A/N: So this is mostly stress relief. And also wondering. Have fun reading it, I had fun writing it.
It wasn't often that Clint Barton found himself in the thick of any fight. He was most effective at long-range - where he could see everything without interference - or in single hand-to-hand combat - though Natasha always bested him in that category. So to say that he was displeased at being forced to ground by the crazy of the week was an understatement along the lines of calling the Hulk a big guy with a temper.
It was a good thing that R&D had long been in the habit of reinforcing his bow, given how often he'd had to use it as a blunt weapon lately. It could get depressing quickly, really. His bow was a modern mechanical marvel and it was being reduced to a glorified club because he couldn't get the distance to use it properly or to gain enough time to pull one of his guns.
"Seriously, what is wrong with you people?" he growled over the comms, mostly at Stark and Banner - for once contributing in a scientific capacity in figuring out just why someone wanted to turn adults into snivelling six year olds and not as a giant green rage monster - but also at the uncaring universe in general. "Any idea with hazardous materials or a lack of common sense and its suddenly the must do project of the year!"
"Hey, I have never attempted to make a kid-ray. Ever." Stark sounded almost personally offended. Bully for him. He got to fly around in his tin can, shooting the frankly creepy robots Dr. Who-Cares-What-His-Name-Is had created to go along with his kid-ray. Clint was stuck on the ground, surrounded by said creepy robots and fast loosing patience with everything. "Who would want to? Being a kid was awful enough the first time through. Why do it ag-"
"Watch out!" Rogers' voice broke into the conversation and Clint dove automatically to his right, taking advantage of a momentarily clear space in the robots around him, and rolling and coming up with an arrow knocked and ready to fire. It wasn't hard to figure out that the reason for Rogers' sudden warning was the fresh wave of robots converging fast on his location. He let the arrow fly, detonating the explosive head with a smirk as soon as it lodged in the ground in the middle of the advancing robot ranks. Overhead, Iron Man dodged sharply to his left, firing repulsor blasts over his shoulder as some of the robots around Clint who hadn't been sufficiently warned off by the explosive end of their fellows took flight to give chase.
This guy had obviously had too much time on his hands if he'd personalized some of the robots to go after specific Avengers. That was more worrying to Clint than the actual fact of a scientist crazy enough to build a kid-ray in the first place.
"Hawkeye, report!"
"I'm fine, Cap," Clint said, taking gleeful advantage of the fact that he had the room to use his bow properly again. "The ranks thinned out, what with me blowing up about twenty of them and about a half dozen more taking off after Stark. Did we know they could fly?"
"It doesn't seem to be all of them. Stark and Thor are taking the rest of them out now. Can you get up high? I need your eyes, we've lost sight of Dr. Boros."
Clint surveyed his last opponents and grinned. "Give me five minutes to get clear of the last of the reject pile and I'll see if I can't locate Dr. Crazy."
"I've got the robots. Go, Hawkeye," Natasha's voice echoed in his ear at the same moment as the woman herself dropped on top of one of the robots, almost gleefully shorting out its circuits with her bracelets.
"Gone," he replied, and started making his way up the nearest fire escape. "Cap, what's the last known for Dr. Crazy?"
"Dr. Boros."
"Man invented a ray gun that turns people into six year olds. He invented a kid ray," Clint returned, using a window and the roof's ledge to pull himself up the rest of the way to the top of the building. "He is Dr. Crazy."
Rogers stifled a laugh, Clint could hear it in the man's voice. "He was on the fire escape of a building three blocks down from your current location, but Thor took out his perch. Once the dust cleared, he was gone."
Clint didn't bother stifling his sigh. "Let me guess, there's a new hole in the building that the planners didn't put there."
"I don't think Agent Coulson is going to be happy about our damage report, no."
With a roll of his eyes, Clint started a slow jog to right, scanning the streets and rooftops around him as he went. "You realize he could have just gone down through the handy new entrance and disappeared at street level? He's had how much of a head start?"
"We have to try."
Empty roof, empty roof, debris ridden roof - courtesy of Thor, given the smoking remains of the robots - debris ridden streets, some petrified civilians taking advantage of a lull in the battle to get the hell out of Dodge...
"I'm trying," he told Rogers, "but I don't think our man is still on site. I'm making my way to where you saw him last, but he's had at least, what, five minutes? Even for a civilian, that's plenty of time to get lost in the chaos around here."
"Just concentrate on the immediate area, Hawkeye. Thor and Iron Man have the perimiter. If he's still here, we'll have him boxed in."
Clint wanted to believe that, but the guy had a habit of zapping his opponents with his kid ray. He'd already left a trail of hysterical six-year-olds wailing for Mommy in his wake. Hysterical six-year-olds that used to be competent members of SHIELD and New York's finest. He was not very optimistic about their chances of stopping him if they didn't get that weapon away from him first.
Pausing on another debris ridden rooftop, Clint whistled silently. There was a vaguely Thor-shaped hole in the brickwork of the building opposite him, but it had managed to avoid both windows and somehow the fire escape was still intact.
Apparently the lectures about unneccesary damage were having some effect on Thor, even if it didn't look like it to an untrained eye.
And more targeted damage or not, there was no way the guy was still in that building. Subtle Thor might not be, but he was thorough. And anything he might have missed, Iron Man's sensor's should have picked up. So the next logical step for Clint would be to try to track their missing mad scientist's escape route. Radioing Cap to let him know what was going on, Clint picked the most likely direction - towards the nearest strip mall, crowds were always good for disappearing in - and set off.
"I'm telling you guys, this guy did not get past us. He's still inside the perimeter," Tony groused as he flew a lazy curve to retrace his most recent path. "JARVIS has SHIELD's surveillance feeds as well as my own, there's like five thousand ways for us to keep track of the people going in and out of the perimeter, not to mention the giant line of NYPD and SHIELD agents with riot shields "
"Then why haven't we found him yet?"
"Because he's sneaky, as well as a mad scientist genius type. Don't worry, Cap," Tony said, "I'm still smarter. He's not getting away."
"Guys, I have a visual on our target," Hawkeye's voice come over the comms, effectively silencing everyone else. "Two blocks inside the perimeter, west side, on the next roof. He's fiddling with the kid ray; looks like Thor might have damaged it when he knocked a new entrance into that building."
"Be careful, Hawkeye. We're heading your way."
"No need, Cap. I'll just tranq him from here. SHIELD can take him from there."
Before anything else could be said, a loud BANG resounded through the streets and and through the comm system. Tony yelped, swatting at his ears, even though he knew that wouldn't do any good, momentarily disrupting his balance in the air. When he regained it, he swung sharply to the west and gunned his thrusters.
"Birdbrain, you had better not have been in the center of that explosion!" he snarled. There was no response. "Jarvis, status update on Hawkeye!"
"Hawkeye, report!" Roger's demanded over the comm, sounding ever so slightly out of breath. Tony knew he had to be running for their teammate's last known position
"Sir, I am unable to get a response from Agent Barton's tracker. It appeares to have been damaged in the blast."
"Dammit!"
When Iron Man landed on the roof where he spotted a collapsed form in a black and dark purple combat uniform, he could see the reason for the non-response from their archer. The explosion they had heard was apparently the kid ray deciding enough was enough and exploding, knocking both Dr. Boros and Clint down, both apparently unconscious.
A quick scan showed neither was likely to wake up just yet, so Tony went to Clint first, very, very grateful that the ray didn't seem to have had an effect on the other man, despite obviously going off with enough force to knock him out. A hysterical six-year-old Clint was not something Tony wanted to deal with.
"I've got Hawkeye," he reported. "He's unconscious, but still adult, so apparently whatever Thor did, it turned off the kid-ify portion of the ray."
"I'm not sure that's actually possible, Tony," Bruce said. "The readings we've gotten off of it don't seem to be particularly stable in the first place. Making it more unstable shouldn't affect it that way."
"Well, it did. I'm right here. No baby Hawkeye."
Pounding footsteps preceded Roger's entrance to the roof, breathing slightly more heavily than normal, but not much. Tony waved him over and then took off for the next roof, pulling out restraints as he did so. He was going to have fun playing with that ray gun.
Clint groaned slightly as he swam back towards consciousness. What had hit him? He couldn't remember taking a job recently, he shouldn't have been in a fight and he always tried to take out his marks from a distance anyway, so what...?
There was another person kneeling by him. Clint forced himself to stay limp, hoping his small groan had gone unnoticed. Stupid, stupid! Don't make noise if you don't know where you are or who's around!
"Barton?"
Well, shit. The person had heard, and apparently knew his name. Only Clint didn't recognize the voice.
The only people who knew his name were either back in the circus, or those annoying SHIELD agents that had been sniffing around his jobs recently. Not recognizing the voice made the vote overwhelmingly in SHIELD's favor.
Double shit.
"Nrgh," he groaned again, purposely playing up his headache to buy some more time. One good thing about SHIELD. They didn't seem to want him permanently damaged, even if they did want to bring him in. If he could buy enough time to figure out how many others were with the new agent, he could probably put enough distance between him and this place before they reorganized from the chaos he was going to leave in his wake.
"Hold still. That explosion knocked you out for a couple minutes. You might have a concussion. Is there anything broken you can feel?"
Explosion? SHIELD had resorted to using explosions to slow him down? And he thought their other attempts were stupidily risky...
"Not...not a good idea," he muttered, feeling his limbs respond as he shifted them experimentally. He could feel his weapons, although he didn't remember putting a knife there and the quiver he was laying half on was off somehow. He could worry about that later. They hadn't disarmed him. That was going to be a mistake. "I'don think...broke anythin'."
"That's good. Take it easy." There was a pause and then a confused. "What wasn't a good idea?"
"Ex'losions," he grumbled, curling slightly in on himself. A hand landed on his shoulder, steadying him, and Clint barely managed not to flinch away.
"Well, I doubt Dr. Boros is going to be able to use that gun again, so we won't have to worry about it."
A gun? What the hell? A gun exploded and knocked him out?
Who the hell was Dr. Boros anyway?
He slitted his eyes open and then forgot about even pretending to be more out of it than he was, because CAPTAIN AMERICA was kneeling next to him, cowl pushed back to reveal a young face with determined blue eyes and a square jawline. The shield lay within easy reach to his right.
"Barton?" The eyes turned worried. Clint shook his head, laughing a bit despite himself.
"I gotta give you guys credit. When you get an idea in your head, you throw out all the stops."
He'd confused the Captain America look-alike, he can tell. Good. That'll gain him a few more seconds. He's on a roof that obviously had taken damage even before the explosion that had knocked him out. (What the hell kind of gun was that? That explosion is too large for anything short of a rocket launcher!)
There's a fire escape five feet to his left. If he can get to that, he can be down and disappearing in a crowd before anyone knows where exactly he's gone.
"Captain, I've been analyzing the readings we got off of that blast, I think it still did have an effect. It's throwing off the same signatures, just in lesser quantities."
Clint started, one hand going to his right ear. A earbud so well-fitted he hadn't even noticed it was there resided just inside the canal. Captain America obviously had a similar one, because one hand reached up to his right ear and he nodded.
"Alright, but it doesn't seem to have had a visible effect. What else could it do? Was it maybe too weak to affect anyone?"
The Captain turned away slightly, bending to reach for his shield, and Clint took the best opportunity he was going to get. Before the costumed agent could get turned back around properly, Clint was over the side of the building and halfway down, earbud discarded on the roof. He thought he heard thrusters for a moment but this was the middle of a city, and it was far too faint to be a plane anyway.
His feet hit the ground and took him fifteen seconds to find the best escape route. With a feral grin, he ducked his head and ran.
There was a reason SHIELD couldn't catch him. And he had a streak to maintain.
