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Okay, thought Clint, this looks bad. This looks very bad. And it smells worse. He shifted his stance in the dark, trying to find a footing that wasn't so unpleasantly soft, and did his best to ignore whatever was trickling down between his shoulder blades.
Being scrambled to deal with an alien invasion of Greenwich at such short notice there wasn't even time to pick up a change of socks had been bad enough. (Not that he'd had a spare pair of clean socks, but that wasn't the point.) Worse had been discovering that not only had Thor's girlfriend already dealt with the problem by the time they landed, but that this was the same girlfriend whose life's work he'd helped to steal a couple of years back in New Mexico. And even though they'd given it back she was now understandably reluctant to cooperate with SHIELD.
They'd mopped up and debriefed as best they could under the circumstances, but then while the rest of the team had been allowed to drift back across the Atlantic he had been assigned to that wild goose chase in Helsinki which left him best positioned to be recalled to London for a monster hunt in a sewer. It was missions like this that made him wonder what life would have been like if he'd stayed in the circus.
It had been an urban legend at first, a monster living in London's sewers that came out at night to maul foxes and get spotted by the drunk and the officially unreliable - homeless people, a group of newly arrived Romanian laborers who ran to the nearest church, begging admittance in what little English they had, a gaggle of youths from Hounslow who'd loaded up on supermarket vodka on the way to save on Zone One drinks prices. It was only when a young insurance broker from the home counties managed to produce not only an infected claw wound, but six shaky seconds of mobile phone footage, that SHIELD was forced to admit that in this new world of gods and aliens it no longer had the luxury of not taking these things seriously.
It had been a joke at first among his team, a kaiju hunt Wing called it. And then everything had all gone to hell when the creature got the jump on them and bit Knight's goddamned arm clean off. And in the screaming and shouting and the volley of bullets Knight was still pumping into the creature left-handed even as Aziz was wrestling a tourniquet around the spurting stump he'd aborted the mission. And they'd fumbled and splashed their way out, Clint yelling at everyone not be a goddamned hero, then only gone and done it himself when he saw the chance of a shot as they evacuated. Joke was on him, he'd lost his team and lost his quarry and now he had no idea where he was in this stinking sewer.
He was also pretty sure he had toilet paper in his boot.
A noise from further down the tunnel made him freeze. Nocking an arrow he crept forward, planting each foot with care in the foul water to avoid making a sound.
"Hold on, the wire's come loose again. Put your thumb there while I tape it up."
Even hyped as he was, Clint was pretty sure that that wasn't the sound of an alien monster left behind after the Convergence. "Hello?" he called.
"Agent Barton?"
"Thor?!"
"Well met my friend!" Thor strode up to him and clasped his hand warmly. The woman with him had been surprised in the act of biting through a piece of Duck Tape, and he had to give anyone willing to put anything in their mouth down here credit for bravery. He stepped forward to help her with her hair, which was caught on the tape, and realized with a start that she was Doctor Foster.
"What are you doing down here?"
"I could ask you the same thing." she grunted, pulling the tape and quite a large clump of hair free with a jerk that had to have hurt.
"I'm hunting some sort of monster that got left behind after the Convergence, it seems to have holed up down here."
"With a bow and arrow?" asked Jane skeptically.
"He wields it with great skill, such that in his hands it is a mighty weapon indeed." explained Thor. "It seems our quest are the same, friend Clint, for we also seek the Jotunbeast!"
"You and...her?" Jane scowled at him.
"Indeed! The Lady Jane has constructed a device with which to detect the signature left upon the beast by its transport between realms. She is most skilled in such arts." said Thor with a proud smile.
"You can track it underground? With that?" Clint pointed at what appeared to be a taped-up margarine tub with wires sticking out and an LCD screen on top.
"The frequency I'm using goes straight through rock." she said coldly.
"And then Thor steps in and kills it?"
"No, friend Clint, I plan to capture it and deliver it to Asgard. Jotunbeasts are extremely valuable beasts of burden."
"You're kidding me! That thing's dangerous! It attacked my team, bit off Knight's arm!"
"Indeed? The knight if whom you speak survived?"
"She should yeah, the team got her out."
"It is a grievous wound indeed for a warrior, but I am sure she shall have heroic tales to tell of this day. Likely you frightened it, a jotunbeast small enough to fit in these tunnels is not yet fully grown." He gestured expansively at the twenty foot high ceiling. Clint gulped.
"What, what will you do with it? When you catch it?"
"Harnessed with a breathing device they are most useful for transport in space."
"You use these creatures in space?! Why?"
"Because horses would freeze to death." said Thor, with the reluctant air of one about to embarrass someone by stating the obvious.
"So what, you're going to take it back to Asgard or something? Because I was planning on getting confirmation of kill, for SHIELD's files."
"Yes you would want that wouldn't you." muttered Jane.
"Don't look at me like I want to murder a space puppy! It ate Knight's arm! Like, her whole arm! Right up to the shoulder!"
"And we shall ensure no more of Midgard's good people will come to harm by catching it ere it attacks again. Have the location of its den yet Jane?"
"Almost got it." she said, smacking the detector. "I just need to get this damn wire to stay in place. I wish we had more light."
As Clint fumbled for a flashlight Thor raised his hand. A glowing orb of blinding white light formed above his palm and drifted towards Jane.
"Oh my god Thor, is that ball lightning?" she squealed.
"I believe it is so known on your world, yes."
"That's amazing! I didn't know you could do that!"
"Had I known it would be so pleasing to you I would have done so earlier."
"Wow! I can't wait to see you do that in the lab! What's it made of? Is it a plasma? A stable electromagnetic field? How are you holding it in position?"
"I am not entirely sure that I know the correct words in your language." Or even in Allspeak he thought to himself, suddenly wishing he had paid more attention to his tutors. "Perhaps I could show you the appropriate texts in the Great Library sometime?"
"Oh yes!" Clint looked away awkwardly and wondered if these people had noses while Thor and Jane kissed passionately for longer than should have been physically possible.
"Uh, the monster?" he muttered apologetically at last.
"Two hundred and seventy six meters that way." said Jane, pointing behind her to avoid breaking eye contact with Thor.
"Great. And are we lost or do we know where we are?"
"I can feel the shape, the energy of the air currents above us as they flow over land and water, the vortices of magma beneath our feet. I cannot be lost in this realm." said Thor, also apparently unable to tear his eyes away form Jane.
"So let me get this straight, Doctor Foster knows where the, uh, jotunbeast is, and Thor knows where we are in a general, geographical sort of sense, but neither of you actually know the way out of here?"
Thor shrugged. "I am sure it will not be a problem."
"Let's just find it first. It's that way." said Jane, pointing at the tunnel wall.
The lightning ball disappeared, leaving Clint temporarily blinded as his eyes readapted to the gloom. There was an echoing crash. By the time Clint could see again Thor had vanished through the hole that had appeared in the wall.
"You can't just go around knocking holes in, in London! What if more London falls on top of us?"
Jane rolled her eyes at him. "He was careful."
"How is that careful?"
"He didn't use Mjolnir. Anyway nothing's fallen down so far when he did that."
"Wait, how many walls have you guys gone through so far?!"
Jane just gave him a look that said "jackbooted thug" as clearly as words could have done and stepped through the hole in the wall. Clint spent a moment considering, but eventually decided that if he was going to be trapped down here by a cave in he'd rather be trapped with the guy who could punch his way out. He ducked through the hole and caught up with her.
"You don't like me do you?"
Doctor Foster sighed. "SHIELD stole my life's work Agent Barton."
"We gave it back."
"You gave it back because it seemed expedient to maintain friendly diplomatic relations with my boyfriend. How many other researchers who didn't know a Prince of Asgard have you done this to, I wonder? How many of them got their research back?"
A treacherous image flashed across Clint's mind of the vast vaults at the Hub, crammed with information that was judged too dangerous to be shared. "For what it's worth, I'm very sorry."
"Are you really Agent Barton? Sorry implies that you wouldn't do it again, but it's your job isn't it? You're given orders and you don't question them, you follow them."
Clint looked away so she didn't see his face as he remembered the ecstasy of absolute certainty, the knowledge that what he was doing was both necessary and right, cold blue fire searing away every last trace of doubt.
Doctor Foster noticed his hesitation, misinterpreted it. "You don't need to answer that, we both know what the truth is." She stepped closer, looked directly into his eyes. "Did you know SHIELD tried to recruit me?"
"No, I don't get involved in intake." As a rule anyway. Budapest had been an exception.
She shook her head. "No, before New Mexico. Dual major in astrophysics and theoretical physics, I graduated top of my year in both. Two guys in suits were waiting in my dorm room, told me about this SHIELD science academy with almost unlimited funding where the best and the brightest - and yes they actually used those words - were building incredible clean energy machines, turning physics upside down by examining alien tech, shining light into the darkest corners of the universe."
"And?"
"And I asked them where the papers were, where these machines were. They said there were some things humanity as a whole wasn't ready to know. So I laughed at them, asked them who they thought they were to decide what I, what we could handle knowing, how dare they decide what knowledge should be shared. I'm a woman in theoretical physics Agent Barton, they may have been the scariest people to tell me what they thought I could cope with but they certainly weren't the first people to think they were entitled to decide what I could cope with, for my own good. So I told them no, I mean people said I was brave facing the Destroyer but at that moment I genuinely thought they were going to kill me or make me disappear."
She paused for breath, still glaring at him. "Instead they thanked me for my time and left. And I went out there and struggled for funding and peeled back a few layers of the mysteries of spacetime with my little theorem and I published it all in Open Access journals because that knowledge belongs to everyone. And I never regretted it, not once, not even when my equipment was held together with Duck Tape and I was living out of an RV eating breakfast cereal to afford kernel time. And then SHIELD showed up again and tried to take it all away."
She paused, choosing her words carefully. "So in answer to your question Agent Barton, no I don't like you, but Thor does so I'm prepared to be civil."
Clint swallowed. "I can respect that."
"Then we can work together." She strode ahead to join Thor. Clint followed awkwardly.
"I'll take point." he offered.
"As you wish."
"Careful, it's deep here."
Thor simply scooped Jane up in one arm. That's how she's still so clean, thought Clint grumpily to himself, then noticed that somehow Thor's cloak still seemed to be clean too. He felt a stab of jealousy and briefly wished he'd shot him while he had the chance.
The tunnel widened and sloped down as they progressed, Jane occasionally consulting her detector and gesturing them on. As they reached a bend Clint became aware of another noise over the steady drip and splash of water. He raised a hand to signal them to wait and crept forward.
The monstrous bulk of the jotunbeast squatted hunched in the gloom. The wounds from Knight's bullets on its shoulder didn't seem to be causing it any obvious distress. It was gnawing on something Clint really hoped wasn't her arm. He slipped back, answering Thor's questioning look with a nod. The warrior motioned Jane to stay back and pulled a glittering silver chain from a pouch in his belt that didn't look strong enough to restrain a kitten.
The fight was over surprisingly quickly. The beast barely realized what was happening before Thor had restrained it with the chain, which unfolded into some sort of improbably delicate meshwork muzzle. To Clint's annoyance his cloak was still clean after the brief struggle too.
Conveniently the passageway ended in an emergency storm drain leading out to the Thames. Clint gulped lungful after lungful of the still night air, which may have been the most polluted in Europe but mercifully still smelled better than the sewer. The embankments were oddly empty, but that fortunately meant Thor had no audience as he strode knee-deep into the river, leading the beast behind him. He let go of the harness as the shimmering lights of the BiFrost engulfed the creature; apparently handling an unrestrained, angry and sewage-covered jotunbeast was all in a day's work for the BiFrost's guardian.
Clint's phone vibrated angrily in his pocket as it picked up a signal and received a dozen text messages in quick succession. There was one text from a number he didn't recognize. "Knight stable. SHIELD compromised, don't check in. This is a burner. Wing." There were also a number of increasingly frantic texts from Natasha that started out guarded and coded and eventually descended to "Where the fuck are you?" and an order to find a TV.
"I've got one from Darcy telling me to find a TV too. What's going on?" asked Jane.
"I guess we have to find a TV to find out."
Jane pointed to a nearby pub sign. "Sports bar! They should have one!"
They did, and the pub goers were too transfixed by it to notice the arrival of three new people, one of whom was wearing armor and all of whom smelled of sewer. On screen helicarriers plummeted into the Potomac while DC smoldered. Thor tightened his grip on Mjolnir and shot Clint a questioning glance.
"Okay." he gulped. "This looks bad."