Hey guys, I'm back! It's been a long time since I've written for this one, but I've got it! So, Sharkisha the 3rd, you asked earlier for a part about Clint being deaf, and the rest of the Avengers finding out, and I thought that was a perfect idea! I already had a story about Clint and Natasha working together and Clint becoming deaf, so I was like, why not play off that? So I did! This beginning part of the story is from my Hawkeye and Black Widow fanfiction named "You Know What It's Like To Be Unmade" so go read that if you're looking for something fun and angsty to read, I'm working on editing that.

But anyway, I decided to do that, have all the Avengers figure out that Clint is deaf, so they are going to be split up into their own separate chapters going across the week. Right now, this is just the original Avengers, but there will be other one-shots and other stories here that will contain more characters. Now, after that, REVIEWS!

Sharkisha the 3rd: Yeah, that ending was really fun to write! If you read the first part of this, I love how that did that in the comics too and incorporated it into one of my other stories, so I would love to do a thing about the other Avengers finding out Clint is deaf! I am taking American Sign Language in school and I am very interested in the language and community, so I always love writing about it. I hope you enjoy!

Guest: Thanks, the idea for the end came to me on a whim and I decided to go with it. Thanks for reviewing!

Alrighty, guys, I'll let you go. Enjoy this first installation of a story! ;)


Racing in between the small shacks that the residents of the remote part of Bogota called home, Coulson was careful to look through every window and check inside. He was looking for any signs of his missing agents while Agents Romanoff and Barton did the same through areas nearby him. A glint of the sun against metal caught his eye and he pressed his back up against the wall of the house where it came from. He stood in front of the door, gun drawn and in front of him, and kicked down the door. Running inside, there were no people, but a single black box sat alone in the middle of the room. A timer was attached to the side, the numbers slowly counting down. His breath hitched and his heart stopped as he sprinted out of the house with his hand to his comm, trying to warn the other two.

"BARTON! ROMANOFF!" He screamed their names over his comm as he ran as far as he could from the building. "BOMB!"

Behind him, the red numbers ticked down one by one, five… four… three… two… one.

Everything was silent when the timer hit zero. It was almost like nothing had happened. Then there was a flash, a sickening white flash and blinded everything, and the explosion followed soon after.

The sound was deafening, and the ground shook behind everyone's feet. The building shook and crumbling, already broken walls falling from their foundation. The shack that housed the bomb was completely destroyed, not a single debris of it remained. The houses around it weren't any better either, most of them were turned to ash just like ground zero, while the bare structure was the only thing that remained.

Clint and Natasha had gotten Coulson's warning, but one assassin was better off than the other. Natasha was the farthest away out of all of them, searching a shack four buildings down. Even she was affected by the blast, however, thrown into a brick wall behind her and knocked into unconsciousness. Coulson had run far enough away in time he wasn't immediately hit by the blast, but the aftershock beat him before he could reach Natasha. He flipped forward and hit the ground on his back, seeing two pairs of hands reaching for him before his eyes rolled back into his head. Clint was the worst off, being stuck inside a house when he got Coulson's message. The shack he was checking was two down from the bomb, and he had just run through the door when it exploded. He was picked up and thrown like a young girl's rag doll, landing on top of a stack of wooden crates. Following the lead of his partner and handler, Clint's eyes slipped shut and he was knocked out.

Natasha's eyes flew open and she immediately regretted the decision. She groaned as she tried to block out the light daggers that penetrated her skull. Expertly, she ran her hands down herself, checking for physical injuries and other problems. A ringing in her ears blocked her from being able to listen to her surroundings, so she was forced to open her eyes. She sat up and used her hand to block out the blazing sun above her. Natasha scanned the area around her as her head pounded and the world spun at her feet. Her body seemed fine, besides a headache and the constant annoying ringing, the only problem was her ankle that was stuck under a piece of fallen wall. Natasha hissed through gritted teeth as she tried to pull her foot out naturally, but it wasn't working. Grunting under the weight, she carefully lifted up the section of wall that trapped her boot and slid it out, before dropping the housing material back on the ground. She prodded the area around her boot with two fingers, wincing slightly at the pin, but she could deal with it. A little thing like the pain wasn't going to stop her, and it was nothing more than a sprained ankle. Besides, she had more important things to worry about, like finding Coulson and Barton.

She limped forward, using whatever pieces of the house she could to help her along until she searched the area around the bomb site and found Clint. He was out cold, lying on top a heap of a broken wood crate, broken wood poking all over his body. Carefully, she pulled the broken wood off him and tugged him out of the crates, hoping to avoid injuring him too much by movement. Once he was free Natasha kneeled over him, gently turning his face from side to side and checking over the rest of him, looking for any outstanding injuries. Finding none, she relaxed a tiny bit and stood back up, standing guard over her partner as she watched the city line for their handler. Not too much longer after, Clint groaned and started to wake up. Natasha did one last check before getting down next to him and helping him sit up.

Clint rubbed his eyes, trying to adjust to the light. His head hurt, and his body felt like it had been run over by fifty trains. Natasha was sitting on the ground in front of him, and he saw her mouth moving, the words forming but not making any noise. Clint waved his hands in front of him.

"Wait, wait, hold on, all I can hear is ringing, give me a second," he croaked out, and he dug his fingers into his ears, hoping to ease the constant ringing that filled his head. Natasha nodded, knowing what he was talking about. Her own ringing had only stopped a few moments ago, and still, everything was a little messed up.

Slowly but surely, the ringing dulled out until it was almost entirely gone. "Alright, there we go," Clint mumbled to himself, but something was off. He couldn't hear his own voice, the only indication he got that told him he was talking was the vibrations of the words in his throat. Clint looked up, eyes flashed with worry and Natasha met them, her own form of worry from the look of concern Clint was giving her. She said something and Clint saw her mouth move, but again, no words reached his ears.

Clint grabbed a handful of gravel sitting on the ground and let it run through his hand, staring at it carefully, while Natasha stared at him, confused. He let the tiny rocks fall to the ground as he opened his hand fully, the noisy gravel making little drops of sound that Natasha alone could hear. Clint looked up at her with his lips pressed together grimly.

"I can't hear anything."


Monday

Natasha didn't even look up from her coffee and book as dirty and tired Clint walked over and slumped into the chair across from her. She didn't even have to see his face to know that a scowl took the place of his normal cocky smile.

"What happened this time that got your undies in a bunch? Steve forget how to work the toaster again?" She asked only half-joking before she took a sip of her straight black coffee. She nodded her head towards the coffee maker where Clint's favorite mug sat underneath, a newly poured cup of coffee keeping warm. She had heard him moving around on their shared floor in Stark tower a few minutes earlier, coming home early in the morning from a solo mission Coulson had sent him on.

Grumbling under his breath, thanks lost in the jumble of words, Clint walked over and grabbed his coffee and putting an unholy amount of sugar in it before dropping two small objects on the table in front of them. Finally, Natasha looked up and saw the broken and smashed hearing aids laying across the wood. She shut her book and stared at her assassin partner and realized something.

"You didn't hear my joke, did you?" Natasha asked, but now instead of talking she signed the question to Clint, flawless switching from English to American Sign Language.

Clint shook his head. "No. What was it?" Natasha smiled to herself and copied his motion, waving him off. A joke was no good if you had to say it twice. He shrugged and coughed before gulping a good part of his coffee, letting the scalding liquid burn his throat on the way down, hoping it would help him wake up.

"Are you ok?" Natasha signed, and Clint shook his head again.

"No. I'm tired, my head hurts, my body hurts, I just got back from a botched mission I had to go fix, I just want to sleep, and now these dumb things are broken!" Clint signed angrily, slamming his fist down at the end of his sentence for emphasis. He set his coffee down and laid his head down on his arms, shutting his eyes for the first time in 48 hours. Natasha sympathized for him and finished off her coffee, dropping it off in their sink before running over and grabbing their first aid kid and painkillers.

She pulled her chair around and tapped Clint on the shoulder, bringing his eyes up to her as she held out the pills. "For your head," she explained and he took them greedily, washing them down with the last of his coffee. Then, she took her first good look at him since he had just come back from the mission and took note of everything that she could work with.

She tapped his shirt and his wrist and finger guards as she pulled out a container of alcohol wipes. "Off with these," she signed and he did so, rubbing his eyes in between. Grunting softly from the use of his sore muscles, he dropped his shirt on the ground and the guards on top of those. Natasha looked over the variety of cuts and bruises that littered his body and took a breath before going to work. This was too many of their nights and days, one or both coming home tired and hurt, and only letting the other tend to them. Neither of them liked hospitals or doctors, and Stark's infirmary was no different.

"So where is your spare?" Natasha signed to Clint as she wiped the blood from his forearm, revealing a three-inch gash that ran across the underside of it. Clint winced when the alcohol touched the open wound, but there was no other indication of that pain

Clint laughed a little as Natasha finished cleaning it and wrapped clean white gauze around the wound, securing it tightly. He flexed his hand when she finished, pushing that pain to the back of his mind as he signed his answer. "Those were the spares of my spare. I'm completely out."

Natasha glanced over at the clear hearing aids on the table, nearly invisible when wearing them. It had been almost a year since the Bogota incident, and the assassins had kept it secret from the rest of the team and almost everyone else, besides Fury, Coulson, and Hill. They had gotten the hearing aids from a source Fury new and trusted, and the hearing aids could just not keep up with Clint and all the missions he had gone through. Clint had felt like not being able to hear made him not important to the team anymore. He was already the most normal person on the Avengers; he wasn't a god, or an accident-created monster, or a genius billionaire, or super soldiers that could kill you with a blink of an eye. He was just a normal guy, who used bows and arrows. Not being able to hear made him feel even more like an outcast. But Natasha had helped him, and he felt better about the whole situation after a lot of persuading and comforting.

Natasha knew the struggled Clint had gone through after losing his hearing. It was rough. There were a couple of stretched that Natasha was really concerned about him. She didn't know if he would make it out of those rough stretches, but Clint was a fighter. Once a fighter, always a fighter. Natasha didn't know anyone more stubborn than Clint. Besides herself, of course. He felt like it, but he had never truly given up. Natasha thought Clint was the person who belongs to this team more than anyone else. He was just a regular guy, and he was teamed up with a thunder-wielding god, a rage monster, a man in a metal suit who was a tech genius, a super soldier who came from out of his time, and herself. For a regular guy, he could hold his own. And he was pretty good at it, too. All the best heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.*

"So what are we going to do? Stark is out of town, but comes back on Friday if you want to ask him to make some Barton-proof ones," Natasha said and Clint gave a sarcastic smile.

"Haha, very funny. I can do that. But what about the rest of the team?" Clint asked just as Natasha finished up bandaging the rest of his injuries, leaving him shirtless and in his Hawkeye pants and boots. Natasha sat back and smiled at her partner.

"We could tell them?" She suggested with a straight face, staring directly at Clint. Both of them held their stares before breaking into laughter, Clint losing first.

"Nah!" Both assassins said out loud before going into another round of laughter. This was going to be an interesting week.


*Quote is not mine, it is said my Gerard Way. I just really like it and think that it applies to Clint in more ways than one.