Warning: I have Started my FINAL YEAR in Veterinary school, so time is less and less my own. I am a few chapters ahead in this, but posting might be stretched out. I am so, very, sorry but that is the nature of this last push to graduation! Thank you so much for sticking with me during this life-changing 4 years.

THANK YOU TO:::

All my anonymous guests!

Casey Storm, Alethea, LeanneDaseyLover, TortoisetheStoryteller, WestonFollower, Liliththestormgoddess, m klindt, .ROX, BookLuv ,casania, Roses in May, penguincrazy, Aini NuFire, Qweb, amy. .9, 8839, Wonderwomanbatmanfan, IWriteSinsOrTragedies, Niom Lamboise, DatNatCatThoe, discordchick, Ms. Hawkeye, ramsayreader

Death is inevitable (so far I've written 9 chapters, but it's definitely not finished! So to be honest, I'm not positive how long it will end up being)

CandyGirl999 (Thor has totally been the breakout character in this! Not planned, i swear. Just totally happened)

5mairer (absolute tears of happy joy. HI CLASS! Go be vet students and get no sleep/food/and get covered in animal juices! On second thought, no. don't do that... :D )

Dr. Nat (What beutiful compliments! Thank you very much. You words have stuck with me!)

TatteredAngel42 (Thank you very much for the compliments! I strive very hard to get that movie quality into these stories, so each one comes out feeling like it might actually happen)

ThePenguinApocalypse(I love infusing real life into these. It gives it that little punch of authenticity)

JRBarton(Aw! Well i hope to keep sailing this ship to see where it leads)

Avenge Me

Chapter 7

Friday….

Clint sat in the stool with the ice pack strapped to his leg, watching Natasha construct the radio receiver. Across from him, Banner and Tony tag-teamed the DNA search on the physical evidence found at the crime scene.

There were still no matches.

Lila bounded by the arc of windows, determined to disappear before Miss Maria found her.

Former Agent Hill stood in a corner across from him, counting loudly down, "10...9...8...7..."

Pepper was hiding behind the couch.

Saturday….

Lila startled Clint by tugging on his arm, crying for her mother, and hungry for breakfast. Her child's mind couldn't decide which was more pressing. Natasha decided to take her out for pancakes and give Clint more time to work. He watched his girl bound away with Natasha, sniffing the trail of snot trying to leak from her nose. He wanted to get up and run to her, but for better or worse, his knee kept him chained to the workbench.

Tony sent a worried glance at the other Avengers in the lab. Clint hadn't left the room yet.

Sunday….

Clint realized there were still five bodies rotting in the barn at his home. He considered calling Coulson for a clean up, but declined. Enough people already knew about his hidden sanctuary to dissuade him from wanting to add any more to that list. He hadn't slept in over two days.

Thor slipped by at some point and slid a sandwich beside his hand. Clint stared at it. He wondered what it meant to be hungry again. His nervous stomach put him off from tasting a piece.

Monday….

Bruce rolled off of his arm to hear JARVIS' alarm sounding in his ear. One of the jerry-rigged transceivers had caught fire. Tony jumped up to put it out.

Steve was sitting against a wall, sleeping possibly, with a set of earphones over his head as he listened to the dead airspace of radio signals they hoped to pick up.

Clint was gone. Lila needed her bath and her bedtime story. She convinced him that only daddy's could do such important things.

Tuesday….

A hit, at last.

Tony flew down the stairs to the lower lab with a digital file in his hand. The room lit up with the face of Samuel Smith, a high profile Hydra agent, ex-member of SHIELD. Now dead. His, was the blood stain on the floor. Finally, progress was made.

Clint continued to adjust the radio signals, obsessed that somehow Fury would find a way to use the old Morse signals to reach out the way he and Natasha always could.

Steve listened to the cycle of the first 20 frequencies. They scanned over and over as he sat back and let the sounds filter through his ears. Clint took on the second set of twenty. Together they listened, for what they could only guess.

Wednesday…

Steve sighed, directing his straw between his lips as he sucked down the glass of citrus water Lila Barton had brought to the lab on her tea set tray. She'd spent the morning mixing "lemonade" with Pepper, and wanted everyone to pay a nickel to drink some. Steve was as unable to resist her charm as the other belabored Avengers. Pepper was determined to make a mogul out of the girl, starting from the ground up. After gathering all the available change in the lab, the two girls set out for some of the lower offices. Within half an hour, Lila had more money in her change purse than Steve did in his last paycheck.

He adjusted the noise-canceling quality of his head phones, switching them off temporarily to get a feel for the atmosphere around him. He'd been laying on the floor of the lab for the past five hours, sifting through twenty circulating frequencies that the three spies of the group used on a continual basis. He'd started out pacing around the lab, but it was impossible to go very far with the radio-equipment strapped to the bench. Sitting on the stool had been his perch for days, but laying on the floor came with its own perks. For one, he could avoid the ragged appearance of his fellow Avengers.

Clint had been running on empty for the last three days. It was Bruce's idea to slip him a sleeping pill with his morning (noon, and midnight) cups of coffee. It gave them a full six hours of Zombie-Barton. He never really fell asleep, more like propped himself at his work station and continued to scan through channels endlessly. Frankly, Ambien-Hawkeye wasn't much different than what Steve witnessed now.

The minute Tony identified the mystery blood sample, he was able to connect the other bodies in Clint's barn to a Hydra faction Hill had been tracking in the south eastern corridor. After leaving SHIELD, the Avengers had a few leads telling them Fury had traveled in that direction. It was possible he picked up the tail there, and tried to escape them by going north. Tony took Thor and blasted through the old base, but came up empty handed. No men, and no leads. They returned that morning, empty handed.

Natasha went back to Barton's place and combed over everything again, in case there was something they had missed. She took the liberty of making the rotting corpses disappear. How, Steve never wanted to know. She was resourceful enough to figure something out. She returned with Fury's pack, but there was nothing more in it to help them. The contents littered the workbench a few feet from where Clint sat, dejectedly listening to his own set of frequency channels. If the Avengers didn't get a lead soon, the archer was bound to either give up and raid every single Hydra base the planet had to offer, or lose his mind completely.

Seeing nothing different than what continued to permeate the room for the last near week, Steve laid back down on the floor, and reached for his nickel glass of lemony water. He'd just about directed the straw into his mouth when the next cycle of frequencies kicked on, like the scan button on a car radio. In the din of white noise and static, a distinct blip of information made him shoot straight up.

Steve pressed the head phone against his ear a little harder, listening to the first sound he'd heard beside the nothingness for nearly forty-eight hours straight.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeep. Beeeeeeep. Be —

The automatic scanner switched over to the next frequency. Steve clambered to his knees and retuned the dials on the old transceiver. Clint and Natasha looked over, their curious, exhausted expression reflecting in the pane of glass walls.

Steve finally forced the signal back, and settled with the earphone pressed against his ear. He listened a little longer, trying to determine if what he heard was even possible or not. When the sound continued to play in alternating dots and dashes, he knew he'd cracked something at long last.

"Someone get me a piece of paper and a pen! I've got something! Hurry!" He shouted. All around him, the room exploded with excitement. Clint rushed over to snatch the headphones off the captain. He stood, listening for a moment himself, as if to believe it was true.

"S.O.S. It's a S.O.S. signal," he whispered.

"That's not what came before it, though," Steve announced. Bruce sat a pad and pen in front of him, and the captain scrambled to write something down. He grabbed the headset back from Clint, and sat on his knees, eyes closed, listening to the faint signal coming through. The others drew in closer, reading over the captain's shoulder as he wrote out the translated words.

"S.O.S. . . . . MOLDOVA. COME FAST. S.O.S. PASSWORD IS GARFIELD. MOLDOVA. THREE CAPTURED. ONE WAY TRANS."

In his excitement. Clint let out a string of expletives. He pounded his fist against the work bench. "That's my son! That's my son! He made a signal! Garfield is the password I told him for strangers." He looked at the others, trying to get them to understand his logic and excitement. "If someone ever came to pick him up from anywhere, in case anything ever happened to his mother or me, that person had to say the password. Garfield. That's the password to pick up my boy! I told you he was smart!"

Steve waved his hand, trying to cut the chatter while he listened. He'd stopped writing the message out where it repeated on itself. "Not safe. Can't trans always. Signing off." Steve opened his eyes. He pulled the ear phones down. "He says, "Send my Dad"."

Clint's jaw clenched. "You bet you will! Someone prep the jet. Get Hill up here with those Hydra base schematics. There's got to be something in Moldova we know about. And figure out how close that is to Sokovia. It may be the bases are linked if Loki's scepter really is there. Suit up." He grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. Any trace of exhaustion, gone. He looked at the others with a renewed vigor. "We're going to get my family back."

Cooper is the smartest kid ever. Figures he's Clint's.

Coming up: where Tony has a heart-to-heart and Clint shows just how hard core he is (part 1)

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