Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nights, after Loki, they go one of two ways. There’s the type where he falls into his bed – or onto his couch, or under a table, or any place with enough edges to feel defensible – and the world goes away. Nine hours, ten, eighteen one time. Just the deep black energy-sucking weight of a black hole, dreamless and endless and practically impossible to escape. Sleep follows him like a lost dog the day after, pressing against his ankles, begging at his feet, trying to tangle him up and trip him back into blankness.

Simone tells him she envies him for it, one time, after he sleeps through the party the new kid above his ceiling throws. He grins enough to fool her over his coffee pot, doesn’t bother trying to find the words to explain that sleep ain’t quite the same as rest. That he’s always sleeping, sure, but he’s never awake. Instead he asks about the drip in her shower, if he needs to get out the wrench again, and the half-horrified look on her face turns his grin into something that’s practically real.

The other nights, sleep’s a black cat on soundless feet, circling the edges of the room but never quite settling. He can feel it nearby, can practically touch it, but it keeps its distance no matter what he tries.

Clint never did like cats all that much.

Time plays tricks when the darkness won’t bring sleep. It’s heavy like canvas tent cloth, folded and stacked so every minute unfolds into so much more than a minute, dusty and dry and stretched out like it’s got ambitions of being an hour. Insomnia takes away daytime hours, nibbles at the edges of them with catnaps and half-sleeps and the uselessness of a tired brain. Then it takes all those seconds, those minutes it’s chewed up and digested, and hacks them up like hairballs in the corners of the night.

Maybe this metaphor’s gone a little too far.

He becomes best friends with the infomercial failures that flicker blue light into the morning’s small hours. He leaves out his aids and watches their soundless slapstick with a kind of fellow feeling, grateful when they soothe him into a shallow stream of sleep with promises that he too could fix all his problems for just seven monthly payments of $89.99.

Lucky the Pizza Dog is born on one of those nights.

Lucky the Pizza Dog, he lives outside of a walk-up in Brooklyn, and he sleeps in cardboard boxes and steals pizza from the trash. Clint’s no kind of artist so there’s no picture accompanying the spider-scratch story, but he pictures something big and dumb and friendly, like a Newfoundland or one of those golden Labs. He figures every good hero’s gotta have some kind of painful backstory, so he gives Lucky one eye and a heart that’s a dumbass, always choosing the wrong person to try following home. It’s nothing, it’s stupid, it’s something to fill in the empty hours and empty corners, but Lucky is substantial enough to weigh him down sometimes into sleep.

Lucky’s story ends happy, ‘cos all the best stories do. There’s an adorable pint-size that he calls Simone, and she feeds Lucky her dad’s pizza and in return he saves the pizzeria from robbers. The bad guys are led away in handcuffs and the good guys eat slices of heaven covered in melted cheese, and Lucky’s there in the middle of it all, dumbass grin on his scarred up face.

Clint kinda misses him, Lucky, when they’re done. It’s not something he really plans, but next time he goes out for groceries he buys a couple of notebooks and a pen that fits his hand pretty good.

Writing just becomes something he does around the edges of his life. Instead of Dog Cops re-runs and weekly clinking trips to the bottle bank, his apartment floor is covered in balls of screwed paper and the dried and chewed husks of pens. At least he knows now that it’s possible to intimidate information out of someone even when your tongue and chin are stained violently blue.

Clint settles into the closest thing to a functional routine he’s had in – maybe ever. He quits trying to sleep around 6, well before the sun struggles over the edge of the world, and consumes his body weight in coffee before scrawling down a few pages of whatever’s fresh in his mind. He’s never been a big reader but he knows enough to know that the vast majority of what he writes is shit; every now and again though he’s right on target and ragged-edged pages join the uneven pile on the kitchen counter. After anywhere from twenty minutes to a couple of hours the coffee wears off and finding words is like fighting through fog. After that it’s some combination of shower and shoot and shave, depending on which obligations are biting at his ass, and sometimes he stumbles over more words all unexpected, scribbles them down in the pad that fits neatly into the back pocket of his jeans.

It somehow makes the days pass a little easier, is all.

As much as it feels like it, the world hasn’t stopped moving around him while he’s been wallowing in the fog of exhaustion. Whatever tissue thin team had formed between them all when they were fighting against the Chitauri, the reality of being part of the Avengers Initiative is more like –

He’s not sure he has an appropriate analogy, here. He thinks maybe if he’d had the kind of childhood that had involved summer camps… one of those specialised ones for drama kids, all flourish and egos and seriously backward social skills. It’s not all that dissimilar to the circus, when he looks at it under a certain light; the fluorescent overheads that bleed all the color out of the SHIELD conference rooms aren’t it, though.

Clint spreads his fingers, just one finger braced against the conference table, his chair tipped backward on one of its four legs as he shifts his weight by degrees, looking for the sweet spot. Natasha’s watching him impassively, Tony’s doing something complicated with a tablet, Steve’s got a tiny frown between his eyebrows that tells Clint he’s doing everything he can to focus on Sitwell’s dry briefing. His frown deepens and he turns to scowl as Clint lets out a triumphant noise and carefully lifts his finger, balanced perfectly for all of five seconds before his chair crashes back onto all four legs, knocking against the table hard enough to screech it across the floor.

“Aaw, coffee,” he says, and Bruce – who’s lucky enough to be sat across from him – snatches his tablet away from the spreading puddle and scoots his chair back, muttering something under his breath in a language Clint doesn’t know.

“Barton,” Sitwell barks out, and for a second it’s familiar in a way that scrapes at Clint’s insides. Natasha doesn’t flinch, in a way Clint thinks only he can see; Clint has never had her level of restraint, and he’s flung himself out of his chair before anyone can react. He hauls the heavy door open and crashes through the nearest fire door, stumbling down concrete steps fast enough to excuse his racing heart, the way he can’t catch his breath.

He’s with it enough to remember to switch off his aids before he enters the range. SHIELD’s facilities cater for more than just handguns, naturally, and he heads for the longest lane available. The bow he picks out is the best that money can buy, weighty and unfamiliar, and it takes him a couple tries, sounding shots, before he’s got the exact amount it pulls him to the left. Then he loses himself in the draw and release, in the sharp sting of missing bracers, the thin impacts settling into a deep hot pain that spreads under his skin and makes everything else he’s feeling a little easier to ignore.

He’s bruised all to hell when Natasha finally shows up, standing just at the corner of his eye. He looses the tension on the bow’s string, letting the arrow lower to point at his feet. He forgets himself enough to expect platitudes for all of a second, bracing himself for the lie that Coulson wasn’t his fault; she glares and signs selfish instead, grasping motion abrupt and jerky enough to show how hard she means it.

Clint pushes the arrow he’s holding back into the quiver, abruptly exhausted and somehow stupidly grateful. She’s right, he shouldn’t have left her alone to do the professional thing; he apologises, the material of his shirt sweat-dampened against his curled fingers.

The room, when they get back to it, is emptier, seems bigger, nowhere to hide under the fluorescent white lights.

“I’m sorry.”

Of course, the rules of physics don’t apply when it’s someone like Captain America, and the lights wouldn’t dare do anything so unpatriotic as fade out the shirt that matches his eyes, which are wide and earnest and a little hard to look away from.

Nat responds, maybe – Rogers’ eyes flick to her – and Clint belatedly switches his ears back on and perches on the edge of the table, his arms folded across his chest, reluctant to be impressed.

Back when he was a kid, Clint’d had a comic book, battered and worn, that he took from one of the homes that’d taken both him and Barney. Five or six weeks, maybe. He thinks he remembers yellow curtains? It was one in a line, anyway, significant only for the hours he and his brother spent hunched over faded primary colors, Clint sounding out the letters that hovered above Barney’s ragged fingernail. It was full of exclamation marks and tales of unlikely odds, explosions and Nazis and unrealistically wholesome swears, and right on the back was a poorly copied picture of the Commandos, barely a blur of black and white. Cap was there with them, front and centre, wide beaming grin that got left back in the ‘40s, but Clint had always had eyes for the guy at his side, dark hair and sniper rifle and the curled up half-smile that faded newsprint couldn’t hide. (Took a few more years and a little experimentation to figure out why.) Either way, when home number 8 had ended in fists and fury and Barney’s blood mixing on his collar with Clint’s hitching tears, when somehow bright primary colors and exclamation marks on a poster had felt like it could be home, Clint watched Trickshot hit every damn thing he aimed at and thought that. That for me.

He… maybe got a little off the point there. All he’s saying is it’s a little hard feeling awed by someone when you’ve seen a poorly drawn cartoon of them get shot in the shoulder and then yell somethin’ about applesauce, that’s all.

“- your handler,” Rogers says, and Clint really didn’t think it’d be that quick, that he’d regret turning his ears back on so soon. He halfway raises his hand and Natasha grabs it without looking, pushing it back down against his chest.

“He was – a friend,” Natasha says, her voice the particular shade of monochrome that covers lost things.

“Know a bit about losing those,” Rogers says, and he’s like a broken window, the small faded smile on his face transparent and sharp and painful. It strikes Clint how young Steve is, in a way it somehow hadn’t before, and suddenly he sees why he’s been pushing so hard for the Avengers all this time. Why he’s kept calling them back in the face of Bruce’s calm distance, Tony’s snappy distraction, Clint and Tasha’s exclusive bubble of anger and grief.

He shoves himself back up to his feet and quirks his mouth into enough of a smile to pass.

“And as cheerful a subject as that is, Cap, maybe you could catch us up on –“ he glances back at Tasha as though asking for help and decides her expression is at least willing – “ what was it, Tash? Interdimensional tax codes?”

“Interorganization diplomatic protocol,” she says, dry, and Clint groans theatrically, pushing forward and grabbing Rogers by the shoulder to tug him around.

“Come on, Spangles,” he says, heading for the door. “For this, I’m gonna need coffee.”

*
Coffee somehow becomes something they do. Him and Tasha and Steve on steel-legged molded plastic chairs, dawn-lit and dark-eyed with fatigue, or middle of the night bright laughter bubbling like hysteria, or like this time, sunset stained, rubble-battered and bleeding.

Clint is, at least.

He finally gives in to Steve’s pointed nudging and grabs a handful of napkins, sticking them straight onto his forehead with cement-dust and drying blood. He figures the way they flop forward over his eye will be kind of rakish, like a pirate, but the half-guilty amusement on Steve’s face is letting on to the lie.

The three of them have a routine, after missions, of coffee and commiseration, usually in the form of companionable silence, so when the fourth chair at the table is dragged out with a screech Clint and Steve manage poorly at hiding their surprise.

“You know there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of this building,” Tony says, every kilo of his armor – so easily overlooked with his grace in the air – dropping into the chair with a crash. “There’s a Starbucks just about every four feet as you head down the block, too. There are, on this floor alone, at least seven state of the art coffeemakers, one of which costs more than Hawkeye here makes in a month.”

“There’s a point in here somewhere,” Clint says, “I just know it.”

Tony spreads his hands despairingly.

“Vending machine coffee?” He tugs off his helmet, slapping the faceplate closed and placing it at the head of the table like a weirdly creepy mascot. “Please tell me they’re Irish at least, or else I may have to disown you.”

“Hey,” Steve says, posture loose and voice easy. “This is about the only thing that tastes right, these days. And it’s the only thing you can still get with a quarter.”

“You know the great thing about time, Cap?” Tony says, running a gauntlet through his hair. “It’s how it keeps moving us further away from boiling as a valid food preparation choice.”

Steve’s mouth curls up at the corner. “Now that, I do not miss.”

“You know what?” Tony touches his fingers to his ear. “I’m calling this. Brucie baby?”

Clint’s still wearing his mission-ready BTE aids, comms built right into them, but Bruce’s sigh is world weary enough, loud enough that he maybe could’ve heard it from Tony’s earpiece without their help.

“I’d really prefer you didn’t –“

“We’re going out,” Tony tells him. “Coffee, donuts, possibly lobster, who knows where the night’s gonna take us. You in?”

“If I wake up in Maine again…” Steve says, vaguely threatening, and Clint turns to Natasha, delighted. Again?

“Lobby, fifteen minutes, wear something green,” Tony says, comms cutting off on the edges of Bruce’s groan. He beams around at them like a cruise director, and there’s a certain resignation in the way Steve pushes himself to his feet, like Tony’s a force of nature and he’s got no choice but to get swept along.

It’s a feeling Clint’s willing to get used to.

(No one wakes up in Maine, maybe. But Clint wakes up almost rested, tucked up in bed with a pizza and a street sign, his head barely aching at all. It feels like a good place to start.)

Chapter Text

In an apartment, Bed-Stuy

There's a sleepy guy

And an arrowhead of flint

To balance and flip and glint

And a lingering taste of mint,

And there's a belly button full of lint

(In spite of the shower

That lasted more than an hour.)

There's a pizza box on the table

That's propped on paper to keep it stable

And a cluster of arrows

And a quiver, long and narrow

And a pair of hearing aids

And at least one can of Raid

And a target and a coffee pot that is always kept hot

And the rusting remains of a killer robot.

Goodnight bot,

Goodnight pot,

(Though, in case, please stay hot)

Goodnight aids

Goodnight Raid

Goodnight selfie of Wade

Goodnight flint

Goodnight mint

Goodnight Clint and his lint

Goodnight stars

Goodnight moon

I’m sure sleep will come soon.

Goodnight Clint.

Goodnight, Clint.

(In the dark, his eyes glint.)

Chapter Text

It’s not like the team bonding fixes him. Next time he’s dragged out on mission he’s sleep-deprived and sore, the bags under his eyes complementing the deep purple of his bow. He’s grouchy and uncommunicative, slouches in the co-pilot’s seat like he’s got a personal vendetta against good posture, and Natasha puts up with it until halfway over Canada before she smacks him upside the head.

“Get your head in the game,” is all she tells him.

He scowls the scowl of the criminally underslept and pushes his boot against the underside of the control panel until he’s somewhere a little closer to upright. Scrubbing a hand over his dirty-blond hair, Clint yawns and flips open the cover of his tablet, scrolling aimlessly through mission parameters which apparently involve a possible HYDRA cell and some heat-forsaken town somewhere in Alaska. He wishes he’d brought another sweater.

The back of the quinjet is taken up by a SHIELD strike team, all dressed in black and the kind of stoic that’d make Hill proud. This is one of the missions he actually gets paid for, nothing imminent or otherworldly or potentially world-ending, and therefore in all likelihood nothing fun. Sitwell had even vetoed the new explosive arrows Stark wanted him to test – something about collateral damage, and Bruges, and officially Clint hadn’t even been there, so it’s not like SHIELD’s got a leg to stand on. Whatever. It’s another Hydra base that’ll end in another dead end, cold and abandoned and bare of anything even close to useful. He’s been doing this a while. He knows how it goes.

The view out in front of them is nothing but unchanging forest, dark and green and impenetrable, even for him. It’s the kind of forest they write stories about, the kind that has fairytale creatures hiding in it, the kind where everything comes back to bargains and blood.

They’d had a fortune teller back at the circus, ‘cos they never missed a trick when it came to separating people from their money. She’d had this whole spiel about darkest Romania, Transylvanian castles and wooden caravans, learning the secrets of her craft at her grandmother’s knee. For all the bullshit she shovelled in her patter she was Romanian, at least. She hailed from Bucharest, where she’d failed at being a singer before running away with a guy who turned out to be a real clown.

Half her stories were inappropriate for little kids’ ears, and Barney’d haul him out of her trailer whenever he crept inside. But firelight and an appreciative audience always brought out her best and she’d tell tales about princesses and peasants, the morning star and the evening star, and how you could always profit by telling the right lies.

Clint shifts his weight and fumbles at a pocket on the outside of his thigh, pulling out a bent notebook and cheap pen. He curls himself sideways so he can hook his knees over the arm rest, rest his notebook on his thighs, and lose himself for a little while in a world made of words.

By the time he thinks to look up again the light is fading out of the sky, what little there’d been there to begin with. A blanket of cloud picked out in shades of grey stretches across the whole of the horizon and promises to deliver snow before morning. He whines under his breath and gives a theatrical shiver; at least in this uniform he gets to have sleeves.

Natasha sets them down in a clearing between towering pines, the ground dusted with crystalline snow. Clint slings his bow over his shoulder and rams his hands into his pockets, trailing along behind the others and keeping a sharp eye on their surroundings. The pace is quick enough that he’s sweating lightly when Ashiq holds up her clenched fist, and he carries on a couple steps forward until he’s beside her at the top of the bluff, looking down at the huddled gray buildings.

“What’re we looking at?” she asks, low-voiced and sharp. Clint scans the area, trying not to resent how snug she looks in her hijab and silently cursing the cold his aids carry deep into his ears.

“Well it’s definitely Hydra,” he says, and Ashiq makes a face. He continues his scan, looking for anything – functioning vehicles, movement, misplaced glints of light – that’d suggest the base is still in use. “I’m guessing abandoned,” he concludes eventually, “but there’s something about those generators I really don’t like.”

“Well I guess your job can be to dislike them up close,” she says. “Romanoff, Chowdhry, circle around and in through the loading bay. I’ll take Park and Lovatt in through the front, Barton’ll be eyes above, and you three can scout the circumference and cover any exits we’re missing. Cookie’s got the jet.”

She’s answered by crisp, well-trained nods and Clint’s sloppy salute. She pinches the bridge of her nose and Clint grins. She’d been doing so well.

“Barton, do not blow anything up until we’ve got any intel there is left to salvage, are we clear?” Clint makes a theatrically wounded face then deflates when she just stares him down.

“Crystalline,” he says. “Although I seriously do not know where these rumors get started.”

“Bruges,” Chowdhry says helpfully.

“Bologne,” Lovatt chimes in.

“Hey,” Clint insists, “that one wasn’t my –“

“Baranquilla,” Cookie rumbles.

“Okay, maybe that –“

“Budapest,” Natasha says, pointed, and Clint grimaces.

“Not like Sitwell let me bring the explosives anyway,” he says.

“Move out.”

Ashiq and her black-clad team head off in the directions indicated, Tasha moving at twice the speed and half the volume. Clint slings his bow across his back and jogs along just below the ridge, ‘cos even if the base is abandoned the habit of not silhouetting himself against any kind of skyline is way too embedded to break. There’s silence on the comms and whatever wildlife there is is too low for Clint’s aids to pick up, so he’s only accompanied by the rhythmic thump of his boots against pine-needle carpeted dirt. It takes him five minutes to circle the base, set himself up at the treeline overlooking the back of the dull gray buildings.
Whatever the generators are powering it has to be something big, and considering some of the shit they’ve found in bases like this it is not a comforting thought.

“In position,” he says, tapping his comms.

“Acknowledged.”

Ugh. Clint misses Tony’s unrelenting prattle.

Ugh. Clint misses Tony.

Patience is a funny thing. It stretches like elastic. Clint can barely keep still waiting for coffee to filter, gets exasperated when the subway takes too long, but waiting for a shot is its own kind of zen. He listens as the groups sound off, Lovatt swearing creatively at the electronic locks that resist her hacking efforts a little too long.

“We’re in,” Natasha says, brusque. Clint watches the wind in the treetops opposite, calculating angles.

“Stay on this level, Romanoff. We’re going down.”

There’s silence for a while longer. A mission like this, Clint had forgotten he should be in favour of silence. It’s broken eventually by Chowdhry’s voice, sounding more than a little freaked out.

“Okay so we found computers? And also there’s some kind of – like – evil dentist’s chair.”

“Tautology,” Cookie says. “All dentists are evil.”

“Well this one was pretty freaking – there are restraints and – some kind of like face-ma–“

Natasha swears in Russian, harsh in Clint’s ear. “The descriptions can wait,” she snaps. Her voice is tightly controlled and it makes the hair stand up on the back of Clint’s neck.

“Tasha?”

“Cut the chatter,” Ashiq says. “Lovatt, get that damned door open.” Clint scowls down at the generators but falls silent. Over his earbud he can faintly hear the clatter of keys – Tasha’s left her line open, something that she only does when something’s seriously upset her. She mutters under her breath, something Clint can’t make out, but the sound in itself is reassuring. Less reassuring is the gentle purr of something that could be the wind picking up, but sounds a hell of a lot more like –

“We’ve got incoming,” Clint says, low and urgent, sharp eyes tracking the jeep that’s bouncing over the uneven track on the opposite side of the valley from his position. “You’ve got maybe three minutes before they see you running, six before they’re on your asses.”

“Couldn’t have warned us a little earlier, Hawkeye?”

“We’re in a fucking forest,” Clint tells Park sourly. He stands and pulls an arrow out of his quiver, eyes the treetops, breathes slow and steady through his mouth. “In case –“ draw, “- you forgot.” Release.

The jeep swerves, the fender clipping the crash barrier before it spins back around to the left, coming to a halt facing back the way they’d come.

“Well,” Clint says, “they definitely know we’re here, now. On the plus side, you can add a few more minutes.”

“Good work, Barton,” Ashiq says. “Romanoff, how –“

“Two more minutes,” she snaps out.

“Can I blow up the chair?” Chowdhry asks into the silence that follows.

“Should I engage?” Cookie cuts in.

“Cookie, that’s a negative. Stay put. Chowdhry, we haven’t got time to –“

“We’ve got a minute and a half,” he says, “and this thing is fucking evil.”

“Destroy it.” It’s not Ashiq, and it takes Clint a second to identify the vicious tone as Natasha.

Men are scrambling out of the useless jeep now, and Clint watches the body language when they see the arrow in the front tire with a sharp kind of amusement. He taps at the controls of his quiver, pulling out a putty arrow and taking careful aim at a pair of black-uniformed assholes who are sticking a little too close together as they scramble down towards the base.

“Four minutes,” Clint says, as the two slam onto their faces on the shale. “Two down, six incoming.”

“Taylor, Goldman, engage,” Ashiq snaps out, rapid-fire. “Murphy get inside, head to Romanoff’s position, and if you see them wasting any time with that fucking chair shoot them.”

The rattle of semi-automatics reaches Clint and he switches focus, giving up on the men flitting through the damn trees and focusing instead on the door that slams open, Ashiq, Park and Lovatt stumbling through it.

“Done,” Natasha snaps over the comms, and a minute after that she, Chowdhry and Murphy are haring out of the loading bay, circling around to join the fight as there’s the low thud of a distant explosion from somewhere deep inside the base.

Clint takes out two more Hydra agents with a carefully placed taser arrow, and Taylor and Goldman have accounted for at least one of the others.

“Barton,” Ashiq says, breathless, “generators.”

“Overkill?” he asks, reaching for another taser.

“Fuck ‘em,” she says.

He’s not going to lie – it is seriously satisfying to hit the fuel line on the first try, the first generator going up with a flash and a peal of thunderous noise, followed quickly by the other. The poor show of force might suggest this place isn’t exactly strategically central to Hydra’s current plan, but at least this head has been thoroughly cut –

The thump of heavy rotors cuts off the thought before it can even finish forming. “Fuck!” he yells, swinging around, fumbling for an arrow and cursing Sitwell’s fucking anal retentive heart, “incoming!”

“Thanks, Barton,” Murphy yells hoarsely, “like we couldn’t’ve –“

He’s cut off with a gunshot, with a surprised sounding grunt that skates ice down the line of Clint’s spine. Clint cools, and hardens, even as Ashiq’s ordering them to fall back to the jet, leave him, leave him, he’s fucking gone, and he narrows his eyes and puts an arrow into the engine intake, slinging his bow over his shoulder and heading for the clearing even as the helicopter’s turbine grinds and tears itself apart behind him.

It’s not the only thing. As the ‘jet takes off, as Clint curls into the co-pilot seat and flexes his hand to get some warmth back, a plume of final fiery defiance blooms from the wreckage of the base they’ve left behind. It takes out the all but the last of the generators, setting off pathetically inadequate fire suppressant systems and triggering any fail-safes that remain to be triggered. Unused doors clunk open, unheard alarms echo in empty rooms; something, alone in the darkness, wakes.

*

Clint follows Natasha home like a lost dog, after debriefings and angry meetings and five targets that he’s utterly wrecked. They don’t travel together, but she’s not unaware of him; it doesn’t stop her letting out a sigh when he appears at her side at the door.

“Tonight, then.” There’s a period at the end of it, end of an era for at least this little while, and he gets why when he walks into her bedroom. She’d never fit into the jeans that are slung over the back of her wingback armchair, and the shirt she pulls on to sleep in isn’t her own. It makes him grin and bite down against the impulse for poorly judged jokes. Clint shuffles out of his work boots and cargos, climbs into her oversized, sinfully comfortable bed, and curls himself carefully around her. She smells unlike herself, gently of cedar and orange, and Clint hopes to hell that the guy treats her right. Body disposal ain’t the piece of cake it used to be.

The gentle swell of Tasha’s breathing has soothed him more nights than he’d care to take a guess at, but she’s always been a cat person and sleep’s curled up with Liho, as far away from Clint as it can get. He makes himself tea in the empty hours of the night and lets it cool at his side, perched on the window seat and writing by the gentle orange light that spills in from the street. He’ll ruin his eyes with the light, he remembers someone’s grandmother telling him that once, but every now and again that feels like it’d be a blessing.

The window seat he’s curled up on is covered with throw pillows and stuffed full of weapons, and maybe that’s what inspires him to write about someone new. A spider, ‘cos he’s not subtle, who works busily in the darkness and builds her webs and catches her flies, only no one sees the beauty and the use of what she can do. She gets chased out of home after home, her simple spider life and her beautiful spider webs pulled apart over and over, but she keeps right on building and catching and helping, even if that’s not the way people see it. People, Clint’s learned, don’t always see things the right way.

When the sun’s coming up, stretching gently warm fingers through Clint’s hair, the spider’s found a place for herself in the corner of a pantry full of jellies and jams and preserving, and the old lady who lives there – who has one eye, turns out in writing, and Clint’s maybe a little worried about his relationship with Fury – lets the spider stay, praises her beautiful webs, appreciates all the things she can do.

Clint has no clue if his story’s any good, but it feels right. He kinda likes it. He likes more that Tasha stays sleeping, feels safe, when he pulls on his clothes and heads out into the dawning morning, leaving her scribbled story for her to see when she wakes.

Chapter Text

Clint’s dog book is gone.

Clint wants it back.

Kate sits in a café. Has she seen Lucky?

No. I haven’t seen Lucky.

Okay. Thank you anyway.

Natasha comes to find him searching halfway under the bed.

Has Natasha seen Lucky?

No. I haven’t seen any piles of paper around here.

Okay. Thank you anyway.

Tony comes over to persuade him to move to the tower, same as he always does. Has he seen Lucky?

No. I have not seen a pile of paper, why are you asking me? I have many more important piles of paper to keep track of, why would I interfere with yours? I am far too busy and important to know where your piles of paper are.

Okay. Thank you anyway.

Simone is surrounded by yelling children. Has she seen Clint’s book?

No, Clint, I haven’t seen your book. And it’s really not the time. I’m trying to get these little monsters fed.

Clint offers to buy her pizza. It goes down well. While Simone’s bundling away the empty boxes, Clint tells the little monsters all about Lucky. Simone would be very happy to have Clint come back and tell stories any time he can.

Steve is sitting in the tower, drawing in a sketch book. Clint asks him about books, in general, because Steve can really draw and Clint has a silly hobby that’s probably not worth his time.

No, I haven’t seen any books, Tony’s strictly digital.

Okay. Thank you anyway.

Clint scuffs along the sidewalk, back to meet Kate. Nobody has seen his book. What if he’s lost it for good? What if Lucky’s gone? Even an imaginary dog is better than –

Wait. What is that sound? That whining, scuffling, whimpering, scrabbling sound?

Clint has found a dog! A flea-bitten, mangy, underfed, shivering dog that he hides inside his jacket all the way home. Clint loves dogs.

(He still hopes Lucky will come back.)