Soli Deo gloria
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own the Avengers or Hawkeye. Or Jenga.
So I know everyone's wondering where the heck Hawkeye is in Infinity War; but, my sisters and I are rewatching all of the MCU movies in preparation for Endgame (!), and we just finished watched Civil War. And I'm sitting here thinking, "What was Hawkeye doing for the first half of the movie?" Hence, this fanfic.
What was the point of retiring if he couldn't escape the Avengers if he tried?
Not that he'd ever try, though. Getting rid of Nat's or Cap's phone numbers sounded like forgetting about family members. Besides, even though his homestead was off-grid and he was definitely the least tech-savvy of the Avengers (hello, freaking Tony Stark and Bruce Banner fought on his team), Clint couldn't get away from them.
He got the entire sunroom re-floored a whole four days before Laura gave birth to Nathaniel. As with Cooper and Lila, it was a home birth, and it was nice for his wife to just lay down with the new baby in the master bedroom without worrying about leaving her husband and two kids in a torn-up house. He kept his phone on silent, only going on it briefly to share pictures of the baby with Nat. Then, once, to email his formal resignation to Fury. He may have been a founding member of the Avengers, but he wasn't up for founding the new birth of S.H.I.E.L.D. Sokovia was the last straw. Sokovia was enough. What was saving the world with a bunch of super-smart super-beings when he had a wife and kids to worry about?
There. He was retired. He occasionally asked about the new Avengers training site they opened in upstate New York with Nat ("Wish you were here to train some of these new kids. They definitely need an instructor with patience," Nat said. "Yeah, that wouldn't be you," Clint said knowingly) but that was it. He kept the TV turned off, or else playing some cartoon for the kids. No world news. No local news. He got up at the crack of dawn and planted gardens and got their winter's supply of firewood piled up by September.
He played Jenga with Cooper and helped Lila with her learning-to-read books and dressed little Nathaniel Pietro Barton in his onesies from Aunt Nat after his bath. Clint played with domesticity just as easily as he ever handled a fatal bow and arrow. Each felt at home in his hands.
The world seemed peaceful. It wasn't, but it could be, on an idyllic, untouched homestead. It truly felt like nothing in the big bad world outside could affect it.
Clint knew where Nat was; he kept tabs on her; someone had to. Who did she have, besides him and his family? Who knew where Banner was. Clint knew she and Cap got on Rumlow after months of nothing; flipping through channels one morning, he stopped on the news. It was world news. It was Lagos, Nigeria. A building falling in on itself. And it was the kid's fault.
Maybe he should've stayed, for Wanda's sake. For Pietro's sake. Was she a wreck without her brother? Did her impulsiveness and inexperience and grief overwhelm her active mind? Her eagerness to put right wrongs and to make up for her past actions lost to a power almost too massive for her to handle?
Well, she did all right in the field out in Sokovia. Maybe Lagos was just a fluke.
But it was an awful fluke. An expensive, life-costly fluke. And it was the kid's fault.
"I shouldn't have abandoned her," Clint said dully.
Laura rubbed his shoulder as the clip of the building falling replayed again and again between pictures of the Avengers involved in the incident. "She wasn't your responsibility," Laura said.
"If she wasn't mine, whose is she?" Clint said. "I don't like letting a guy down when he takes a couple dozen bullets for me. Abandoning his twin sister and letting her face the wrath of an ignorant world sounds like a pretty shitty thing to do; and apparently, I'm doing it."
"She has the other Avengers. They'll step up, since you're not there," Laura said gently. "You know this happens in this line of work. You of all people know it."
"I know." Clint rubbed his hand over hers and sighed. "I just feel responsible. Like I need to go help them out."
Laura raised an eyebrow. "How's retirement going, Hawkeye?" While she supported his avenging while he was avenging, she was happy to support his retirement, too.
Clint turned to face her and smiled. Not a whole lot of guys in his line of work ever retired, never mind had all he had to look forward to in retirement. He should be grateful. He should say that the field and the world could go to hell; he wasn't going to save it again. He'd earned his peace and quiet. "It's going all right," he said, kissing his wife.
He'd earned his peace. So why didn't he feel at peace with his decision at all?
Without letting Laura know, just to soothe his conscience, he texted Nat and Cap. His eyebrows furrowed together as he read the differences evident in the voices of their texts. "They're keeping her at Stark Tower. It's where she can be safe while the world accuses her," were Nat's words. Meanwhile, Cap said, "Stark's keeping her locked up under Vision's supervision while the world decides her fate."
"Nat, is she being held against her will?" Clint called her once he escaped to the emptiness of the barn.
"Not . . . exactly," Nat said, though her tone said otherwise. "Innocent people were killed, Clint. The King of Wakanda is asking for justice."
"It was an accident. It wasn't premeditated murder. She was trying to save people," Clint argued.
"Well, you and I know that. I don't think the rest of the world wants to take that side of the die, though. In the meantime, we're keeping her out of the media storm as much as we can."
"Oh, so everyone else is making her decisions for her? Rich, knowing your history, Nat," Clint said, his voice a little too harsh.
A few seconds passed. The guilty feeling gnawing at his chest hoped she wouldn't hang up. Finally, she said, "I wish someone cared enough about me to try to protect me from the world when I was her age. I wasn't as lucky. I hope things will end better for her."
She hung up then and Clint muttered to himself as he threw his phone onto his workbench. He felt too disgruntled to not be involved; but no, he wasn't supposed to get involved. This wasn't his business anymore. He couldn't just be on call to be baited by bits and pieces of news stories of the Avengers for the rest of his life. That was no way to live.
If he had never joined S.H.I.E.L.D., Clint was sure he, as a civilian, could've enjoyed peace. He only would've enjoyed it because he wouldn't have known all that it took to keep it.
Clint might've left the fate of the world to his friends' hands if the world hadn't called for the Sokovia Accords to be ratified. Despite himself, he felt a little left out of the big group meeting calling for surrender or nothing. He could see himself in that conference room listening to the different arguments on either side, but ultimately never being swayed from the one side he knew himself squarely on: the side of freedom.
"They're asking us to give up our rights so they can control our actions, so we can become puppets in the hands of a council who don't care about us, don't care about what we personally believe; they'll just use us as weapons of war, and they could force us to do things we regret! At least when we're in our own hands, we can own our regrets, we can own our actions as the ones we decided to take!" Clint wasn't shouting, but he sure as hell felt like it as he paced the kitchen floor the night before the Sokovia Accords were due to be signed.
"So you believe that the Avengers can do whatever they feel necessary and not feel the consequences of their actions so long as the best end is achieved?" Laura sat on the kitchen counter, almost smiling as he paced.
His head shot up and he said tiredly, "Hey, whose side are you on?"
Laura's hands flew up. "Just playing devil's advocate," she said meekly. She wrapped her arms around his neck as he calmed down enough to stand still in front of her. Her fingers kneaded against the tight knots rolled up in his shoulders. "You're getting all worked up. Retirement doesn't suit you."
"Being ignorant of world events and doing nothing to fight them doesn't suit me," he said gruffly, closing his eyes and trying to get lost in her warm touch.
Laura couldn't figure out exactly why he was so worked up. Then she remembered the radio silence of this afternoon. He'd been avoiding his phone. "Nat's there," she whispered.
"Yeah," he said. "She's siding with Stark over Cap. It's wrong, Laura. I just . . . I don't understand her."
"I think you should try," Laura said, so he looked up to meet her eyes. "She's done a lot of bad besides a lot of good. Maybe she's tired. Maybe she does recognize how the lines blur between what you can get away with in the name of doing right and what you can't. Laws hold people accountable. They don't seem to affect the Avengers. But maybe a law should. Maybe the Accords should."
"She thinks that the Accords can keep her on the straight and narrow, keep her from going too far off the beaten path again?" Clint wondered wearily. His eyes focused; he said, "I wish she could talk to me about it. There was a lot she did that I wasn't there to witness, but she and I have been through hell together."
"Well, you've always been good. She hasn't been," Laura said. "You know you won't go rogue. She doesn't know she won't."
"She wants an accountability partner?" Clint waved his hands. "Hello, I'm right here. I'm a text or a call away."
Laura was gentle. "You're retired. You have me and the kids. She's family and we love her, but I think she holds back a little. Doesn't want to impose."
"She can impose as much as she wants. She's family, damn it," Clint scoffed.
"I think she inherently knows that. But does she feel like that, when she's with us?" Laura asked gently.
Clint stood back from them for a second. Aunt Natasha was welcomed at their house, despite how opposite she was. A sterile Russian assassin turned double-agent several times over, feeling welcome at a domestic, peaceful, Midwestern homestead, untouched by the cruelty and ulterior motives of the world? Yeah, guess she couldn't exactly feel at home here. She and Clint might be partners, but when she looked at what he had, she knew it would never, and could never, be hers.
"I need to talk to her," he said.
"You do," Laura nodded.
But Nat wasn't accepting his calls. Might have something to do with the ratifying going terribly wrong; something to do with a bomb going off and destroying the building, killing a dozen people and injuring many others. The King of Wakanda could ask for justice no more; so his son would. Clint stared at the TV; he couldn't flip the channel now. He was too embroiled in this; his friends were caught up in world politics, and the freaking Winter Soldier was showing his face again?
"This is just getting weirder," Clint muttered under his breath.
"Where is that, Daddy?" Lila wanted to know.
Clint looked between the smoldering building and the commentators' voice overlapping in German and English and his small daughter with missing teeth and turned the TV off. "It's nothing, princess," he said.
Lila's eyes flickered between the blank TV and her dad. "Are you going to save the world again, Daddy?"
"Nah, baby," Clint said, squatting to her height. His smile didn't quite meet his eyes as he rubbed her arms. "I'm retired now. I'm staying here with you and Mommy and Cooper and Nathaniel forever."
Lila's face told him she didn't quite believe him. "But that's what you do, Daddy," she said. "You come home, then you go save the world, then you come home again."
"Not this time, baby," Clint said, not quite convinced himself.
Cooper entered the room with a toy car and Lila said to her brother, "Daddy says he's not going to help save the world." She broke her dad's grasp to grab the remote and turn on the TV, to show Cooper.
"Lila," Clint said warningly as Cooper watched a camera pan over Aunt Nat talking to the bloodstained new king of Wakanda.
"Dad, they need you," Cooper said. Strongly, "Aunt Nat needs you."
"Kids, I'm done with that life now—!" Clint tried.
"You're done with Aunt Nat?" Lila wondered, concerned.
"No, I'm not. I'm still there for her, just not now—" The kids didn't understand politics right now; they'd get it when they were older.
"Dad, the Avengers have to save the world. Aren't you an Avenger, Dad?" Cooper asked suddenly, stopping Clint dead in his tracks.
"Yeah, Daddy, aren't you?" Lila wondered.
Clint met the eyes of his two kids and realized something. They believed in him no matter what; they were strong kids, willing to send their dad off into the fight because that was what he did; and he was an Avenger, damn it.
Clint didn't want to get pulled out of retirement. But he could never be an ignorant civilian, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how much he pretended to be. He knew he needed to help his friends outta this shit they got themselves into, and he needed to be able to look his kids in the eyes when he got home. They needed him to be a hero, so that was what he was going to be.
"Yeah, I'm an Avenger," he said. He squeezed Cooper's shoulder and kissed Lila's forehead and raced through the house, calling, "Laura!"
Clint loved Nat, but he couldn't take her side on politics. Agree to disagree. So when Cap called him, telling him Bucky wasn't at fault and they needed numbers on his side, Clint said, "I'm in."
"I need someone to get Wanda out from the Avengers tower—"
Clint walked around his house, already dressed as Hawkeye. He slung his bow and arrows on and said, "I'm already on it." He was gonna free that poor kid. She might not have a brother to watch protectively over her anymore—and she might not need to be protectively watched over anymore—but she needed to know she had someone on her side.
Clint pocketed his phone. He entered his kids' nightlight-lit bedrooms and kissed their sleeping foreheads. He found Laura in the rocking chair he made her for last Mother's Day and watched Nathaniel squeeze his one finger with his five tiny ones.
"I don't know when I'll be back," Clint said, "but I will come back."
"Don't get arrested in the name of freedom," Laura joked.
"Can't get arrested if they can't catch me," Clint said. He kissed his wife before closing the door to the nursery softly behind him so he wouldn't wake up his son. Clint inhaled and tightened the strap of his quiver on his back.
Clint Barton opened the front door and Hawkeye left his house. He didn't know how much of this was the world and how much of this was Avengers infighting. He didn't like the division wrought between the team. Hell, even Ultron hadn't done that to them. He didn't know just how much of a mess he was getting himself into, or that he'd break his promise to Laura.
All he knew was that he had to save his friends on the run. Had to save the kid.
Well, he tried out retirement, and learned that while retirement suited some people, it would never truly suit him. Was worth a shot, though. After all the shots of his career, just this one time, he missed.
I love juxtaposing this against the fanfic I wrote in 2012 about Black Widow and Hawkeye going on a date. HA HA HA. The differences are great. I love it.
Thanks for reading! Review?