in fact, that for an indeterminable length of time it didn't even occur to Clint that what was happening around him wasn't still the thick, unfocussed haze of vague and sticky dreams. The haze clung to him, as reluctant to let go of his mind as he was reluctant to consider letting it go. It was uncomfortable, and there was a fuzzy, subconscious notion that whatever lay beyond the haze would be rather unpleasant.

Of course, from that point onward, proper awareness promptly decided on a more rapid approach, although when Clint blinked his mind open, the haze still lingered on the edges of his consciousness and vision. Maybe that had something to do with how he was pretty sure he was floating half a step next to his body.

There was a voice from somewhere to his side. "Clint?"

"Hrmblghr," his mouth said after the moment it needed to figure out how it worked. Yep, definitely not quite connected to his body. That wasn't what he'd meant to say at all.

"You're awake." The voice belonged to a face, and both the face and the voice were familiar. Red curls. Black suit. Or sometimes baggy sweatpants and goofy shirts stolen from Clint's closet. When that voice sounded as calm as it did right now, without a hint of inflection, it was never a good sign.

"Hi, Nat," he mumbled through tingly lips once he'd found the way back inside himself. "Don't tell me you've been weeping at my sickbed. I'd have to be embarrassed on your behalf."

Her mouth twitched a little, which he counted as a win. "You," she told him then, every hint of a smile vanishing once more, "are an idiot." There was little he could do in the way of reacting to that beyond a solemn nod, so that was what he did.

Natasha filled him in, eventually, when she'd assured herself that he actually was fine (as much as could be expected), and he was coherent enough to pinpoint the source of the haziness as painkillers. For those he immediately was immensely grateful, as he could imagine only too well what it'd feel like without them.

The humourless robots had shot at him, and then quite a bit of rubble had landed on and around him, and all in all there were some things in his body that weren't exactly in their best shape anymore. His ribs, for one thing, at least three of them. And his leg. Two of his fingers. His kidneys were probably sort of alright. They'd also have to have an eye on his head, but it wasn't like there was anything important in there to get concussed or otherwise damaged. Nat, when he told her that, didn't seem to find it nearly as funny as he did. She just looked at him in her unreadable way until his smile dried up and crumbled from his face.

She didn't say anything though, and Clint was glad. She knew he knew what she was thinking, so there was no need to say it out loud, and if Clint felt bad at least it spared him the you could have died talk and all it entailed.

"Get some rest," she told him when she left, and he'd have told her the same and that he was the one who'd been out cold for nearly twelve hours while she'd watched him sleep like some Twilight stalker vampire, but she closed the door before he could make the words make sense.

Bruce came in next, to check the monitor they'd hooked him up to. He looked a little worn but smiled encouragingly and promised that Clint's fingers would sustain no lasting damage and he'd be able to use bow and arrow again soon enough as if nothing had ever happened at all.

"As long as you go easy on them and give them the rest that they need, Clint," and he wanted to protest but also to keep his fingers functional, and it wasn't Bruce's fault that there was no other way. Still, this all sucked.

"This all sucks," he told Bruce.

Bruce shrugged at him and cleaned his glasses with his t-shirt. Or possibly Tony's t-shirt, Clint wasn't certain that Bruce's wardrobe included Metallica merch. "You were lucky." No arguing with that. "If they'd hit you just a little bit to the left..."

And there was the hesitation, the reproachful look infused with something that came dangerously close to pity, and Clint had never been this relieved to have Thor barging through the door, Tony in tow.

For the next few hours, the Avengers Tower's infirmary transformed into a jumble of noise and a bit more chaos than was generally considered appropriate for infirmaries that were literally anywhere else but this tower full of crazy people. Clint didn't mind much. It was a welcome distraction, Thor proudly telling him how they'd all defeated their enemies and nearly slamming Mjölnir into a piece of equipment because apparently he sometimes forgot that he was holding a big magic hammer. Clint didn't even know why he was holding it in the first place. Tony grumbled about still not having found out for certain where the robots had come from – it wasn't Latveria, and wasn't that a change for once – and Clint got to chew him out for nearly burying him under a small heap of electronic scraps earlier. Tony showed a bare minimum of remorse for that one and promised to construct a new kind of arrow for Clint, which he probably would have done anyway just for fun, but what did it matter.

And still, even with all the distraction and the room nearly constantly full of people, their presence wasn't enough to keep his mind off the glaring absence of their team leader. When Tony and Thor left, squabbling about pop tart flavours, and Bruce had sternly told him to rest one last time before taking his leave as well, Clint's thoughts inevitably began to gnaw away at him, like termites gnawing at a wooden house's substance, eating their way through until they infiltrated the entire goddamn structure and popped up in the living room. Eventually, the house would collapse, nothing uncertain about that.

Where was Steve? Why hadn't he shown up?

There was a part of him, small, insistent, stubborn, that ceaselessly told him that Steve had been injured. Incapacitated. Or worse. Strangely enough, that thought was shut out almost easily. Even if he believed the others would try to keep such a thing from him – and Clint was 100% sure they wouldn't, for any reason – he did know them too well for that. The general mood wasn't nearly sombre enough, Thor had no talent for pretence on a scale that high, and not even Natasha would be able to mask the loss of Captain America.

That left the other voice of worry in charge, one that was significantly more vague, and significantly less reasonable, and Clint could not shut it up.

Maybe Steve simply didn't care enough to visit. Face it, Barton – you fucked up. Went against orders, got yourself taken out of the game for at least a few weeks. Way to go, Hawkeye. What's the point of you?

"How are you feeling?" Steve asked when he did come, and Clint's hands grew damp and gross which was really uncomfortable under all the gauze, and what kind of reaction was that even to someone asking after his well-being? It felt like waiting to receive a dressing-down by a teacher or parent or whatever other kind of authority figure. That moment when they insisted on pleasantries and etiquette, and all the while you were on edge because you could sense the storm brewing on the horizon.

"Fine," Clint answered with an awkward shrug. "Though I guess you'll have to find someone else if there's a new killer robot attack any time soon, seeing as I'm out of commission. You could place an advert. 'Frisbee-wielding fish looking for a bicycle effective against androids,' that kind of thing." It was rambling and not much of a joke, and it fell flat accordingly.

A newspaper ad might even work, now that Clint thought about it. Couldn't be too hard to find someone with skills more useful than his own. Any new hire might even have their hearing fully functional. Hey, maybe he could parse his disobedience off as not having heard the order properly.

Captain America, in civil clothes, was looking at him with a face that tried not to be stern. "I'm going to assume you'll be back on your feet by the time of the next robot issue. They don't happen that often."

"Now you've jinxed it. They'll show up again later this week, just because you said they wouldn't."

Steve gave a miniscule sigh. He didn't even crack a smile, and Clint's faux cheerfulness melted off him like butter in the sun. Not long, now. Steve Rogers was good at a lot of things, but awkwardly small-talking his way around an issue was not among them.

For lack of a better idea, Clint counted down in his mind. 4 … 3 … 2 … aaand 1.

"You took an unnecessary risk today." And there it was. A quick glance confirmed that Steve was wearing his disapproving eyebrows, pulled low over his eyes and with a distinct crease between them. Clint sucked his cheeks between his teeth and said nothing. "You acted against direct orders," Steve – Captain America – went on. "You can't just – blindly jump into things, take action without any kind of plan or backup-"

"I had backup," Clint interrupted despite his best efforts not to. "You were on the way, weren't you?"

"You had no idea when we'd be there, Clint."

The calm, collected tone set Clint's teeth on edge. Condescending. Disappointed authority figure down to a T. "As if your whole thing isn't barging into shit half-cocked," he growled, and probably would have gone right on if Cap didn't talk over him.

"I'm nowhere near as vulnerable as you are! You should have waited for someone else-"

"Oh, like for you?" Clint was sitting upright now, and all but snarling, close to jumping out of bed to get into Cap's face, regardless of what Bruce had said. "I'll just wait for you next time, or for Tony maybe, for a real hero, is that it? Leave the dangerous stuff to the big boys and watch the civilians get hurt in the meantime, to be sure I get out unscathed?"

"I didn't mean-" Steve looked taken aback, like he wanted to go back and swallow his words before they hit the air, but Clint was on a roll.

"Frankly, Captain, I don't care to hear what you meant." His heart was beating audibly, hard enough to chase his pulse through his clenched fists, throbbing in his injured limbs and bones, and he resolutely ignored the burning behind his eyes. "Get out."

"Clint..."

"Get out, Cap." His gaze was fixed on the white wall across him. "Go do something heroic."

He heard Steve start to say something before his mouth snapped shut. He left.

Clint managed to spend about half the following day in the infirmary, mainly in the company of Natasha, since Tony was busy dissecting mangled robot remains, Thor was off somewhere with his girlfriend, and Bruce, when he wasn't actively checking up on his patients, was pretty horrible at the whole visiting invalids and good bedside manner thing, so he tended to mostly leave people in peace until they were back on their feet.

Natasha arrived while he was gloomily staring at the bland white ceiling, too sore to get up just yet and too agitated to sleep. With her, she brought a large box containing no less than twelve doughnuts in all the colours of the rainbow and then some. At least two of them sparkled.

"Stop moping and help me eat these," she told him, plopping the box onto his lap and herself onto the mattress next to him. "We'll give any leftovers to Thor when he gets back, but at least half of them need to be gone by then or Tony will want us to share."

"Why won't you give Tony any?" Clint asked, curious despite himself. It wasn't exactly a subtle attempt at distracting him, but it was working well enough.

Natasha picked up a bright blue doughnut with yellow sprinkles. "He doesn't deserve any," she said, and refused to elaborate further.

They spent the morning through to the early afternoon getting crumbs all over the bed before Clint decided that even with Natasha there, he was becoming too stir-crazy to stay any longer. It wasn't even a real hospital, just another room in the tower that happened to harbour medical equipment within its four walls, but somehow the fact that it was an infirmary automatically caused a hospital atmosphere, and there was, to his knowledge, literally no one in the world who wasn't made uncomfortable by hospital rooms.

They could at least glue some of those glow-y stars for children to the ceiling, to make staring at it a bit more interesting. He'd mention it to Tony, the guy would love that idea.

Bruce came by, then, because there was no getting out of the infirmary without Dr. Bruce's permission. When he frowned at the idea, Nat bribed him with a revolting-looking, poison green doughnut, and he shook his head but eventually gave his consent to Clint's premature discharge.

Clint limped towards his own rooms on crutches and half-high on painkillers, with Natasha trailing after him, carrying the remaining doughnuts (a staggering amount of three – Thor would be disappointed) and probably making sure he didn't stumble and break any more important bones, like his neck.

"He worries, you know," she said abruptly after Clint had managed to settle himself and his battered leg on his own mattress. He gave her a blank look that likely wasn't nearly as blank as he wanted it to be, stomach clenching in discomfort. Natasha's eyes on him were calm and calculating and fucking reasonable, and he couldn't exactly throw her out. "Steve," she clarified, though she had to know that wasn't necessary.

"You talked to him, then?"

"He talked to me." A lopsided shrug. "Said something about unnecessary dangers and not being able to get through to you."

"Oh, he got through to me alright," Clint muttered, forcing himself to not drop his gaze to the floor.

Natasha shook her head. "I know what he said – he told me. And I know it was stupid. But I also know he didn't mean it like that, and I think he knows it was stupid, too." A head tilt, this time. Somehow, her gestures never seemed to be symmetrical. "You should talk to him."

Clint didn't want to talk to him. (Except, of course, that he did.) "I can't talk to him anyway, I'm practically bedridden." To demonstrate, he prodded his unwieldy (useless) leg and waved in a vague, all-encompassing motion towards the room and himself.

Natasha's eyebrow rose in a mixture between pity and amusement. "Not relevant, since Steve will hardly leave it at where you two left it off. He'll be back. And I'll be off now," she added, and was gone.

Clint stayed behind with a quarter box of doughnuts and a sinking heart.

In a different situation, the unicorn doughnut – glazed in seven colours, sparkly pink glitter on top, enough sugar to last a grown man for two days – would unquestionably be delicious. If he weren't virtually confined to one room, even if it wasn't a pseudo hospital room anymore. If he didn't feel kind of sick from the previous four doughnuts that were all he'd eaten today.

If his thoughts didn't keep churning, 'round and 'round the carousel, no matter how determinedly he tried to think of anything else. Actual, real life carousels, for example. Or unicorns.

So Clint miserably nibbled at his unicorn doughnut, failing spectacularly at level 129 of Candy Crush, when a hesitant knock sounded from the door. After a moment's consideration – he could pretend to be asleep, or say "go away" and that would be that – he sighed and set the phone aside. "Yah. It's not locked."

The door opened a crack, and Steve (of course it was Steve) poked his head through. "Hey." For some reason, he was whispering. "Can I come in?"

"Dunno if you can," Clint mumbled, mostly to himself, but jerked his head in agreement. Steve stepped forward and closed the door behind him with a click, looking awkward and out of place.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, and if that wasn't déjà vu Clint didn't know what was.

"Like I ate about two point five doughnuts too many," he said. Steve glanced from the mostly empty box to the half eaten abomination in his hand. "Want one?"

Of course not. At least he finally gathered the courage to pull up the chair that wasn't covered in laundry and sit down, a respectful distance from the bed. Incredible.

Clint watched the Captain America persona be pulled into place as Steve straightened himself, and then slip away after barely a handful of words. "Hawkeye, I know that- Clint." He raked his hand through his hair, and Clint waited, muscles wound uncomfortably tight. "I know what I said was… well. Could be interpreted the wrong way, and I'm sorry for that. But you must know I didn't mean it that way."

"Do I?" Clint shot back, and oh, they were off to a fantastic start. "Because it sounded pretty unambiguous to my ears."

Cap took an audible breath. "I didn't mean to imply that you were less- capable, or less useful-" Clint clenched his teeth. "It's just that – you were on your own, you couldn't know when we'd arrive but you knew we were on the way, and you dove right into a situation you couldn't properly assess from your perspective, after you were explicitly told not to. You should have waited, just for one minute, taken time to think –"

"There wasn't time!" He'd hoped to stay calm, but the words exploded out of him on a wave of helpless anger. "Those people didn't have a minute! They were about to be shipped off to god knows where and there was no one nearby apart from me, no other chance for them to get out! I was the only one who could help them in that moment, and so I did, and even if I don't have superpowers or a flying superhero suit or a frikkin' magic superhero hammer, I'm gonna help people if I have the chance, and if you don't like it then maybe you shouldn't have let me into the damn team in the first place!"

By the end of it, he was close to yelling, and once he broke off, panting, he couldn't look Cap in the eye anymore. The painkillers seemed to have evaporated together with his composure somewhere along the way, and his entire body hurt. Bruce would have a word with him about balling his fist so tightly while his fingers were injured. If they hadn't been useless before, they definitely were now.

"You were vulnerable." Steve's voice was low, piercing the silence his own had left behind. Clint cleared his throat.

"So would you have been. Or Natasha." He bit the inside of his cheek and gave a shrug. "You're not invincible, either."

"No, but-" With a sigh, Steve broke off. "No, you're right," he said then. It sounded defeated enough that Clint turned his head to look at him. A self-deprecating smile played on Steve's lips. "I'm sorry, Clint, I am. And you're right. I wasn't there, I couldn't really judge the situation when I told you to stand down either." It was his turn to look away in shame, and Clint didn't know how to feel about that. At all. "I just… we got there, Nat first and then Tony and I, and you were down, and I didn't even know if you were alive because we had to focus on the damn robots first… All I could think at the time was that if you were dead, I would never forgive myself for not having gotten to you sooner."

The words hung between them, and Clint had no idea what to say in response.

"You know, when something happens to me, that's not on you," he said eventually. "I'm a big boy. I make my own choices, and if they're shitty sometimes, well. Though I'd have thought you'd trust my judgement by now."

"I do."

The answer came promptly, maybe even a little too promptly, and apparently it deactivated some sort of filter between Clint's brain and his mouth, because he blundered right over the miniscule sentence to blurt out, "I mean, I know I'm not the kind of guy you'd expect in a superhero group of all things, and I actually don't remotely know what the hell I'm doing here – I have a bow and arrow, for Christ's sake, though it's a hella rad bow and arrow, but what the hell is arrow guy doing with the superheroes? Anyone with a bit of training could do the shit I do, firing a bow and arrow isn't that hard, check out the Olympics or something-"

"That's bullshit," Steve interrupted, and while the cussing wasn't all that unusual, the vehemence with which it was uttered shut Clint right up. Steve glared and looked seconds away from shaking him. "For one thing, if you went to the Olympics, you'd wipe the floor with the other contestants."

It would have been funny if there wasn't still that fierce, earnest look on his face.

"And then, even if what you just said were true – which, again, bullshit – the point is that you do the things you do, without anyone having to ask you to, and nobody else does. They become contestants for the Olympics instead I guess. Being a hero is great and easy enough in theory when you have the skills, but actually going out there and putting yourself in the line of fire like you do is something else entirely. And I wouldn't trust Robin Hood himself to fight the battles you fight at our side."

"Robin Hood's a punk ass bitch," Clint said before he could switch his brain filter back on. After a beat that consisted mostly of the two of them locking eyes in mild astonishment, they were both bent over laughing themselves silly over nothing.

Must be a special talent, Clint thought to himself as he struggled to breathe through his laughter and – how many broken ribs, again? I just ruined a moment before it even became a moment. But he could feel the tension in the room dissolve, and when they had caught their breath, he grinned at Steve, who was smiling back.

"I'm probably the last person who should be giving lectures on why barging into things unprepared is a bad idea, anyway, huh?"

Clint nodded empathically. A warm, comfortable feeling had settled in his chest and appeared to be planning to stay for a bit. "Yup. True. Though I think now I gotta go apply for the Olympics." That earned him a measured shove against his shoulder. "I'm just saying! Clint Barton, Hawkeye, Official Avenger, and Olympic Gold Medal Winner – I gotta."

"No." Steve shook his head, the austere look undermined by his twitching lips. "That'd be cheating, or something. Besides, I bet they don't accept applications from superheroes."

Clint pouted.