A/N: I will not usually be updating this often. But the Age of Ultron stills happened, and there was lots of Hawkeye, and I got really really really excited and then this whole chapter just sort of happened.
Disclaimer: I don't own the character of Clint Barton or the rights to the Avengers or anything else Marvel owns.
...
Mission Two: This Isn't Sherwood Forest
The girl in R&D. Beth. She didn't mind when Clint kissed her, smack on the cheek, after the aliens-in-Canada mission. She'd even encouraged it—as long as it was accompanied by a personal commendation. Because apparently a good word from Clint Barton went a long way. Something about how he never put in a good word for anybody, so she must have done something right.
He'd kiss her again when he got back from this mission. He'd jokingly complained about the bad sunburn he'd gotten last time he got sent off into a desert, and she'd decided that was her cue to build her own sunblock. Odorless, so he didn't smell like a tourist, and it looked more like a layer of grime than the shiny store-bought stuff. Even put two different types together: one with bits of sand and one with bits of dirt, depending on the warm climate.
She was a genius, and he had two tubes of the stuff in his rolled up knapsack-disguising-his-quiver.
Maria Hill, on the other hand, didn't seem to appreciate being kissed on the cheek. Not even under the mistletoe. At the Christmas Eve party. After Coulson egged him on.
Clint was about ninety-five percent certain Hill was the one who sent him on this stupid assignment. With no extraction plan.
He'd known that was an eventuality. He and Coulson had talked about it. How Clint seemed to be annoyed by extraction teams more than the team actually seemed to do any good. How he liked to call them in only after everything had gone as poorly as possible. How he used them as a chauffeur service more than anything else.
But this felt like Hill. Really boring mission, lots of waiting around in the blinding desert sun with only the hint of activity, only a whisper that this might be the drop point.
"We should investigate every possibility," she's told him—very smugly—as she handed him a canteen and told him not to die out there.
What's worse—Hill was right. Clint was right where he needed to be, because there they were. Stolen weapons. They'd arrived a few hours ago to a small, remote camp out in the middle of nowhere.
It was good luck Clint was the best at spotting the unspottable. Easy enough to find a weak link, one guy who took a little too many trips into the desert. Easy enough to follow him one day. Easy enough to find a perch in the mountains and set up for the duration. Easy enough to wait, to watch.
The thugs who took the weapons were average at best. Probably a smash-and-grab group, nothing much. They weren't the ones Clint cared about. He was more interested in the buyers. Soon as he figured out who they were, he'd step in and break up their little rendezvous.
And so Clint was glad for the sunscreen, because he'd been sitting in his perch for days. The bad guys here were thorough, if simple. Set up shop days before they expected company and then prepped themselves, set up traps and back doors in case their buyers turned on them. Smart.
Nowhere near as smart as the buyers, though. Clint could see advance scouts in perches a lot like his peppered throughout the mountainside. Clint knew where every single one was, but he didn't want to take them out yet. He needed the buyers themselves, not their lackeys.
Day Five and it finally looked like there might be some excitement in the camp. Lots of patrolling, lots of chatter. Clint had planted a bug three days ago, but all he could tell from the bits and pieces of snatched phrases from the other side of a phone conversation was that the buyers made these thieves nervous—and they were coming ahead of schedule.
So now it was time to get rid of the snipers. Clint didn't need a bullet in the back, no matter what the SHIELD shirt was made of. (He was thinking of getting Coulson to design him his own suit. Something more . . . Hawkeye-like. The guy actually wasn't bad with costume design—something about Captain America fanart that Clint really didn't want to ask about.) And Clint had an arrow for each sniper.
Quick and quiet. No muss, no fuss. He knew how to stick to the shadows, and he had the advantage. He knew where they were, so he knew where to look, when to duck, when to hide. They didn't know to look for him.
One, two, three—three down. Same quiet technique. Head shot. Never take the chest shot; that was too easy to protect. And sure, his explosive arrows could take out Kevlar, but he didn't care to give away his position. Even if it would only give away the enemy's position.
Two more. Clint didn't have ears on the buyers, but he did have ears on the snipers, and he could hear through his earpiece that they were starting to realize something was wrong, starting to get a little testier, a little more alert.
And then, suddenly, things went quiet.
Dead quiet.
Clint frowned. He didn't think the thugs who snatched the weapons tech were that good, and the buyers certainly weren't about to take out their own advance men. So what happened?
It was a bad idea to investigate. A very bad idea. But if there was a third party involved, Clint had to know about it. He didn't like going in too exposed. He took risks, yeah, but not unnecessary ones.
He checked out Sniper Number Four's location first. The guy was very, very dead. Whoever took him out must have used a silencer; Clint hadn't heard a gunshot, and he'd been listening carefully.
He didn't need to check out Number Five to know somebody else was in on Clint's investigation. Didn't have time to see if it was friend or foe, though, because he could see someone approaching. Nice black car, tinted windows. Way out of place in the middle of a place like this. If the thieves were going for subtlety, their buyers didn't seem to care much for it.
He checked the ground quickly for the bullet. Russian-made—what were the Russians doing way out here? He pocketed it; he'd have Beth analyze it when he got back. And he turned to leave—right into the barrel of a revolver.
He held up both of his hands. "Okay," he said grinning. "I admit it. That right there—that was a good move. I'm usually not that easy to sneak up on."
The guy on the other end of the revolver didn't seem to care what Clint said. Possibly he didn't understand him—he just knew Clint was in his way and laughing about it. He pointed the gun threateningly and waved his arms to indicate that Clint should move away from Number Four.
Clint raised his hands a little bit higher and tried the calmer tone approach. "Sure thing, big guy," he said slowly.
The guy smiled like he had the upper hand and took a step towards the sniper—a step too close to Clint, who had, after all, been trained in this sort of thing. He grabbed the guy's wrist and tilted the gun down, guiding his arm, moving his aim. He kept his feet firmly planted and used his opponent's own strength against him, turning with him so that he would stay behind the guy. Finally, when the guy tried to flip Clint, Clint used that momentum to take the guy with him into his roll, pulling the revolver away with him and pulling out his bow in the same movement.
He tossed the revolver and fitted an arrow as the guy grabbed the rock face to regain his footing. A simple arrow, just the pointy tip, right through the forehead, and Clint grabbed the guy's shirt so that he wouldn't fall limply into the camp below.
Not that it would much matter. His cover was already blown. But it'd be nice to keep the bad guys looking for him around the four other snipers as well, just to spread them out.
Clint fitted another arrow and gritted his teeth, still thinking about his mystery assassin. Someone else was here. Someone good. They'd have to be that good to get past Clint and blow his cover without his noticing. Because Clint noticed everything.
Like the fact that the buyers' car had pulled to a stop and there were some particularly big and nasty looking guys getting out of it.
Clint sighed. There were too many variables here. This was supposed to be simple. Identify the buyer, intrude on the buy and take them down, retrieve the stolen weaponry. He could do that. But deal with another assassin and a bunch of guys trying to track him down? New variables.
Not that he couldn't do it—he just preferred to stay out of the line of fire until the big finale. He liked to be able to see the whole picture first.
Well, new plan. If they were sending out people to look for him, they'd start with the snipers, and Clint had about two minutes before the next patrol was close enough. He fitted one grappling arrow and rappelled down the side of the cliff. Probably a little bit obvious, but it was the fastest way down, and besides, the other way through the mountain was about to be cut off.
Clint kept his ears peeled for the whisper of a shot, for the barest hint of the other assassin, but he had reached the bottom before he heard anything—and that was a patrol running towards him.
He wasn't sure if he'd been spotted, so he ducked into the nearest crevasse and waited. They ran past him, but one of them noticed the rope and split the patrol into two groups.
About six men in each group. That was manageable.
He poked his head out. Memorized their positions. Then, the flash arrow. They'd stop to shield their eyes, and Clint was already fitting arrows for them while they stood nice and still as easy targets. One. Two. Three. Four. Five—where was Six?
A gunshot tore through the rock right beside Clint, and he saw the sixth guy talking into his handset. Looked a little unbalanced, probably still half-blind, but he was wearing sunglasses and a suit and tie. Looked professional.
Tie Guy took another shot at Clint, so he rolled out of the way and fired another arrow. This one disabled the handset, the next knocked the gun away, and the next one would have been right between the eyes if he hadn't heard the other six guys running and shouting in—was that Mandarin? It sounded Mandarin. Clint didn't know languages, but he'd been in enough places to pick up the basics. Like "two beers, please" and "you're under arrest," and while none of the phrases they were shouting were those two phrases, it sounded phonetically similar.
Clint switched arrows and fired an explosive one at the rock face just above the guys running towards him. Half of the rocks tumbled down in the patrol's path, which would buy Clint time to—
Bam. Tie Guy barreled right into Clint. Knocked him down. Clint didn't bother to try to get up, because he saw the kick coming. Instead, he rolled out of the way and reached for a handful of dirt and crushed rock.
He threw that handful in Tie Guy's face and pulled himself to his feet with a deep breath. Got the wind knocked out of him. Tie Guy packed a punch.
He reached back to fit an arrow, but Tie Guy had learned not to let him get that far. He rushed at Clint again, so Clint had to go hand-to-hand. He could do it, but it wasn't his favorite.
Tie Guy made a grab for Clint's hand when he threw the punch, so Clint faked and grabbed Tie Guy's shoulder with his other hand, using him as a vault to get behind him. Or at least, he would have done if Tie Guy hadn't grabbed Clint's ankle. But rather than getting dragged all the way back down, Clint grabbed his bow and locked it around the back of Tie Guy's head, taking Tie Guy with him with the momentum of Tie Guy's own strength as he tried to pull Clint back down.
They both fell hard, but Clint had the advantage of knowing he was going to fall. He slid with the fall so that he could get a little distance—just a little, only enough to fit an arrow. Tie Guy was already back up, already charging when Clint let the arrow fly.
Eleven inches. Less than a foot. Clint knew it was exactly eleven inches that his arrow had traveled before it went through that guy's throat. And all six feet of him was falling straight forward.
Clint ducked to the side and fitted another arrow, looking first to the rock fall he'd caused, where he knew at least six guys were waiting for him. But he was close to the camp now, and there had to be more guys.
He could hear his heart pounding in his ears, but he couldn't see anyone. At least not yet.
He kept his bow ready, an arrow fitted, as he headed into the camp—and then he saw why he hadn't been attacked yet.
About twenty guys, all in various stages of dead or dying or incapacitated. One looked like he'd been electrocuted. Two had apparently shot each other. Another looked like he'd been hit by a car.
Clint groaned because he already knew what he would find when he looked inside the tent that he knew had the stolen weaponry.
Yep. He was right. There they were—the little square impressions in the dirt where boxes used to be. Drag marks on the ground.
There was no way the mystery assassin could have done all this and had time to escape, though, so Clint rushed out of the tent and spotted it—the truck.
It was probably one of the trucks they'd used to get the goods here in the first place, and he recognized the sputter of an engine being hotwired.
He fired a basic, sharp arrow to puncture the front left tire. The truck wobbled for a bit, but the driver kept going.
Clint fitted a second arrow, this one for the back left tire, but then something happened. First, he was hit hard just between the shoulders (he realized only second later it was a bullet in his Kevlar). Second, the person driving the car threw some kind of smoke grenade at him (and not a real one—which was kind of nice of this mysterious person). And third, he heard someone shouting in English to "stop them both."
Clint had already hit the ground from the first bullet, and the smokescreen meant the bad guys couldn't see that he was already down. So the hail of bullets that he heard went mostly above his head. He did take one more in the boot, but it just grazed him—tore up the boot more than anything else.
Clint kept low to the ground and crept his way to the edge of the camp. He heard the sound of an engine close by and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid becoming road kill. From the brief glimpse he got of the car, it looked like the nice black one the buyers brought.
That car would be able to catch the mystery assassin's disabled truck no problem, and while Clint wasn't too pleased about the cargo passing hands from one bad guy to another, it meant he still had a shot at his mission.
Which, at this point, Clint figured would just be to blow the crates up. His cover was blown, and there wasn't much chance of him getting to see much more of the supply chain than what was already here.
He fired a grappling arrow and let it take him above the thicker smoke. He found a ledge, a nice, solid ledge, found his target, and fired.
The explosive arrow found its target, and the mystery assassin's truck caught fire. In a few seconds, the fire would reach the weapons.
He saw a side door open and a figure dressed in black tumble out of the driver's side. The figure took off running just seconds before the explosion.
The nice black car got hit by a good chunk of the exploding debris, and Clint saw three bigger guys hustle a taller, skinnier guy out of the car. Probably the head honcho. Clint fitted three arrows for each of the big guys—and then something hit the ledge underneath him.
He looked down and saw that, through the smoke, someone had spotted him, and this time, they weren't throwing smoke grenades.
He threw himself out of the way of the second one, which was thrown with much better aim and would actually have hit him, but now he was falling.
Luckily, he made a habit of recycling his arrows, if he could help it, and he refitted the grappling arrow and fired. It caught on something—Clint couldn't see what as he fell through the smoke, but he'd been aiming for the sturdier cliff face about twenty feet from where he'd perched on his ledge.
The rope went taught just in time, and Clint was glad he didn't end up splattered on a desert mountain as he used the momentum to swing past the people shooting at him. He landed on his feet and took off into a run. There was an opening just about ten yards from where he was, and Clint knew it led to a higher vantage point and a path back to where he'd originally hidden. (By path he meant a good ten-minute free climb followed by a twenty-foot drop into Clint's cave.)
He had almost reached the opening when he heard the gentle tic of something falling beside him. Grenade.
He threw himself inside the opening and hoped it would be enough.
…
Yep. There it was. The deep ringing sound in his ears and the drumbeat in his head. He'd been out for—how long, now?
His side hurt, too. And his chest felt funny. Exposed.
Clint looked down. Oh, great. No shirt. Nice of the bad guys to patch him up, though, even if the makeshift bandages were so dirty he could almost taste the rocks in his blood stream.
He wondered why he was alive.
And, apparently, tied to a chair.
He didn't have to wonder very long, though, because almost as soon as he was awake enough to realize his surroundings, one of the big guys from the black car was in his face, shouting something in . . . Hungarian? It sounded like Hungarian. Hard to be sure—there were still cobwebs upstairs. And in any case, it didn't matter the language if Clint couldn't understand it. And he didn't think it would help to ask for a beer, but he tried it anyway.
He got smelly breath and red, angry eyes in his face for his troubles, but Clint grinned. So, Hungarian. He'd been right. Nice to know his brain was still working.
The guy shouted some more stuff that Clint still didn't understand, until, at last, the guy got so frustrated that he grabbed the back of Clint's chair and tipped him over—crash—right into the ground.
"Ow," Clint said without losing his smile.
A second guy grabbed the back of Clint's chair and hoisted him back up. He looked a little calmer. Good Cop, then. He talked to Clint in measured tones, but this one was a language Clint didn't even know his usual two sentences in.
He caught a couple words, though. "Stark" and "Hammer." Two big weapons tech companies (though Clint was honestly surprised to hear "Hammer" in there—that company was pretty close to bankrupt, wasn't it?)
"Thanks for patching me up, boys," Clint said when the Good Cop stopped trying to talk to him. "I appreciate it, I do." He shrugged and grinned, but the shrug hurt something. Probably ribs. That would be a fun recovery. "It's just that I don't know how to thank you in whatever language it is you're speaking. I'm not normally such a rude house guest."
"Ah, American." This was a new speaker. Tall and skinny and dressed in a suit that looked like it was way too warm to be wearing out here. (He'd already taken off his suit jacket—which was lying, discarded, on another chair.) He looked no older than Clint, and he had a slight Chinese accent. "CIA?" the new guy asked.
"Freelancer," Clint said without missing a beat. "CIA's too serious for me."
The new guy blinked at Clint, then smiled. "No matter. We will find out who sent you and where you hid the missile plans—and where your partner is—soon enough."
"Friar Tuck sent me," Clint said. He chose not to react to the bit about the missile plans. Explains why he was still alive. There had been something else in this shipment besides just the weapons. "I left my Merry Men at home, sadly."
The slightest trace of a smile touched the new guy's lips as he rolled up his sleeves. He had an interesting tattoo on one arm. Ten little circles. "Naturally, you thought you could handle this assignment on your own."
"Partners get in my way," Clint shrugged—oh, right, he'd forgotten that shrugging hurt that bad.
One of the bigger guys turned to the skinny guy and said something in Hungarian. The skinny guy laughed and waved the comment off, then turned to Clint. "My friend thinks you're more trouble than you're worth."
"He's not the first to say that," Clint said. "Don't seem to play well with others—that's me."
The skinny guy laughed, light and airy, again. "I disagree. You had help today. For instance, you seem to be attached to the glorified Stone Age weaponry you brought with you." He reached out his hand, and the third and final big assistant brought out Clint's bow.
Clint frowned. "Careful," he said without thinking about it.
The skinny guy turned it over and over in his hands, admiring its every curve. "It's a sophisticated weapon. Not, I think, the same weapon that killed two of my snipers and twenty of my friends' men."
"What, you think I'm not a good shot with a gun, too?"
The skinny guy smiled again. It wasn't a normal smile—just the ghost of one, like he remembered how to smile but didn't do it often enough to do the actual smiling thing. "You have no reason to protect him if he's not your partner."
"Fair point," Clint said. "Another point: she's a she, so there's that."
The skinny guy paused and raised both his eyebrows. "Ah," he said simply. "So she's involved." He seemed to think about it for a bit longer before he laughed and nodded. "Yes, this seems like her handiwork."
Clint smiled grimly. "Let me in on the joke?"
But rather than answer Clint, the skinny guy said something to his big assistants. And judging by the looks—the wide, murderous grins—on their faces, it was probably something like "Kill him."
Clint wished he could reach his feet. He always kept an extra knife stashed there.
"What," he said, "you stopped caring about where I stashed the plans and who I'm working for?" Play for time. That was good.
The skinny guy laughed. "She has the plans, no doubt. And you're out of your league."
Clint laughed. "Always."
"As for who you're working for . . . ." The skinny guy threw Clint's bow at his feet. "There won't be enough of you left to send home, so why bother addressing a card?"
Clint watched as the skinny guy grabbed his suit jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and left. He looked down at the bow by his feet, then up at the guys who looked like they would enjoy having him for lunch. He grinned. "So," he said. "Who wants to go first?"
Good Cop pulled out his gun, and Clint took that as his cue to move. This was gonna hurt.
He rolled, with the chair, to one side and grabbed his bow. He'd kiss Beth full on the mouth when he got back, because it had been her idea to program a keypad into his bow so he could choose his arrow tips in any order with the press of a button—and detonate them.
He went the detonation route, and the two guys who weren't Good Cop were close enough to get caught up in the first blast. The second blast—when the rest of the arrows and their various toys blew up—caught Clint and Good Cop.
But Clint knew it was coming, and he'd put the chair in the way of the blast, so at least he was no longer tied to that rickety thing. But this meant he was out of arrows and stuck in the middle of a camp with just the knife in his left boot and no sole on his right boot, definitely a few bruised ribs, some good burns, and on top of everything, a painfully huge splinter in the palm of his left hand.
This escape was off to a great start.
He knew the explosion would bring investigators, so he cut himself an opening through the back side of the tent and tumbled through, holding his knife close.
The first guy he saw had his back to Clint—easy enough to take down—and now Clint had a gun. Not as good as his bow, but he was out of arrows.
And now Clint was in his element. Point and shoot. Find a target and take it down. It was like practice at the SHIELD academy, where they brought out those little cardboard targets at increasingly difficult angles. Only this time there weren't any little old ladies.
He emptied the clip on his stolen gun and then moved on to the next guy. He'd shot enough to pilfer two more guns, and he emptied those as well—all the while moving closer and closer to the edge of camp, to the black car.
He grabbed two more guns—one for each hand—and had them held off enough to pause and hotwire the car. Didn't take very long—old habits died hard, and this was one habit that SHIELD didn't seem to mind him keeping—and he was off and roaring down the stretch of desert.
He ditched the car somewhere in the middle of nowhere (and slashed all the tires to slow them down and bend the rims) and doubled back to find his original perch, the one they hadn't found for five days. He'd stashed an extra quiver back there, and besides, he had food and supplies to last him several more days. Wasn't safe to go to any of the nearest cities if they were still looking for him. Besides, he could patch himself up okay. Ribs weren't broken or cracked, just bruised, and the rest was Field Medical 101.
It was very nearly the next morning when he dragged himself back to his perch and collapsed in a heap against the wall. Home sweet home. At least for now.
He reached for his canteen to take a much-needed drink. And that's when he saw it. A little hand-scrawled note.
"Thanks for the assist," it said.
…
"I swear, Barton, we can't send you anywhere without you blowing something up!" Maria Hill said.
He was in a SHIELD medical facility, the nearest one he'd been able to find when he emerged from the desert mountains. They'd pumped him full of plenty of liquids and bandaged him up pretty good, and he got the standard lecture about taking care of himself. An agent's body should not be a casualty of the mission if at all possible. Stop taking stupid risks. That sort of thing.
"That's why you love me," he said, grinning. "And besides, I wouldn't have had to blow anything up if I hadn't had company."
Hill's gaze flickered, and Clint could tell she was reading pieces of his initial report. "Yes," she said mildly. "You encountered another agent?"
Clint leaned forward, his eyes bright. "She's good, Maria," he said. "I didn't once spot her until I'd blown up the truck she was driving." He paused, then added, "And that doesn't happen to me. Not ever."
Hill frowned, probably just as much at Clint using her first name as at his report. "You think she could be a threat?"
"I think she already is. And I think she's a step ahead of us. She knew they'd stolen plans as well as actual weapons," Clint said.
"Neither Stark Industries nor Hammer—"
"Yeah, well tell Obadiah-what's-his-name that he should check his inventory more carefully." Clint fell back hard against the too-white bed they'd set up for him. "She got away," he said, more quietly this time. "She got the plans, and she got away, and she set me up to take the fall for the whole thing."
Hill smiled. "If I didn't know better, Barton, I'd almost say that was admiration in your voice."
Clint laughed. "You'd be right." He shrugged. "You think I get the chance to meet someone that good very often?" He leaned forward again. "I think we should look into this, Maria."
She pursed her lips. "I'll see what I can do," she said, but it wasn't very convincing.
Clint sighed as Hill cut the transmission off. Maybe he'd talk to Coulson. Coulson wasn't as opposed to taking risks as Hill was, but then, Hill was on the fast track to second-in-command, and career agents were a lot harder to convince of anything off the books.
But Coulson? Spark his curiosity, dangle the idea of something even slightly out of the ordinary, and the guy was like a kid in a candy store. It had been his idea to start the Index, after all, even if almost everyone who was an Index candidate usually turned out to just be human. (Clint remembered the almost comic disappointment when Coulson tested Clint for anything supernatural and came up with zilch.)
He'd maybe just suggest that this mystery assassin was a little too good at not being seen. Generate some decent suspicion without actually lying.
….
Clint appeared in the doorway with an evidence bag and a cup of coffee. He set both down on Beth's desk and coughed to get her attention.
"You're bringing me coffee?" she asked, surprised.
"That's to say sorry for blowing up those two samples of sunblock you sent me with," he said. He pointed at the evidence bag. "That's a bullet I'd like analyzed. And this—" He grabbed her hand and pulled her in for a kiss. Full lip contact. "This is for the bow you designed. I'd like all of them to do that, pretty please."
She playfully batted him away. "You only come in here when you need something," she said.
"Not true. I also come in here when you want to experiment with your designs and don't think the higher-ups will let you." Clint shrugged. "It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I get sunblock—you get coffee."
She rolled her eyes and laughed. "I don't know why I put up with you."
"Yeah. I'm a menace," he said, grinning. He turned to leave, then looked down at his arms and remembered: "Oh, and that sunblock?"
"Yeah?"
"Real good at dealing with burns. Turns out the stuff's more powerful than you think. You might consider putting some of it towards fireproofing. I've noticed you've had a few more explosions in here lately."
Beth put both hands on her hips. "Like you don't know perfectly well that half of those are your fault."
Clint had been headed towards the door, but he turned on his heels and raised his hands in surrender. "My fault?" he repeated.
"You want trick arrows?" she asked. "You get to fill out the insurance forms."
And it looked like she really was going to pull out some paperwork, so Clint ducked out of there as fast as he could.