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Help .
Clint blinked and scrubbed at his eyes. He refocused on the quadrangle a quarter mile off and resolutely ignored his peripherals.
Please help . Sweat ran down the side of his face. Help . Help. Help help.
“Fuuuuuuck,” Clint groaned to himself.
Please help. The signing was somewhat sloppy but the meaning was unmistakable. The guy signing was in a little alleyway in a nook invisible from the street but entirely within Clint’s field of view from above. He looked rough like maybe he’d been beaten senseless a few times, and though he wore dark pants they seemed stained wet with something, probably blood.
Clint’s target wasn’t in sight but he could very well lose his shot if he left his perch. Please please please please.
“Oh my god, fuck.” Clint put away his bow, packed his things in a few familiar movements, and skittered down the back stairs. The guy’s alley was nearby but not close , and it took him ten minutes to find it, and then the guy.
Please help , the guy signed again, mouthing the words and fuck this was not Clint’s job and this guy was definitely a player but he’d come down here and he wasn’t going to leave this half done.
“Why me,” Clint muttered as he approached.
“Nobody else to turn to,” the guy said.
“Yes, fine, I’m here. I’ll help.” The guy had been worked over; his face was kinda messed up and his breathing was shallow. The leg was bad times, though - soaked through with blood enough the guy’s skin was pallid. “You got folks after you still? People I need to keep an eye out for?”
He shrugged, winced, and paled even further. “Don’t think so but I can’t be sure.” He wore a dress shirt and slacks and marks around his throat said he had not so recently been choked with his own tie.
“This is such a shitty idea,” Clint told himself as he went to help the guy up. “You are such a shit,” he told the guy, and got his arm around and under his shoulders. He nearly passed out while being dragged to his feet but was surprisingly helpful during the stumble to Clint’s hidey hole for being basically unconscious.
“How did you even know I was up there?” Clint asked as he dragged the other man into his room. He didn’t particularly expect a response but the guy kind of lolled against him more firmly.
“Didn’t. But I had a feeling you were on the field. Didn’t have anyone else who wasn’t out to kill me.”
Clint lay him on the bed, propped up his legs with a gear bag, and went to lay out the first aid kit. Clint wasn’t a veteran to the whole assassin for hire bit, but he’d learned early on the importance of being well prepared for anything. He’d acquired a military-grade med kit at the first opportunity, and from it he pulled blunt-ended scissors, antiseptic, expanding wound-blood-stoppey foam cement, and bandages.
“Who are you with?” Clint asked, but the guy had passed out.
He cut off his pant leg and got the - as suspected - bullet wound to stop bleeding. There were no other bloody holes that he could see, so he doused the cuts and abrasions with antiseptic and called it a day. An afternoon. “Oh my god why am I doing this?” he asked the unconscious guy as he wrapped bandage around his calf. The guy didn’t respond. He was unconscious but his heart rate wasn’t either super fast or super slow, and Clint was no fancy doctor to put in IV fluids so he was done.
Clint searched Mr. Probably-a-spy’s pockets but found no identification. He had no jewelry and no watch. His shoes were expensive - probably custom - but Clint didn’t know fashion and they didn’t say much but ‘fancy’ to him. He had an honest-to-god no-shit Captain America tattoo over his heart but beyond that his skin was clean of anything but scars.
He could sit and watch this guy be unconscious, or he could go maybe make sure his reputation and income didn’t collapse. He had already been super helpful what with taking the guy in and keeping him from bleeding out and giving up the secrecy of his secret safe spot for the sake of a rando begging for help in an alleyway. Not even a rando - probably a spy or assassin or something. Ugh. Why did he do this to himself?
Clint changed into clothes free of blood, put a line of electrolyte drinks next to the guy’s head, grabbed his bag, and left.
--
Clint resettled in his nest and watched for a little over an hour before deciding that no, it wasn't in his head - something was weird down there. Guard rotations were normal but movements within the building were… not happening.
A few ill-advised rooftop-to-rooftop jumps, a grappling arrow and rope, and a twilight climb through the air later and Clint got an answer as to why there was no longer movement taking place in the building’s secured floors.
Everyone was fucking dead. Like, six dudes over two floors were dead. Clint’s mark was dead. Clint debated for a moment before shooting an arrow through the corpse at short range - no reason to not get paid just because he didn’t technically do the deed himself. At the epicenter of the destruction was what was clearly identifiable as a torture/interrogation room. The last dead fella was in there - he had taken a blow to the throat severe enough to eventually swell up and choke him to death. Brutal.
On the table beside the interrogation restraints was a wallet and a badge, a phone, and a watch. The first item in the wallet was an ID with a picture of the guy in his safe house. “Sure, seems legit,” Clint muttered to himself. He scooped up the items and crept out the way he’d entered.
When he returned to his safe house the guy was conscious, had drunk all of the electrolyte drinks and only spilled some of the blue liquid on his pillow.
Thank you , the guy signed, wearily.
“Okay what’s with the signing?” Clint demanded and his stupid traitor hands followed along with the words out of his mouth.
“Sorry, I wasn’t sure...”
Clint narrowed his eyes, suspicion building. “What the fuck - you knew I was the one up there? How did you- Are you stalking me? How is this fucking possible?”
“I knew you had been hired for a job in the region; I figured my target and yours might be the same one.” The guy spoke in short bursts on half-drawn breaths.
“What are you - a fanboy? A rival?”
“It doesn’t matter. I need to contact my people.”
Clint rolled his eyes and dropped the guy’s stuff on his stomach. The guy made a high whine of animal pain and turned white. “Fuck, sorry, sorry. What’s the matter?”
“Cracked ribs - not broken I don’t think.”
“Oh fuck, sorry man.” The tone came out wrong, and the guy looked at Clint like he wanted to ballslap him more than a bit. “You want help wrapping up?”
Clint helped him wrap his ribs, let him call ‘his people’, and even helped him get across town to the pickup location on his bum leg. Clint was a goddamned saint.
--
The second time Mr. Definitely-a-spy fell into Clint’s lap was more of a collision than a rescue on Clint’s part. Clint had maybe not picked out his employers with many criteria beyond “I think they have the money” and “they want to give me the money to do something shady” and he maybe should have done a little more checking, but he was an assassin not a spy .
So he’d gone to get info about his job and the fat pile of cash promised and they maybe - surprise surprise - were actually terrible humans who were also evil and also weren’t interested in handing over fat stacks of cash. They were in fact interested in interrogating him for a while about a previous job and following that up with some light torture.
Which… Not that Clint was particularly proud of his life history, but Clint knew enough to know that these guys were not great at the torture. They seemed to be in the “psychological torture is the coolest torture” camp, and they told him all sorts of things they would do to him soon but not right now, except they did that after they’d thoroughly busted his hearing aids. So while burly intimidating guy #1 pantomimed stuffing a sausage with his entire fist, and creepy intimidating guy #2 did his best Silence of the Lambs impression, Clint with his janked up hearing and his maybe-a-concussion couldn’t really be fucked to get scared about anything.
They were either overconfident or overcrowded, because a few hours later another dude got thrown into his cell too. And wouldn’t you know it, it was Mr. Leg Wound himself. He looked considerably less roughed up than the last time Clint had seen him. This time he wore only an undershirt, boxer briefs, and dress socks. Apparently they didn’t trust the guy to keep his pants, or he’d been caught flagrant delectable with someone in the organization.
The leg wound had healed to a dimpled pucker at entry and some surgical scars where they’d gotten the bullet out and sewn him back together.
“Man what the fuck?” Clint said, feeling tired and overwhelmed and a bit nauseous.
The guy said something but Clint didn’t catch it. “They fucked up my ears,” Clint said, and signed ‘deaf’ at the same time. The guy’s brows came together in understanding and he nodded.
Sorry , he signed.
“What happened to your pants?” CLINT still had his pants. Why did this guy warrant pantsing?
The guy looked like he was trying to come up with some signs, but eventually shrugged, waved his pointer finger around at their surroundings, and raised his hands in a ‘who the fuck knows’ gesture.
Clint flopped back against his cell wall and sighed.
OK? the guy signed.
“Yeah, man. Just…” Clint sighed again. “Yeah.”
The guy nodded, pointed to himself, then Clint, then out?
“You don’t even have shoes - how are you planning to escape? Who the hell are you anyway?”
He pointed at himself and laboriously spelled out P H I L.
“Phil,” Clint repeated. The guy nodded enthusiastically. “I’m Clint.”
“I know,” the guy replied with obvious enough mouth movements that lipreading was simple.
“That’s creepy.”
Phil shrugged, waited a moment, and signed out again.
“Sure. I’m down for out.”
And they did. At one point Mr. Pants-off Spy Phil even tossed Clint an empty gun and Clint straight up beaned a guy with it so hard he went down in one go. It was awesome.
THEY were awesome. Which kinda pissed Clint off, because hello , lone wolf. Because Clint had watched enough Dr. Phil (ugh Phil) to know he had trust issues and was like the anti-team player. And him and not-Dr. Phil? They worked together great. They were like…
Clint leapt up, grabbed a fire-control system pipe and like, levered himself up into the little transom window over a locked door, smashing feet-first through it. When he let Phil through after him and saw the other man’s crooked, kinda dopey smile it lit him up in a place long dark right below his heart.
Let’s go Phil signed, and they both seemed to be trash fires but together, they were a goddamned conflagration.
They went their separate ways after blowing those shitballs to hell, but it was not so easy to get his mind away from the enigmatic pantsless spy.
The preoccupation was not helped when Clint found a business card in his jeans pocket from Phil the spy. Like it legitimately said “Phil Coulson” and it didn’t say anything like “super spy” or “intelligence operative” but Clint knew. How the fuck did that guy slip him a card? Where the fuck did he keep this card with no pants, no shirt, no nothing? What the fuck.
And it had a phone number. And Clint maybe got a bit drunk and he maybe called it. And that was maybe the most positive life-changing thing he ever did for himself.
“Hello?”
“How DID you lose your pants, man?”
He heard a huffed laugh. “You got your ears back online I see?”
“We’re not asking questions about me, Phil.”