A/N1: I am slightly put out by the fact that ff net messed up the formatting I had for Will's contact documents in the last chapter. If you guys get another update notice, it's cause I'm trying to fix it. (It worked right on AO3, dang it!) In other news, Clint's here! Go, read!

"Clint?"

Natasha restrained the urge to glance over at the passenger side of the car. She knew her partner wasn't any more injured than some sprained muscles and scrapes and bruises. Looking at him wasn't going to change that, in either direction, but it would make him irritable.

"I told you, I don't care where we go, I just want out of this city."

Well, more irritable. If she weren't already intimately familiar with the issues he was fighting in his head right now, she'd be tempted to punch him in the head again.

Instead, she sighed, and refused to let her hands tighten on the wheel as she navigated the maze of rubble and construction and debris that had been New York's streets. "I know you don't, but I'm not choosing your cover for you. Where we go affects it. Pick something."

There was an inarticulate mumble from her right, and some of the tension riding between her shoulder blades diminished. Not all of it, but…a small portion. A grumbling Clint was a functioning Clint.

So long as she could keep him functioning until they reached safety, Natasha was fairly certain she could guide him through the first shaky steps towards reclaiming his sense of self. As much as she trusted that Sitwell knew how to do his job well, and that he would side with them over the WSC…well, he wasn't Coulson. He'd done remarkably well keeping up with the two of them during the chaos of the battle for New York. Natasha would remain forever impressed that he had anticipated how fast she and Clint would move after her partner woke as himself again. The pain pills he'd stashed in Clint's field suit had been a large part of the reason he'd done so well in that battle after everything he'd already gone through.

She didn't particularly care if his aim was still almost supernatural under adverse conditions, it was better when he wasn't fighting a migraine from having his mind raped and his head rammed into a metal pole then punched with all the force she could muster.

Honestly, Natasha wasn't so sure that the cognitive recalibration had much of anything to do with how Clint had broken free of Loki. The god had shown himself to have the tendency to underestimate mere humans time and again. Clint had been fighting the control since the first moment he was taken. All that he had needed was a chance, an opening to exploit.

She'd reviewed the tapes, both of her fight with Clint, and of Coulson's confrontation with Loki. She still wasn't sure if she had rammed Clint's head into the railing before Coulson had shot Loki with the Phase 2 canon. In the end, Natasha supposed there wasn't much difference to before or after. Whether it had been her actions, or Coulson's, or a combination, Clint had been granted the opportunity he needed to claw enough control back to stop fighting her.

And no matter how much every agent at SHIELD knew that there were some situations where you just had to make the best of bad options, no one would be especially happy to see Clint right at this moment. Given a few weeks for the immediacy of the battle to fade, and the pain of friends lost to recede slightly, they would realize it wasn't his fault. Right now, though…

No, right now, they needed to disappear. They had to fall off SHIELD's radar and quickly. Sitwell had helped with that, blandly handing her two duffle bags that usually lived in their respective on base quarters in New York, already – always – packed and ready to go.

"Enjoy your vacation, Agent Romanov. Don't let him try any more stunts until the effects of the concussion wear off."

So, as much as she wished it were Coulson who had their backs right now, Sitwell was doing an admirable job of taking up that slack. Until Director Fury could calm the Council down, or distract them with something else, she and Clint, and the rest of the rag-tag team that had formed, needed to get out of the spot-light.

For Clint and her, it wouldn't be hard. They were both accustomed to disappearing, sometimes in plain sight. Natasha had seen Clint transform himself time and again with a change of posture, accent, clothing, attitude – any and all the combinations he needed –so that someone he had spoken to not an hour earlier didn't recognize him beyond a vague you seem familiar. And while for Clint it was always an effort on some level, Natasha herself had been trained to do the same, with even more deadly effect.

She had no hopes of Stark even attempting the same, though his injuries might make Pepper keep him confined to the Tower for a day or so. Dr. Banner's presence might help there as well. Stark had taken to the man who became the Hulk like nothing else Natasha had observed. Maybe having to temper his actions to keep his new friend out of trouble would help, though Natasha doubted it.

She also doubted Dr. Banner would stay in the country for much longer. Some wounds ran too deeply to be fixed by fearless camaraderie and shameless offers of material objects.

Thor, of course, was no longer even on the planet, having taken Loki back to Asgard to face his punishment just that morning. It was perhaps uncharitable to wish him not to return, when he had done so much to help them fight off the Chitauri, but Natasha's primary concern right now was her partner. Clint did not need reminders of Loki and all that had happened since the madman's arrival on Earth. There would be enough of them to face without that.

As for the good Captain Rogers, he was doing much the same as she and Clint would. Getting out of the city, with no firm destination in mind beyond not New York. He'd expressed an interest in seeing how the rest of the country had changed since he'd woken from the ice, and she had grabbed the opportunity for distraction and had Clint help her throw together some clothing that would help the super soldier blend into the crowds better than his own clothing did. However comfortable he felt in the clothing he chose for himself, it fit better on men decades his senior in years lived, even if he should be that same age. She wondered, sometimes, how he was handling the oddity of being effectively cut off from his own generation so well.

That task had kept them occupied long enough for exhaustion to finally claim her partner, dragging him down into a deep, dreamless sleep. Natasha didn't hope she could exhaust him that well again – the Chitauri had done that, at least, for good. Fighting an invading army was terrifyingly exhausting. Tonight would be the first of a long series of difficult ones, she knew, but this was nothing they hadn't dealt with before on lesser levels. Loki's words drifted through her mind.

"Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything?"

Both of them had done things in their pasts they were not proud of, true enough. But the difference, the thing Loki could not see, was that as horrible as their pasts were, Clint and she had never done those things because they enjoyed them. They had made the choices they did because those decisions were the best they could make at the time, for themselves, with the information at hand. It didn't absolve them of the wrong they had done, but it explained it. Their actions of the present worked to balance their ledgers, bit by little bit.

It was something Coulson had spent a long time convincing both of them of, and Natasha refused to let Loki cause either one of them to backslide in the progress the man had made.

Finally giving in to the urge to glance at her partner – slumped moodily against the door, glaring at the buildings they passed - Natasha admitted privately, silently, to herself that it might be harder for Clint than for her, for perhaps the first time in their long partnership.

Clint could feel Natasha pointedly not watching him, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of acknowledging the silent worry. He knew she was trying to get him to lay claim to his own actions again, to build a base against Loki's invasion of his mind, his free will. It was even something he knew was a good idea, but right now, Clint wanted nothing to do with it.

He was still exhausted, even after sleeping without dreams – and thank whatever higher power existed for that! – for nearly six solid hours before being bullied into Natasha's car to witness Loki's departure to a well-deserved punishment.

Clint hoped it was a severe one. Involving damp dungeons and magic cancelling chains or whatever the equivalent was in Asgard. Not like he really had any real knowledge of the place to go off of.

But now, curled into a tight ball in the passenger seat, watching the city around him become gradually more intact as they traveled further from the epicenter of the attack yesterday, Clint just wanted to retreat into silence and not have to think about anything that had happened. Because then he could ignore what he had done to his own people, could forget that he had turned his gun on the director, nearly brought down the Helicarrier, tried to kill Natasha, and that Coulson was…that Phil was…

Biting down on the inside of his cheek to stop the sound that wanted to claw its way out of his throat – Clint wasn't sure if it would have been a sob or a scream and didn't particularly want to find out – the archer curled tighter into the door, and squeezed his eyes shut. He needed something to distract himself with. Something not connected to New York, or the Avengers, or aliens or crazy scientists or super soldiers or anything to do with the past week at all –

"So…middle of nowhere, Ohio. Who would have thought this would be the ideal place for terrorists to recruit potential new recruits?"

"It's hardly the middle of nowhere, Benji," Jane said disapprovingly. "We're not that far from Cleveland, actually."

"I don't care! There isn't a decently sized town within twenty miles, the internet connection is horrific at best and this is the middle of nowhere!"

Will sighed and rolled his eyes as his teammates bickered with each other. He kept flipping through the pages of the marriage registries they'd gotten copies of from the local library, looking for the name they needed. It wasn't as if the necessity of hunting down paper records was new, it just usually didn't happen on missions that took place in technologically advanced countries. And no one had expected this one to lead back to their own shores – so to speak, anyway – so everyone was slightly tense and extremely frustrated. Will planned on terrifying some of the analysts back at headquarters for missing the domestic side of this issue so badly once this was over.

A thunk interrupted the verbal spat, and Will looked up to grin briefly at his team leader, who had hurled his half-empty water bottle at the other two members of their team, impacting the wall exactly equi-distant between the two other agents. Ethan's expression practically spat fire as he struggled to contain his own frustration with the entire situation.

"If you two aren't going to help us look for the contact's information, shut up or take your fight elsewhere. Brandt and I are actually trying to get work done! We need this information and you aren't helping!"

Will looked back down hastily, biting his lip to keep the smart comment that wanted to come out from escaping his mouth.

"The final sign of the apocalypse, my friends. Ethan Hunt advocating research over one of his insane plans."

That was very much something Clint would say. Not Will. He had to be Will here.

But, by God, it was so hard to hold it back when he snuck a glance at his red-faced teammates. He couldn't help the snicker that escaped, but that was okay, because Will had a snarky sense of humor that often poked fun at his team mates, but just as equally at himself. Snickering could be excused.

He bent his head back to the book before the temptation to say something sarcastic overwhelmed his good sense, and felt the slight puff of displaced air as Benji flopped down on the motel bed with him; Jane had chosen to join Ethan on the couch, leaning to read over Ethan's shoulder, wordlessly offering the dented water bottle back. Ethan took it with a mostly incomprehensible grumble.

"Not one word, Will," Benji growled. Will laughed instead, and handed Benji a portion of his stack of pages.

Back in the car, leaving New York, Clint smiled faintly, letting his memories take him away from any thought of the past week. There had always been something about the IMF agents that made up Will's team that settled Clint. Whether it was the way they all fit together, or just the fact that he enjoyed their company even when not on missions, Clint didn't really care.

There hadn't been a reason he should have accepted Ethan's offer of joining his team, from a mission standpoint. But there hadn't been a reason not to, either, and Clint had been more than fed up with Will-the-Analyst.

His alias had been fed up with working behind a desk, because Will knew that the IMF had done some serious house cleaning and gotten rid of their potential and real security leaks. It was why Will existed, after all. And Croatia or not, Will had always wanted to do something more active than pull together random data points to point out the big picture that needed fixing to other people.

It always felt like a job half done, if he didn't see it through to the end. And that drove both Will and Clint nuts.

He didn't know what it was about the missions they were given, but they always seemed to end up doing something insane. Will rubbed at the headache threatening behind his temples and regarded the mess of the files he had meticulously organized and labeled the night before. A small corner of his brain pointed out the irony of
him being the one mad about paperwork, not Coulson, but that was Clint, and Clint didn't exist here.

"What happened?"

Jane looked up from where she had been watching Benji bandage the gash on her forearm, eyes not quite bleak, and not quite furious, but some combination of the two.

"Our intel wasn't accurate. They knew we weren't who we said we were, and they followed us back here. We didn't notice in time and they got in, and…" Her eyes shuttered even more and Will didn't press. He could guess easily enough. The rifled through files and the battered state he and Benji had found Jane in when they burst in, worried about the comm silence, were answer enough.

"Why take Ethan, though?" Benji wondered, securing the bandage and moving on to a scrape on Jane's elbow, gently cleaning it. "They already got the info they wanted." He tilted his head at Will's disordered files. A notable chunk of them was missing.

Will sighed again and shook his head. "Doesn't matter. What does is that we get Ethan back, and the files, before they do anything damaging with them." He scowled as he gathered up the scattered pieces of paper, irritated beyond measuring. "I told them taking the paper copies was idiotic. I told them it would be noticed before the hacking would have!"

A snicker broke into his quiet rant. Will looked up to see Jane smiling at him, looking much more like herself all of a sudden. "Uh-oh," she said, eyes dancing, as Will stared at her. "Somebody's gonna be in trouble," she sing-songed.

On second thought, maybe she wasn't back with them yet. She didn't usually get giggly if she was in shock, but this hadn't been quite normal, even for them, and –

"Heads're gonna roll," Benji agreed, grinning. "They didn't listen to the Chief Analyst. Shame on them."

…oh. Will felt a laugh of his own fighting to get out, but he fought it down. He couldn't contain the grin he gave them, though, and he didn't try to. "Yeah," he agreed. "Just cause I'm in the field again doesn't mean my analysis skills are defunct." He slapped a hand down on the papers he'd stacked on the table. "If I can see the flaws in this approach, while attempting not to get shot, someone at a desk in New York damn well better be able to see the same."

Jane started snickering and Benji chortled as he finished cleaning and bandaging her wounds. Will relented and let a small snort escape, before he called them both to attention. They had to get Ethan back before he could go lecture the idiots in New York, after all.

"Clint?"

The archer sighed as Natasha's voice drew him back to the present, but he still refused to look at her, staring unseeingly out of the passenger window.

"Richmond," he said flatly, picking a city at random. He liked the southern states anyway. "Let's go to Richmond."

"Alright," Natasha acquiesced.

Silence descended on the car again, but it wasn't as tense as it had been. Clint did feel a bit better for having made a decision. They had a goal now.

He could work with that.

A/N2: Thank you all for the lovely well-wishes on my vacation. I had a lovely time, and would have liked a longer one, but don't we all feel that way coming back from vacation? ;) Also, Natasha is...odd to write. I liked writing her, she's just...different, I guess. Not quite the challenge Ethan was (IS!), but still a bit of a challenge.