Work Text:
Monday morning at the Avenger’s mansion, two in the morning. Bruce Banner sat gingerly at the kitchen’s center island, trying to convince himself that he was hungry enough for the oatmeal and orange juice he had just finished making. He was sore, both from working out a little harder than normal (thanks to goading from Steve and Thor) and from the recent fight with Loki.
Bruce groaned a little and set his head in his hands, exhausted. It wasn’t Loki, so much as it was wave after wave of concrete Gollems that the asshole had conjured easily. They’d never set a hand (or hammer or repulsor or shield) on him. Loki had been running them ragged for nearly a month straight, and while Steve was nearly convinced that it was part of some bigger, more sinister plot, Thor maintained that it was more Loki’s style to just pester.
Tony had argued with Thor about the proper definition of pester and wouldn’t it be more accurate to use ‘torture’ or ‘maim’ or ‘cause total fucking devastation’? Thor had grumbled loudly before Jane had managed to drag him from the briefing room.
Bruce had followed not long after, a major migraine starting to just present behind his left eye. He needed a dark, quiet room before the pain crashed down on him like a freight train, and finding any place dark enough or quiet enough was sometimes the harder task. He’d ended up in his bathroom, submerged in hot water. He found that he could sometimes re-create a sensory deprivation room if he suspended himself in a tub and kept his ears below the surface of the water to dampen the ambient noise.
He’d apparently fallen asleep, however, because he awoke to the subtle sound of JARVIS paging him and bringing the lights on to 30%. It was simultaneously comforting and disturbing to know that the house was keeping track of him well enough as to keep him from drowning in his own tub.
Bruce had mumbled out a somewhat awkward ‘thanks’ before he struggled out of the tub. The water had gone tepid and it was actually fairly uncomfortable; his muscles had tightened up and made him feel slightly worse.
——
“You awake?”
Bruce jumped a little and blinked to focus on Clint, who’d just leaned across the counter to get a closer look at Bruce. “Uh- ” Bruce cleared his throat and shrugged. “No, not really.”
“You almost face planted into your oatmeal, Doc.” Clint reached across and pulled the bowl away from Bruce; it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to eat it, anyway.
“I think we can blame Loki for that.” Bruce leaned forward and put his cheek against the cold granite counter top. “Probably.” His breath fogged up the surface and Bruce narrowed his eyes, irrationally irritated. Or very rationally. He was tired and sore and also, his stomach announced, very hungry.
” Wa-” Clint gave Bruce a sidelong stare. “Was that your stomach?”
“It was a balrog.”
Clint huffed with quiet laughter. “I’m going to make something a little more edible than Spackle, if you’re interested?. ” Bruce nodded and sat up. “I’m very interested.”
Clint hummed and gave Bruce a thumbs up, before he turned around and started to crack some eggs into a pan; both of which Bruce hadn’t noticed. He really had been out of it.
Bruce, still feeling incredibly exhausted and lazy, was content to simply watch. Clint seemed to know what he was doing, at any rate. Perhaps he used to moonlight as a short-order cook in some greasy spoon, to fund his archery habit through high school. Bruce grinned as he tried to picture that. The hardest part was trying to place Clint in a classroom; it wasn’t that the man wasn’t educated, it was more that to Bruce, Clint seemed like the kind of guy who had other things to do. Lectures and Homework- those seemed more alien when applied to Clint than imagining him working his way through middle America.
Bruce looked at Clint, whose back was to him. No, it didn’t fit at all to try to place Clint in an atmosphere that didn’t let him experience things first-hand. To an extent, all of the avengers were the hands-on type, but people like Natasha and Steve could at least sit still for longer than twelve seconds in the briefing room. Tony had to be doing at least two other things; a pda in one hand and the current mission files spread out across the table, while he ‘listened’ to Fury or Coulson.
Clint did manage to sit still, but it was a close thing. He seemed to be well practiced at knowing when it was necessary. Bruce shook his head because of course Clint knew how to sit still and stay patient; he was a trained assassin and a hell of a sniper. If that didn’t mean the man had a boatload of discipline, then Bruce wasn’t as smart as he’d like to think.
It just seemed that Clint could turn it off and on in a matter of seconds; there was hardly ever a reason for him to sit and be patient at the mansion, around the other members.
Clint suddenly backed up to lean against the center island, watching the eggs from a distance. He shifted to cross his arms but ended up just holding one elbow to keep the wooden spoon from contacting his shirt.
Bruce caught sight of something under the threadbare white cotton and leaned forward, intrigued. “Is that-” Bruce knocked his glasses up his nose a little further and squinted, “.. is that a tattoo of a cotter pin?”
Clint dipped his left shoulder and looked back at Bruce. “It keeps my arm attached. Very necessary.”
Clint grinned and rolled his shoulder and Bruce leaned back in his chair, smiling. There was something important about the placement and purpose of that tattoo though, some deeper meaning and Bruce was very interested.
He didn’t push the subject though. They ate their breakfast (it was very good; perhaps he was right about the short order cook bit) in relative silence before Bruce offered to clean up. Clint waved his thanks before he left to go do whatever it was an archer with insomnia did.
Bruce, for his part, went right back to his room and did what he did best: research. What he found was really quite interesting and would probably go a fair way in explaining some of Clint’s more peculiar habits.
It was several weeks before he could find the right moment to bring the subject up again; no use in causing friction with unwanted attention. The unfortunate thing was that they were on a mission at the time. Bruce (Well, Hulk) and Clint had been separated from the team and Clint had been grazed by some falling debris. Hulk had conceded play time to Bruce so he could help. Before he’d reverted, Hulk had managed to create a fairly well covered area out of the rubble so Clint and Bruce weren’t in any immediate danger.
Yet.
“Clint stop moving, will you?” Bruce reached for the archer’s quiver to remove it, but Clint ducked and spun out of the way. “No, I’m fine. The blood is drying up!”
“It needs to be looked at and all that- stop it!” Clint had managed to duck Bruce, yet again. “You’re going to open it up again Barton; just let me get a field dressing on it to keep out all the concrete and whatever else it is you’re going to be rolling in.”
Clint sighed and looked from Bruce to the only viable exit and then back again. He shook his shoulder a little; it did feel a bit more gritty than it should. “Fine.”
He didn’t like to be out of the action for long. “Just- make it quick, okay?”
Bruce nodded and stepped forward to unhook the quiver. Clint’s uniform was a chalky grey from whatever huge piece of concrete and re-bar had clipped him and there was a jagged hole in his uniform where the metal bar had ripped through. Bruce turned the quiver over and sure enough, there was some damage there as well.
“Better look at your gear, see if it’s still okay.” Bruce held it over Clint’s good shoulder. Clint cursed as he sorted through his arrows, chucking some to the side with some irritation.
“Hey, you need to take this off for a minute.” Bruce tugged at one of the shoulder epaulettes before Clint shrugged out of the top half of his uniform, his eyes still glued to his quiver.
Clint’s right shoulder had a fairly good sized tear running along the spine of his shoulder blade but he was right, it had stopped bleeding, for the most part. Bruce picked through one of the packs on Clint’s belt, the one he knew contained the field first aid kit, and began to pick the bigger bits of concrete from the wound. Clint didn’t jerk away but it was clear that what Bruce was doing wasn’t completely pleasant. “You’re going to need a tetanus shot for this one, Clint. I think it was the re-bar that did the real damage.”
They’d have to wait until the battle was over, though. Bruce finished up the delicate work of what boiled down to ‘picking scabs’ and rubbed some antibac ointment on the wound and covered it with a few layers of gauze bandages.
The rest of Clint’s back looked to be in pretty good shape, luckily, but Bruce’s gaze lingered over an old scar that was just below the apex of Clint’s left shoulder blade (and also just below the cotter pin tattoo- it wasn’t just an inked line in the shape of the pin, there was an accompanying circle of Sanskrit in a much lighter color); it looked like a pretty severe puncture wound and Bruce wondered if there was an accompanying scar on Clint’s chest. “This one looks like it almost killed you.” Bruce said conversationally, as he handed Clint’s uniform shirt back.
“Bullseye.” Clint said, without elaboration.
Bruce wasn’t sure he understood and Clint must have picked up on that. “I mean both, you’re right and it was Bullseye. He didn’t miss, this was to prove a point.” Clint pointed to his chest before he snapped his quiver back into place.
“We should get going.”
Bruce nodded and took a breath before he ramped up his pulse.
——
The writing of Clint’s tattoo was from the Bhagavad Gita, Bruce thought to himself as he leafed through his dingy and torn copy of the manuscript. The cotter pin, however, was a little more obscure. It had taken a lot longer to fish out the meaning of that, but it was apparently something that carnies carried with them.
There was a lot more to Clint than he ever let on and Bruce was kind of hooked. If he was right, and he usually was, the script was from the the last few chapters of the Bhagavad Gita; Jnana Yoga.
Learn to discriminate between what is real and what is not, what is eternal and what is not
Bruce stared at the passage.
It was no mistake that he’d spent so much time in India. Of all the places he’d gone, all the religions and all the disciplines he’d studied to help him come to terms with his life and with The Hulk, it was really only the words in the Bhagavad Gita that had helped.
Bruce suddenly shifted and started to root around his messy desk for an index card and a pen.
——
Clint flipped the card over again. One side was written in English and the other side, Sanskrit.
When a man dwells in his mind on the object of sense, attachment to them is produced. From attachment springs desire and from desire comes anger.
From anger arises bewilderment, from bewilderment loss of memory; and from loss of memory, the destruction of intelligence and from the destruction of intelligence he perishes.
-Tony once asked what it was I did to ‘get it under control’. I think you’d understand more than he might.
Clint grinned and stuck the card, Sanskrit side facing out, under the frame of his mirror.
He did, indeed, understand more than he let on. And, it seemed, he and the Doctor had a bit more in common than he’d previously thought.
----
