Thank you to CrazedFangirl13 and Black' Victor Cachat for your lovely reviews. I hope you enjoy your Clint oneshot, and Black Widow and Hulk are coming soon, but I don't think I'm going to add to Brutasha because I ship Clintasha so much the craving to write their fluff is out of my control.
Okay, just a little warning before we get started, this chapter is very long for me. I had to do a piece of descriptive writing for school, which is why there is so much detail in this. I love the idea of Falcon and Hawkeye becoming friends, but lots of people have already done the bonding over birds idea I had originally, so I decided to do something that hasn't been done before. Please favourite, follow or review if you like the story, and constructive criticism is accepted.
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
Hawkeye regulated his breathing, trying to force his unwilling lungs to cooperate. His head pounded from all the blood rushing to it, his lip curled in a determined grimace. His arms burned, the tension making them tremble. He could do this. He could do this. He had to do this. He had to think about Natasha, that always chased the pain away. He thought about the way she laughed, a giggle that erupted from her like a volcano. He thought of the feeling of bliss when he woke up with her in his arms. He thought of the way her touch was gentle, the quiet conversations they held over the pillow, the inside jokes that no one else understood. He needed to do this for her, to make sure he had her back in a fight. He needed to do this, or it might cost him the one thing that made life worth living.
Sam Wilson wandered in with a towel. He didn't really feel like training only to find that pretty much everyone else made him look like an eight year old girl whenever he tried to work out. Worse still, he'd probably be asked if he wanted to spar with Romanoff, and that was an answer that he definitely knew the answer to. Duelling with the Russian never ended well for him, and he had the bruises to prove it. However, the training room looked empty enough, and it was one sure fire way to get rid of Stark. The man had been following him around all day asking about his newfound ability to talk to birds. If Sam heard one more "So what would happen if you flew past a bird that was mating? Does it make happy sounds or what?" or something similar he was going to throw something.
He paused just before he reached the treadmill. He looked around at the source of the laboured breathing, his eyes widening at the sight. Above and to the right of him, a thin pole stretched along the room. It was maybe 20 feet high, and couldn't be more than ten centimetres thick.
Barton was standing on his hands on the pole. He had his hands wrapped around the pole, his whole body ramrod straight in the air above it. His face was contorted with pain, but he didn't falter.
"Um, hey." Sam immediately regretted having spoke when Barton physically flinched away from the words, wavering slightly on the pole before finding is balance again. He nodded at Sam upside down. "How long have you been up there?" He didn't expect an answer, but he got one.
"Not long enough." He ground out.
"Jarvis, how long?"
"Four hours and fourteen minutes have past since Clint Barton assumed the position." The voice never stopped amazing and slightly creeping Sam out. Clint had been in that position for four and one quarter hours. Falcon had been told that Clint was human, but right now if he'd been told that he was actually a god Sam wouldn't have been surprised.
Barton's usual black t shirt had slid up, revealing something that Sam had never noticed before. His muscled skin was full of faded scars. White lines where the cuts had healed were everywhere, as if a child had attacked him with a felt tip. There were also more definite scars, if just as old as the rest. They were small straight lines, that weren't as big as the others but looked a lot deeper.
Sam had seen some bad scars in his time. He had a pretty nice collection himself. But it was the sheer number that shook him to the bone. There must be at least forty of the deeper scars, and that was all that Sam could see.
"You're staring at me." Sam looked up sharply at the other man, who had one upside down eyebrow raised. Sam searched for something to say, and settled for the first thing that came to his mind.
"You don't have a safety mat underneath that. What if you fall?"
"I fall." Hawkeye took a laboured breath. Sam wasn't surprised. The thought of being up there for more than four hours turned his legs to jelly, he could hardly blame the other man for struggling.
"You can stop if you want to."
"No. Not…good…enough…yet…" He was definitely struggling with his breathing now.
"You don't have to speak. If you want to stay up there I can't stop you, but I'm getting a mat underneath it."
"No…"
"You don't get the choice I'm afraid. Sure, push yourself to the limit during training, but look after yourself afterwards." Without waiting for a reply Sam grabbed the thickest mat he could find and pulled it so it was underneath the marksman. He then filled a water bottle with cool water and placed it next to the mat.
"What…are…you…" He cut him off.
"I'm getting everything ready so that when you do get down you can rest for while before you have to get up and get anything."
"I don't…"
"I don't care whether you want my help or not. You've got it, so quit complaining." Sam crossed his arm, looking up at the upside down man.
He went over to the treadmill and started to jog, plugging in his music and looking at Clint out of the corner of his eye. Time wore on, and Clint's face contorted with pain. His breath was coming out in short bursts, and Falcon could see that he'd reached his limit. Hell, he'd reached his limit an hour ago.
Then suddenly he was plummeting through the air, hitting the mat with a thud. Falcon jumped off the treadmill, rushing over to the man lying spread-eagled on the mat. His eyes were closed, his face contorted with agony.
"Hey man, come on, wake up." Sam slapped his face gently, rocking back on his heels in relief when his eyes opened half way.
"I… fell… mat."
"Yeah, you're okay. A few nasty bruises in the morning, mind."
"Head…"
"I'm not surprised your head hurts. All the blood's been pumped into your head for five hours. That might be dangerous, I'll ask someone about that later." Clint strained to get up, but Sam pushed him down again, mindful of his sore shoulders and arms. After five straight hours Clint was weak, but he still groaned in complaint.
"I have… get up… Nat…"
"Romanoff's out at a meeting with Fury. She'll be back in a couple of hours. She's safe, I promise. And you don't have to get up, you have to lie down there while I try to figure out if what you just did was damaging you somehow." He put a bit of authority in his voice, and at last the archer stopped complaining. "Bloody avengers." He muttered under his breath. He turned to the freezer they kept in there especially for ice packs and got out a couple, before grabbing a cloth and running cold water. Jogging back over to the now limp man, he forced himself to smile at what he hoped was reassurance.
He didn't know Barton that well, had barely spoken a few words to him, but this seemed like a crazy thing for anyone to do. He even doubted that Steve could, or more likely would, do that, and he was a freaking super soldier! Five whole hours standing on your hands on a ten centimetre pole 20 metres off the ground. Not to mention the fall, even though there was a mat there it would still leave a pretty massive bruise.
He placed the cold towel on Hawkeye's head, smiling at the grunt of thanks. He carefully placed the ice packs on Barton's shoulders, a few more on his strained arms. "You're crazy, do you know that? Absolutely crazy." Clint seemed to have lost the ability to speak, what with his body on fire and his head pounding like the inside of his skull was a drum. His eyes flicked over to the bottle of water, silently communicating what he wanted. Sam ran to go and get the softest punching bag he could find. Then he put one arm around the other man's shoulders, lifting him slightly off the ground. He grunted in pain, but didn't tense up. His body had probably lost the ability to tense up. When he had slid the bag into place and lowered the other man down onto it, Falcon grabbed the water bottle and trickled some water into his mouth. He was probably doing everything wrong, but somehow he knew that Hawkeye didn't want anyone else to know about this. He had no reason to be ashamed, but he didn't want to make the other man any more uncomfortable than he was already.
Every couple of minutes he dribbled more water into Clint's mouth, making sure he swallowed it before giving him some more. He was obviously thirsty, but considering the strain his body had just been under it wouldn't really be a surprise if it decided to expel the liquid violently all over the floor.
"Jarvis, conduct a medical examination of Agent Barton, will you?" He readjusted the ice packs, and Barton's eyes opened wider. Clearly his head had relented a bit, because his vision was sharper than it had been a few minutes ago. He raised one arm slowly, biting on his lip when his muscles creaked in protest. Falcon handed him the water bottle, raising his eyebrows as he downed it all. "If you throw up, I'm not cleaning it up." Clint let the bottle slip out of his fingers.
"Haven't drunk… since start." His speech was coming to him slightly better, and his breath was coming out in more even breaths.
"Of course. Sorry, I forgot." They sat in silence for a few more minutes, until Hawkeye started to push himself up. "Woah woah woah! What do you think you're doing?"
"Getting up… training." The simple move of bracing his hands against the floor made him groan, each move sending shoots of agony pounding through his body.
"You're not going to stay on the floor, are you?" He shook his head, and with a sigh Falcon stood up, trying to find a part of the other's man's body that probably didn't hurt as much as the rest and failing. He wrapped an arm around the other man's chest, half carrying and half dragging his limp body over to the chair against the wall. The other man didn't make a sound when he hit the chair, but his sharp intake of breath told Sam all he needed to know.
"Okay, what now?"
"Give me a few minutes."
"A few minutes, are you kidding me? Last time I checked you don't have super healing, and you were upside down for four and a quarter hours, your body isn't just gonna get over that."
"Only four?" Hawkeye looked up, disappointment in his voice.
"What do you mean, only four? I couldn't get up there to start with, never mind staying up there for four freaking hours." Clint grunted in response. "What do you need to hang on for?"
"Huh?"
"There must be better ways of training that putting your body through torture."
"I've gotta build up my strength." Sam tilted his head at the man opposite him.
"I'm guessing you don't mean your muscles, but they have taken one hell of a workout." They sat without speaking for a few minutes, until Clint looked up. "It's my mind." The words seemed to fly out of his mouth, as if he'd been carrying a weight for too long and just needed to tell someone. "Loki just pointed his sceptre at me and I wasn't me anymore. What if something like that happens again? What if I end up hurting Natasha, or another one of the team? I thought, if I could condition my mind to be stronger I'd be able to fend off any attacks like that again. I thought if I didn't have a safety mat and if I knew that when I fell I would plummet onto concrete I'd be tempted to stay up there longer."
"Loki was magic. He was a god from another realm, and he was so different to anything we'd ever seen before. To anything anyone had ever seen before. That sceptre was something no one had any control over, and the fact that he chose you does not make anything your fault. You don't need to feel responsible, there's nothing more you could have done."
"I'm a killer. I don't deserve to be here."
"You're a freaking avenger. All the seven billion people in the world and they chose you to be in it."
"Technically Thor isn't a human."
"Shut up and let me be inspirational." Hawkeye laughed, and Sam smiled to himself slightly. "What I'm saying is, you're a hero. You're a hero, just like Captain America and Thor and Iron Man, you're a hero. There are little kids out there who make themselves little bows out of wood and string because they want to be like Hawkeye, they want t save the world just like you do. Now, promise me you won't push yourself like this again." He looked at him, and already knew the answer. "Okay, make sure you never push yourself like this alone. If I can't be there, Romanoff or Steve or someone. You don't have to be alone."
They sat in silence, but it was a comfortable one. Sam had seen a part of the other man that he didn't think existed, and wouldn't forget that in a hurry.