Thank you to:::
BoomerCat, natashgriz, Lillehafrue, Daughter of the North, Batghost, DatNatCatThoe, Bellanca, All the Guests, Ms. Hawkeye, shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod, khaitosfren, a fanfictioner, Jazzysauce, Akane Izo, NorthernMage, TheNaggingCube, Qweb, Hamato Alexa, discordchick, YukinaKid, BecauseImBatman108, comicsans-spideydehaanfan, WhoAteMyEnchilada, JRBarton, Fury-Natalia
MC (Its finished at last!)
Invisible Observer (watching as you read through all of my Hawkeye Initiative has brought me the keenest of delights. I often look ahead to see where you are going next and gasp when I realize how close you are to "Where the Worlds Burn.)
ELOSHAZZY (I think you already read "Where the Worlds Burn", but I'm not positive. Any who, the epilogue for that sheds considerable light over my take on Clint's history. Want a good cry h/c? I'd tackle that:)
Friends Check for Bullet Wounds
Chapter 6
Bruce wasn't wearing any shoes. He didn't notice until he spent the first six hours banished from the surgery suite. At first he stood for a while, watching the slow, meticulous, work of the experts as they traveled downward through Barton's skin, muscles, and bone to deal with his chest injury. He had to turn away when the decided to crack one of his ribs. After a time of standing, shifting from foot to foot, he finally sat with his arms cocked over his knees. Tony eventually sank down beside him.
"So you're a black-sock guy." Tony remarked. It had been seven hours now since they'd said a word to each other.
Bruce looked down at his feet. "I'm whatever's cheap and comes in a Hanes multi-pack."
Tony snickered.
"For practical reasons." Bruce elaborated, though he didn't need to.
"Never thought you hit the shoes-off stage for walking around the Tower. Is this, dare-say, homey now?"
Bruce considered that for a while. Another monitor in the next room was sounding its alarm, followed promptly by three others. Clint was fighting for his life again. It was a struggle they could not help him with. Neither wanted to stand up this time to watch the flurry of movement where the doctors tried to save him one more time.
"Clint's room." Bruce said.
Tony looked up from his lap. "What about it?"
"My shoes are in his room."
Tony chewed on that notion for a while, but for the life of him he could determine why Bruce would have done that. "Ok, you've got me. Are you and Clint like a thing? You hold my toothbrush, I keep your shoes?"
Bruce elbowed him. "When I went down to find him, I wasn't expecting to find a guy with a knife in his back sitting on a couch. He leaves his boots by the door, so I wanted to leave my shoes by the door. I don't know him that well, I didn't want to insult him."
"I don't think any of us know him very well. He sleeps on the floor."
"I did see that."
"I don't know why. I've given him a credit card and told him to go wild. You know what the biggest thing he bought was?"
Bruce smiled a little and looked over. "A couch?"
"No. I don't know where he got that. I don't know how he got it in there either. He bought shoes. New combat boots. That's it." He leaned back against the wall and rubbed his eyes. To put it bluntly, Clint wasn't really living at the Tower at all. He might leave his stuff there and sleep on the floor once in a while, but that was it. "Living" constituted growing roots, getting a plant, or at the very least buying a bed. Clint Barton did none of that.
"Maybe he doesn't like cooking." Bruce wondered.
"Well that was random." Tony said.
"Sorry, I must have been thinking out loud. His kitchen doesn't have any of the appliances plugged in. I don't think the fridge was even running. Where does he eat? Have you ever seen him in the cabinets upstairs?"
Tony considered that for a while and confessed that he hadn't. Across from them the flurry of sounds, alarms, and movement by the windows settled again. Clint must have decided to keep fighting and normalized his stats. If there was one thing about him they knew for sure, Barton was tenacious to a fault.
"I should get my shoes." Bruce said without moving.
"Yeah you should. Come on, let's get them now before he wakes up and refuses to let us in his place." Tony said, shifting to his feet. He extended a hand to Banner, helping the doctor up. They sent a withering look at the surgeons. The medical waste bin was getting fuller with the bags of discarded blood products they sent ripping into the archer at full blast. Tony tugged Bruce's arm again and they headed off together. Neither wanted to be away for too long. They knew the surgery would take hours and most likely stretch through the remainder of the night. Already well past midnight, they saw no sign of the knife attempting to be extracted. There was a considerable amount of other damage to correct first.
They arrived at Clint's bedroom door without bothering to speak along the way. Standing just in the hallway was enough to pull them up short. For one, no one had bothered to shut it behind them. Clint never left his door open. Seeing the gaping entry only served as a painful reminder that their archer might never come back to shut it himself. Bruce moved inside a little, picked up his shoes, and retreated back to the hall to slip them on.
"This is ridiculous." Tony said, marching straight inside. Bruce stumbled in after him.
"Tony, I don't think we should just—"
"Why not?" Stark cut him off. "I own the place. I want to know what he's doing in here. If anything."
"I think he still prefers to have at least some privacy, though." Bruce continued, though he found himself cruising right in behind Tony. They reached the kitchen first and the two of them turned in surprise to see Pepper Potts standing against the counter with a pan in one hand and a plug in the other. Her strawberry red hair was done up in a bandana and she'd changed into her pajamas at some point.
"I wasn't snooping." She said instantly.
Tony gave her a soft smile. "I thought you were in bed."
"Bed!" She exclaimed. "How could I possibly sleep? Agent Barton's down there in your weird surgery thing and all I can think of is what if it wasn't him? What if it was you? What's going to happen when you decide to pull that thing out of your chest and—" The more she escalated the harder the tears flowed down her cheeks. Tony rushed toward her and pulled her against his chest. She cried against him, bitter unforgiving tears.
Bruce tried to find something in him to say that might serve as both comforting and inspirational. He came up completely empty. He often served as Tony's sounding board regardless of his profession as not "that" kind of doctor. This was a moment for the two to hash out alone.
Turning around in the room to try and find a different point of focus, Bruce noticed something he hadn't before. Stacked in a corner by the wall of windows was a tower of paint cans and other supplies. Two used rollers resided in a tray of dried paint the same color as the walls. Somehow he'd just assumed everything in the room had been done by Tony's staff. This, though, made it seem like Clint himself had taken on the home improvement projects. With his eyes opened to the strange possibility, Bruce looked around for more confirmations to his idea. The kitchen wasn't quite finished. A strip of the checkered tile had been pulled up, or was readying to be pasted down, just a few feet from where Tony and Pepper stood. A few trial paint smears coated the backsplash along with three or four squares of glass tile. Having no plugged-in apliances suddenly made a lot more sense. There was a stack beside the sofa of various magazines, including the old Ikea one Clint had made off with over a month ago. Some pages were doggy-eared, or marked with hand writing. Beneath that was a pad and paper of layouts, schematics, and ideas Clint had drawn himself. Bruce felt a little wrack of guilt after yanking the plans free and cruising through them, but it wasn't enough to make him stop.
"He's fixing up the place." Bruce said.
Tony and Pepper looked over. She'd begun to dry her tears on his shirt.
"What did you say?" Tony asked.
Bruce held up the plans. "Clint. He's not just living out of a home-made sleeping bag. He's fixing up the place. The way he wants it, I mean. Tony, check these out."
Curious, Stark came over with Pepper following beside. He took the graph pad Bruce offered to him while the doctor continued to scan through the design magazine. He found the current wall color on one page, circled alongside three others Clint apparently liked. One had the word "den" written beside it while the other had "bathroom", "kitchen" or "bedroom". Half a book later, the different flooring options were listed. Clint circled the checkered pattern, which he currently had installed, but apparently wasn't crazy about his choice. He had sent away a request for two other samples a week ago, right before he'd left for his latest mission.
"A functional man's bachelor pad with the gravitas of unlimited cash. Not too snooty, but with enough elegance to be perceived as well off." Tony flipped through the carefully designed plans.
"So he's the anti-Stark?" Pepper asked, a little mirth returning to her voice. She sniffed again, banishing the wetness from her face with the palm of her hand.
"Must have taken him weeks to draw these up." Tony remarked, too focused on the designs to notice her jab.
"Makes sense why it looks like no one lives here." Bruce replied. Finding a particularly clever note on the side of an Ikea catalogue, he turned the book around for Pepper to take. There was a feature highlighting a cheerfully yellow chair with a fleur-de-lis design in white pressed between two repurposed wood crates against an eggplant wall. Beside it, Clint wrote "Pepper will like this".
Pepper's face crumbled together she snatched the book, reading Clint's annotation four, then five times before she could bring herself to breathe again. "That's the color I picked out for him. I thought, maybe, he just didn't like it."
Tony hit the last page of Clint's design book, encountering a totally new purpose for the walk-in closet. Clint wanted to create a false wall, or safe hideaway in the back as a weapons' vault. The technical skill he showed in the planned dimensions and execution really was masterful. "You know, we can help him with—"
"No!" Bruce cut him off in an instant.
Tony's head snapped up, a look of hurt in his eyes. He was a fabricator with an entire book of ideas waiting for inventing and Bruce squashed all of that in a single word. "What? Why not?!"
"Because this is Clint's project and he didn't ask for help." Bruce played tug-o-war with Clint's design book but eventually managed to take it away from Tony. He rearranged them beside Clint's couch again in what he hoped was the same order as before. "He wants to do it himself. When he wakes up, we can ask if he needs some extra hands, but he is NOT waking up to Tony Stark's Extreme Home Makeover. What would you say if one day I redesigned your work space?"
Tony folded his arms. "I would be appreciative."
"Liar. You'd yell, stomp around, and for three months all I'd hear is how you can't find anything."
Pepper angled a little more beside Bruce. "You, know, I agree with him on that."
"Who's side are you on?!" Tony exclaimed.
"Right now, Barton's. Tony, you aren't messing this up for him. Maybe he needs to redo the place. That could be the way he copes. I don't say anything about your need to make forty thousand suits in our basement."
"I do not make forty-thousand suits in the basement, I made thirty-nine. And it's not the basement."
"The point is—"
Bruce stepped between them. "The point is, guys, that all of us came here to snoop on our teammate because he's down there fighting for his life on a surgery table. We feel guilty because we're only finding all of this now and as a team, we should have tried a little harder to know Clint better. I know I was shocked when I went in there and found my roommate was sleeping on the floor. He has a duffle bag of clothes to his name, a drawer full of medical supplies, and a couch. That's all he owns. Until he wants more, the best way we can help him is be supportive."
Tony wanted to fight him on that point, but even Pepper, who'd come down to plug in all the electronics and fill the fridge with food she planned to order, pulled off her bandana and shed her yellow rubber gloves. With nothing further to accomplish besides invading his life more, the three headed for the door. Pepper still didn't want to see the surgery, understandably, and returned to the Glass Castle instead to wait for news. No one had yet heard from Steve, Thor, or even the missing Natasha.
Bruce and Tony returned to the medical wing. They wanted to be there when Clint finally woke up. Neither risked admitting to themselves that Barton might never survive at all.
Soooooooo when I wanted to break the 100 mark, i had no idea y'all would take me to 112. You guys are so Awesome.
I like to give shout-outs when they are well worth it and today this person is the MVP. BoomerCat, if you have not had the opportunity to read this writer's story about Clint's Christmas at the Avengers Tower...you should. I did and I have to say it was one of the most delightful reads i have ever enjoyed.
Keep reviewing my friends. And thank you for your loyalty. I had no idea this book would be so popular. Natasha will arrive in the next chapter I think...