Chapter Text
There was a particularly gory mission. Actually, make that very gory.
Flesh ripping, blood sucking creatures had descended a few blocks down the road from Stark Tower, making it pretty much a bloodbath. They were, in short, huge-ass globs of see-through slime with a ridiculously wide and sharp set of chompers. They moved way too fucking fast and had already killed several civilians before Clint sprinted to the scene, having been closest to the spot at a coffee shop two blocks over.
The Avengers had to engage in nearly six hours of furious fighting, ducking and weaving and firing their own respective weapons at the creatures that mutated. When they blew a creature into fragments, the fragments would blow up in the span of ten seconds to become another fully functional monster. It was the firefight from hell, complete with regenerating enemies and superheroes who had to figure out a new battle plan every single damn time the gobs of motherfucking slime mutated.
Finally, Clint and Natasha herded out all the civilians trapped on the ground, and the Hulk rapidly threw together a concrete enclosure ripped from the sidewalk to contain the creatures. The Avengers then took to the skies and high perches and fired superheated bullet after bullet, flaming arrow after arrow, bolts of lightning, chunks and chunks of granite and repulsor blast after blast while Steve, armed with just the one shield, singlehandedly blocked two hundred civilians from all the falling concrete and granite debris dislodged by the ricochet of power from the sky above.
When the creatures finally dissolved, Clint vaulted the concrete barricade and leaped over dead bodies to the side of a pregnant woman. She was the last to be ingested by the final monster that got thrown into the enclosure, and she was still breathing faintly amidst all the death and carnage around. The blood loss was horrific, but Clint stripped off his uniform and pressed it to her in a valiant attempt to stem the bleeding anyway, because that was his duty. To serve and to protect. And he couldn’t in all good faith just leave her even though it was obvious that she was dying.
“Thank you, but I know I won’t make it,” she rasped.
“No,” Clint growled, his teeth grinding together. “You are going to survive. I need paramedics right here, stat!” He yelled, looking around frantically, only to look down again as she weakly tapped at his hands.
“It’s fine. Thank you anyway.” Clint couldn’t move his hands away from the flow of blood. He was still frozen, even as she smiled faintly and her eyes fluttered shut, and as Phil and Natasha gently moved his hands, tugged him to his feet, and led him away, back to SHIELD HQ.
Clint insists that he’s alright and that he’s fine, over and over again. He’s stubborn, and Phil and Natasha both know that he’s not really fine but he just wants to be left alone for now.
Four hours later, Phil enters Clint’s floor in the Avengers tower. He bypasses all the security codes set to maximum and slowly, carefully, looks for Clint. He leaves his shoes on the shoe rack by the door and pads silently through the place in his socked feet.
He looks in the kitchen first. There’s no sign of Clint, but he knows Clint had been through not too long ago – every countertop is gleaming, the sink has been wiped dry, the dishes are back in the cupboard and the rag clipped right in the middle of the drying rack. It even smells faintly of lemon-scented disinfectant.
He checks the study next. All the books have been carefully arranged in place, sorted by the author’s last name in alphabetical order and by size, and the new designs Clint had been working on for a new weapon have been very meticulously hole punched and filed in a binder. But Clint is nowhere to be seen.
He heads for the bedroom, pokes his head in, and knows that Clint isn’t there. He’s left absolute tidiness in his wake, his walk in closet categorized neatly by colour, material, and occasion on which to wear them, and his bed made military-style. Phil isn’t sure if it’s Clint’s years in the military before coming to SHIELD, or whether it’s just his compulsive need to have all corners straightened out, but at any rate… He shakes his head. He knows where Clint is now.
Sure enough, the sound of flowing water tells him that Clint is indeed in the bathroom. It’s the last stop for his routine - Clint cleans first the kitchen, then tidies all his books, then folds and arranges all his clothes, cleans the toilet and finally washes his hands. Multiple times. Phil knocks on the door and then pushes it open. Shutting the door behind him, he takes a seat on the edge of the (thankfully dry) bathtub and waits.
Clint continues washing his hands and muttering under his breath. “Forty-nine. Palm to palm, one-two-three-four-five. Fingers interlocked, one-two-three-four-five. Right palm to the back of the left, one-two-three-four-five. Now the left palm to the back of the right. One-two-three-four-five. Left thumb. One-two-three-four-five. And the right thumb. One-two-three-four-five. Now scrub the right hand’s fingernails against the left palm…”
Phil can recite the process in his sleep, backwards and forwards and as many times you want. He’s seen Clint do it enough times, especially if the mission was a bloodbath. So he just sits and waits for Clint to be done. Whether the whole routine takes an hour, two hours, or six hours, he will wait for Clint to be done.
Finally, Clint finishes off fifty, and turns with weary eyes and aching body to Phil. Phil leads him out and into the bedroom, where he unfastens Clint’s clothes and folds them neatly, placing them in the laundry hamper. He undresses himself, hangs up the suit (because Clint always insists that he hang it up) and gets them both into bed, under the covers. As he fits his front to the curve of Clint’s back, he hears Clint’s whispered thoughts.
“I couldn’t save her. I should have been faster to get to the scene, faster at thinking of a plan to kill those things, more efficient at keeping the people safe…” Phil takes Clint’s rough hands in his own and caresses his raw, barely scabbed over fingertips, and his heart fucking aches.
“You did the best you could. It was superb. And that’s more than enough,” he whispers into the ear of the man he loves. He kisses Clint’s neck, then his lips as Clint turns his head to face him. Phil pets Clint’s hair and his cheek with one hand, his other holding Clint to him tightly under the covers, slowly lulling his exhausted, weary lover into rest.
/_\
There had been a strange occurrence in the Avengers tower. No, make that strange occurrences. Plural.
Whenever it was past two in the morning and one of them was still working in the lab, training somewhere or just not in their beds, JARVIS would prompt them to leave and to go to bed. That was not the unusual occurrence. The out-of-the-norm thing was that usually, JARVIS would stop prompting after the person ignored him or refused to leave thrice. But now, JARVIS would proceed to play difference pieces of violin noise.
It was definitely noise. It wasn’t music or sound produced by a violin – it was carefully written and played, and the string of squawks produced were certainly enough to make the person either grumble and flee, or at least start looking for the noise cancelling Stark-headphones.
What no one could figure out was where the hell JARVIS had gotten his hands on the music.
Bruce never heard it when he was alone. He only heard it when he was in the lab with Tony, because if he was alone, he usually left the lab after thanking JARVIS for reminding him of the time.
Pepper only heard it once, and that was because Natasha was away. If she was here, Pepper would never have heard it because she would have gotten her to bed by then.
Thor and Steve never heard it because they had the habit of sleeping by eleven.
Clint and Natasha never heard it because JARVIS knew that they could take care of themselves.
Loki and Tony heard it all the time.
Tony recorded the music and ran a cross-reference of the piece against all known sound recordings found on the Internet. It came up negative – obviously it had been written, but never been recorded and put online.
“JARVIS, tell me where the hell you got that damn piece of noise.”
“Sir, I am unable to tell you.”
“I programmed you, damnit! Now tell me where you got it or else I’m skipping your next few maintenance checks and upgrades.”
“It was produced by a violin, Sir. And you have always performed my maintenance checks regardless of any mitigating circumstances.”
Frustrated, Tony kicked the leg of the table and spent the next minute hopping and swearing before giving up and going to bed.
Then one day, Tony decided to tackle the attic of the previous Stark mansion. He hadn’t had it cleaned out since his parents and Jarvis died, and Pepper had informed him that it was best that he go through it himself as there were supposed to be various valuable items within. Hence, on a rainy Sunday morning, the Avengers and their handler, Coulson, trooped over to the previous Stark mansion to be enveloped in dust clouds and relatively ancient relics.
The mansion’s attic held numerous treasures, including some Picassos, Caravaggios and a Rembrandt. It also held a selection of the early Chanel, Prada and Versace. But the find of the day was a top of the line Stradivarius. Tony had been about to throw it in the junk pile when Clint darted over and snatched it out of his hands.
“What the hell?” Tony yelped in surprise. Clint cradled the dusty case protectively against his chest.
“This is a Stradivarius,” he snapped, opening it up reverently. And then, for the first time in a very long while, he gasped.
“This is from the golden period,” he breathed, lifting out the original yellowing receipt. The other Avengers heard their exchange and had clustered around the two. With shaking hands, Clint lifted out the violin and the bow. It had been protected well by the case, and still in pretty good condition. He put it to his shoulder and lifted the bow to it.
The music starts out mournful. There is graceful elegance set free in the very way Clint draws the bow across the strings. He is not one of those expressive players who sway and rock from side to side, but his intense concentration and furrowed brow communicate well enough. There were dips and rises and long notes, and the initially mournful tone changed to something hopeful and then to a rapid up-down-up-down slew of notes. Then when everything tapered off in a slow, sweet melody, most of them sighed. Just as they were about to applaud, Clint launched off again into another barrage of fast-paced notes, finally ending the last three notes off with a flourish. Breathing hard, he took a deep bow to the enthusiastic ovation he received.
“You never told us you could play the violin,” Steve ribbed good-naturedly.
“Man, that violin’s all yours,” Tony exclaimed loudly, moving to clap Clint on the back. Then he froze.
“It was you, wasn’t it? You wrote that devilish piece of squawks that JARVIS insists on playing after two am!”
“JARVIS said he wanted to torture you. I was only too happy to oblige.” That prompted laughter all around, and Tony eventually gave in and laughed too.
Phil thought he benefited the most from that afternoon. Sure, there were outrageously expensive authentic masterpieces of art and fashion to sell, and Clint got a violin he had never dreamed of owning. But for those few minutes, Phil thought he could see another part of Clint’s soul.
And he was happy.