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The mission could have been handled by a toddler, but he had taken it without a word of complaint and completed the objectives with speed and efficiency. By the book, without a drop of blood to be reproached to him. He knew they were mostly keeping him occupied so they could pretend not to be watching and analysing his every move and words for a sign that Loki may have indefinitely compromised him. It was a waiting game, and until his name was cleared there was nothing for him to do but take it in stride and keep his teeth from grinding too loudly. Natasha had managed it, hell he had gone through screening too when he had first joined SHIELD. But doing it again when his skills could so obviously be employed better on another dozen missions grated against his nerves. And he hated reporting to Fury on things that were several levels under the man’s pay grade simply to keep appearances up.
His phone chimed as he stepped into the elevator. He pressed the button to the top floor where the director would be waiting for him, and got it from his pocket. He lifted an eyebrow at the picture he had just received, showing Thor and Steve arm wrestling over Tony’s coffee table. The phone chimed again and it was a message from Natasha, saying Tony was throwing a pizza night since Thor had decided to drop by.
Thor’s presence was worrying, but Clint wagered that if he was busy comparing biceps size with the Captain no urgent catastrophe was on their back yet. He had not really met the guy for long, but Natasha said he was OK if a little on the dense side and definitely an asset in a fight. So he tried to keep an open mind, even if he could not picture him without the shadow of his psycho brother at his side. He suppressed a shudder and pocketed the phone before the elevator shuddered to a stop and the door slid open into Fury’s office. The director was not alone at his desk. There was a second person that he should probably not recognise from the psychological evaluation division. Too bad for Fury, he had a habit of doing his homework.
Keeping his face schooled, he stepped forward and into the frying pan.
They released him two hours later, frustrated and with a killer headache. Fury had grilled him on all his decisions, trying to provoke him into making a mistake. He had kept his cool, defended the way he had handled the mission and handed over all his intel to SHIELD. The whole gig had been ridiculous, just as expected. But despite his low expectations coming up he could not rid himself from the feeling something had been off with Fury.
His phone started ringing, and since it was Nat calling he picked it up.
‘Hey,’ he greeted.
‘You’re done? I can come and pick you up.’
‘I think I’ll pass this one,’ he replied, feeling his headache threatening something worse if he pushed for it. ‘I’ll head back to my flat and catch up on some sleep.’
‘You’re OK?’ Natasha asked after a while. ‘You know that if you need to talk about it, I’m here.’
She meant well, but her words and gentle tone only grated against his frayed nerves like sand in a fresh wound and he would rather she didn’t. He was not made of broken glass.
He was NOT broken.
‘I’m fine Nat, I can handle myself. I don’t need to talk, I just need to sleep it off.’
‘If you’re sure,’ she finally replied reluctantly.
‘Have fun babysitting the team,’ he quipped, and hung up before she could add anything.
He gave a long sigh and made it to the SHIELD issued flat he bunked at when he was in between two missions. She cared, but sometimes he wished people would just stop breathing down his neck.
That night he dreamed of a white room. There was a dark shape in the distance. It looked human, like someone waiting on their knees. But however he tried, he could not move any closer.
The dream happens again on the following day, and the day after, and then every day after that. Sometimes it was just a glimpse of that white room, before the nightmares caught up with him. Sometimes they would take up the whole night. They accompanied him on his missions and back and did not leave him again.
Thor comes and goes, and it takes Clint a few months to catch on a pattern. He asks Tony about it, because the Norse god certainly did not visit earth every fortnight or so in the past or someone would have picked up on that. Giant beam of energy in the sky and all that… Tony’s answer involved a lecture about a wormhole pathway having finally been fixed and making it possible for Thor to visit his brother. And that made Clint pause, stop and lose his shit.
‘Loki’s sentence has been transferred to earth and NO ONE TOLD ME?’
‘Didn’t Nick tell you? I thought that’s why you were sulking so much lately!’ Natasha cut in, her eyes betraying her shock.
‘We all thought he did!’ Tony added, holding his hands up in the classic Don’t Shoot The Messenger position.
‘You had a meeting with Fury the same day Loki's custody was transferred to SHIELD and you got out of it with your nerves in a knot.’
He rubbed his face with the palm of his hands, feeling against his skin the calluses from the hours spent on the job or training for the job, for SHIELD.
‘No. Nobody told me.’
He was not sulking. He was just… He did not feel at ease being around other people, even his teammates. And he knew it did not improve his image in SHIELD’s books.
The dreams had grown steadily sharper with time. Each night, at a crawling pace, he had managed to move closer to the enigmatic figure kneeling in the centre of the room. And the room shrunk in answer, like there was nowhere else for him to be than here.
What his mind had refused to acknowledge, his instincts had known for a while. That he knew the shape of these shoulders, and the dark color of his hair, or the green of his robes.
Loki haunted his dreams, had wormed himself deep enough that Clint could not get him out of his head.
And shame clung to his skin every morning and for the rest of the day, until he slept again and there was nothing to do but crawl a little closer.
In his dream, Loki is a silent kneeling figure, his eyes always closed. Concentrating on something, Clint recognises from memories he would rather not have.
From the moment he had recognised Loki, he focused himself on ignoring the dreams and what they meant about how his brain might actually be an irredeemable scrambled mess. He makes excuses not to go home. Throws himself into the job and the missions, and tries to convince himself he is fine. Recovering maybe, but fine.
Not broken.
Learning Loki might be just a thousand miles away shatters the illusions.
He had nightmares in spades in the past, and after New York a fair number of them featured green eyes and the cold clutch of a blue light against his heart. But Loki, the room, they started only after he was brought back.
There was something very wrong with him, and that thing was Loki.
He started pulling every piece of intel he had on where SHIELD might be keeping their murderous god. Bases that were fitted with facilities that could hold such a monster, since Loki had obviously not yet managed to slip away from them. If he could not get him out of his mind, he needed to know that he would truly be kept at the bottom of a dark pit that he had no hope of escaping.
The need to know wormed itself under his skin like a fever, consuming every moment he had that was not spent masquerading as a perfectly functional agent.
‘Where are you?’ He finally asks one night.
He had come close enough that he could see Loki perfectly, his smooth face, the way he held his wrists like they could be bound by manacles. The god’s green eyes snapped open, peering in his direction but failing to find him properly. Like Loki could only just about guess his whereabouts.
Clint did not think the god would actually reply. And he has no idea why he did.
‘I saw a frozen shore before they took me inside. There was a taste of salt in the air.’
The dream shattered like Loki’s voice had broken it, and Clint jolted to wakefulness with a sheen of sweat clinging to his body. He immediately rose and dashed for his computer, ignoring the steady whisper in his ear that egged him on, urging him to find the one he had been taken from.
If he had to make a guess before, he would have not gone for the small base in Alaska. But it all made sense now, even as he tried not to acknowledge his absolute certainty came from a hint he had gathered from a dream .
From Loki.
They must have chosen a small base and a handpicked crew to keep any intel on Loki from leaking. A debatable choice, but Clint was certain they must have balanced things out by posting elite personnel on every job.
It did not bring him any peace of mind. The facility they had been studying the Tesseract at had been top of the line, he had been posted there to monitor and ensure security and Loki had broken it open like an egg. But he had used that staff. That staff that was also in the custody of SHIELD.
Running on that jittery energy that crawled under his skin, tracking the staff location through SHIELD encryption barely took a fortnight. It almost took him longer to find an excuse as to why he did so in the first place, so he could benefit from the Avenger’s help to retrieve it from the very dodgy facility where it had ended up.
The frown on Fury’s face when he had finally admitted before them all that he had been worried enough about the presence of Loki and the staff on earth to track the location of the later promised retributions. But the whisper in his ear said it was of no importance anymore and Clint knew it was right.
They swiftly retrieve the scepter from HYDRA’s clutches, and the rest of the team tries to make sense out of what looks like the beginning of a program on human experimentation. He does not care, his attention entirely honed on the scepter that Natasha is carrying. But she is weary of him, he sees it. He does not let the sceptre leave his sight. He is patient. He almost thinks they won’t leave him any window of opportunity when they make it all the way back to Stark tower without leaving him a chance to get his hands on it. But Stark is too cocky, or confident, once they are back in his own home.
They are distracted by everything they have just learned.
The moment his fingers close around the scepter feels like coming home. There is no visible shimmer of blue light, but a power surges up his arm and washes inside him. It rekindles a truth that, buried deep down in his heart, has never really left him. He has tried to fight it off, to fool himself, twisting his mind to provide excuses while his heart knew who he longed to serve. The sceptre is here to remind him of his purpose. Of the loyalty that was taken from him.
He has already taken too long to perform his duty.
They are too engrossed in their argument about HYDRA and SHIELD to notice him leave. Natasha does, but she makes the mistake of following him alone. He knows, and this time she does not get the jump on him.
He has learned.
By the time they are done discussing his behaviour, she is lying unconscious on the ground and bleeding from the head after experimenting Clint's own brand of cognitive recalibration.
He makes it into the Alaska’s base like a knife through butter. These men are trained, but he is better. They did not expect him, and he knows the base layout and SHIELD security protocols inside out. He is silent, and efficient. The sceptre strapped to his back pushes him in the right direction, drives him further than he would have believed himself capable. It whispers secrets to him, and Clint shoots his arrows where agents are waiting to catch him.
They keep Loki well below the ground level, not quite a pit but in a bright white cell. He kneels in the centre of it, his wrists and neck in shackles with chains securing him to the ground. There is a bright circle of runes running around him.
The facility has gone on lock-down, and Clint does not stop to think when he follows the whisper of the sceptre to wield it and blast through the door of the cell. He has the feeling that he is merely a tool, that had the sceptre not longed to be reunited with a hand worthy of wielding it, Clint could never have summoned its power.
When his master finally lays his eyes on him, there is a weariness to his gaze. They flicker fast, to his face, to the staff in his hand. They widen minutely.
‘The Hawk. I thought maybe you had forgotten me.’
‘It took me some time to get my mind back in the right place, sir. And to find you.’
Something in his voice seems to shift Loki’s track of thought. His eyes narrow, scrutinizing him with a darker glint behind them.
‘Destroy that containment ward then’, he snaps, ‘prove yourself.’
The order hits him like a punch to the chest. Certainty and relief flows with the command guiding his hand. From obeying the one entity he has chosen to belong to. The scepter hums under his fingers and the blast that follows is enough to melt a good quarter of the etched rune work from the floor. Immediately, a green haze blooms against the binding and chains keeping his master prisoner. The magic slowly starts to corrode and crumble the metal before his eyes.
The sound of running steps reaches them before he is done with them.
‘Keep them away,’ Loki seethes, with an unmistakable note of panic.
The corridor leading to the cell is, unfortunately for the SHIELD agents, a perfect shooting range for Clint enhanced arrows. He only needs to buy Loki some time, and he has enough ammunition for that.
He thought that maybe he heard Fury’s voice over the speaker at some point, trying to convince him of something. He didn’t listen, his mission took priority.
To protect.
Finally there was the sound of metal clinking against the floor and of Loki getting up. He did not turn to watch, keeping his attention focused on the corridor.
‘Can you make it out, sir?’ He asked.
There was no answer, only a pair of arms grabbing him from behind and the horrible feeling of being pulled apart.
And they were out. In what looked like the middle of nowhere, where it was as dark as it could be and with the pinprick of a million stars in the sky overhead.
Loki immediately collapsed to the ground, the grass, and Clint went down on his knees to follow, starting to check him for injuries before noticing Loki was actually shaking with laughter. He looked exhausted, and a little thin, but otherwise unhurt, and Clint had no idea what to do with himself until Loki raised a hand to grab his jaw in a painfully tight grip.
‘You betrayed me,’ he spat scathingly, a mad green glint burning in his ancient eyes. ‘You betrayed your god.’
It was true. He had failed, been too weak and fallen to the enemy. His mind had betrayed him. But had found his way back. He had worth once, and he was laying it again to his master’s feet. In Loki’s hand the sceptre pulsed, casting the familiar folds of its blue light over the both of them.
‘I will not disappoint you again, sir,’ Clint managed to articulate through clenched teeth, bones grinding against bones.
Something in what he said or showed must have satisfied his god. Or maybe he had watched inside his mind and seen the truth. The smile that Loki gave him was too sharp, dipped in madness and dripping with satisfaction.
‘See that you don't, little hawk. I would hate to kill what’s mine. And I am growing quite fond of you.’