Not Your Own Chapter 7: A Very Hawkeye Interlude, a X-Men + Young Avengers Crossover fanfic

Chapter 7 - A Very Hawkeye Interlude

Peter Parker was pretty sure that Natasha was watching him like a hawk ever since Nikki had joined SHIELD, so he'd been watching Nikki probably closer than he would have done for anyone else.

And it turned out to be a smart move even without Natasha being threatening, because Nikki seemed genuinely incapable of stopping himself from careless flirting, and a few older agents seemed to take that as an invitation.

Peter had tried to talk to him and point out the twenty-year age difference between Nikki and the guy he was flirting with the last time Peter caught him, but Nikki had just pointed at his Aunt Kate and how in love she was with Kurt. Which… was true, but that didn't mean it was automatically okay.

And it wasn't just the age gap. It was how passive Nikki was about it all, like he didn't realize it was anything more than playful flirting until he got invited to a broom closet… and went along with it. He was young, and he didn't see anything wrong with it, but Peter could see alarm bells.

So, as tactfully as he could, he had pulled Nikki aside to ask him if he was interested in doing a little undercover work.

"I know you've been doing some small stints here and there, but we're trying to put more people in Hydra. They've been scrambling since Viper died, but we're hearing some new chatter about them trying to rally around new leadership."

"Yeah, Mom and Dad have been talking with Uncle Steve about keeping Hydra from unifying. They've had some factions get pretty powerful, but it's easier to deal with them when they're fragmented like this."

"Yeah, well, want to do a little sabotage and make sure they stay fragmented?"

Nikki broke into a grin that looked so much like his father that it almost set Peter back a step. "Hell yeah."

When Kate got to Clint's place and was immediately greeted by a dog looking for attention and treats, she laughed, gave in to falling into a heap on the floor to get slobbered on, and grinned up at Clint. "We haven't done this in forever."

"What, pool our resources to take out bad guys that want to go after our healing friends? I thought this was a regular thing."

"It kind of is, and how sad is that?"

Clint grinned crookedly at her and held a hand out to help her get to her feet. "Yeah, it's pretty rough out there when the least-powerful heroes have to be the bail out crew," he teased.

"It's a tough job," she laughed.

"Okay, if you two are done with the meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society, some of us have actual work to do," Natasha said, shaking her head at both of them as she headed out the door, dressed like a civilian but slipping on her Widow's bites underneath her sleeves. Nearly nine months pregnant, she was supposed to be doing intel-gathering only, but she never took chances, especially because this third pregnancy had her paranoid more than normal.

"Have fun," Clint said, though not before he'd caught her by the arm to steal a kiss.

"I'm sure you'll have more fun than me," she said when the kiss had broken.

"Depends what you're doing."

"You're not wrong," she chuckled and gave him another kiss.

Kate stood to the side, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed as she watched the whole interaction, but she waited until Natasha had actually left before she kicked off from the wall and lightly socked Clint in the arm. "And people tease me and Kurt."

"You two haven't stopped since the day you met."

"And?"

"Nothing." Clint laughed and shoved her in the shoulder as they headed out together.

Their target for the day wasn't anything like K and her family team dealt with. They weren't going after the weapons programs themselves but their backers. For example, while the Board had well and truly fallen apart, copycats cropped up often enough to keep the Defenders busy, and they were always fun to hit for a Hawkeyes outing if Kate told Jessica Jones she wanted something to do. There were also corrupt politicians, but those were harder to hit.

And, of course, there was Hydra.

Hydra had been listless for a long time after Viper died, and they were still scrambling without a clear leader. But a large faction of those in Hydra were falling back on the prejudices that often radicalized people into joining organizations like that: calling people to arms against mutant menaces and the like.

A few barons in Hydra's old leadership managed to get enough of a following to try to boost their numbers and funding with an underground human trafficking ring, and that had to stop. As did AIM's experimentation rings.

Because the experimentation issue was fresh on Jana's mind, she'd dug up a lead on that on her own, and Kate hadn't wanted to get in the way of her and Akihiro using AIM as a reason to go on a destructive date. So, she and Clint were taking on a Hydra trafficking ring before it could get big enough to grow legs.

Beyond just wrecking the place, they were also going to try to find information they could give to Peter Parker so that SHIELD could root Hydra out on their end, too, freeing up the teams to deal more with rescuing people in trouble than with the unending parade of more mundane evil.

Not that the Avengers or the X-Men were ever going to stop fighting Hydra, but with Peter at the helm of SHIELD, the heroes trusted its agents a lot more to work as equal partners.

Still, broken and fractured though they might be, Hydra had fangs, so while Kate and Clint teased each other all the way to the hideout Kate had flagged in her detective work, once they were close enough that they might encounter some outer perimeter guards in green, they fell back into an easy "working" teasing - more whispers and pointed looks and half-said phrases that relied on years of inside jokes than the full-on laughing fit Clint had instigated when he'd started over-dramatically retelling his side of things when he'd seen her and Kurt get together and become, in his words, "just the worst."

Kate didn't even argue it.

The two of them separated to opposite sides of the building, and Clint went in first, slipping through the roof as quietly as he could. He could feel his shoulders protesting but ignored them for the moment, knowing that Kate would tease him about his age if he said anything.

Natasha had pointed it out, too. He wasn't a supersoldier like she was. He couldn't keep doing this forever. He was literally getting too old for this, all jokes to the contrary.

But his pride wouldn't let him quit, not yet. Sure, a lot of the founding members were headed toward retirement, but Clint didn't deal well with boredom. He wasn't even sure what he'd do if he retired.

And besides, Kate was right there to back him up if he was too slow.

He crept around the rafters, watching the Hydra soldiers underneath him, but his attention was drawn not to the guys in charge of talking about how awesome they were but to the scientist sitting at about three different computers, surrounded by the evidence of meals he'd had at his desk as he kept working. He couldn't see any evidence of people being trafficked; in fact, it looked like they'd stumbled into something else.

"Katie," he muttered into his earpiece. "Do you see Ned Landry?"

"Wow, that's a reference," Kate replied, which had Clint chuckling under his breath. Trust her to speak the same language he did. "Yeah, what about him?"

"You said these guys kidnapped a couple mutants and tried to feed them into their trafficking operation last week."

"They did."

"So what's that guy doing? And where are the people?"

"Want me to find out? Computers a little out of your expertise, old man?"

Clint nearly rolled his eyes. And there was the joke she'd been waiting to tell all night. "I think I can handle it."

"I don't know. You're the one using decades-old movies as your reference points. You sure you know what all the buttons do?"

"You're hilarious."

"I absolutely am." Kate was grinning broadly; Clint could hear it even over the earpiece. "Okay, I'm going to deal with Ned. You got anything you want in particular, or do we just want to have fun?"

"That second thing."

"Right. Nat told you to have fun, so it's an order now."

"Can't disappoint the wife."

"Oh, are you married, Clinton? Oh, to the Black Widow, you say? How many kids together?" Kate snickered.

"Yeah, yeah. Like you're any better. Oh, your husband is how hot again?"

"Extremely."

"I can't tell; you haven't mentioned that fact in over five minutes."

"I'm losing my stride, Hawkeye," Kate said dramatically, though she had dropped her voice to barely over a whisper as she made her way over to their computer guy.

"Obviously," Clint chuckled under his breath, letting the teasing drop as Kate neared her mark and he got close enough to the larger group of soldiers to be an effective distraction.

He announced himself with an explosive arrow and then waved at the soldiers who looked around furiously for the source of the problem — before taking off at a sprint to lead them away from Kate and to get into the open for some better angles. He heard the whine of a Hydra weapon charge up and vaulted over some suspicious crates, which exploded behind him into a goo that stuck to the walls and to the back of his uniform.

"Gross," he muttered under his breath as he took a hard swerve and then spun around to shoot another exploding arrow right into the middle of the Hydra soldiers. And since there hadn't been too many uniformed Hydra creeps to start with, he was pleased with himself for the short work he was making of the lot of them.

Not ready to retire yet, huh, Nat? Clint thought to himself.

Of course, just as he was celebrating internally that he hadn't lost a step … he missed seeing a Hydra soldier coming around the corner and took a hit that, honestly, would have been much worse if James hadn't suped up the team uniforms forever ago. He could feel the energy of the weapon dissipating across his suit and winced. Even the mild shock he still got was enough to make his hair stand up straight and put his teeth on edge.

"Hawkeye, you okay?" Kate asked over the comms, sounding more concerned than Clint thought she had any right to sound.

But then, maybe it had looked worse from where she was.

"I'm okay," Clint said — and proved it with a double shot that put down a couple soldiers who had been headed his way, probably thinking like Kate did that he was down for the count from whatever that weapon had been. "You figure out what our computer nerd was up to or do I need to come do your job for you too?"

"I'm good. You?"

"Always," Clint said.

"Great. I've got a present from Santa Stark I've been meaning to try out on a deserving hideout."

Clint laughed. "I can't believe you guys still call him that."

"He's getting old enough that it fits him even better," Kate teased.

"Yeah, I'm never gonna let him live that down now. You know that, right?"

"It was my gift to you," Kate replied easily, sounding closer, so he looked up to see her in the rafters above him just as she jammed an arrow into the wood underneath her feet and dived toward him, letting the rope in the arrow catch her before the ground.

He let out a scoff of a laugh. "You keep giving me grief about my age, but aren't you a little old to be an adrenaline junkie still?"

"Lies. I've been wired this way since I was born."

"You're a grandmother."

"In my defense, my daughter literally had a teenage pregnancy, so you can't put that on me."

"Sure, sure," he laughed, ducking when he heard the whine of another weapon charging up. It went over his head, but it blew up the wall near Kate, and he heard her let out an exaggerated "oof" as she hit the ground. She shook her head and got up quickly enough, but it was enough to let Hydra catch up to the two of them, starting to surround them.

"You alright, Hawkeye?" Clint asked, shooting a couple Hydra agents as they tried to make a circle.

"Yeah," she groaned, though she looked pretty bloody.

"Which arrow?"

Kate raised both eyebrows as she followed his train of though, then shook her head as she grabbed the arrow in question. "No, no, this one's mine," she said, and Clint saw a flash of white that was enough of a warning for him to get down before some kind of pulse went through everything in the building.

As Clint watched, several Hydra agents started swearing as multiple different sources of sparks traveled across their uniforms. Communication devices, weapons, anything that had any source of electricity, responded to the shockwave with their own mini shockwaves, until the soldiers had to drop whatever they were holding to keep from getting hit again.

And that was their cue to go.

They took off running, though it took a second for Clint to realize that Kate was laughing. Even then, he didn't turn to look at her until they were well away from the hideout — and then, he couldn't help but laugh along with her.

"We have got to do this more often," Kate said, grinning with her hands on her knees.

"No kidding," he laughed.

She straightened up and grinned at him, tucking her purple hair behind her ears. "So," she said, still grinning, "Ned was looking into extradimensional sources of energy."

Clint raised both eyebrows at her as he fell into step with her. "That's a little outside the norm for them, isn't it?"

"Usually. But there's been a few pockets of it popping up in the last few years — not to mention Noh's stuff."

Clint lost his good mood. "Someone in Hydra got their hands on some of his tech?"

"Someone got hold of the notes of his dissection, more like."

Clint narrowed his eyes at that. "How much do they understand?" he asked at last, knowing that Kate would actually be able to answer that question. Even if she didn't understand all of the technobabble, she'd lived on the ship long enough to speak some of it as practically a second language.

"Enough," she said — which told Clint this was bad.

"Okay, well, fun's over," he said, and she let out a sigh but nodded her agreement.

"See you next time, old man," she said and punched his shoulder for good measure.

He shoved her back. "See ya, Grannie," he shot back — and waited until she was gone before he rubbed his arm.