Thank you to:::

AvengerOfFiction: DAW! Thank you!

brandibuckeye

penguincrazy: Hardcore clint = awesome

khaitosfren

amy. .9

8839

Ms. Hawkeye c: just a littler Starky-attitude somedays:)

Niom Lamboise

CandyGirl999: ohhh pity them allright:)

WestonFollower

BlackxValentine : A FIST PUMP! WHOOT!

ShadowPhoenix22

discordchick

m klindt : Jump the shark. I love it. Well hopefully this story is helping people warm up to the idea of father Clint and the farm family. I really want to break down that harsh disconnect a lot of people felt when their ship sank.

IWriteSinsOrTragedies

Liliththestormgoddess

JRBarton: I did have a quiet one! thank you!

Wonderwomanbatmanfan

Avenge Me

Chapter 9

The room exploded in a shower of light as his arrow connected with one of the central computers. Sparks erupted through the air like the kaleidoscope of fireworks. Clint ducked to the left, rolled behind a central column, and popped up a second time with another three arrows on his bowstring. He let them all fly simultaneously, taking out four clustered men. He dropped when a hail of gunfire chased after him. The cat was out of the bag now.

He tapped his comm. "Hawkeye in, found a nest. Central Tower."

"Can you handle it?" Steve asked.

"Yeah, got it. Stark?"

Clint raised on his haunches, prepared to let loose another volley. The minute he lifted up, the entire line of displays flickered out in a single wave. The overhead lights blinked out, and he was bathed in total blackness.

"Stark? Cap? Anyone?" Clint felt the edge of the column he hid behind and moved back beside its cover. The radio was utterly silent.

EMP, he thought. Most likely the Hydra agents were prepared for it with shielded night vision equipment. Soon they'd be coming for him. Alone in the dark, surrounded, he had few options left but to fight his way out.

He ducked down against the column, pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes, and waited. It took time to get night goggles on, get them ready, form teams, and come after him. With a new arrow on the line, he waited them out. He pulled the arrow back and pointed it straight up. He counted the seconds. Ten, twenty, thirty. They should have clustered up, started marching, they'd be on him in no time.

Clint released the arrow. It slammed into the ceiling, and once the tip hit rock, it flared like a rocket. Beneath the protection of his glasses, he looked around at the fifteen Hydra agents trying to get the drop on him. Every one of them had some form of body armor, knives, and guns split between a few semi-autos and a handful of autos thrown in for flavor. The entire faction flanked him in a half moon from one side of his column to the other.

Maybe they thought they were clever. Maybe they thought they had an Avenger dead to rights. Clint aimed to prove them all wrong. With the flare blinding all of their high-tech sensors, and his ten dollar sunglasses protecting his eyes, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Clint shot out of his position, grabbed the muzzle of the nearest weapon, and directed it at another Hydra member. He released the gun before it went off and burned his palm. The minute the shot rang out, the entire faction became a shooting gallery. Clint moved behind one, stole a knife, slit his throat. Moved to the next, stabbed him in the spine, dropped under another gun, and suffered the ringing of a blast in close proximity to his left ear. It was worth it for the shot to go wild and land in the left knee of another agent.

Two shots went wild, followed by a series from an automatic. Clint spun behind a body, but he still felt the pang pang of two bullets smacking into his back. The pain blasted through him, but quickly faded away under his adrenaline rush. He shoved the butt of a nearby gun skyward, spun it over the agent's shoulder, strangled him with the gun's strap, and emptied the cartridge into the men around. Within a few seconds, Clint had taken out twelve of the fifteen. The others stumbled away from his grasp. Three arrows ended them.

The flare fizzled out. Clint pushed his sunglasses back to the top of his head, and glanced around in the darkness. There had been a few technicians milling around initially. Some might have built up the gusto to come at him, but for the most part, he knew they wouldn't. Given the chance of facing him, after what they'd surely heard him do in the darkness, or slipping away into the night, he was sure they'd done the latter.

Clint leaned down and grabbed one of the night vision goggles off of a dead agent. He felt around for their strap, expanded it, and fed it over his own eyes. He reached his hand back and pressed along the two gunshots he knew he'd been hit with. His hands came away clean. No blood. At least Stark's coat worked for distant gunshots. It wasn't perfect. His kidney had probably formed a bruise by now, and the second shot slammed right into his spine. He shook it off for now. He wasn't dead, or paralyzed. That meant he could keep going.

Clint tried his comm again. "Stark, you dead out there? Thor, did you jumpstart him? Anyone copy?"

The dead airspace was all that reached him. Somewhere beneath him, a generator which had been knocked out, kicked on again. He heard a whir of motor spinning, and within a few moments, the auxiliary light system kicked on. A smile found its way to his lips, and he shed the goggles. He wasn't a big fan of the tech to begin with, and working without it was preferable.

He finished a cursory sweep of the command center. Beside a few technicians crammed together beneath a desk, which he kept in place with a little jolt of electricity, the room had been evacuated. Initially, he started his sweep on the eastern entrance. Now he crossed to the interior door, and followed it to the very heart of the central tower.

Since the EMP set off, the area seemed to clear, like rats escaping a sinking ship. It was possible that had been the play all along. Lights go out, abandon post, and take as many Avengers as possible with you. Since Fury was a SHIELD contact, with less and less involvement on any Avengers details since his supposed death a year ago, they probably didn't expect the entire team to come after him. Clint was hoping Hydra hadn't found the connection between himself and Laura or Cooper, but that was something for Stark to figure out.

There was little resistance the further into the base he pushed himself. The place had little adjustments made to its layout since its original construction nearly five hundred years previously. Modern influences, like the halls of exposed lighting strung up beneath basket cages, reminded Clint more of being in a submarine rather than in a medieval castle in the middle of Europe. The small, drafty halls, with their tall narrow windows, gave way every so often to massive halls like the command post he'd left behind. Some were full of boxed mechanics.

He glanced inside, as he moved through their rows, to find some of the more advanced Hydra weaponry they'd encountered at other bases. Laser guns, with qualities similar to Stark's repulser waves, could leave a nasty hole in someone if the beam was concentrated enough. A few of the gun crates had been raided, not surprisingly, meaning the higher tech might be in play should he come across more splinter groups.

A spray of bullets hailed down on him from an upper balcony that circled the room on three sides. He dipped down beside the high walls of the crate and yanked an arrow free. A second wave of gunfire joined the first at nearly a forty-five degree angle from his position. If there were more guns up there, they were trying to box him in, taking turns shooting so neither mags emptied at the same time. It might have been smart, if it wasn't a technique Clint himself had been taught in basic. And where there's a way to do something, there is also a way to do something about it.

Clint wrapped his fingers between the edges of the nearest crate, and slid it away. In the small crevice created, he wedged his bow through, and met the first man. It became a contest of who had the faster trigger finger. Clint won.

He tumbled forward, came up, and while the second guy was busy watching his buddy topple over the railing to the bottom floor, Clint sprung out of his position. He sent an arrow through his eye, and didn't wait to see the body drop. There were still halls to clear on the first floor before he headed up. Hopefully the EMP wasn't wreaking havoc on Stark's reactor. He had ten minutes to make the rendezvous they planned in the center of the second floor. If Stark didn't make it, then he'd have to go looking for him.

"Hawkeye in, I'm sweeping my end. Anyone got a bead on Stark?" He asked the dead radio waves. Nothing came back to him. If Tony was alive, he'd be working like a madman to get their comms back online. If he wasn't, then this mission was going to get that much more complicated.

Clint cursed under his breath. It felt almost good to taste the words. He'd been attempting to steer clear of his more famous outbursts since Lila was around, and, heaven help them, so had Stark. The billionaire practically radiated bad vocabulary, and the last thing Clint wanted when his wife came home was to hear Lila's new favorite word.

The thought of it propelled him forward again. Five splinter groups stood between him and the second floor, and though it took time to fight his way through them, they were no match for an Avenger on a mission which hit so close to home. He fought like a man possessed, hitting his targets one after another as he cut through the mortal men on his journey upward. He met a few of those advanced weapons, but none were in capable enough hands to do any real damage.

Arriving at the top of the second level, he met a temporary bottleneck on the landing. It lasted as long as it took him to find another explosive tip. Bottleneck destroyed. He sailed through the smoke and smoldering bodies of the ex-agents before spilling into another open hallway. There were three paths; the one ahead, he could see led into a banquet-like hall, similar to the others he'd encountered full of Hydra tech. The left curved up and around the outside edge of the tower base, and disappeared around an unlit corner. The right did the same.

A majority of all humans were right handed. Naturally, when presented a choice of right or left, a right handed person would pick the right side more than the opposite. When he was taught to clear a room of assailants, he started from the right and worked the room from that point. If another nest of Hydra went hiding up the stairs, they'd head to the right. He followed suit.

The halls on the second floor weren't as well maintained, if such a term could be applied, as that of the first. The submarine lighting flickered in and out of use as he jogged his way down the echoing passages. There were a series of off-shoots to the central hall he encountered. Some led to spacious rooms, once occupied by guests or nobility in some ancient time, now left to rot in their World War II era cots and canvas bedding. One of the rooms, though, caught his eye.

There was a staircase in its corner, leading straight down. He was on the southern edge of the complex and, poking his head inside, he could see that the stairs also spiraled up. It was likely the room connected somehow with the central spire. The dust had cleared from the room under heavy foot traffic. None existed on the stairwell, which was well lit all the way down to the abyss below. If there was any better lead, he hadn't found it.

Abandoning the rest of the second floor, he decided to take a chance. He grabbed one of his arrows, and backtracked to the hall again to jam it into the wall. If Tony saw it, he might make the connection that Clint took the stairs down. Before deciding to search on his own, he tapped the comms again. After attempting another call check and getting nowhere, he abandoned the idea and went on alone.

He had a sense for direction. Like an internal compass lined up on the Earth's magnetic field, he could feel himself dropping lower than the first level into the catacombs beneath the central structure. There was no entry on the first floor into the strangely hidden staircase. Whoever constructed it, must have thought of the access way as an escape route. It had the same mysterious feel to it.

A few cobwebs snagged at his elbows from the damp stone walls. Someone, or a team, had already come down and disturbed the spiders, causing their silk to drift uselessly through the air in front of him. The two bullets he'd deflected in his back were beginning to match the crescendo he ignored in his knee. The three of them might as well leave him be, Clint hadn't planned to stop until the entire base was torn apart, or his family was back in his arms again.

A flap of wings sent him ducking temporarily. Five bats, stirred from his presence, went screaming into the higher halls above his head like shrieking ghouls. Clint tried to shake off the momentary surprise, and straightened again. The staircase was coming to its first halt. Below him, the stones continued spiraling down, a real Frankenstein's castle creation, while here in the labyrinth it developed an exit.

Clint spied beneath the stone archway into the darkness beyond. Again, the dust had been disturbed under a few dozen boot prints, prints and scuff marks he recognized from the floor in his house. He could get off here, or keep spiraling down. Either way, he should leave a sign for Stark if the man wasn't dead.

An overhead light blinked on, popped, and fizzled out. In the temporary shine, he could see a lengthy hall that spilled into what appeared to be another open hall. Weighing his options, he decided to get off here. He took an arrow head from his pant pocket, and jammed it into the grout between two stones at the top of the arch. At least it would give the others a fighting chance of finding him this deep underground.

The overhead light popped on again with a sick, sizzle, like bacon in a frying pan. Its single bulb doing the work of half a dozen more blown out along the stretch ahead. Clint stuck to the corners of its glow, and peered into the open hall.

He thought initially that it was all a single floor, but now realized that he'd been led to a series of interconnected catwalks that ran above a lower hanger. His assessment of the place as a Hydra supply base, seemed more likely, given the sheer number of crates packed into the tight space. There had to be a third, larger entrance into the underground labyrinth for the Hydra commanders to even attempt fitting all the cargo into the hanger. He hoped Steve or Natasha had some luck in finding it.

Full sized jeeps, Humvees, old plane parts, more munitions boxes than he could count, were all stacked in a sort of organized chaos down there. Why Hydra needed such intense military grade weaponry this far into Eastern Europe, he couldn't quite understand. His thoughts drifted back to Hill's old report, trying to piece it all together.

Sokovia, a base only fifty miles from them, was quickly climbing its way to the top of their list as locations for Loki's scepter. If that was the case, having these supplies readily available made all the sense in the world. He filed the information away for now.

"CLINT!"

The scream caught him up short. His breath halted in his chest as if someone had socked him right in the gut. He spun in place, looked over his shoulder, and locked eyes with her.

"Laura," he wanted to scream her name, but settled for a whisper of utter disbelief. He tracked his way across the catwalks, scaled a small staircase, and found his way across the room. He hit the far wall, and followed the elevated paths to the old dungeons left from times past.

"Clint, my God, Clint!" she cried when he appeared. Her arms fed through the bars, dragging his body against her with only the rusted steel standing between them. Clint wrapped her against him, his face pressing as hard as it could against hers.

"I found you, I've got you, I'm not letting you go!" he exclaimed, breathless in his utter relief.

"Dad!"

Clint's eyes glanced over her shoulder, and there was his son. Cooper's hands joined his mother's as their small fingers tugged for purchase on his Kevlar coat. The archer leaned down and pressed his lips into the boy's hair.

"I heard you, I got your message, and I came to get you. You are so smart, you know that?" His heart was overwhelmed in the moment. He could hardly think.

"I knew you would, dad, I knew it! I told mom, didn't I, mom? I said it, right?"

Laura's eyes filled with relieved tears as she pressed her face against his hair. When she turned to Clint again, her heart dropped.

"No!" She screamed.

Clint tried to turn. He felt his wife's hand reach for the sidearm he kept in the leg holster. Neither were fast enough to stop the shooter. The Hydra agent had one of the enhanced weapons. Before Clint could face him, he fired. The laser shot tore through the archer. The fight flooded out of him as he hit the dungeon bars. His dilated eyes locked onto his wife's, noticing the splatter of blood, his blood, speckling her face.

"Daddy!"

"Clint! Clint, no!"

His knees buckled, and Clint's body began to sink.

umm...

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Coming up: escape the compound. fight to live.

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