Work Text:
“JARVIS, adjust the circuit load on the fifth and sixth relays.”
“Circuit loads decreased by 1.7%,” the AI said in that even, perfect, calming tone it used at times like this. Tony knew—because he’d programed the damn thing—that it was picking up on stressors in his voice and diction, gauging his mood based on known and quantified rubrics, and responding using an extensive preprogrammed library of actions. Didn’t make him appreciate any less the effort JARVIS was going to to be gentle.
He activated the electric engine, looking at it as it sat, foreign, in the nest of the Harley’s block box. He’d gutted the original innards with brutal determination when he’d walked in the door eight hours ago, trying to lose himself in something he could understand. Something he knew he could fix. Machines were soothing. Infinitely simpler than people—machines could be taken apart and rebuilt, after all.
Shards of glass, of concrete, of metal. A body among the chewed up wreckage of what used to be a factory…
“Medical is on the way. Hold on.”
Tony shook his head hard, feeling the pain catch on the stitches in his hair before it flared through his neck. He flexed his sore hands against a chill that he knew was purely psychological. He hurt just about everywhere, in fact, but it was muted by painkillers and a pervasive numbness. He ignored it, noticing instead how the tiny dynamo he’d built was dwarfed by the space in the motorcycle that was made to house a combustion engine. Like a single, frail body in a nest of destruction.
Stop, he told himself sharply. He studied the engine, trying to hold all the rest of it at bay. He supposed he should be flashing back to being eaten out of his suit—or maybe dropping two floors when it gave up on him. But he was caught in the loop of his failure, eating him from the inside.
As soon as the dust cleared, Tony started looking. But the others were just...
Gone. The engine was gone. He needed to rebuild. He couldn’t find his focus, though. He couldn’t think in any kind of order...
“Stark, what’s happening?”
“It can’t keep up with them. Jesus, where are they all coming from?”
He tried to concentrate on the engine. Engines were simple. He knew better than anyone that computers were complicated and smart. Engines were stupid. Easy. They didn’t reason and think and swarm and attack... He adjusted the torque on the tertiary cylinder.
“I don’t think anyone expected this to be easy, did they?” he’d asked, responding to a gripe from Clint that he wished he remembered. So God damned flippant.
“Doesn’t sound like us, no,” Steve had replied, a smile in his voice. That hadn't lasted long, had it?
“Now?” He looked up at the readout displayed in the air in front of him. Still no good. Efficiency was less than 120 cycles. That wouldn’t give the damn thing a top speed of much more than 150 mph. Not that any normal person would want more than that, but this was not an engine for a normal person. Tony pulled the main controller board and turned to the worktable beside him, grabbing a soldering iron and a length of wire to bridge one of the circuits. Maybe he could bypass the damn thing.
“We disrupt the signals passing between them.” He'd been sure of himself, but not too sure. “Upset the hive mind.” Not sure enough.
“They’re coming, Cap. I count… a whole lot.” Clint had grossly underestimated.
“All right. Tony? Are you sure this is going to work?”
“No.”
Maybe if Thor had been there, he could have just fried them all at the same time. God, had anyone even thought to try to get in touch with him yet? Tony didn’t know where he was, exactly. The message would have to go through Heimdall on Asgard. Hell, Heimdall probably already knew…. Stop.
He sat back after long moments, replacing the board and moving out of the way of the sensors to give JARVIS room to check the whole structure. “How about now?”
“Efficiency is now 114 cycles per second.” The AI almost sounded apologetic.
“We’ll get you out,” Natasha’s voice was rough. Not so much cold as frozen. Immobile. “Sorry we—”
“What?” Tony barked, pushing away the memory. How the hell had he made it more inefficient!? How had he fucked up so badly again?
“They’re not stopping, Tony.” Natasha could put a wealth of “You fucked up” in her tone.
Tony glanced involuntarily toward the alcove where what was left of his suit stood, half-consumed by the horde he’d been unable to stop. His plan hadn’t worked. All he’d done was put everyone else in danger. All he’d done was probably kill—
“DAMN IT!”
He picked up the motorcycle’s abandoned gear shaft and threw it as hard as he could into the far corner of his workshop, watching with detached satisfaction as it dented the wall and itself, bleeding oil onto the concrete floor.
Blood in the rubble. Wide eyes locked onto his in pain and fear, as a chest too damaged tried to draw breath…
He stared through the mess on the floor for a full minute before Dummy noticed it and moved to clean it up. The sound of the robot’s servos whining brought him out of his daze and Tony looked down at the burn his soldering iron had made in the worktable while he had his little breakdown.
He took a deep breath and got back to work. He couldn’t do anything else. He’d wait and he’d see and he’d deal with whatever the others wanted to do to him.
He was used to screwing up stuff like this—last ditch engineering marvels really only worked half the time. It was just that he'd always been the only one to pay the consequences. Teams sucked—this was one of the reasons why.
“Can I see the schematics for the secondary turbine, J?” he asked, shutting off the screaming part of his mind. If nothing else, he was at least good at that, right?
“Of course, sir,” JARVIS replied gently.
Right?
* * * * * *
Natasha laced up her toe shoes, taking absent, long-ingrained care to ensure that the ribbons lay just so across her calves. She hadn’t changed into her dance clothes, her bodysuit providing more than enough stretch and support. She wasn’t feeling dainty, and the ballet she had in mind wasn’t dainty, either.
She’d always secretly hated both Nijinsky and Stravinsky, and Le Sacre du Printemps was one of those ballets that was simply nerve-wracking for the prima. Too much time on stage with nothing to do but stand and be circled around while your muscles cooled, followed by a “sacrificial dance” that almost lived up to its name sometimes, especially when you were made to practice it from first pounce to last collapse ten times in an afternoon.
But the gym had been no help at all, and she couldn’t be still and wait. Not this time. With the bruises up and down her back and the stitches in her arm and legs, en pointe wasn’t going to happen. Luckily, Rite of Spring called for skill, not grace—there was something brutal about this composition, and she needed brutal right now. Something as angry as she was.
Natasha settled herself, standing in the middle of the fight area—hardwood floors that worked as well for dance as they did for other battles—seeking the calm that came just before the toebox touched the stage.
“JARVIS, please play Danse sacrale.”
“The first leap is to show determination,” her mistress used to say. “The Chosen One is fated to die for the dance of Spring, and she must look every inch the dedicated virgin.”
Stravinsky’s music wrapped her in the cacophony of nature, as Natasha’s mind conjured the Wise Men circling. Watching.
“Hawkeye, get to the rafters. Keep an eye out.”
The Chosen One leapt too high, turned too awkwardly. Stravinsky’s music jerked and spiked and shrieked around her as Natasha followed Nijinsky’s choreography to the letter. It had caused a riot when first performed. “The ugliest travesty of ballet,” one critic said. “Nijinsky himself should be sacrificed for this.”
“They’re coming, Cap.” Clint had been as calm and cool as usual. “I count… a whole lot.”
“All right. Tony? Are you sure this is going to work?”
The spins Nijinsky called for were meant to be awkward, tight then loose then desperate then exhausted. Fresh leaps followed, always thrown off kilter mid-flight by the Chosen One’s impending death. The chaos of it pulled on abused muscles, punished bruises that were, in places, bone-deep. And she relished it.
“No.” Tony didn’t lie when it came to these sorts of plans. His bravado he saved for the easy ones. “But I don’t think we have a lot of choice.”
The Wise Men had been played by other girls when she had first danced this role at thirteen. Natasha had no troupe now and the dancers she saw only in her mind kept circling, pushing the Chosen One to an ecstasy of self-obliteration. She felt a sharp, hard twitch in her leg. Stitches going, maybe. She couldn’t care less at the moment.
“Guys, if we’re going to do it, now’s the time.” There'd been an edge to Clint’s voice… They should have paid more attention.
“All right, Tony,” Steve said, ready for the fight. He thought. “Get up there and get it ready. We’ll distract them.”
The Chosen One fell for the first time, slamming her hand to the ground in frustration before leaping up again. The sacrifice wasn’t over, after all. Stravinsky’s score strove brittly onward. Natasha’s leg began to ache in earnest, but she’d danced through worse. Fought through worse. Lived through worse.
“They’re not stopping, Tony.” She’d voiced the observation mildly, knowing they could all see it. A viscous mass of… things. Metallic cockroaches in a wave, udulate and awkward.
Like the Chosen One, as her dance neared its end, as she pushed against her death and jerked and leaped in chaotic fashion. She fell again. Again. Each time slamming a hand into the ground and fighting on, lifting leaden legs that stood straight in defiance before being beaten into submission. Natasha’s fists had bled, back in those days, from repetition. This time, they bled from sheer anger as wounds barely closed broke open again.
Tony was blaming himself, she knew. She didn't have the energy right now to convince him he was wrong, and she wasn't even sure he wanted her to. Sometimes it was easier to blame yourself than to deal with the fact that sometimes, as Clint would say, “very bad shit happened.”
“Natasha, get up to the second level,” Steve had commanded her. “Make sure they see you. If we can split them up, maybe Stark’s machine will be able to stop them.”
The Chosen One slammed, full body, to the ground, the ability to fight failing her abruptly.
“Stark! They’re going for the supports!”
“I see that,” Tony barked back, sounding panicked. “They’re everywhere up—”
Natasha had sworn a blue streak in her head, hearing the chewed metal sounds from above and below. “Stark!?”
The sacrificed girl flinched upward, desperate to continue.
“NAT, GET OUT OF THERE!”
Clint’s call was the last thing she heard before the sheer force of the collapse drowned out the world.
Exhausted, worn literally to death by the force of the puissance du printemps—The Power of Spring—the Chosen One lay still, waiting for the Wise Old Men to carry her to the Afterlife.
Ten minutes later, Natasha was still lying on the floor, waiting.
******
The first time he’d done a handstand, he’d been beaten for it.
Okay, not really for the handstand, but for goofing off in the barn when he was supposed to be working. The exhilaration of feeling that kind of sheer control over his body had almost been worth it, though.
The first time he’d done a backflip off the barn ladder, he’d broken his wrist. His dad had broken his forearm for good measure. Why waste a perfectly good emergency room visit, right? Once he healed up, he’d made sure he never fell wrong again. At least at home.
Clint shook his head to dispel the memory. That wasn’t the past he was chasing here. He wandered the edge of the circus grounds, that familiar smell of animal and grease and burnt food wrapping him in comfort. Without thought, he headed for the back yard and the mats and trapeze setup.
“Hey, Monkey!” a boisterous call rang out to him, and he grinned warmly and turned. The man coming up from behind him was tall and thin, with tight-cropped black hair and a beard more intricate than Tony's. He was young in movement, though his arms and legs, proudly displayed by bright yellow skin-tight shorts and tank top, were ropy and hard with age. His face was cragged, but wreathed with a perpetual joy of life that Clint had almost forgotten.
Maybe that was why he’d ended up here. He barely remembered the trip from the Tower. He just remembered that the traveling show was nearby. And he couldn’t be in the silence at home any longer. He needed a little joy. Or at least a reminder of it.
“It’s Clint now, Hiram,” he said, stepping forward to engulf his former mentor in a hug he needed too badly. “I haven’t been Monkey for a while.”
Hiram snorted, his mustache twitching in mirth. He gripped Clint’s shoulders like a loving father. “You’ll always be Monkey,” he averred, pride dripping from the words. “Though I hear you’ve really embraced Hawkeye.” It was a light-hearted censure.
Clint ducked his head. “I was always a better archer than an acrobat, Hi. You knew that when you took me in.”
“I knew you were special when I took you in, Clinton,” Hi told him gently. Clint blushed, wantIng to melt into the fetid circus grounds, so Hiram took pity on him and shook his shoulders once before letting him go. “You look the worse for wear. Being a superhero is more difficult that being a cirky, yes?”
He could see everything from the rafters. The horde was coming, moving like a trick carpet with uneven rollers beneath.
“Yeah.” He grinned fatalistically. “Well, more complicated, at least.”
Hi shook his head. “Now you’re challenging me, aren’t you?” He gave Clint one more assessing look. “That outfit looks flexible.”
Clint chuckled blackly, thinking about what they'd been through in the last three years. And the last twelve hours. “Kind of needs to be.”
“Let’s see how flexible the body within still is, yes?” The old acrobat led the way to the mats and Clint dutifully ditched his boots and socks and set himself at the end of one long runner. It had been years since he’d done this without needing to.
“Crap. The signal’s not strong enough to disrupt them all at once.”
“Natasha, get up to the second level. Make sure they see you. If we can split them up, maybe Stark’s machine will be able to stop them.”
A swarm of the tiny robots followed Nat across the floor, threatening to take apart the building around her. Clint fired an explosive arrow into the mass at the base of the stairs, but it only parted the waters for a second.
Yeah. So maybe he needed it this time, too.
“Eight-walk,” Hiram commanded, clearly making it up as he went along. “Then a standing back salto, two-flip, eight-walk, inward three-quarter spin tuck, side somi, three whips, and a walkover.”
Clint grinned, committing the complex series of moves to memory automatically. “Is that all?”
“Don’t ever get cocky, Monkey,” Hi cautioned him sternly, ruining it with a smile. “But this should be easy for a superhero.”
“Couldn’t we just have one easy one?” he griped, looking across the machine factory floor as the side door was chewed open. The Hulk bellowed beyond it. Looked like he was using a car now to just smash huge swaths of them at a time.
“I don’t think anyone expected this to be easy, did they?” Tony said, shit-eating grin in his voice. He lived for this crap. Hell, maybe they all did.
“Doesn’t sound like us, no.” Even Steve.
“Still, it’d be nice. Just once.”
“Not today, though,” Steve said, as the wave approached. “Hawkeye, get to the rafters. Keep an eye out.”
He took a deep breath, centering himself and picturing each move before he even bent forward to put his hands on the mat. He raised his legs, straightening them cleanly before walking forward eight steps on his hands.
God, there were a lot of bugs. From up high, he could see the thousands of them, eating chunks out of the place as they went.
He bent his elbows, pushing off to punch up and land on his feet, launching instantly into a back salto and twisting in the air to land again, facing forward.
He couldn’t see Tony from where he was, but he could hear the whir of machinery over the chittering mass. They were coming closer. “They’re coming, Cap. I count—” Jesus. “A whole lot.”
One forward flip, directly into the next. This time he landed on his hands and heard Hiram hoot in appreciation for the improv.
They were destined to be overrun. There just wasn’t any way to stop the damn things.
“Stark, what’s happening?” Steve’s voice was even, but Clint could see him on the floor below, beating back the ocean with a shield.
“It can’t keep up with them,” Tony confirmed, guilt and anger in his voice. “Jesus, where are they all coming from?”
Eight paces forward on his hands. His wrists weren’t used to quite this strain.
“They’re not stopping, Tony.” Natasha was trying to be her usual cool and calm self, but there was worry in the tone that Clint knew Tony would read as censure.
He launched himself straight up, landed on his feet, and launched again, twisting halfway through the flip to land facing back the way he’d come.
Clint tightened his grip on his bow. It had been useless in all of this. He had been useless.
He leaped as hard as he could, feeling the day catch up to him. He twisted again, spinning on his side like a top before his feet hit the ground with a jarring, unsupported thud.
“Stark!” he yelled, watching the horde climb the steel columns near where Natasha had stationed herself. He’d heard Tony’s repulsors a minute ago, but they were silent now. “They’re going for the supports!”
He bent more deeply than he should have needed to and gave himself a short run to work up momentum.
“I see that,” Tony yelled back. “They’re everywhere up—”
“Stark!?” Natasha called when they had to wait too long for the rest of that sentence. Clint could hear the bugs chewing in the background noise of her mic.
The first whip move was half the velocity he needed.
“NAT, GET OUT OF THERE!”
He wasn’t going to make the second.
The sound of falling concrete and overstressed walls assailed him, and he grabbed for purchase as the roof supports started to bow and give way. Steve and his shield and the floor below dissolved into dust and rebar and chaos.
He crashed to the mat face first, feeling his nose crack and the pain drive into his skull.
Hiram was there to help him sit up. “You need to work on that,” he murmured gently after a long moment, giving Clint a minute to collect himself.
“Yeah,” Clint whispered, trying to pretend the tears were all for the broken nose.
He hung from the rafter by one hand, the floor beneath him a madness of destruction. He couldn’t see Natasha or Steve, but Tony stepped out of the darkness on the third landing, his one visible eye bleak.
“Come on,” Hi said, taking his arm and hauling him to his feet. Even after all these years, he could still make Clint feel like a child. A protected child, though, and he guessed that was worth something, right? “You can clean up in my trailer.” Hi grinned. “And there’s beer.”
Clint smirked in spite of himself. That’s worth something, too.
* * * * * * * *
The benefit of living in New York was that you could get anything you needed, whenever you needed it. The benefit of having a billionaire for a best friend was that you could afford it, too.
Bruce’s arm ached from the half hour it had taken to hand grind the lamb and the ghee and the spices and the yogurt to just the right consistency. Parul Rashmani was 96 years old when she taught him to make this dish. Her hands on her ancient, rusting grinder then had been surer than Bruce’s were now.
He hated this. He hated waking to the aftermath of pain and chaos that he didn’t remember, to friends and teammates who’d been through a hell they considered him a witness to, even though he’d never been there.
He hated remembering the look in Tony’s eyes when he’d surfaced. After.
“What happened?”
“Medical’s here,” Tony answered without answering. He looked about ten years old and guilty and scared and tired, but he dug up a grin. “It’s all kind of a mess.”
Bruce looked around the communal kitchen, at the stove where he had three pans going, at the countertop where he had bags and jars of flours and spices and bowls of vegetables laid out and waiting. The soan papdi was cooling in the fridge, and he had naan dough resting.
Cooking. Chemistry. That was kind of a mess, too, but so much easier than real life.
“Natasha?”
She looked up at him, bruised face tight with a lack of everything, which just made it full of too much.
“We need to go,” he said gently. SHIELD was cleaning up the bugs that hadn’t been squished flat in the building collapse. The Other Guy had apparently smashed the main relay that was controlling the hive mind, and the ones that were left were mindless, harmless drones, nibbling on scraps.
He wished the Other Guy had done his business sooner.
Masala was a trick of science, Bruce knew, as he used his chemical scale to weigh out the exact portions of cardamom and jeera and saunf from his spice tray. That had been a gift from Steve. Steve had never learned to cook—a bachelor in 1945 wasn’t supposed to learn to cook and a bachelor in 2014 didn’t have to—but he had an appreciation for art, and he’d remarked once that masala dabba were artistic in their own right, full of colors and smells and beauty.
Clint had declared that Steve just wanted Bruce to keep cooking so he wouldn’t have to.
“We’ll meet you at the medical center,” Natasha had stated coldly when they tried to transport her for her injuries. She’d walked away strongly, and he swore she was simply refusing to allow her body to limp as she made her way to the quinjet.
Tony turned to follow, clearly furious with himself. Bruce wished he knew why.
It was on the way home that Natasha explained what happened, her eyes purposely not on Tony. “We tried to short-circuit the collective, but there were just too many of them.”
Bruce had nodded. Translation: Tony tried to stop them and couldn’t and now he blamed himself.
The cardamom seeds popped lightly in the heat of the ghee, releasing a scent that Bruce always found at once enticing and nauseating. There was something… unctuous about the smell. It clung to you. Like the smell of blood.
There was nothing Bruce could do for any of them, and he knew it. He’d been through this before, after all, though not this bad. Not one of them.
He weighed the saffron—fine strands of deep red that were more expensive than any other spice in the world, and worth the cost—and dropped it in the mortar, grinding the fragile plant stigmas into a powder, mixing the Kewada water in carefully until the blood red paste was just right.
There was a lot of blood. It was startling, really. The human body only held so much, after all.
Bruce would do what he did. Be here. Be ready. What happened down in the medical center—and it had better happen soon, one way or the other—would dictate what happened to them all. Tony would blame himself, regardless. And while it wouldn’t be the first time he hadn’t been able to save someone, it would be different, because it was one of them—the only people he really trusted in the world. Tony once told Bruce that he’d never trusted anyone who hadn’t let him down in one way or another.
Death was a pretty permanent way of doing that.
He packed the galawati into his chatti—the Indian cooking pot had been a gift from Natasha, and Clint had made the same joke about it that he’d made about the dabba—and placed a coal on top, lighting it and watching the flame be slowly consumed by the compressed carbon.
Natasha… would survive. Another hole in her heart, maybe, but she’d move forward because she had no idea how to do anything else. In a way it was pitiable. And in a way he envied her. He didn’t look too closely at what he himself was going to do if this all turned bad, but he knew that, of all of them—
An alarm started beeping, startling him from his thoughts, and he looked around for a threat before he realized he’d left the coal burn too long without covering it. He slapped the top on his pot with an irritated, embarrassed groan.
“JARVIS, please turn off the fire alarm in the main kitchen,” he muttered, hoping the AI hadn’t alerted everyone. “Nothing’s on fire that shouldn’t be.”
* * * * * * *
It was cold. Or maybe he was cold.
Steve flexed his battered hand and looked out at the afternoon light over Manhattan, then down at the sketchbook in his lap. People thought he didn’t get hurt, like he was… Teflon, or something. But his back ached and his arms stung and he had a headache that hadn’t quit yet. He felt beaten and tired and every one of his nearly hundred years.
The robotic cockroach in his sketchbook stared at him. It was black and sleek, with bulbous eyes and sharp legs…
He flipped to a blank page and started something new. Anything but that.
“The Hulk is outside, smashing away,” Tony had said. “He’s not going to slow them down.” He winced. “I’m glad they only eat metal, because I swear, they’d be taking chunks out of him, the way they’re climbing all over him.”
Steve’s pencil skated along the grain of the paper and Tony’s face slowly appeared. He looked worried.
“What do you have?”
“Other than a screaming case of the heebie jeebies?” Tony replied. “It looks like they’re individually dumb as rocks. Collectively, though....”
“A hive mind,” Natasha said.
He drew Natasha’s face in solitude, eyes and nose and lips alone. She looked shocked. Not really like herself at all.
“Yeah. I have an idea.” Tony took off, flying through the empty skylight before Steve could stop him. He kept his comm open, though. “Hey! Big guy!” The Hulk’s almost comical grunt of surprise and attention reached them all clearly. “You know those annoying gnats? If you follow them back to their lair and smash it up real good, they might stop bugging you.”
“Unbelievable,” Clint murmured, an appreciative smile on his face.
Steve blinked at the sketchbook. As he had drawn, he'd broadened Tony’s face, merging it with the Hulk’s body so that the two of them menaced the enemy as one. He grinned. Tony always had understood the monster better than any of the rest of them.
“Okay,” Tony had said in a satisfied tone as he swooped back into the factory. “While we wait for him to do his thing and hopefully shut down all the chiggers, let’s try something else.” He fell silent a moment before a bright light shone out from his chest canon—not violent or destructive, just light. He shone it on a group of bugs that had gotten in front of the others.
The bugs stopped their relentless march and began to mill about. Tony followed up the “just light” with violent and destructive light and torched the whole lot of them with his repulsor.
“Nice,” Natasha said.
Steve was less surprised to find he’d unconsciously drawn the beginnings of the Iron Man armor around her face. The shocked look was out of place on the powerful figure.
He sighed, studying the two drawings. Separate but intertwined. That was the way he’d always seen the group, but he was beginning to realize, painfully, that they weren’t that at all. They were a whole. All of them together. He started sketching again, and a figure formed under his hand, making him smile wryly. Bruce wouldn’t appreciate the Captain America costume, but he wore the shield well. He was the real protector of the group. Less warrior than keeper of their collective humanity.
He didn’t remember the collapse, but he remembered Tony’s face when he came to, buried almost to his neck in rubble. Stark had been beaten—mentally as much as physically—by this one, but the darkness in his eyes was more than that.
“What happened?” Steve asked.
Feathers grew from the graphite tip, folded and broken. A hawk, arrows in its claws, plummeted downward... Steve closed his notebook and sighed.
He was cold. It was past time to go inside and check on the others, and he realized he smelled something cooking.
As he walked into the main area, Bruce was just walking out of the kitchen, bearing a platter piled with naan. He grinned in embarrassment at Steve, but gestured for him to sit as he set the flatbread on the table.
“I was going to send out a general announcement. I… seem to have made a lot,” Bruce murmured.
Steve smiled in appreciation of his friend’s thoughtfulness. And worry. “I could eat.”
He pulled a corner off a piece of naan and chewed it idly as Bruce went back to the kitchen for more. He was just returning with a huge dish piled with meat patties when Tony walked in.
“Good God, Dr. Banner is cooking again,” he announced good-naturedly, patting Bruce on the back with absent affection and grabbing a patty from the dish with his bare hand. He looked worn out, his eyes squinting around his concussion. The bruises he’d gotten in the collapse had had time to darken and they spread all the way over the side of his face. “JARVIS said you were burning the place down earlier. That true?”
Bruce shook his head and smiled a thank you for the normalcy. “False alarm.”
Tony nodded, instantly sober. “Good. I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
“I think we all have.”
The three of them turned at the pronouncement, to see Natasha limp into the room. She hadn’t been limping that badly that morning. She had fresh bandages on her hands, but the wounds had bled through in places.
“Are you all right?” Steve asked reflexively. She shot him a look that clearly commanded him never to ask that again, and sat beside Tony, snagging a piece of naan.
“What are we having?” she asked, as Bruce came out of the kitchen for a final time, juggling a pan of what looked like lentils and a tray of a sweet delicacy Steve had come to appreciate in the twenty-first century.
“Soan papdi,” he said, reaching for a thread-like cube. Bruce held the platter out of reach and sat down himself.
“Not until you eat your meat,” he scolded with a smile.
It was almost normal. Until you noticed the one empty chair across from Natasha.
Tony obviously had, and cleared his throat in the sudden silence. “I saw the circus is in town,” he said quietly. Steve wanted to glare at him for twisting the knife of Clint’s absence, but Natasha just nodded and he backed off. Maybe those two just needed to pretend he was… out. Not downstairs fighting for his life.
“Clint… was talking about it. He knows one of the trapeze artists. I guess she’s the wife of the guy who took him in when he ran away from home.”
“The one who taught him to walk on his hands?” Tony asked. For some reason, he really seemed to find that fascinating. It wasn’t that hard.
Natasha grabbed a patty of meat. “Hiram Javovsky,” she supplied. “He died this summer. Clint wanted to pay his respects.” She seemed to realize how maudlin that sounded in the face of what was happening to them now, and fell abruptly and painfully silent.
“This is good,” Tony muttered to Bruce after a long moment. “You should keep some... for him.”
Bruce didn’t seem to be able to do anything but nod in response.
* * * * * * *
“Here now,” Hiram told him, that implacable tone to his voice as he reached into his freezer, pulled out an icepack, and wrapped it in a dishtowel. “Put that on that huge honker of yours and don’t bleed on my carpet.” He never had let a kid cry over an injury. Clint had learned not to blubber long before Hiram got to him, but it was amazing how gentle the old guy could be about it. Leagues from the smack upside the head that Clint was used to as a child.
Clint examined the stained and pitted wool covering the floor of the ancient trailer. “You’d notice if I did?” he asked incredulously.
“No, I wouldn’t, but it’s the principle of the thing.” Hiram indicated that Clint should sit at the table and moved to lean against the kitchenette across from it. “You want to tell me why you’re here?”
“Natasha!” Tony’s call was beyond worry, and Clint firmed his grip on the strut that was holding him 70 feet above the ground and waited for an answer. “Jesus…. Cap! Where are you!?”
Tony looked up at that point, and Clint saw that half his mask had been eaten away by those damn things and his face was bloody beneath it. Tony nodded his determination to rescue somebody and tried to launch himself into the air toward the roof struts—
Clint shrugged. “I’m not sure. I guess I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Hiram clucked his tongue at him, like the old days, those few times Clint had tried to lie to him. “Really?”
—and yelled in shock as three of his four flight stabilizers abruptly failed. They’d probably been eaten away as well. Whatever had happened, Tony’s flight was over in an instant, and Clint saw the horror on that exposed side of his friend’s face as Tony fell toward the rubble below.
Which left Clint. By himself.
“You have friends like them, and yet you’re here with an old kinker like me?”
Tony was just gone, and the bugs were still coming. Hundreds had been squished flat—and he wouldn’t think about Natasha and Steve—but hundreds more were taking their place, swarming up the sides.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Clint repeated coldly.
He had to get out. Had to get down. He marshalled his strength and pushed himself up onto the beam that had been his savior. Clint set himself, breathed deeply, and started walking. It was a tightrope. Just a tightrope.
With homicidal mechanical bugs chewing through it.
“I think you know that’s not true,” Hi scolded him. And Clint did. He did. Bruce was somewhere, right? He might have saved Clint’s life—well, the Hulk might have, anyway. If he’d just been five minutes quicker.
He could see them chewing through the far end of the beam and damned the fact that his quiver and bow had been lost in the initial collapse. But as quickly as he noticed them, they stopped, milling around like the ones Tony had lit up earlier.
His relief was short-lived, as the girder lurched under him. It had been compromised too much. So he ran—that emergency run that a tightrope walker knows too well. Get off the line or fall.
Clint fell.
“And that’s it, then?” Hiram asked, surprise and amused derision coloring his tone. “You just fell? You’re done?”
He fell.
And he heard the sudden call of his name. Natasha.
“Medical is coming. Hold on.” She sounded scared.
“Steve’s unconscious.” Tony? “The bugs have stopped trying to kill us, so the Hulk must have found the main controller.” Tony’s eyes were sick and bloodshot and guilty as hell. Clint tried to ask what happened, but his chest felt crushed and his breath was gone and he locked his gaze on Tony in fear.
Tony met him, terror for terror. “Birdman? You in there?”
Clint looked up at his old friend in shock. They were alive?
Hiram smiled big. “You’re an idiot, Monkey,” he said kindly. “You know that, right?”
Clint’s shock turned to a full smile. “I’ve been told that a few times,” he admitted wryly. And all of a sudden he hurt. A gasp escaped him and Hiram and his trailer seemed to swim before his eyes as his chest caved in and his head exploded.
“I’d wake up if I were you, Monkey,” Hi counseled him through the haze. “They’re probably getting pretty impatient, and they don’t seem the kind of people that take well to waiting.”
“Yeah,” Clint whispered, the pain engulfing him before he could say goodbye. The circus dissolved around him and a heart monitor beeped, alarming and rapid, too close to his ear.
“Agent Barton?” A nurse. At the medical center? GOD, he hurt! Just… everywhere. “Clint, can you hear me?”
He didn’t try to nod—his head would probably fall off if he did. He whimpered, though, which was just embarrassing.
“We can give you something for the pain soon,” the nurse assured him. Donna? Was that her name? He opened his eyes and a plump blonde woman a few years older than him was smiling down at him. Donna. Definitely. “I just need to call the doctor.”
“Team.” He could only manage the one word, but right now, it was the most important one he could think of.
Donna understood and grinned gently. “I’ll call them first.”
* * * * * * *
It was weeks before he could leave the medical center, and the circus had long since moved on. But they weren’t hard to find, and Clint rode one of Tony’s electric motorcycles into the little town of Makatou, Tennessee, at midnight, to find the show all out and over and the riggers breaking down for the move to the next town.
He was stopped at the edge of the back yard. “No one in, man,” a boy told him bluntly. “Artists only.” He wasn’t much older than Clint himself had been when he’d started working for Hiram.
Clint nodded. He couldn’t claim a ticket to the back end any more. Hadn’t had that right for years. “Can you find Kira Javovsky for me?” he asked, pulling out a twenty and handing it to the kid. “Tell her Monkey wants to see her?”
The kid looked him up and down and stopped dead, his eyes going insanely wide. “You’re one of them,” he whispered. “Aren’t you? The Avengers?”
Clint grinned big. He was one of them, all right. He wasn’t usually recognized. “I used to be one of you,” he said with an easy camaraderie. “Can you get Kira for me? I’ve been meaning to visit for a while now. I suddenly don’t want to wait.”
The kid shook his head and moved the fence to let him in. “Go on. Third row past the cook shack. She’s got a green—”
Clint nodded. “Green and white Airstream. I remember.”
He wandered carefully past the wranglers, watching his step more to avoid being in the way as they bedded down the animals than to look for the shit on the ground. He was pretty used to dealing with shit, after all.
But the shit he dealt with was different now. And he didn’t deal with it alone.
That’s worth something, I guess, he thought, raising his hand to knock on the door with the faded painting of a flying man. It opened, and a face he hadn’t seen in a decade stared back at him.
“Hey,” he murmured, unsure of the welcome he would get. Too late to think about that now, Hiram laughed in his head. Clint had left the circus before Hiram had found Kira, after all, though he’d visited enough that they knew each other well. But Clint was a gilly, now—an outsider. Not family.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, a smile stretching across her tired face. “Monkey!” She stepped down and into a hug that, like Hiram’s hug four weeks ago, he hadn’t realized he needed so badly. “I had a dream about you! Almost a month ago, now!”
Clint grinned. Hi had obviously been working overtime that day.
“Tell me all about it.”
* * * * * * *
the end