Chapter Text
He’d lost his sword.
It was hardly the most pressing thing to be worried about, now that Thanos’s army had melted away into nothingness around them, and the heroes were left in the wreckage of the compound that had been their home. The lucky among them were still standing. Those less fortunate were lying in the dirt—dead Asgardians, dead Wakandans, what looked to be dead monks, dead—dead Tony.
Clint’s hand twitched again, reflexively grabbing for the sword that was no longer there.
He hadn’t seen Tony at first. He had watched in confusion as Thanos’s soldiers had melted into dust. It meant they must have won; he knew that. He recognised the disintegration from clips he had seen on the news, recognised the dust from that horrible day when he had turned and seen just such a cloud floating away from the very spot his daughter had been standing.
Thor had been easily recognisable from behind, and Steve had been standing next to him, so Clint had picked his way over the scorched battlefield towards them, ears still ringing with the sounds of battle and gunfire. Steve would have been the best person to ask, the most likely to know what had happened, but when Clint arrived, the questions had died on his tongue, because there was no need to ask, not now that he had seen Tony’s body, half-burned with the stones still set into his armour.
He must have planned this, Clint thought idly, his heartbeat now echoing in his head and his stomach swooping. He must have at least planned for the possibility; otherwise he would not have constructed the armour he had worn into battle to be compatible with the stones.
But that was Tony, always planning for every possibility.
Clint felt rather than heard heavy footsteps approaching behind him, and he turned to see the Hulk standing next to him, arm still blackened and burned like Tony’s. He looked as shocked as Clint felt at the sight of Tony’s body.
Pepper wept quietly, kneeling next to Tony’s body in the dirt. Rhodey stood a few feet away, silent tears falling down his own cheeks as one metal-clad hand rested on the shoulder of the kid Clint supposed must have been the one Tony had brought to Germany. The kid was either unable or unwilling to hide his grief—his frame kept jerking as sobs shook him and he was sniffing audibly.
Meanwhile, the four of them stood in their own small group, the only four left from that day in New York all those years ago. Tony had almost died that day too—well, they all had almost died, but Tony had been the one who had flown into that wormhole in a suit that had not strictly been designed for spacefaring.
There were flashing lights suddenly, and Clint finally looked up from Tony’s lifeless body. Emergency service vehicles were approaching, accompanied by trucks Clint recognised as belonging to the National Guard. He suddenly realised Steve was speaking, and brought his attention back to the present moment.
“… will start to prepare for the burials,” Steve was saying. “Thor, I think you’ll need to be involved, or designate someone who can be. We lost some Asgardians; I want to be sure the bodies are treated in a way they would have wanted.”
Thor nodded, muttering something in the affirmative and turning to head over towards the arriving convoy of vehicles.
“I should go too,” said Bruce quietly, and Clint craned his neck up to look at him. “I can help with triage… with the injured…”
“No, you’re injured yourself,” insisted Steve. “Go meet the medics, Bruce. Get that arm seen to.” Bruce visibly deflated, as though Steve’s words had given him permission to relax, however he did not move immediately. “Have either of you seen King T’Challa?” Steve asked, glancing over the scorched battlefield.
Clint turned, scanning the field. He spied Thor talking to a brunette Asgardian, who was running her hands through the mane of what could only be described as a pegasus. He spied Rocket, the little raccoon who had lent Natasha and him the ship they had used to reach Vormir on their final mission as a team. Rocket was hugging what looked like a bizarre man made out of sticks, but Clint had seen far too much crazy recently to bother questioning what that was about. He saw Wanda, sitting alone on the ground, uninjured and contemplative. And finally, he saw the Black Panther, talking to his general, his face covered in sweat and exhaustion visible in his posture.
“He’s over there,” Clint said, turning back to Steve and pointing.
Steve was giving him a funny look, his eyes narrowed and searching. Clint frowned back at him. “What?” he asked pointedly.
“Are you going to get that?” Steve asked.
“Get what?”
“Your phone’s ringing.”
The sound must have been drowned out by the approaching vehicles and the activity and the ringing still echoing in his ears from the battle, but Clint heard it now that his attention had been drawn to it. He didn’t remember putting his phone in his pocket, but he must have done so, because surely enough it was trilling away in there.
Laura’s face appeared on his screen, and for the second time he thanked his past self for having the foresight to keep paying her phone bill even after—well, after. He answered the phone and pressed it to his ear. He hadn’t heard Laura’s voice in five years—she had barely been able to utter a sound before Thanos had blown Avengers Compound to hell and ended their call early.
“Clint? … okay… news…”
He could barely hear her over the bad connection—he supposed the cell towers might be overwhelmed by the millions of extra people who had just appeared and would want to make a phone call. “Laura?” he said, his voice cracking on the word. “I’m okay, Laura, are you—are the kids safe?”
She said something in return, but it was too muffled for him to make out. Annoyed and desperate, he slammed his finger on the “volume up” button. “What?” he asked. “It’s a bad line—say that again?”
“… okay… saw… news… New York?”
Someone from the National Guard was now shouting something over a bullhorn. Clint brought the phone away from his ear long enough to switch it to speaker mode. “Yes, we’re in New York—upstate New York—at the Avengers Compound.”
Laura said something in response, but her voice was now so distorted that Clint couldn’t pick any individual words out. “Laura, I can’t hear you,” he said, jamming his finger into the ear that wasn’t pressed to the phone to try and cut out some of the background noise. “I’ll need to call you back—could you just—I’ll come get you, Laura, you and the kids, I’ll come—I just really need to see you right now.”
Laura said something else, and even though the words were too garbled to make out, it was a balm just to hear her voice, even through a shitty, overloaded cell phone connection. “I love you,” he said, and he assumed she said goodbye, because suddenly the call was disconnected.
Clint swallowed thickly. Laura. For the first time in five years, he had been able to speak to Laura.
Without meaning to, his gaze darted over to Pepper, still kneeling by Tony’s body.
“Hey,” Cap said suddenly, and Clint’s attention was drawn back to him. “You okay?”
Clint stared back at him, aware that the slightly shocked look on his face would do nothing to stop the vaguely concerned look on Steve’s. “Yeah,” he said, aware that his voice sounded strangled. “I, uh, need a car…”
“Go with Bruce; get checked out,” said Steve.
Clint glanced over to where Bruce had been standing, but he appeared to have left while Clint was on the phone. “No, I’m fine,” he insisted. “I need a car; I need to go get them—“
“Laura said she’d drive the kids out here,” said Steve.
“Oh,” said Clint, surprised. He chuckled. “Guess that’s another super soldier thing then? Understanding messed up phone lines?”
Steve relaxed at that, and his mouth quirked in what was almost a smile, although it did not quite reach his eyes. With his friend lying dead not twenty feet away, it was not a surprise that he could not quite muster his usual smile. “Guess so,” he said quietly.
The aftermath of the battle held no peace for the warriors. The battlefield remained a hive of activity, only this time, instead of an opposing army, it was an army of medics, of officials, and after a little longer, reporters.
With Laura coming to him and the Avengers compound destroyed, Clint did not really have anywhere to go, so he began doing the only work that was available to him: helping the teams of rescue workers find the survivors and tag the dead.
It was grim work, but not work with which he was unfamiliar. He had seen friends fall before, held their hands as they—
“Let me go.”
No.
“It’s okay.”
It would never be okay again.
“Agent Barton?”
He had been kneeling motionless over the body of a fallen Wakandan warrior too long.
“Agent!”
“Not an agent,” Clint mutters to the dead Wakandan before looking up to see Cameron Klein standing over him.
Klein had always been kind to him when they had been together at S.H.I.E.L.D. He had been kind to everyone. He was exactly the last person Clint would have expected to last at S.H.I.E.L.D., an organisation that tended to think people were at their best after they had been “toughened up” a bit. Nevertheless, he had survived the environment, and had even outlasted S.H.I.E.L.D. itself.
Clint had no idea what he had done after the agency had fallen. He hadn’t bothered to look him up. Yet here he was, wearing a cheap suit, giving Clint a strange look that was a little too close to pity.
“Pepper Potts has organised accomodation,” Klein said. “Captain Rogers wants everyone who was in the battle to head off and get some rest.”
Clint nodded, glancing back at the Wakandan warrior once again. The man looked young, possibly even as young as Clint had been when he had first joined S.H.I.E.L.D. Clint attached a purple tag to the man’s front, indicating that the man had been dead when Clint had found him. If he was lucky, someone would recognise this man and fill his name into the space provided. “Yeah, okay,” he muttered.
Klein was still giving him a funny look. “If you need, er, information…” he said, not quite meeting Clint’s eyes. “I mean, it must be strange, coming back from nothing only to find yourself in the middle of all this…”
Clint suddenly understood what Klein was talking about. After his family had vanished into nothingness and Clint had gotten his bearings from the news, it had not taken him long to recognise the obvious move to make. He had removed his ankle monitor, grabbed some essentials, and vanished, trusting that he would be lost among the chaos. Sure enough, when he had checked the official census results upon their release some months later, his name had been listed among the deceased—right next to Laura’s.
He didn’t know exactly how Natasha had realised he was still alive, but he knew she knew. He had realised she did about three years ago, when a string of sloppy mistakes on his part had brought Avenger attention his way. He had waited, almost hoping to be caught, hoping Steve’s eyes would turn cold as he looked over Clint’s bloody work, hoping Nat would look upon him with the disgust he felt for himself.
When nothing happened, there was only one explanation. Natasha had figured out it was him, and so was allowing him to live, allowing Ronin to continue killing. He knew her too well for it to be anything else.
He didn’t answer Klein, but the other man ignored his silence. “Anyway,” he said, with that slightly awkward air to which he was prone, “if you go back towards the marshalling area, they have cars that can take you.”
And because Clint couldn’t really think of anything else to do, he went.
——————————
He tried Laura again when he reached the room he had been assigned in the romantic, sprawling hotel Pepper had somehow managed to commandeer. Clint couldn’t quite puzzle out how she managed it, what with what had happened just hours ago, but he supposed that was how things went when one was rich. While Clint might have had to call accomodation providers himself, begging and pleading for rooms for homeless heroes, Pepper could just ask a single person if she wanted. “Make sure the Avengers all have a place to stay. Put it on the company card.”
Laura didn’t sound quite so garbled, now that Clint had quiet and privacy in the quaint, wood-walled room, but his ears were still ringing badly enough that he was having to guess every other word. He suggested they FaceTime, hoping the internet would be more reliable than the cell phone network overburdened with families reuniting across it, but Laura’s phone was by now missing five years of cumulative security updates, and the app refused to boot. Clint found out via text, which ended up being the best compromise they were able to come up with.
Texting his wife after five years of her being dead wasn’t exactly the reunion he had been dreaming of, but until they got the damned phone lines sorted, Clint didn’t really know what else to do.
The car wouldn’t start, Laura had told him.
He should have predicted that, really. His mind was still roaring with the battle, and what had come before. He still had not told Laura.
It’s been five years, the diesel would have expired, he replied.
Diesel expires? she wrote, then his phone pinged again almost immediately. The kids are starving. I couldn’t find anything edible in the house, and we never got to finish the hot dogs.
Hot dogs? Had that been what they had been eating that day? It had been so long ago. It was a blur to him now; driven out by pain and blood.
His phone sounded again.
We’re going to try and knock at Mr. and Mrs. Hobson’s to see if they have any food they can spare. We’ll sleep here tonight and I’ll try and rent a car in the morning.
She seemed to be a lot more level headed than Clint was feeling about the whole thing, although it was admittedly hard to tell over text. It was a bit of a change in pace; normally she was the high strung one between the two of them.
You okay? she said, her latest text lighting up his phone once more. He had been silent too long.
I am now that you are.
Three dots appeared on his screen almost as soon as he pressed send, indicating Laura was typing once more.
Stay with Nat; it sounds like you need her right now.
Clint’s lips parted, his mouth suddenly very dry. The roar in his ears intensified, the echoing explosions from the battle suddenly replaced by the awful, horrifying wind that had echoed around that cursed peak on that planet so far away that Clint probably couldn’t have seen its star if he looked to the heavens right now.
He blinked, and a tear landed on his phone screen. Without bothering to wipe it off, he hastily tapped out, Nat’s dead, but he did not press send. His thumb hovered over the button, but he could not bring himself to tap it.
Instead, he deleted those awful words he wrote, and replaced them with, I do need her right now.
He sent the message.
His phone pinged again. I love you.
I love you too, he tapped out, and then, because he couldn’t bring himself to do anything else, he shoved the phone away and curled up on the carpet, finally giving in to the tears for his best friend.