Warnings: language, brief mention of drug use, vague descriptions of weaponry because honestly, it's not my cup of tea.

To the people who have felt obliged to school me on Detroit: I lived there for five years. I'm just poking a little fun at it, because honestly, it was the worst five years of my life. Sorry if I offended anyone.

I do not own the Avengers.


He didn't come back, and that was a problem.

Natasha waited and worried, watching the time tick by. After half an hour, she accepted that he probably was not going to return.

"JARVIS, where the fuck is Barton?" Stark's creepy stalker-AI had its uses after all, she supposed.

"He departed from the building ten minutes ago Ms. Romanoff. Would you like me to attempt to contact him?"

"Yeah. Wait. No."

"Ms. Romanoff?"

She'd stayed up all night for him. She'd cleaned the blood off him, tried to heal his wounds. She had worried, and cared, and lied for him. It had been hard, really hard, and awkward. And after all that, he'd just left? Just like that? Well, fuck that, and fuck him.

She was done.

"Yeah, cancel that, JARVIS."

Part of her mind was still screaming at her, with red flashing lights and shrieking alarms. She knew how much danger Clint was in, how his addiction could ruin his life, how it already was. She knew that turning her back now was about the worst possible thing she could do. He needed someone to stand behind him, someone to care, when he so clearly didn't.

She knew that. But it didn't matter. She wasn't going to be that person. If he wanted to ignore his problems, who the fuck was she to get in the way of that?

Natasha steeled herself, banishing her lingering worry and anxiety. Clint was a big boy, he could handle his own shit.

Right?


Clint found his bag on the floor of lab three, surrounded by what seemed like a half-ton of broken glass and three quarters of his blood volume. Okay, maybe it wasn't that much blood, but somehow knowing that it was his made it seem worse. Seeing the swirls and whorls he had drawn while lying there, he felt vaguely nauseous.

He knew he'd have to be more careful in the future. Tasha was right, after all. He could have killed Stark, though he liked to think the billionaire would have donned his suit and put him down, if it had come to that. Those bracelets activated pretty damn fast. Still, he had been reckless. And that had to stop.

The bag, he saw, was open, and Clint felt a flash of irritation. Of course she took them, dumbass, who wouldn't? But, on top of the rest of his things, more-or-less where he'd left them, he found his bottles. Both were present, and both were still full. He remembered then that Natasha had dosed him with Valium. She would have had to go into his bag to get it. And she put it back. He shook his head, struck by the immense trust she had shown him.

A trust, he thought as he uncapped bottle #1, he probably did not deserve.

Within a few minutes, he was on the street outside Stark Tower. He didn't quite know where he was going, but the Tower felt claustrophobic. He was surprised—although, he shouldn't have been—when his feet took him back to SHIELD. He supposed it wasn't exactly like he had a life outside of work and saving the world.

He ran into Fury in the lobby of the building, about ten feet inside the door. What were the odds of that? Really?

"Barton," the director said, dryly, "I thought you had food poisoning. Massive food poisoning."

Is that what Tasha had told him? "Uh, I did. It's better now. Must have got it all out. Better out than in. You know?" He was babbling. Fuck.

Fury rolled his eyes. Eye. "Since you've decided to grace us with your presence, I have something I need you to do."

"What's that, sir?"

"There's a mutant or some shit causing trouble in Detroit. Structural fires, explosions, that sort of thing. I don't know if it's intentional or if it's accidental, but it's got to stop. They have enough issues there on their own. One of our teams managed to tag the guy with some sort of tracking device, so it's just a matter of retrieval. I'm sending Rogers in to get him. He needs a lift. Since you'll be there, you can help him out."

Clint couldn't help but notice the subtle way he didn't actually get a choice in the matter.

Fury continued, "Bring only what you need. This should be an in-and-out sort of thing."

Clint nodded, heading towards the elevator.

"Barton?" Fury called from behind him. Clint turned. "The fuck happened to your hands?"

Clint looked down at the bandages around his knuckles, and thought quickly. "Accident in Stark's lab, sir." Well, that was true. Kind of. "It's fine."

"If you say so," the director said, with narrowed eyes.

Clint mentally shrugged and got on the elevator. In the locker room, he grabbed his bow and its accoutrement, and, after consideration, strapped on a pair of pistols. He added a knife at his ankle, just in case. Then, he shoved the rest of his belongings into his locker and slammed it shut. He immediately regretted not packing about fifteen other weapons, but dismissed the feeling. He was traveling light, after all.

Rogers was waiting for him in the co-pilot's seat of the jet. "Barton," the supersoldier greeted him.

"Rogers," Clint replied easily, glad to see that the captain had traded his spangly outfit in for something a little more low-key. "Ready to go?"

"Been ready for half an hour, Barton, just been waiting on you." Steve cast a sideways look at Clint, noticing the bandages on his hands and the dark circles under his eyes. Feeling that discretion was the better part of valor, though, he didn't mention it.

"Sorry about that, Cap. I had food poisoning." Laughing (perhaps too hard) at the concerned look on Steve's face, Clint got them in the air and headed west.


"Jesus," said Clint, "Remind me never to park my jet here again. I'm kinda worried someone's going to steal it."

The Detroit City airport left something to be desired. It was located in a...questionable part of the city. On the plus side, it was almost completely empty, making it easy for them to escape notice. It wasn't like they were undercover or anything, but Clint just didn't want to draw unnecessary attention. Paranoia was such an ingrained part of his personality at this point that he just accepted it.

The car rental kiosk was closed, and looked as if it had been for awhile. Luckily, Fury had arranged for a car to be dropped off for them. Soon, they were on Woodward Avenue, heading south towards downtown.

"So, Cap, what's the plan?" Clint asked, impatiently bouncing his leg up and down, and leaning over to fiddle with the radio.

This, understandably, made Steve nervous, because Clint was driving.

"Uh, could you please watch the road?" Steve asked, remarkably polite, considering how Clint had nearly driven into the side of a bus.

"What? Oh, yeah, sure."

His cell phone rang. He wrestled it out of his pocket, nearly driving into yet another bus in the process. Damn, those things did not like to stay in their own lane, did they? Christ almighty. "Hello?" he answered.

"Barton?" It was Fury.

"Yes, sir?"

"We've got a location for you. He's just off Michigan Avenue, near the freeway. I'll send you the coordinates."

"All right. We'll check it out." He ended the call. "Great news, Rogers. Fury found our friend." Steve, Clint noted, didn't seem to share his enthusiasm.

He checked the coordinates and parked a few blocks away. It was only about nine o'clock, but the area was almost completely deserted. He didn't know if that was ominous or not.

The pair exited the vehicle and began walking cautiously towards the indicated location. They found themselves walking down a block of dilapidated houses, inhabited only by prowling stray cats and...was that a possum?

"Nice neighborhood," Clint snarked, his voice carrying in the near-silence.

Steve was too busy wondering what the hell had happened to this place since the 1940s to chastise him.

Suddenly, the top floor of the building three houses up from them lit up in an explosion that colored the deepening twilight around them in shades of red and orange. Through the falling debris, Clint picked out a shape running into the night.

"Bet that's our guy, Cap, this way!"

They broke into a run. Between Steve's enhanced speed and Clint's sharp eyesight, it should have been an easy task to catch this guy, but he clearly knew where he was going a whole lot better than they did. After a few minutes, though, it became clear where he was going.

"He's going to that building!" Steve called to Clint, pointing up ahead. Looming in the middle of the largely-flat expanse, was what appeared to have once been a train station.

"Fuck," panted Clint. That building had to be at least fifteen stories high. That guy could lose them easily if he managed to get inside.

The headache that had been haunting him for hours began to blossom into something truly magnificent.

Fuck this, thought Clint. He stopped and whipped out his bow. The dim light was not ideal, but he'd made harder shots. He nocked an arrow and took careful aim before letting it fly. It hit its mark, just above the guy's right knee, and he stumbled and hit the ground hard.

Steve reached their quarry first. Clint, whose headache had, in just a few seconds, reached "epic migraine" proportions, took a moment to catch his breath and stave off a wave of nausea before joining him.

The guy was babbling something about a chemical spill and how he couldn't help blowing things up, it just sometimes happened when he touched them, and he thought it might have something to do with his sweat, and...

Clint decided to leave decoding that to Steve. Instead, he took out his knife and cut off the guy's pant leg off and fashioned it into a bandage. The wound wasn't too bad (Clint never miscalculated how much force he'd need in his shots), but it was bad enough. Clint imagined Fury would be pissed if this guy went into hypovolemic shock before he could be properly questioned.

As Clint went to bandage his leg, though, the guy suddenly freaked out. He kicked out with his uninjured leg, catching Clint square in the chest.

"What the fuck?" Clint sputtered, massaging his bruised sternum.

"Haven't you been listening?" The man's words were tinged with panic and hysteria.

Clint had to concede that he had not been.

"There is something wrong with me. With my sweat. And blood. And…other stuff. I don't know what, but it's not good. I think it might be killing me."

Clint failed to see how this was his problem, but the guy continued. "And now you're covered in it. In my blood."

Clint looked down at his hands and saw the blood that was saturating the bandages wrapped there. It wasn't his. Great. He had potentially poisonous blood in contact with his still-kind-of-open wounds.

Fantastic.


"If you're so innocent," Clint said later, on the jet, "Why the fuck did you run?"

"I've seen the movies. I know how it is. I figured it was only a matter of time before the government sent someone to kill me."

Clint thought that was pretty melodramatic. But then he remembered how the government had initially reacted to Dr. Banner, and reluctantly admitted that this guy might have a point. The government was not exactly friendly towards the unintentionally destructive.

Once Clint and Steve had explained to him (his name, it turned out, was Chris, but Clint was too pissed off at him to acknowledge he had a name) where they were going, getting him to agree to come with them wasn't hard. He wasn't impressed with the changes that the chemical spill had wrought on his physique, and was willing to do about anything to reverse it.

Clint had finished bandaging his leg, because really, he couldn't get any more exposed to the potential toxin.

While he was engaged in that, Steve called Fury and told him about the situation. Fury said he would send in a team to analyze the contents of the barrels that Chris had stumbled over in an abandoned warehouse while doing some "urban exploration." Sure, there was a lot of abandoned stuff in Detroit, but it seemed suspicious that someone had just left a few barrels of a substance that could turn people into bombs lying around.

Steve had also mentioned that Clint had been exposed to Chris's blood, and Fury had ordered a slew of medical tests and procedures to make sure Clint wasn't going to start blowing things up with his body fluids.

"Non-optional," the director had said.

So they bundled Chris up, covering all of his exposed skin so that he didn't accidentally sweat and blow up the jet, and in a bit less than two hours they were back at SHIELD.

When the medical team came for him, Clint remembered why blood tests might be a bad idea. But he couldn't refuse. Not with Fury standing right there. So he clamped down on the anxiety rising in his chest and allowed the nurse to take several vials of his blood.

He hoped that the lab would only test to make sure that whatever was wrong with Chris wasn't actually contagious.

But he should have known that SHIELD would be nothing short of meticulous.


Okay, so, not as much angst as I thought there would be. Next chapter, though, the shit is going to hit the fan, I promise.

Thanks to everyone reading this!

Please review so I know how I'm doing.