Really quickly: I'm probably going to be a little more spotty on updates for the next couple of weeks. I'll definitely try, but I've got back-to-back vacations planned; collaborating with my editor/sister and getting new chapters posted while we're gone might be difficult. You've been warned! Now, enjoy this section!
Clint was the last one in the training room that night. There were no windows and no clock, but he could judge by the looks on people's faces and the yawns that had bounced around the room as they'd all left that it was pretty late.
He ignored the heaviness in his own eyelids, striding forward and retrieving his arrows from the dummies around him. It would have been utterly pointless to try to sleep while his mind still whirred like an angry machine. Sighing, he slipped arrow after arrow into his quiver; he hadn't slept in what felt like millennia, and tonight was not looking very good either.
Back in the center of the room, he called for JARVIS to start him on a new round of dummies, and to please make it a challenge for him.
Rings started spinning. Arrows started flying. Clint had brought enough arrows to allow each dummy a single shot, but, by the time the he had slain every robot in the room for the umpteenth time, he still had half a dozen arrows left in his quiver. His trick shots were getting better, at least.
As soon as things stopped moving, he heard the door behind him open and close, soft footsteps tapping their way to the weapon corner outside of the rings. He didn't bother to turn, instead setting out to retrieve his arrows again, checking for damage and counting them meticulously.
He was halfway around the outer circle of wounded and dispatched dummies in the process of reaching for another arrow when a hand tugged it free first, holding it out to him. Wordlessly tracing his eyes up the length of the arm and to the face, he took the arrow, tapping it against his palm out of habit.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, turning to get the rest of his ammunition from the other robot corpses.
Elizabeth followed him, carefully keeping a line of dummies between them. "I had expected the room to be empty," she said quietly.
"Well, hate to spoil your fun, but I don't really plan on leaving any time soon." Clint yanked an especially stubborn arrow from its target and swore when the arrowhead broke off.
She shrugged and made a gesture that said No, please; keep training.
And so he did, killing another slew of dummies. She simply stood out of range, watching expressionlessly – empirically. "Something's on your mind," she noted as the room stopped revolving.
"Yeah," he admitted roughly.
He expected her to ask if he wanted to talk – to get such strong emotions off his chest. But she didn't. She only hesitantly stepped forward, holding out her hand blithely. "Me too," she said, and he understood. For a second, he clutched his bow tighter, so she smiled quietly and dropped her hand. "I should have known. My apologies. Never get between a man and his weapon." Instead, she stepped out of the target range, moving to the shelves with the weapons. Clint watched out of the corner of his eye as she picked up a set of ten throwing knives. Then, she stepped back into the middle. "Would you mind if I—"
"No, please. Go ahead." He wanted to watch her. Not everybody was a reliable shot with knives.
She weighed the first dagger in her hand, flipping is so she was holding the blade. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she threw, and it landed dully inside the head of the dummy. "I seem to have fallen a bit out of practice," she muttered, appraising the situation with a highly critical eye.
"What are you talking about? That wasn't bad at all," he said.
She was already aiming another knife as she replied, "I've done better." He couldn't deny her statement, so he watched as she threw again. This one was more graceful than her last, her knife landing squarely in the dummy's chest, right over the false, metallic heart. With a glance back at him, she said, "See?"
He raised his eyebrows appreciatively. "Where did you learn this stuff?" he asked as she aimed at a new dummy.
"Back home," she returned, flinging the knife smoothly.
"Which is . . . ?"
"Quite a distance away. You won't have been there."
He shrugged. "I'm not so sure about that. I've been a lot of places."
"Norway?" she asked.
"Maybe," he replied. "If I have, it was a smooth job. It doesn't really stand out in my memory." She just nodded, throwing again. "You don't really look Norwegian, though."
Her cheek twitched up a bit, the edge of a smirk barely visible from his angle. "I never said Norway was home."
"Then what –"
"My family and I traveled there often when I was younger," she explained. "It was always one of my favorite places."
Clint stepped out of the way as she turned, taking aim at another target. "You should talk to Thor about that sometime," he said. "I'll bet he could tell a story or two. Being a Norse god and all."
Her eyebrow jerked up, and she threw, the dagger slightly off her mark. "I'll bet he could," she echoed. "How is he?"
Was he mistaken, or was there genuine concern lurking beneath her voice? "You mean with all this Loki crap?"
She gave a half-shrug. "In general, I suppose. How has he been?"
"Why don't you ask him yourself? You never talk to him," he pointed out. When she didn't say anything, only looking down at her next knife, he said, "I guess he's okay. I don't really know. He doesn't seem quite as okay as last time, but I think Loki just kind of has that effect."
Elizabeth was silent for a moment, and then she turned away from the targets entirely. "This may be an entirely irrational question, Clint, but why do you hate Loki so much?"
"You try being someone's slave for a while and see how you like it."
She lowered her eyes, though none of the rest of her changed remotely.
"I mean, the worst part was that I knew," he said. "It wasn't like I was unconscious the whole time or anything. I was completely aware of everything that I did on his orders. He made me think that it was right to do it, so I did."
"I know," she murmured.
"How could you?" he snapped. "How could you know what it's like to have him turn your world upside down and make you think that such awful things were actually good? How could you know what it's like to live with the memories every single day?" He jabbed a finger at his own chest. "I have to live with it, you know. It's not one of those easy-breezy forgive and forget things. He had me try to kill my own team – even Natasha! He made me think it was the right thing to do." He took a breath, calming himself a bit before saying, "I hate him because he hurt me, Elizabeth."
"Not because of the things he'd done on his own?"
Clint shrugged. "Everyone's got some red in their ledger, I guess. I know I'm no angel. Nobody here is. We won't claim to be, and we won't try to hide the fact that, yeah, we've messed up." He looked at her. "Hell, I used to be an assassin. I killed people for a living. I'll probably always have more blood on my hands than Loki, so who am I to preach at him?"
She stared back at him, face unreadable. "He's not really like that, you know; a killing machine."
"Well, when he wants a second chance, you let me know," he told her. "Since you seem to have the red-line to him and all. I can promise we won't make it easy on him, but, someone out there was kind enough to give me another shot at life. I figure he deserves the same."
"You all seemed ready enough to kill him when he showed up on the television," she noted.
With a scoff, he said, "I don't know about the rest of them, but, to me, that was him wasting his second chance. The next time I see that man's face – for real, I mean – he'd better have something nicer on his mind than destroying my planet. And it'd better be really clear, right away. Really clear." He lightened up a little, smirking at her. "You're not a bad shot with those. You ever shoot a bow?"
She smirked right back, saying, "I have not shot a bow in ages. It's even been a while since I've done this." She gestured to her knives, all embedded in targets around the room.
"Well, knives work for you; you must have been something special at one point," he told her, indicating the decimated targets all around them.
With a bitter laugh, she replied, "Actually, I was always considered mediocre. At just about everything. But thank you, Clint. It has been quite some time since I've been complimented."
"Yeah, no problem. I call it as I see it." Together, they went around and gathered all of her knives, and then he turned, leaving his bow and quiver on hooks in the weapon corner. "I'm gonna go try to get some shut-eye. You staying around a while?" he asked, finally feeling like nothing but dead weight, ready to collapse into bed.
"I think so," she answered.
He nodded, half in the hallway and half in the training room. "Well, goodnight."
"Goodnight, Clint."
He slipped quietly out into the hall, closing the door behind him; he looked back just in time to see a knife spin across the room and tear through the only remaining dummy, slicing its head clean off.
Breakfast the next morning was a quiet affair. It was a rare thing that they all sat down to a proper meal together—Clint maintained that doing so regularly would make them seem too much like a normal family—and they had pulled out all the stops. Still, among the bacon, eggs, pancakes, fruit, biscuits, and toast, there was no conversation aside from trite small talk about things that didn't really matter. Tony shattered even that, however, when he pulled out a small bag and set it on the table.
"Alright guys," he said, handing the velvet pouch to Pepper. "Take and pass. Just like grade school."
Steve watched as Pepper pulled out a tiny flesh-colored item, giving the bag to Elizabeth without looking at the object itself. She rolled it around in her fingers like she knew what it was. Good. If it wasn't novel to Pepper, Steve probably had a better-than-average chance of recognizing the thing himself.
Elizabeth, however, stared down her nose at the object in the flat of her palm suspiciously, very obviously uncertain as to whether she should crush it like an insect or cradle it like a diamond. She said nothing, waiting patiently for Tony to explain, though Steve could see a snide remark forming behind her pursed lips.
When the mystery bag reached him, Steve obediently pulled out a miniscule, almost-spherical thing that he had never seen before in his life. Great.
Around the table, people were placing these off affairs into their ears. He held off, wanting to know its purpose before putting it that close to his brain.
"Stark," Thor asked, staring at his object in much the same way as Elizabeth was staring at her own, his expression a fair bit more animated, "what is this strange contraption?"
Tony took the bag from Clint, procuring the last remaining item for himself. "Comms unit," he informed them. "You put it in your ear so we can talk to each other."
"Like a two-way radio?" Steve inquired, amazed at the microscopic size of such a device.
Tony shrugged. "Whatever floats your boat, Gramps." He demonstrated the proper usage of the unit by sticking the thing into his right ear. Thor imitated him, and Steve followed. It felt very strange, having a foreign object in his ear, but if Tony said it would help them, how could he argue?
Elizabeth watched them as though they had all just eaten something that they had found at the back of the refrigerator, covered in green fuzz and drawing flies like sugar water. "What does it do?" she asked, some of her contempt seeping into the question.
"It receives vibrations of the jaw bone that it amplifies into speech, and then it transmits the impulse to each of the units wired into the network," Tony explained in what he certainly must have thought to be a clear and concise manner. She just slowly arched an eyebrow, the comm balancing on the tip of her index finger.
"Magic," Thor said abruptly. At the sound of his voice, Elizabeth's eyes jerked over to him, so cold and sharp that they could have turned to metal. Undeterred, he repeated himself. "It uses magic. That's what I tell myself, at least."
She didn't turn away, though Steve wondered how it was possible to glare so vehemently at someone while avoiding the other's eyes entirely. Somehow, Elizabeth managed the gesture, and Thor eventually quelled.
Wordlessly, she stuffed the comm into her ear, her gaze softening only after the device was positioned securely.
"Uh, JARVIS," Tony said, oblivious to what had just passed between Thor and Elizabeth.
"Yes, sir?"
There was a mutual shriek from all present, hands flying to cup ears, cringing from face to feet.
"Set the volume down about twelve units," Tony told his computer. The subtle ticking in their ears indicated that the order was being carried out.
"Better, sir?" JARVIS asked, voice now suitably adjusted within the range of audible-not-painful tones.
"Yeah, thanks." Tony stood up from the table, pacing around to stand behind Elizabeth. A hand on her shoulder made her look up at him, and he smiled, though it was a grim gesture. "You sure you want to do this?"
She took a breath, looking around at the faces. "Of course," she said. "Are you all sure you want to help?"
A unanimous chorus of affirmations silenced her immediately. Once the voices died down again, Bruce raised two fingers to get her attention, and, when she nodded at him, he asked, "What exactly are you going to be doing once you get inside the room? We want to make sure you'll be safe too, you know."
For an instant, she appeared as though she hadn't expected such a response. Her cool composure came back to her almost instantly, though, and she gave him a mild smirk. "I will speak to it," she said, an unusual amount of confidence behind the words.
"Will that work?" Pepper asked.
"I'm counting on it," Elizabeth replied. "It listened to me once."
She didn't say that such a fact rendered it far more likely that the Scrimorus would disregard her the second time. What was the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice. . .
The Chitauri were hardly ones to be fooled or to be made to appear foolish.