A/N: Hi everyone! Massive apology for the monstrously delayed update. Words would just not come for this fic even though I knew what I wanted to happen. I'm working on it though! And this plot is slowly, but surely, developing. This chapter is not beta'd. As soon as my beta reviews this and gives me suggestions I will update it. I don't expect major alterations, just some stylistic changes. Also I know this chapter was short compared to the other ones, but I felt like the length was appropriate for the events covered. When I wrote the end it felt like it should end there and the thought of adding anything seemed off somehow. Hope you enjoy it! Thanks to everyone who has followed, favorited, and/or reviewed this story! 3
Clint breathes out, focuses on his mark, lets his arrow fly. He's been in the range for the better part of two hours, letting arrow after arrow loose, shoulders burning with satisfaction at each thunk, fingers thrumming with boundless energy.
Nock.
Loose.
Repeat.
When he finishes his workout, Clint lets the savoring smell of Steve's breakfast guide him into the kitchen. He swears JARVIS redirects the smells through the air vents on purpose. He hears the others before he sees them, their murmuring voices sounding too insentient, too serious for eight o'clock in the morning. Clint hovers at the edge, listening, wondering if they're talking about him. He still hasn't gone to the SHIELD psych department to get evaluated and while Natasha has loosened her leash around him now that she knows he isn't going to run any time soon, she still makes sure he's eaten and slept at least four hours a night. He's begun laying awake in bed, counting down the time until he can leave, none the wiser. He doesn't know how long he can keep this up though.
Clint ducks back into the hallway where the elevator is and with careful maneuvering, unhinges the air vent above him and worms his way inside until he finds himself laying atop the kitchen, peeking through the air vent above the table.
"How long has it been?" asks Steve, closing the refrigerator door, a glass of orange juice in his hands.
"Five days today," answers a weary Bruce, a hand running over his haggard face, body hunched over the table.
"'Tis a most tragic affair," comes Thor's solemn voice, "to lose a loved one in such a manner."
"Bruce maybe if you tried again he would answer. Tell him you left something in his lab," Natasha says.
Bruce shakes his head. "He isn't letting me in. He'd probably have Dum-E come to the door and give it to me instead."
"Doesn't someone have override codes in case of an emergency?" Steve questions, leaning against the counter. For once, Clint thinks Steve may have slept the entire night. His eyes are brighter, his movements less sluggish. Clint even thinks he saw the Captain drawing again as he sat on the common room's windowsill.
"Pepper has the codes and she's in Malibu overseeing the final transfers of the company's HQ," Natasha says.
"He'll come out when he's ready to," Bruce says.
"Aye, you are correct, my friend. Our Man of Iron must experience his grief in order to move on," Thor proclaims.
"Stark doesn't grieve, he self-destructs," Natasha states, cocking her head as if in consideration, eyes ransacking the room until she meets Clint's gaze and calls out, "I know you're there. You need a shower, the smell gave you away."
Clint hops down from the ventilation system and lands next to Steve who sends a tiny smirk his way.
"Is there a reason you blew my cover here, Tash?" Clint asks, dusting himself off.
Natasha rolls her eyes. "Yes. You're going to get Stark out of his self imposed exile."
"Uh, what?"
"You heard me, Barton. The man won't respond to any of us. He's even blocked Banner's access to the lab."
"Yeah, he and Pepper broke up. I would want my space too, after that."
"He's been down there for days, Clint," Bruce sighs, shaking his head. "I can't imagine he's been taking care of himself all the while either. He won't even let any of us in to bring him food. I'm half convinced he's been surviving off of motor oil these past few days."
"Case in point. If he isn't letting any of you in, what makes you think I'll be successful? And even if I do somehow get in there, then what? Do I drag him out kicking and screaming? Knock him out and throw him over my shoulder? Force feed him?"
"You tell me," Natasha says.
"What?"
"Well, you and Stark certainly spent a lot of time together before he locked himself away," she says and if Clint didn't know her as well as he did he may have missed the acidic undertone to her words.
"Tasha…"
"She's right," Steve says. "You know him better than we do."
Clint shakes his head. "No, nu-uh. He and Bruce spend hours in the lab," he says, pointing an accusatory finger at the man in question.
Bruce shrugs. "We don't talk much."
"You guys talk every morning."
"About studies, experiments, theories, ideas—science."
Clint's eyes roam the room, trying to find someone willing to go instead or at least agree with him about what a horrible idea this is. He isn't the comforting type, has no idea how to approach this. No one answers his silent appeal.
"Fine. Alright. But if he ends up jumping off the landing pad without the suit on don't say I didn't warn you."
Clint walks towards the liquor cabinet and takes out a bottle of tequila.
"Clint," Natasha says, a warning in her tone.
"I believe our Man of Iron has had enough Midgardian mead, my friend," Thor supplies.
"You want it my way, you're getting it my way," he says turning to rummage around in the fridge. He pulls out the cartoons of leftover Chinese food they ordered the previous night. Grabbing a bag from the cupboard, he puts everything inside, including two forks and four bottled waters.
By the time Clint crawls to the vents above Tony's lab he is covered in a layer dust, knees and elbow aching with sharp pain. He can feel the vibrations of Tony's music reverberating through the vents. He thinks, Tony better appreciate this, loosens the screws of the air vent, hoists the mediocre bag of supplies to his shoulder, and jumps down.
The workshop is in disarray; and, really, Clint should have expected this—when is the workshop not in a constant state of chaos?—but Tony's usual chaos somehow had an air of order, as if all the scattered wires and tools were scattered that way on purpose. This time, though, the wires, tools, and odd gadgets are scatted in a craze. Clint glances at his feet and finds he landed on the organs of a tablet. When he moves the pieces crunch under his boot.
Tony is slumped over his desk, fiddling with parts of the suit, monitors around him illuminated with lines of code. Empty bottles and half filled coffee mugs cover the desk. Tony looks pale and gaunt, thinner. His hands are covered in black smudges, fingernails crusted with blood and grease.
"The others are worried about you, you know," Clint says pulling up a chair opposite, plopping the bag of food on the desk between them.
Music is blaring around them and for a moment Clint wonders if Tony heard him when the man glances up, hands stilling. Tony's eyes are bloodshot.
"That so?" he says, fiddling with the parts once more. He crosses wires, nicking a finger on a sharp edge in the process. Red trails down his finger, gets smeared on the wires, smudges covering the gold of the piece.
"Think they're worried you're going to die down here if we let you." Clint picks up a gauntlet, pokes at the fingers. "Improving dexterity?"
"Amongst other things. So, what, they sent you down here to keep me from kicking the figurative bucket?"
A smile tugs at Clint's lips, but he bites it back. "Something like that." He takes out the food, pushes a box over to Tony. "I brought food. Chinese. You're going to eat it and then down an entire bottle of water before you fall over dead and I get charged with negligence."
Tony grunts, poking and prodding at the circuits in front of him. Clint pulls out food for himself, leans back in his chair, props his feet up on the desk, and eats. After a while, Tony wipes his hands with a rag and picks up his food.
"So, you gonna tell me how there are more fish in the sea, Barton?"
Clint raises an eyebrow. "Do you want me to?"
Tony takes another bite of his egg roll, shrugs.
"Well, there are, but no two fishes are the same."
Tony smiles and it is tired, a small up quirk of his lips that doesn't reach his eyes.
After they finish eating, Clint makes Tony drink a whole bottle of water before he grabs a tablet, checks the encryption, and signs into an email belonging to one of his aliases. Days ago, once they finished the conference with Fury, he sent out feelers, encrypted messages to his contacts in the seedy underbelly of life the world over. He even cashed in a few favors. Yet, all he has are vague rumors, a rising sense of suspicion as people begin to pay attention. Nothing definitive, though, nothing Natasha and he hadn't already suspected.
They continue on this way, he and Tony, in quiet silence—Tony muttering to himself as he tweaks lines of code, Clint wiping the dust off old aliases.
Hours later, Clint is pulling himself into the same vent he came in through. He stays in the vents until he unscrews the one above his room. Inside, he heads to his closet, grabs the flattened duffel, and throws in a few sets of clothes. When he finishes he climbs back into the vent and makes his way back.
He doesn't try to clean the workshop, but he does sweep the floors with the help of Dum-E after the second time his boots crunch over glass and wire. He also cleans Tony's work area, dumping cold coffee down the sink, letting the empty coffee stained mugs pile up. When he swipes the last one, he hears something clatter on the floor.
It's a ring.
Clint stares at it, crouched down on the floor. It's a simple silver band with a red diamond. Clint stares and stares until the music rises, and then he sets the ring down in front of Tony.
"Don't," Tony says, though Clint had resolved himself to silence. "We weren't—I didn't," Tony gestures as he speaks, hands curling in muted expression, "we weren't engaged." Tony looks down at the ring before nudging it with a finger, the diamond catches the light, sparkles red like blood. "It was my mother's. I gave it to Pepper after the whole Vanko fiasco. I didn't propose, though, didn't say anything really, just left it on her desk." Tony's voice is steady; Clint wonders if anyone else knew about this. "She wore it, sometimes it would hang from her neck in a chain, other times she put it on a finger. We weren't going to get married or anything, god knows I'm not made for marriage." Tony takes a deep breath, considers the ring, and puts it in a cup bursting with random pieces of tech.
Clint empties the last mug, takes his usual seat, and checks in with Natasha and Fury, leaving Tony to his noisy ministrations. He spends the rest of the day reading files, researching possible leads.
In the morning, his back and neck crack when he stretches. His joints ache and he considers bringing in an air mattress down here because, while he has trained himself to sleep anywhere, anytime, in any position, he isn't as young as he used to be and the soft tempur-pedic bed on his floor has undoubtedly ruined him.
"God, how have you been sleeping down here without ruining your back?" Clint mutters, rubbing his neck, yawning.
Tony raises an eyebrow over the cup of coffee cradled in his hands. "Right," Clint says, "you haven't been sleeping, at all. Why did I think otherwise?" Clint stretches once more and slips the knife he hid on his person as he slept into his duffle.
"No one asked you to stay down here," Tony says, reading on his tablet. Out of the edge of his vision, Clint sees charts and graphs. Simulation results, he guesses.
"Yeah, well, someone has to look after our resident hermit," he says, heading over to the coffee machine in the corner counter.
"I take offense to that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I could sue you for slander."
"It's not slander if it's true."
"Hmm touché," Tony concedes.
For a while, all Clint hears is the hum of the coffee machine and the soft tapping of Tony's fingers. "There's no music. You always have music."
Clint expects a sarcastic remark, but all he gets is, "I got a headache. And you were sleeping."
"How long was I out, anyway?"
"Few hours," Tony says, still immersed in his results. "Why?"
Clint shrugs, "Just wondering." He picks up his coffee, makes his way back to his seat.
Tony's gaze travels over him and Clint can feel his silent assessment, but he doesn't comment, so neither does Clint.
They spend the day much like they did yesterday. Tony tinkers and Clint encrypts and decrypts messages. There are rumors surrounding Russia—he sends those files to Natasha, not trusting himself to sort bullshit from reality where the Russians are concerned.
Music blares once more and Tony is quiet as AC/DC lyrics rip through the air. Clint would be concerned, except Tony's hands are steady and his eyes aren't as bloodshot.
He doesn't mention the unopened bottle of tequila he smuggled in the day before.
Three days pass this way, with Tony absently working and Clint keeping quiet company, sometimes checking in with contacts, other times disassembling and cleaning his bow.
Once he finishes with his bow, Clint brings down his handguns and rifles. He's disassembling his L115A3 AWM rifle when Tony looks over at him, his gaze critical, and says, "I'm a little offended, I make better rifles than that."
"You made better rifles than this," Clint corrects, pressing the cleaning rod into the barrel.
Tony rolls his eyes. "How many rounds can you hold? And how's your scope?"
"Five, detachable magazine, day or night scope. Why? What are you thinking?" Clint asks, narrowing his eyes.
Tony picks up the scope, sights through it. "I can think of a few modifications."
"Knock yourself out, Shellhead," Clint says, tilting his head to hide his grin.
The rest of the day is spent with Tony modifying his rifle and Clint cleaning the rest of his guns. Its calm and peaceful in a way Clint hasn't experienced since before the invasion, since before a hammer fell out of the sky and a god came tumbling down, since before SHIELD fished a glowing blue cube out of the ocean.
Then one day Fury calls and says, "We found a body in a ditch."