A/N: Thanks to everyone who reviewed, followed, and favorited this story! I had no intentions of continuing this and you guys were so amazing that you changed my mind. I'm currently in graduate school and updates will be slow, but I have a good sense of where I want this story to end and I will get there eventually. I hope you enjoy this chapter, and feel free to leave reviews (I love them as much as Hawkeye's dog Lucky loves pizza).

In the end, Clint spent a couple of days at S.H.I.E.L.D. before returning to Avengers Tower. It was selfish of him to consider leaving. The Avengers…well, they didn't need him and they didn't notice he was gone, but they expected him to be there during fights.

With that in mind, Clint slunk through the back door of the Tower late at night, and rode the elevator directly up to his room. There wasn't much decoration, but the familiar furnishings were a welcome sight. He kicked off his purple converse and all but collapsed onto the couch in his living room.

He ached everywhere; his ribs, his head, his hair. Was it possible for hair to ache? His did. He reached a hand into his pocket and pulled out the hearing aids poking into his hip. He set them onto the coffee table, his ears still too tender to have them in now.

Sighing, he tucked his head into the corner of his arm. That was an issue in and of itself. He hadn't told the Avengers yet, not even Tasha, but after what happened with Hammer, he knew he would need to come clean soon. He didn't consider it a liability, but others would…the Avengers would. They wouldn't think about all the previous fights he'd helped them win, they'd worry about how his lack of hearing might affect communication or allow him to be snuck up on at an integral point.

Tasha would kill him when she found out he had been keeping this a secret from her for well over a year. Maybe he'd tell her first and let her kill him so he wouldn't have to tell the others.

Unfortunately, Nat was currently on a mission with S.H.I.E.L.D. that would take her a few weeks to complete. She was the only Avenger who seemed to show an interest in him, or at least used to show an interest in him. She had left for the mission without saying anything to him. In fact, if he hadn't overheard Steve mentioning her absence to Bruce, he wouldn't even have known she was gone. He didn't know where her head was at these days. But if it physically wasn't at Avengers Tower, that gave him more time to squirrel himself away in his room and plan out his confession.

And provided there weren't any calls to assemble, that's exactly what he intended to do…after he slept, of course. Clint burrowed deeper into the couch, one leg hanging off the armrest from where he laid on his stomach. He couldn't remember the last time he got a good night's sleep. Nightmares woke him up and doubts kept him awake, but maybe this time would be the exception.

As his eyes drifted close and his body became blissfully heavy with exhaustion, he happily thought to himself that even if the alarm rang, he wouldn't be able to hear it with his hearing aids out. He could sleep as long as he wanted.

Selfish again, Clint realized, but he was too tired to care.

Clint slept for almost six hours, a personal best in the last couple of months. His quiet night was the prelude to a quiet week. With no emergencies and no calls to assemble, Clint spent his days either practicing in the shooting range or attempting to convince himself that he wasn't actively hiding from the Avengers.

In his defense, he almost attended an unofficial team dinner. Pepper had sent out an e-mail to everyone on Tony's behalf, inviting them all to join in for a group dinner. He was half-way to the communal kitchen after a long day of practice in the shooting range when he realized he didn't have his hearing aids. Clint may be proficient at reading lips, but even he couldn't keep up with multiple conversations at once. He thought about running to grab them from his room, but they were the over-the-ear kind and besides being visible, they would hurt like hell in his still healing ear canals.

The other option was bringing it up to the others then and there. Maybe he could even convince Tony to take a look at them for improvements. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s were good, but they had nothing on Stark tech. The idea was tempting, and if Nat were there to glare at everyone who dared to question why he was still on the team, maybe he would have gone through with it.

Who was he kidding, he wouldn't have done it. He'd still be walking back to his room to make a pot of coffee and eat energy bars in self-imposed solitary confinement.

That was his problem. He spent too much time alone with his thoughts and inferiority complex instead of trying to make things better. He should have spent more time bonding with the team, getting to know them. He probably could have done a better job of letting them know more about himself, too. Nothing major, of course. He wouldn't tell them about his past, his time with S.H.I.E.L.D., or anything like that, but he could have told them something.

A simple, "My favorite color is purple, I love bows and arrows, and I'm a walking disaster," might have reminded them to check for the guy in a purple uniform shooting arrows with a bow who had a tendency of getting into trouble.

And really, Clint was starting to get annoyed with evil groups like A.I.M. and their determination to hurt him. Clint thought A.I.M. had been destroyed when Tony went head to head with Aldrich Killian, but the week before Nat was scheduled to return they resurfaced. He wasn't sure where they crawled out of, some unknown subdivision of A.I.M. with a fetish for yellow hazard suits, but the Avengers were inevitably sent to stop them when they started destroying the city. It sounded like a simple mission, and for the most part it was. Start to finish, Clint estimated the fight took thirty minutes. Most of the A.I.M. agents were handcuffed and being shuttled into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody while the rest had scuttled off to hide. Cap and Stark were going over mission details with Director Fury while Thor wrestled the Hulk into submission. As for Clint, he was collecting used arrows and keeping an eye on everything from a distance.

For once, the only part of him that ached was his head. S.H.I.E.L.D. gave him an extra pair of invisible hearing aids with a built in communicator before the fight, but they irritated his ears. He could tell his canals were inflamed; in fact, he would have predicted as much before the fight when he shoved them in and they settled uncomfortably into place. Sparing a glance at the preoccupied Avengers, Clint quickly pulled out his hearing aids, relishing the release of pressure.

That was his first mistake.

His second mistake was pocketing the hearing aids and stepping out of sight to gather more arrows.

Clint wasn't sure how he missed the guy in a bright yellow suit hiding next to the dumpster…and really, what was it with him and dumpsters?...but at least he got a solid punch into the guy's face before the Taser shocked him and Clint slumped into a twitching heap on the ground.

As they loaded him into a non-descript van, Clint prayed the Avengers would realize he was missing, because this? This looked very, very bad.