Chapter Text
Clint takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. It's been awhile since he's been to California, and he doesn't really want to be back. But, well, some things are worth it.
The slow, creeping terror that defined his teenage years clamps down at him as soon as he steps off of the Quinjet and smells the air. California all right, even if it’s the damp redwood forest and not the sharp city. Even if he’d been a hawk for most of it, the smell of the region always reminds him of battle and blood and death, to a degree he's never seen when working with SHIELD.
He lived with this fear for almost a decade, though. He could do it again for a few days.
Clint walks away from the helipad flanking Fury, who’s here for the annual diplomatic meeting with the leaders of the Hork Bajir colony, to keep everyone in touch.
The original Valley was compromised at the end of the War, but Redwoods are the best trees on Earth for the Hork-Bajir, and conservation status is as good a reason as any to keep the valley closed to tourists and laypeople. There’s only one road in and out, three human buildings, and the rarely-used helipad. The road's technically been closed for years though, nominally due to a landslide.
It’s not a very long meeting, but he sits in on it anyway, running security and keeping an ear out - there’s nothing he needs to say, actually, ten years or so have made the humans and Hork Bajir alike accustomed to another's presence and quirks of management. It’s clear that everyone is on the same page before they even start, which is a nice change from most meetings he sees.
The human contingent is technically led by Fury, but actually led by a combination of a Dr. Gia Campelli - a dark skinned woman dressed in bright colors and large jewelry, who is a sociologist or something - and a blonde white woman who lives in the area, a lawyer that Clint avoids even thinking about. He never meets any of their eyes, not that he makes a point about it.
The Hork-Bajir contingent is matched to the humans, but is actually, always, led by the Seer.
Toby.
He knows she knows it's him, even if no one outside of Fury is technically supposed to know here. Toby always knows.
He goes up to her, afterwards, privately, and she walks up to him, and gives him a true Hork-Bajir smile.
“Namesake,” they say to each other, and embrace.
It turns out that she has three children now, and is hopeful for a fourth. The Hork-Bajir population has grown fairly rapidly, but wasn’t big in the first place. She’s been busy trying to negotiate new territory for them, though, as in a few years the Valley might well be bursting at the seams.
She’s scared about what will happen if she dies, and there is no Seer. She’s scared that the humans will take her people’s rights away. But she’s determined and hopeful, she genuinely likes the humans working with them and thinks that they are on her people’s side. She’s offered Fury assistance, should he need it, defending Earth. It’s their planet, too, now.
They talk, and talk, late into the night, at a campfire whose wood was all stripped of bark beforehand, among the damp redwood forest, and he finally doesn’t smell blood any longer.
“It’s not easy, fighting for our Freedom. But we have it. And I will keep fighting for it, until my death,” Toby says, in her easy way of making grand declarations.
“Yeah,” Clint smiles back at her. “Me too.”