Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers or any of the right related to anything Marvel.
"Clint? Clint!"
Clint tried to pick himself up off the floor, but everything hurt. It felt like he'd just coughed up half his stomach, and that was definitely blood on the floor. He felt like he'd been squeezed too hard in too many places.
He thought about staying down and waiting until the nausea subsided, but then he felt someone's hands close around his shoulders, and he swung. Hard.
"Ow," said the someone belonging to those hands, but he didn't sound like he was too badly hurt. Shame.
Clint pushed himself to his feet and scrambled backwards, nearly tripping over an oxygen canister. He looked around and saw that everything looked white and pristine—everything but the blood on the floor—and figured he must have been in a hospital.
Great. Dad was going to kill him for racking up hospital bills. How'd he get here, anyway?
He pressed himself into the nearest corner, hiding behind medical supplies and cabinets and squeezing into places the big somebody else in the room couldn't get to.
"Clint. Come out, please. I need to take a look at you and make sure you're okay."
Clint curled up into a ball, tucking his exposed knees up into the purple shirt that was ten sizes too big for him and that fit him more like a nightgown than a shirt and waited. Maybe the somebody would give up and go away. Maybe he could slip out of the hospital before Dad came to get him. Pretend the whole thing never happened.
Yeah. And while he was dreaming, he'd like a treehouse.
"Clint, I'm not going to hurt you. You took off your mask to eat the sandwiches I brought in, and you must have inhaled more of the contagion," said the somebody else in the hospital. "I think every change might happen once you pass a certain threshold of the dust in your system. You didn't have your mask off for very long."
Clint didn't know what he was talking about, but it sounded like doctor nonsense.
"It must be deeper in your skin than we thought. We're not sure how to get it off of you. I thought we'd cleaned you off well enough, but now I'm thinking the only way to get rid of it is to wait for Thor to come back with a solution."
Clint heard a door open, and new voice, soft but also hard like a soldier's, joined in. "He giving you a hard time, Doc?"
"I can handle it. You're not supposed to be in here with them."
"I heard coughing. I wanted to make sure . . . ." The new guy trailed off. "Whose . . . ?"
"Clint's."
Was that a sigh of relief? Clint narrowed his eyes. Some way to treat a patient.
"At least let me help."
"Steve, you are helping. I still need you to keep Stark out of here, and I still need you monitoring his situation. The serum in your blood must be keeping you from de-aging as fast as the others, because from what I can tell, you should have gone back at least a decade, given how much time you spent carrying Natasha around and chasing after Clint."
"Yeah, well, five years is still a pretty chunk to lose," the new guy—Steve?—said sadly.
"So don't lose any more."
Steve paused, probably thinking about what the doctor guy had said, then laughed and called out, "Clint, where are you?"
Clint curled up tighter into his little ball. Advantage of being small.
"Behind the tables," the doctor said. Tattle tale.
Clint saw two gloved hands reached through the space between the medical tables, but they couldn't reach Clint, not when he was so well tucked away. But then the tables started to move apart, which shouldn't have been possible, because they were bolted down and that was why Clint had hidden there, but the next thing he knew, a guy in a red-white-and-blue uniform had scooped him up into his arms.
Clint did everything he could not to get taken, though. He bit and kicked and clawed and pulled hair, but Steve was really big and really strong, and the next thing Clint knew, he was dumped onto a hospital bed that was way too big for him.
"Don't make me ask Bruce to tie you down," Steve said, and it looked like he meant it.
Clint glared at Steve. At least he'd managed to give Steve a swollen lip, not that it mattered.
"Thanks," the doctor said.
"Anytime, Bruce. And next time? Just call me. I'm more than willing to risk a little infection if it keeps him from de-aging into nonexistence," Steve said, shrugging easily. He coughed quietly into his elbow, and the doctor (Bruce?) raised his eyebrows.
"'s Nothing," Steve said quickly, darting out of the hospital room.
Bruce sighed and turned to Clint, who was definitely thinking about making another run for it, but he was kinda waiting until after Steve was far enough away from the door that he might have a chance at making it.
But Bruce seemed to know what Clint was thinking, because he sighed almost patiently and said, "Listen, Clint, you can run away, but if we can't find you, you're only going to have another coughing fit." Bruce looked Clint over. "And I'm not sure how many more of those you've got left in you."
Clint looked over at the blood on Bruce's white floor and, to his annoyance, found that he had to agree with the doctor. "Fine," he muttered. "Now what?"
"Now, you put your oxygen mask back on, and we feed you intravenously from now on until we can figure out a better solution," Bruce said, handing Clint a new mask to wear.
Clint frowned at it. "I don't like it," he said, but then he coughed again.
"Put it on," Bruce said, and there was something powerful behind Bruce, just in his eyes. Powerful and green and big and it looked like he could hurt Clint.
"Make me," Clint said. Because he didn't like being pushed around, and it didn't matter that Bruce was bigger than him.
That something dangerous flashed in Bruce's eyes, but he looked over at something beside Clint's bed, and he calmed down.
Clint looked there, too.
It was a baby. She was wide awake and smiling behind her mask, with her chubby hands pressed up against the side of the glass. She pointed at Clint and smiled some more.
"What's her name?" Clint asked despite himself.
"Natasha," Bruce said. Now he was smiling. "She likes you."
"How come she's here?"
"She has the same problem you do, Clint. She's aging backwards. And if you don't put on this mask, you'll turn into a baby same as Natasha did," Bruce said quietly. He held out the mask again, but this time, it seemed more like a plea than a demand.
Clint narrowed his eyes at Bruce, then, finally, swiped the mask out of the doctor's hands. "Fine," he said. But he wasn't happy about it.
A/N: Yes, at last we have Kid!Clint. I am ridiculously excited about this.