So...this idea happened. Let's just see where it goes, yeah?
Chapter One - A Tiny Bit Bad
He spotted her at the end of the Triskelion hallway, relief crashing over him. She wasn't facing him but the deep red hair, slightly curled and cut off just below the shoulder, was as unmistakable as the slight favor she gave to her left foot in her stance, as if ready to sprint at a moment's notice with her right, and the squared-off way she held her shoulders—powerful, confident, determined.
"Natasha!" Clint called, walking quickly toward her. "I've been looking for you all day; listen, there's something you need to—"
She turned to face him, gray-green eyes piercing. Something he saw there cut him off, stopped him from speaking. Her face went white.
"Nat?" he asked, close enough now to count every dark eyelash framing her wide eyes. "Something's wrong, I—"
Natasha punched him in the face.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER
"One on your six," Stark's asinine voice said over the comm tucked snugly in his ear. Clint nocked an arrow and turned in less than half a second flat, only to see his target explode right in front of him without him releasing an arrow. "Oh, wait, I got it."
Hawkeye released the tension in his bowstring and dropped his arms until the entire thing was pointing towards the ground. "Thank you, Stark," he grumbled, rolling his eyes as the man in the metal suit flew overhead. A strong blast of wind gushed past him, following Stark as he rocketed through the big blue sky, firing repulsor blasts in front of him at the next clump of enemies. Spotting another one of the metal spiders they were currently fighting, he raised his bow and loosed another arrow.
"Whoops, got it again." Stark flew by, two more enemies crumpling in his wake at the same time as Clint's target was blown to a pile of smithereens. Cap glanced at them from a few yards away but wisely didn't say anything, decapitating a nearby spider with his shield. Barton gritted his teeth, firing off an arrow at a target a hundred yards away from Stark and taking a special pleasure as he watched the metal spider short-circuit and keel over onto the ground, eight gear-covered legs twitching madly before slowly coming to a stop. A millisecond later he had his bow aimed at another arachnid right in front of him, flexing its mechanical pincers, only to hear the sharp rapport of a gun next close to his ear. The spider's wiry guts exploded outwards with the string of Clint's now still taut.
"Whoops, got it again," Natasha smirked, shooting him a mischievous glance.
"Fear not, Barton, there is more than enough enemies for all of us," Thor decreed, appearing at his side. His hammer spun in a tight circle, then slammed through an entire line of spiders with a series of dull clangs. "Now there are fewer."
"Besides, we all know you only have a limited number of electro-arrows," Natasha added with a smirk. "We're just trying to help."
"At this rate, I'm going to go home with a full set," Clint grumbled.
"Comin' through," Stark called. Barton, Thor, and Romanoff all ducked, feeling the wind rush over them as Iron Man shot past just above their heads. A burst of concentrated white light shot from his chest, frying another few enemies.
"Yeah, we get it, Stark," Barton muttered. "We all see your fancy new suit. You can stop unibeaming everything now."
"Mark XII," he said proudly in Clint's ear. If it wasn't for the mission—and because Fury roasted his ass the last time he'd done it—he would've pulled out his earpiece and stomped it to bits. The next time he spoke, Stark's voice was distinctly less excited. "And you know exactly what it's for, Barton."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Clint replied innocently, firing yet another futile arrow thanks to Iron Man's more than thorough work.
"JARVIS, please remind Barton of his actions this morning," Stark said through gritted teeth, comm link still open.
"Mr. Barton inserted a new segment into my code, specifically into the part that programs my speech," JARVIS answered, as stately and British as he could emulate while having the unmistakable voice of Dora the Explorer.
Clint attempted to repress a smirk but didn't try very hard. "Well, it's not technically Dora...just a voice sample from a S.H.I.E.L.D.'s synth tech that I noticed kinda sounds like her…"
"Oh, of course," Stark replied, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. "That's why he also says this when I ask: JARVIS, where's Pepper currently located?"
"Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swi—" A fzzt sound came across the comm, the sound of Tony shutting off JARVIS's audio system because he couldn't stand it anymore. This time it was Barton getting the disapproving look from Cap, although the slightly bemused undertone to it made him wonder if Steve had actually ever seen Dora the Explorer...doubtful.
Clint had to struggle to contain his mirth, only to be throttled by a giant spider that he hadn't noticed scuttling up to him from the side. Two of its front legs clamped his neck between them while its metallic pincers snipped uncomfortably close to his nose. "Not—becoming—Voldemort—today!" Clint grunted as he reached into his quiver for an electro-arrowhead. He jabbed it into the space between the spider's head and abdomen, receiving a bit of jolt himself as the electricity arced through both him and the spider, thankfully shorting out only one of them. When he had recovered his wits enough to push the spider skeleton off of him—meaning he was still tasting iron in his mouth but the smell of singed flesh had subsided—Barton did so, heaving and shoving the bundle of scrap metal off of him onto the ground. He stood up, looking around.
"After all that, thanks for the help," Clint spat, bringing his hand up to his nose, which stung. It came away red and wet. "Hey, it got me!"
"Aww," Natasha teased, coming up beside him. "It stole the tip of your nose."
"Not funny," he growled, feeling that, indeed, a tiny piece of skin there had been shorn off.
"I think it's funny, Rudolph," Stark said overhead, blasting another few of the robots.
"Shaddup."
Returning his full attention to the battle, Clint turned to find that a spider was attempting to creep up on Natasha from behind, but before he could so much as shout a warning, she back flipped onto it, hands gripping the steel legs and then releasing just before blue arcs of electricity—the Widow's bite—shot out at the spider from her bracelets, thoroughly cooking its insides. She landed on her back hard in the grass, and Clint offered her a hand up as he wiped the sweat off his brow with his left. She accepted it, pulling herself upwards. "I like spiders," she growled, resetting the charge on her bracelets, "but apparently that doesn't extend to mechanical ones created by AIM to try to kill us."
"You'd think a group called Advanced Idea Mechanics could come up with something a little more original than robotic spiders," Clint muttered, agreeing. "Didn't they ever watch Runaway? Or, for that matter, Stargate?"
"Or they decided to go for size over ingenuity," Natasha said, pointing ahead of them. A larger spider, several times bigger than any of the others and with the bulk of a minivan, was making its way down the hill towards them.
"Dibs on the giantest spider!" Stark called, barreling toward it through the air. Barton and Romanoff rolled their eyes.
"Team, do you read?" Bruce Banner said in their ears.
Clint pressed his hand to his comm. "Yes, we read you, Banner. Have you got anything for us?"
"Maybe a way to shut them all down," Bruce replied in his usual calm, slightly uncertain way of speaking about his ideas.
"Good, what is it?" Natasha weighed in.
"There's an odd energy signature coming from a spot three hundred meters west of you," Banner informed them. "Nothing on satellite imagery except a gray blotch, but based on its position and some other factors I think it may be a communication relay for the spiders. Destroy that, and they won't receive any more commands from AIM."
"I'll go check it out," Clint said, shooting another spider approaching them straight through the pincers. He got a lot more done while Stark was distracted.
Natasha nodded. "We'll keep them from following you. Thor!" The last word was a shout, simultaneous with a powerful kick of her foot that sent a stray spider skidding across the grass towards the thunder god. He turned, spotted the offending arachnid, and promptly smashed his hammer through it.
"Well-kicked, Lady Natasha," Thor bellowed. "Might we work together on a few more of these unnatural beasts?"
"Coming your way," Natasha replied. She gave Clint a nod before beginning to wade back into the fray.
"What do I do once I reach this communication relay?" Clint asked Banner as he began to jog to the west.
"Describe it to me," Bruce replied. "So I can tell you how to shut it off."
"It's too much to hope for that there's just switch with a label reading 'Off'?"
He could hear the older man's sigh over the comm link, grinned to himself, and kept running. As he reached yet another grassy hill, he spotted a gray rectangular object in the distance with a thin pole sticking up out of it towards the sky.
"I see it," Clint said, approaching swiftly to look down at the console. It had a lot of red and green buttons, some of which were lit and depressed while others untouched. "I'm starting to rethink my assertion that I was the right guy for this. Should've sent Stark, he'd be able to make some sense out of this junk."
"No worse than Cap trying to repair a helicarrier engine. The line to beat is 'It seems to run on some form of electricity!'" Banner let that sink in for a moment.
"He can't hear us, right?" Barton checked.
The scientist ignored the question. "Now, Clint, what do you see?"
Hawkeye closed his eyes and then opened them, splitting up the crowded console into distinct imaginary sections. "Okay, top left there's a dial from 0 to 100; it's currently at 83. Next to that is a red button and a green button, and someone's pressed the green one. Below is another reading that just as a bunch of numbers scrolling by...100110011111100000110101—"
"Not important right this second, keep going," Bruce told him. "What else?"
"Top right, two more dials…" Clint quickly listed off the rest of what he saw, almost missing the lever in the exact middle as well as what looked like a dead man's switch. His partner in crime was silent for a few moments. "Could you make sense of any of that, Banner?"
"Press the green button all the way on the left," Bruce replied in lieu of an answer.
"Okay, the screen now reads 'Activated.'"
"Hit the red button right next to that."
Clint did. "Nothing happened."
He could almost hear the soft-spoken scientist scratching his head. "Try it again."
He did. All the lights began flashing red. "Wait, what just happened?" Clint said, backing away from the console automatically. "Is it going to blow? Because I want to be far away from here if it's gonna blow."
"No?"
"Bruce!"
"I don't think so," Banner replied carefully. "Just...just hit the red button again."
"That's what I did last time and this happened," Clint shouted, but darted forward to follow the instructions anyway, less inclined for it to blow up as he dallied than for it to explode because of something he did directly trying to fix it. Not that he wanted to blow up at all. Natasha would kill him.
Miraculously, he was not incinerated. The flashing stopped. "Okay, it's back to normal now," Clint informed him.
"Try the dead man's switch," Banner suggested. "Just for a few seconds, to see what it does."
"If you say so," Barton muttered, wrapping his fingers around it and pulling downwards slowly. Blue slivers of light began filling an empty bar on the left side of the console that he hadn't thought to mention before. He described it as best he could as the bars increased. "And there's a whirring sound too," he added at the end, only just becoming aware of it.
"I think we have the right one this time," Bruce said, sounding relieved. "The switch probably has to initialize the mechanism by which the ro—"
Whatever Banner was going to say regarding how exactly the machine would shut down or incapacitate the spiders, Clint would never know. The earth gave a sudden jerk beneath him as the progress bar shot to full, then all of the lights went dead. A pulse of blue-tinged white light shot outward in all directions from the thin pole, hitting him squarely in the chest. Something icy shot through his veins and he was thrown backwards, hitting the ground headfirst with a dry thud.
For Clint Barton, the world blinked out of existence.
I would really, really love to know what you all thought. To be continued ASAP :)