Where was Clint Barton during the events of CATWS? This is just something I've been playing around with for a while - potential to turn into something longer.


It was a mark of how well planned it all was that they sent someone he trusted to do the deed, a mark of their intelligence that they sent someone he wouldn't doubt for an instant. He assumed that the agent walking towards him at an arranged drop was bringing orders from Fury; he had no reason to think that it wasn't business as usual, not until three bullets slammed into his torso and he found himself bleeding in the street with the words "Hail Hydra" ringing in his ears.

Athens had never been good to him; three missions in fifteen years, seven penetrating wounds to show for them. All in a day's work. Sometimes he wondered exactly how he'd managed to survive the shitstorm of his adolescence long enough to be recruited to SHIELD, though in that moment he wasn't entirely sure why he had ever thought that life on the other side of the fence would be any better.

Amid the screaming and the inability to draw a full breath, he had lain in the road with the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He had wanted to get to his feet, to give chase and find out just what the hell Jensen had meant when he invoked the name of a long dead Nazi science division, but the stabbing pain in his chest when he tried to move had quickly let him know that was not going to be an option. No heroism then, no answers, just pain and panic, fleeing civilians, and one solitary good samaritan that stayed with him when everyone else ran for cover.

"Hold on," she told him, applying what in his somewhat biased opinion might have been a touch too much pressure to the site of the bleeding, "help is on the way."

He wanted to believe her, he really did, but if SHIELD agents were gunning down other SHIELD agents in the street because they were actually working for Hydra, then help seemed a long way off. Perhaps he was already delirious from the pain? The urge to laugh aloud made him consider the possibility, though if he recalled correctly it was also one of the signs of hypoxia. Clint made a concerted effort to breathe, pulling the air into his lungs in spite of the jaw clenching pain the action caused him. He was aware of the ambulance and of armed police as he slipped from consciousness, his last thoughts being to wonder about the statistical probability of survival if Hydra really were making a comeback as the darkness descended and to wonder how the hell he was going to explain who he was to the authorities when he came round.

He woke to sunlight and the steady pulse of pain in his chest and hip, head slightly fuzzier than it had been immediately after the shooting and its subsequent bounce off the ground as he fell. Three bullets, not even a get well soon card or a hot nurse to make it worthwhile. Disoriented, he blinked and took in the room. Standard medical environment, typical machines, a fluorescent light that flickered in time honoured and incredibly irritating fashion. Hospital not military, he decided, an assessment that was reinforced by the discovery that he was handcuffed to the bed rail. Fantastic.

The tac vest had saved him, his ass winding up in a hospital bed rather than a morgue table thanks to nothing more than quick reflexes and the thin layer of kevlar beneath his shirt. The vest had definitely taken the worst of it, two in the chest resulting in nothing more serious than a cracked rib or two, some bruising that resembled a rorschach test, and a serious urge to wince every few seconds when he inhaled. The third bullet, the one that went in just above his left hip, was the charm. Surgery needed: do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Slowly the memories drifted back, blood, pain, panic. Hydra. He wondered how long he had been in the drug induced sleep of post surgery and decided that it was probably too long. There wasn't time to lie around feeling sorry for himself, he needed to get up and get moving. He had to report to Fury, or whomever was at the helm at that moment.

He glanced at the clock on the wall and found that it was over three hours since the shooting, and there, confined to a hospital bed and half dosed on post op pain meds, he finally came to understand what it all meant. Someone had rather helpfully tuned the TV in his room to a news station and the headlines were alarming, unbelievable even. There were few things that Clint Barton had ever ruled out seeing on television, a wise precaution following the events in Manhattan a couple of years earlier - the world was certainly far bigger than even SHIELD had given it credit for - but the sight of the Triskellion burning on international news was one of those things. He had never anticipated the burning of SHIELD's mothership.

The news were speculating that the attack had a terrorist motive but Clint caught the distinctive whiff of Hydra in the mix. The coincidence was too strong to deny, first he was shot by a SHIELD operative claiming loyalty to Hydra and suddenly SHIELD, and by association all of its agents, were the bad guys.

How would they bring down a security organisation like SHIELD? First eliminate top assets, second cause chaos, third discredit. Textbook really, the signs were easy to see if you knew what to look for.

The guy who shot him wouldn't have claimed responsibility for a long dead Nazi science division if there wasn't any truth in it, and he certainly wouldn't have announced his masters so willingly if he'd intended for Barton to survive.

Definitely time to check out of the hospital and go to ground.

He was hardly a rookie and he knew from personal experience that a good assassin, not that they called them that on paper but he was in favour of calling a spade a spade, rarely waited for the target to regain strength before coming back to finish what they had failed to accomplish the first time. Without SHIELD however, he had no credentials, no diplomatic protection, and no hope of extraction. If he was going to get out of his current predicament, he was going to have to do it himself.

Step one: get out of the handcuffs.

For a few minutes he simply stared at the television screen, fighting off the effects of the pain medication that was still in his system. He flexed his wrist against the cuff that bound him to the bed and considered the options. While most of his colleagues on the Avengers team would argue that Clint was more of a fighter than a thinker, he had been known to get himself into and out of more than a few ridiculously tight spots in the years since he had found the dubious calling that became his career. He was not entirely without his wiles.

Truths presented themselves; he was alone, without backup, and with Hydra's reach becoming increasingly clear he couldn't trust the medical personnel or the police assigned to guard his room. He was also an Avenger, three years in the field with Rogers, Stark et al had to have done something to prepare him for a situation like this. He'd be damned if he just sat there on his ass and waited to die.

"C'mon Barton," he chastised himself, "think."

His eyes bounced around the room, looking for anything that he might use to get out of the cuffs. He wasn't exactly a stranger to restraints, professional and recreational exploits had made him more familiar with such things than the average joe. He wouldn't say that he was an expert but he'd learned a thing or two from Natasha about how to escape from almost incalculable odds. There was a reason why Fury turned to the Widow when he wanted the impossible.

"What would Romanoff do?" he whispered, trying to see the room through his partner's eyes. She was definitely the brains of their operation but he had other skills, skills that only seemed to manifest with pinpoint accuracy when his life was on the line. There were any number of things in his immediate vicinity that could be turned into a weapon if he could only get his hands on them, which was more than likely the reason they had cuffed him in the first place.

All right, focus:

Option one - feign a medical issue and try to talk his way out of the cuffs. Brief consideration ruled out that option, too risky in the event that the responding attendant was male, in spite of what Stark might imply with his constant commentary about Clint's sexual orientation, there were some roads he just wasn't interested in going down. There was also the potential that his attendants might be working for Hydra, or fast enough to shoot him full of pain relief before he could gain the advantage.

Option two - try to talk the guards into letting him out of the cuffs. He was a charming guy, not without the skill to turn many situations to his advantage, but there were limits to what he could do under the circumstances. Convince them that he was open to defection? A possibility, but not without risk.

Instead his eyes landed on the table by his bed and the plastic food tray that rested on its surface, obviously left there for when he woke up. A plan, quickly and imaginatively labelled option three, began to form in his mind, details fell into place as he ran through the variables. If he could get his hands on that fork, he could most likely pick the cuffs, another highly advantageous skill that he had picked up from his partner - what he wouldn't have given in that moment for one of the seven thousand bobby pins that Natasha seemed to dress her hair with - then it was just a simple matter of overpowering the guard and making his escape.

It said a lot that option three, complete with the risk of debilitating physical injury, was the most feasible. It was not shaping up to be the day that he had imagined, sun, sambuca and sightseeing being replaced with blood, surgery and betrayal. As soon as he was done taking care of his current predicament, he was definitely going to have to rethink his opinions on solo missions.

"Can't wait to tell this story," he muttered to himself, "going to be a doozy."