**August 14th 2008**
Clint hadn't been to a hospital in a long time, not since Bucky had hired him. The man was a textbook ex-military nutcase, from the dog tags that hung around his neck to the trust issues that surpassed even Clint's own. Bucky had avoided hospitals like the plague – they were too risky and asked too many questions - and so, through association, Clint did too.
From what he could tell, he hadn't missed out on much.
They'd wrapped his head in bandages, given him some pills and then left him alone to sleep for 6 hours straight. All things Clint was pretty damn sure he could've done by himself for free. Then, apparently, they decided to send him into surgery while he was nice and docile and unable to protest.
The ringing in his ears still hadn't stopped. He was having a bit of trouble understanding what the doctors were saying, but he hadn't worried. Give it an hour or two, it would pass.
At least, that's what he'd thought until he woke up from his drug induced sleep to find a doctor standing over his bed, two unfamiliar objects in her hands.
Clint had felt mildly nauseous when the nurse came over and unwrapped the bandages from his head. "Don't [wor-], [ca-] down. [-] let me get [th-] off," the doctor said and Clint frowned at her in confusion.
"What?"
She gestured for him to wait a moment, still unravelling the bandaging from around Clint's head until it was all gone. When it was done she set it to the side and turned to face the marksman with a serious look on her face. She spoke slowly and clearly and Clint tried to focus on her mouth to figure out what the hell she was saying. "Mr [Barton] we wa-[nt?] you to [-] [these?] for a while," she said, holding up the two objects in her hands. "Is th-[at? is?] okay?"
Unsure of what else to do, Clint nodded.
Ten minutes later the two behind the ear hearing aids were awkwardly fitted behind Clint's ears. To his relief, they did indeed make it easier to hear what the doctor was saying. He wasn't so keen on the uncomfortable weight of them behind his ears and he subconsciously nudged them with his fingers while the doctor explained his situation. Most of which he'd figured out by himself.
His name was Clint Barton. He was currently in Stockholm. He'd been involved in an explosion which left him with two ruptured ear drums, a few second degree burns across the left side of his body and a length of shrapnel buried in his leg. She said the damage to his hearing was permanent. She said the surgery to remove the shrapnel had gone well; he would be back his feet in no time. She said the police would like to speak to him now. He numbly agreed.
"No, I don't know why someone would try to kill me," he found himself saying even though he knew it was a lie.
"Have you recently been involved in any gang activity in the area?"
"No."
"Why were you-"
"Was anyone found with me?" Clint asked, cutting the officer off without even thinking about it.
There were a few moments of confused silence before the officer cautiously answered, "No, just you. Why, was there anyone else with you?"
"No, no one else," Clint said, shaking his head before looking up at the man with a confused frown on his face. "I can't... really remember," he said softly. And that was a lie too.
Everything had happened so quickly.
Bucky and Clint had been investigating a building just outside of Stockholm . One of Bucky's informants had thought to be a central hideout for Hydra –the group, Bucky had finally revealed, they had been targeting all this time. They'd been working alongside said informant; a peaky, hairy and aggressively cheerful man named Roffe, who owed Bucky a favour from 'way back in the day', something Clint thought was a stupid thing for a 26 year old to say, but, whatever.
They'd spent the early hours of the morning trying to convince Roffe that yes, they were going to the bad guy's hideout and yes, he was coming with them. The guy was a suborn bastard and by the time they'd finally got out of their damn hotel it had been long past midday. Clint had been thoroughly pissed off at the two of them but then, they hadn't really noticed. Too busy talking like old friends, shitty inside jokes and all. They were old army buddies, he assumed.
Clint had been tired, hungry and pissed off, which was never a good combination with him. So he'd ended up trailing a few meters behind them; hands shoved in his pockets and his hood up over his head.
Maybe that was why he didn't mention it when he spotted a tiny tuft of wire poking out from under Roffe's car. Maybe it all just went too fast.
Either way, it hardly mattered. The end result was still the same.
Roffe had reached out to open the door and then the world exploded in a blast of fire.
Clint was blown back a few feet from the flaming mess that used to be a car. His ears filled with an incessant ringing and the air clogged with a thick, cloying smoke that left a sour taste on his tongue.
He couldn't move, he could barely breathe, the air punched out of his lungs as soon as he hit the ground. His skin stung, burning mutedly in the back of his conscience as he made a futile attempt to pull himself to his feet.
The movement sent a sharp stabbing pain through his head, overwhelming agony forcing him to be still. His hands cupped his ears which seemed to hurt most of all, something wet coating his fingers. Every jostle sent ripples of pain through his body so severe he felt a ragged scream rip from his throat. It took him a few slow seconds to realise it was strange he hadn't heard it.
The sheer force of the impact left him disorientated, his mind smothered in a dense fog. Smoke steadily pumped out of the wreckage as people began to swarm onto the street, running towards him, grabbing him, shaking him; their lips moving but no sound coming out. Clint shouted at them to get back but they only closed in tighter. Was he even speaking at all? He couldn't see Bucky or Roffe anywhere. He shouted louder.
Clint never saw the paramedics arrive. All he felt was a hand clamping down on his shoulder and a sharp prick at his neck, then everything went black. Clint couldn't remember much after that, his final shout dying on his lips as he fell into blissful unconsciousness.
**4th September 2008**
Clint had gone into hiding and, if he was really honest, he wasn't enjoying it as much as he thought he would.
Ducking into Spain after everything in Stockholm went sideways had seemed like quite a good idea at the time. But now, well, the novelty of the whole 'time to relax and recuperate' thing had rubbed off a long time ago. All he wanted to do was get out and do real work again.
Bucky was dead, and while Clint would miss a good friend, a good boss and a good man, traditional grieving didn't sit well with him.
He needed to do something to take his mind off it all. But what Clint needed wasn't a job acting as a cleaner in the café across the road. What he needed was to shoot a man dead from 100meters away at an impossible angle and get away with it.
Too bad his gun had been inside the car when it exploded.
But do you know what? Clint kinda liked Barcelona all the same.
He liked that in this country he couldn't understand what people were saying even if he could fucking hear them. He didn't know Spanish and it was the perfect excuse. At work he would just stare at a person with a blank expression rather than put his hearing aids in and attempt to understand. People would usually sigh and point at whatever they wanted him to do. Clint could figure it out from there. He liked it better that way.
Clint rarely spoke these days. Hell, he hadn't had a straight up conversation with someone in over a week and that's with most of his co-workers speaking perfectly good English. Not that he'd particularly want to speak to them anyway. They were all high school age, not a single one over 18.
To be fair to them, Clint not showering or even shaving in nearly two weeks probably didn't help his popularity. He looked bad and smelled worse but he couldn't do much about it. The shower in his hotel room was broken and he'd been far too exhausted in the evenings to do much more than collapse into bed anyway. He knew that it wasn't reasonable to expect them to speak to him, and he was fine with being ignored. But then, kids couldn't just ignore him, they were too cruel for that.
Clint knew they liked to call him things when they though he was out of earshot. He read their lips and saw it anyway; pervert, creep, freak, stalker being some of their many favourites. They thought he was simple in the head, tried to avoid him at all costs. Clint found that placing a single foot into a room was enough to clear it.
It was a lonely existence, but one he'd resigned himself to nonetheless.
Back in his hotel for another day, Clint lay back on his bed with his eyes closed, taking in the peaceful silence of mid-evening Barcelona. The humidity from outside now replaced by the cool breeze of an overhead fan.
Of course, Clint knew the hustle and bustle of the Spanish markets outside his window hadn't ceased to exist. People still blasted music out their windows, still shouted to each other across the street and still honked their horns when traffic became too congested for their taste. It was just him. It was just him being too cocky for his own good, thinking he was invincible, and reality coming to bite him in the ass like it always should.
He hadn't been careful enough, and now he had to pay the price. He wasn't going to cry over that. It was just how the world worked.
Clint didn't like to feel sorry for himself; especially when he could be a smouldering pile of ashes right about now. But that didn't mean he liked the life he was leading. This person he was becoming, the dreary future that he had to look forward to: that wasn't him.
It was fake, all of it, from the name he gave his employers to the age on his application forms. In this city he was becoming the kind of ghost he'd promised his brother he'd never become: silent and complacent, boring.
Pathetic.
It wasn't like he could just pull himself out of it either. He'd tried.
This miserable, artificial life he'd build for himself seemed impossible to snap out of, he was shackled to it. It felt almost like life had always looked this dull and mundane even though he knew it hadn't. He was more vulnerable than he'd ever been before, a dangerous thing in his line of work. The sad truth was, without Bucky around to watch his back, Clint was next to useless.
Fiddling with the two hearing aids in his hands, Clint idly wondered if he should start wearing them again. He wrinkled his nose at the thought.
A glance at the clock informed him it was time to change the bandages on his leg. Maybe he would put some cream on his burns while he was at it; they were beginning to itch after all. He should really board up those windows too; they were a weak point in an otherwise secure-
A knock at the door stopped that train of thought before it could finish.
When Clint opened his door he had his aids in his ears but even so he wasn't ready for what met him on the other side.
The terrifying assassin girl on his doorstep was surprising enough; he hadn't seen hide or hair of her in over a month. But that's without mentioning the struggling blonde guy she had locked in a securing chokehold.
Clint stared.
The guy was quite obviously Steve Rogers - still fucking tiny as ever with his huge glasses sitting crooked on his nose and his face flushed red from either the pressure on his neck or the exertion of his anger. Maybe both.
Assassin girl met Clint's eyes with an unimpressed look. "He's been watching you for days. You're getting lazy," she commented, not breathless in the slightest. She tilted her head to the side, giving him an odd look for a moment. "You grew a beard."
"You dyed your hair," he replied defensively, his voice croaky and cracking from days of disuse. Though she didn't smile, Clint swore amusement flickered in her eyes for just a second.
Then she shoved Rogers through Clint's doorway before walking in herself like she owned the place. She turned to look at him expectantly. "Come on, you're going to want to hear what he has to say."
Clint met her eyes for a few long seconds before letting out a sigh of resignation. "Yeah, we'll see about that," he grumbled as he closed the door with a click.
Clint, as it turns out, did not want to hear what Steve Rogers had to say.
What Steve Rogers wanted was to shout abuse at Clint for a solid ten minutes until his little voice got all dry and scratchy and he couldn't continue anymore without dying of an asthma attack.
Clint didn't even try to stop him. It was nothing he hadn't told himself on his worst days.
Steve Rogers blamed Clint for the explosion that killed his best friend.
Steve Rogers wanted Clint to pay for what he did.
But, most of all, Steve Rogers wanted his best friend back, and Clint couldn't do that for him.
"Hydra has taken him captive," Steve insisted from where he sat on Clint's bed, his hands adding emphasis to his words. "I swear he's still alive, I know it. If you would just look-"
Clint was too tired for this bullshit. "No you think he's alive based on a hunch."
"They never found a body! He could've been taken in before the-"
Clint gave him a mildly offended look. "I think I would've noticed if someone tried to kidnap Bucky in broad daylight."
"You missed the bomb. Who the hell knows what else you missed that day," Steve snapped back hotly, his cheeks tinged red and his eyes a little too bright.
Clint folded his arms across his chest, glaring the younger man down. "Bucky's dead, Rogers," he gritted out. "Accept it and move on. I have."
Steve laughed darkly, his eyes full of bitter anger while they swept over Clint's rumpled form. "Yeah, no, you're doing just fine," he said, sarcasm dripping from every word.
Clint found himself rise to the defensive, almost spoiling for a fight. "Oh, I'm sorry; I forgot, you're the fucking expert. Go on. How am I doing?" he spat, raw hostility in every word and when Rogers didn't reply he only persisted. "Come on. You've been following me around long enough to know, right? How the fuck am I doing?"
Because Clint knew how he was doing.
He knew he was drinking more and sleeping less. He knew he wasn't eating enough and he spent his days cleaning up other people's messes for them. He had no friends, no prospects, no goddamned reason to be here and he fucking knew it.
Rogers, for all his anger, wouldn't say any of that to his face.
For a few fleeting seconds Rogers had the decency to look ashamed. "Look, I didn't mean-"
"Yeah, sure you didn't," Clint snapped, and a tense, awkward silence stretched out between them that he didn't give a fuck about.
Clint's fury petered out almost as fast as it had appeared and he slumped a little where he sat. He decided to keep his voice firm but low, mostly for his neighbour's sake. The last thing he needed was to get kicked out of this hotel on top of everything else.
"I'll put it this way. There was over 1kg of explosives in that car, Rogers. I was a good few metres away and the blow back still nearly killed me." He paused for a moment, recollecting himself, the memory fresh and surprisingly painful even after all this time. "Bucky was right beside the blast, not three feet away. He's dead, that's it, end of story," he muttered, his jaw set and his shoulders tensed.
Steve was breathing hard, his little hands clenched into fists at his sides. "Bucky could've survived it," he argued, though his voice was a little weaker. Clint was suddenly struck by how fucking sad it was to see a guy so deep in denial that he couldn't accept dead as an answer. Rogers should go see a bereavement councillor or something. "He was a Ranger for two tours; he knows what to do in those-"
"Steve, the army doesn't teach you how to be bomb proof," Clint sighed, the whole conversation just giving him a headache. "Please, just give it up and go the hell home."
He was exhausted beyond belief and just wanted to go to bed. His hearing aids were beginning to hurt a little where he'd hastily stuck them in. He hadn't worn them this long in - well, ever - but he refused to touch them with Assassin girl still in the room. Too dangerous.
Speaking of which, he turned to the girl, one eyebrow raised. "You thought I'd want to hear this guy rave to me about my dead friend for half an hour? Because if you did you were wrong. Like, so fucking wrong."
She held his gaze for a few seconds from where she lounged lazily on an uncomfortable looking armchair. Assassin girl had dyed her hair, now a light strawberry blonde. It looked fantastic, Clint thought, though he would never tell her that.
"Steve's right," she said, startling just about everyone in the room. Even Steve himself looked shocked, but considering his experience with the woman, that was unsurprising.
Clint tried his best not to feel too betrayed. "You're telling me you agree with everything you just heard?" he asked in disbelief.
She rolled her eyes. "Obviously not, but I did my research before coming here. Unlike some people." Steve shifted a little at the comment but didn't interrupt. "They're holding him at a base a few miles outside of Rennes."
"Where the fuck is that?"
She gave Clint an exasperated look, like he was being stupid on purpose. "It's a city in the northwest of France."
Clint pulled a face. "France? Why would they take him there?" He held up a hand before she could answer. "You know what? It doesn't even matter. Even if Bucky is there, which he isn't, the chances of him being alive are 1 in a million. The guy's been in there for what? Nearly a month? There's not a chance they'd keep him alive that long."
"Stranger things have happened," Steve chipped in, sounding overwhelmingly hopeful. It made Clint want to go shoot something. "Like I said, they never found a body."
Clint waved his hand dismissively. "No, no, no. The guy is dead. And even if he wasn't, what do you want me to do about it?" he was getting dangerously close to whine territory. "I have no gun, no money and no interest. Why the hell are you here?"
Assassin girl raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. "I can get you a gun, money is Rogers' problem and, of course you're interested, you're an assassin. This is what you do."
Clint felt something inside him snap. Something sharp and bitter and jagged that he hadn't even realised was so close to breaking until it was too late.
"No I'm not, not anymore," he replied with a sigh, stepping forward and turning his head to the side, giving her a clear view of his hearing aid. He didn't care what she would do with the information anymore, it didn't matter.
"I can't hear right; explosion busted both my eardrums to hell," he muttered, utterly defeated. He kept his eyes glued to the floor, unable to look her in the eyes. He'd never felt so useless. "I can't just walk into a job without being able to tell if anyone is behind me, I can't do it. I'd be dead in twenty minutes flat. So, I'm sorry but I can't help him and I can't help you."
A heavy silence hung in the room for a few seconds. But to his amazement when Clint met her eyes the girl didn't look fazed in the slightest, merely looking from his ears to his face, unimpressed. "You can still shoot straight, can't you?"
"Of course I-"
"Then I'll watch your back while you shoot," she said.
Those words hung heavy in the air, holding far more weight to them than Clint thought they deserved. He narrowed his eyes at her. "And you expect me to trust you on what exactly? I don't even know your name. What are you getting outta this?"
She met his eyes steadily, irritation clear as day. She folded her arms across her chest in an intimidation tactic that worked beautifully. "If it matters so much to you, my name is Natasha. And no, I don't have to explain myself to you."
Natasha, huh? How normal. Clint wondered if that was even her real name.
"Yes you fucking do," he snapped, with maybe a little more force than necessary. Steve made a strange noise like he feared for Clint's life, suddenly reminding Clint of his existence. In a show of shocking self-restraint Clint tried to lower his voice so that only she could hear. Steve could probably do without the extra stress; he was liable to burst a blood vessel over it. "Last time we met you were choking the life outta Bucky, and now you want to save him? What's changed?"
Natasha met his questioning gaze with a steely glare. "Make your mind up, we've wasted enough time. You're either helping us or not."
Clint wasn't satisfied by the avoidance but figured it was probably the best he was going to get out of her.
He thought about his days spent mopping up other people's spilled food and drink in the café across the road. He thought about being a freak that blends into the furniture. He thought about how it's only a matter of time until those kids he works with make a formal complaint to the owner who only gave him a job as an act of pity.
There was nothing for him here.
Hey, though Clint would never say it aloud, maybe he was glad to lose an argument. Just this once.
"Alright fine, I'm in," he relented, rubbing a tired hand over his face. "But on one condition."
"Name it," Steve said immediately, that infernal hope creeping into his voice once more.
"Stop following me. Both of you can stop following me, alright? That's it. I've had it," Clint demanded with little conviction behind it.
Steve swore that he would never do it again. Natasha gave him a disinterested little half-shrug. Clint thought that was the best he was going to get.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he said, as Steve kept talking, moving to usher the shorter man out the door before the guy offered him his first born or something. "I've agreed to help you, not house you. Get out of my room, go on, shoo. Scoot."
Steve left with several more apologies and many thank-yous that made Clint feel like backing out of the whole thing all over again.
Natasha just exited out the fire escape window without a word. Clint didn't mind. He knew she'd be back by morning.
With a sigh he pulled out his hearing aids, set them in their case and collapsed into bed for a long awaited sleep wondering how his life had come to this.
