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Clint Barton has spent a surprising amount of time on the other side of a jail cell. Y’know, given that until a year ago, he was fighting for the ‘good guys’. Granted he’s usually breaking into the high-security secret prison, or hiding in the ventilation, or undercover, but still. He knows how the game is played.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he tells one of the Raft guards who’s manhandling his bow. “Watch your fingers, kid, you’re gonna snap the mechanism.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Sam asks, eyebrows raised. Even though not thirteen seconds ago Clint saw him level a stare that would have shamed even Stark towards the guys who were logging his own gear for inventory.
“It’s worth more than this guy makes in five years,” Clint complains.
The guy in question looks up and makes a hurt noise.
“If I’m not truthful with you,” Clint tells him, hands twisting in his handcuffs. “You’ll never improve.”
What he’s saying is, he’s used to it. He’s used to having to entertain himself until his evac gets in. He’s used to the long silences and the Russian mobsters and the guards that have never even heard of the words ‘police brutality’. Even if the Raft is one of the most formidable prisons ever conceived by the hands of man. Even if his usual evac was on the other side of the line drawn in the proverbial sand.
The point is, he knows from the moment they’re wheeled in handcuffed to metal slabs that he’s gonna do better than everybody else.
He lasts exactly twenty seven minutes and thirty-four seconds.
“Is that,” Clint says, reaching through the metal bars as far as he can to try and leverage himself outward so he could see. The room they are in is octagonal, so it kinda works. “Are you— are you singing Uptown Funk?”
The Uptown-Funkness immediately stops, even though Lang had been getting to the good bits with a surprisingly decent voice.
“It gets in your head, you know?” Scott sighs. “Like, you think you’ve grown past it, you think that it’s gone and not coming back, man, and then somebody just casually says it’s too hot and you gotta like sit there and say to yourself, ‘I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say it. I’m an adult I can make this decision to not say that stupid phrase’ and then the next thing that you know you’re skidding into a room like that Kool-aid guy on steroids going ‘HOT DAMN’.”
Scott’s looking at both Clint and Sam for confirmation, maybe, or for one of them to nod sagely as if they had also somehow felt this feeling before.
“I got nothin’,” Sam says directly to Clint.
“Nope,” he answers. “Me neither. I’m starting to wonder why I bothered to pick this guy up in the first place.”
“Well,” Sam says, crossing his arms between the bars like they just sat down at a pub somewhere and are having a conversation despite the fact that neither of them can hear anything over the music and the drunk shenanigans happening in the background. “He is pretty handy in a fight.”
“Is he, though?” Clint asks. Scott’s watching them like somebody with whiplash watches a tennis game. “I mean the giant thing was pretty cool, but only useful in rare occasions when we’re in an open space and not in some underground bunker.”
“We do spend a lot of time in underground bunkers,” Sam allows.
“And unmarked warehouses. Conveniently half-constructed buildings. Likewise abandoned former military bases.”
“Hey, you know what,” Sam says, apparently in their defense. “We’ve improved on our property damage numbers recently. Banner still holds the record, obviously, but that’s kinda a given.”
“You guys get into this sorta thing all the time, huh,” Scott says.
Sam and Clint both shrug. This is honestly not even the strangest thing to happen to them in the last six weeks, let alone since they formed the Team. And then, y’know, un-formed it.
“I mean,” Clint says. “Nothing’s as bad as New York four years ago.”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “You should watch some of the footage.”
“Oh, I did,” Scott says. “Watched it happen live from San Quentin. We had one of those 21 inch flatscreens installed, it was pathetic. Not you guys, obviously. The flatscreen.”
Clint smiles. “Yeah, I missed most of that.”
“What, really?” Scott asks. “Why?”
Sam looks at Clint, because Sam knows the story. “I kinda got brainwashed by a horned greasy-haired demi-god and his glowstick of destiny.”
The hours start melting by. They specifically left Clint with nothing that could even remotely be fashioned into a projectile, but that’s never stopped him before. The bed doesn’t even have screws or springs. Goddamn minimalist furniture.
Listen, Clint Barton has maybe knocked somebody out with a copper penny, but that’s classified. The point is, you’d be surprised what can be used as semi-lethal projectiles.
Stark comes at twenty-nine hours in. Clint gives him the best stink eye he can, because what’s a few dick kicks between friends? Ex-friends. Because of course Clint jumps back into the fray only to get his ass beat by a guy in a literal cat-suit and Nat. He’s filled his bad luck quota for like six years. “You knew they’d throw us in here, Stark.”
Stark flinches, but that might just be from the shiner he’s got. “I didn’t know they’d bring you here.”
“You knew they’d bring us somewhere!”
“I didn’t think they’d bring you to some supermax at the bottom of the freakin’ ocean, Barton! You chose this!”
Clint sees the words hit home the moment that Stark realizes what came out of his mouth, and with a look that could guilt-trip even Nick Fury he moves on. Clint listens to the conversation with his forehead pressed against the bars. He can’t help it, he has half a dozen escape plans filtering through his head.
Forty-five seconds later Tony’s walking back out of their cell block and from the quick glimpses that Clint can catch, Sam’s doing irritated laps in his own cell.
“Well, you caved quickly,” Clint tells him. He hears a frustrated groan from two cells over.
“I thought you were retired,” Sam says.
Clint snorts and moves back to his bed, punching his pillow back into something even remotely comfortable before he lies down again. He puts his arms behind his head. “I was.”
“And you’re back, because?”
“You ever think ‘retired’ doesn’t actually mean ‘retired’?” Clint asks the ceiling. “Maybe ‘retired’ is a code word for ‘trying to keep this goddamn planet from burning down’. Has it burned down? No, because I do my fucking job.”
He can’t see Sam, and there are three walls of reinforced carbonate-plated steel that would probably be strong enough to withstand a suckerpunch by Carol Danvers, and yet Clint can still feel the stink eye Sam sends his way.
“Girl’s hit ya hallelujah,” Scott starts singing five minutes later. “Girls hit ya hallelujah.”
“Holy shit, shut up!” yells Sam.
Twelve hours after Stark’s departure, Clint is working a chip off the back side of the sink. It’s small, too light to do any real damage, and not sharp enough to cut skin— and listen, Clint Barton may be a contrite son of a bitch but he is not about to take on a fully staffed super prison with a piece of plaster barely the size of his big toe.
But it’s evenly weighted and flies pretty straight once he gets the hang of it. He can run calculations all he wants and it helps pass the time with something to occupy his hands.
All in all, the Raft is not the worse prison stay he’s ever had. He doesn’t ever want to think about his time in the Gulag, because that was by far and away the worst of them. France was a breeze, he was in an out in less than forty-five minutes all on his own. Budapest was and still remains both the worst and the best thing to ever happen to him.
Scott Lang, however, is really aiming to change the way that Clint Barton ranks his stints in prison.
The humming starts up again and Clint groans. It’s bad enough that Uptown Funk has been in his head for the last three days, but he’s caught himself humming it, too, and then an hour later Sam starts in, and it passes between the three of them so it’s a pretty much constant continuum of uptown, funk you up, uptown funk you up.
He releases the chip at the perfect angle and watches it curve left from his place against the wall. It disappears around the corner and there’s a bated breath for three-quarters of a second before there’s a thwap and the sound of Scott Lang smacking his forehead. “Ow!”
“I will legitimately pay you seven hundred dollars,” comes a voice from the far left that could only be Sam’s, “If you would hit him again.”
“Sorry, man,” Clint tells him, already mourning his chip. “That was the only one I had.”
By day five Clint would literally take anything other than Uptown Funk to get stuck in his head. He’ll take the Carebears themesong. He’ll take that song that Zazu sings to Scar in the Lion King. The one about the coconuts. Literally, anything, other than the same goddamn song that’s been in his head since Scott started singing it five fucking days ago.
Thankfully the first indication that something might be setting off red flags on the radar comes the next morning, in the form of a sudden rumbling in the floor underneath them. By Clint’s calculations, that could either be one of two things: one, either their evac has finally decided to get their ass into gear, or two, the hulk finally decided to drag his big green ass to the fray.
Either way, this should be their exit, stage right, pursued by bear.
“Did you,” asks Sam.
“Yup,” Clint answers before Sam can even get the question out. “I counted forty-five guards on this level. Based on our past experience I’d give it about four minutes.”
He doesn’t even bother getting up off of his bed, even though his bow hand starts itching. Six days. Six days is definitely a record. And the Summer Camp wake up alarm from hell that starts blaring doesn’t really do much to calm Clint’s nerves. Neither do the flashing orange lights that start strobing. Thankfully he has nearly a decade of working with Romanov to give him that patience of a Saint. It’s how he got to be such a good goddamn shot.
“Oh, god,” Scott says. It sounds like he’s already at the bars of his own cell. “This is my first prison break-out. Is this your first prison break-out, Hawkeye? I kinda just did the whole due-process thing when I got out for my last stint. Well, I mean, there was this one other time, but technically speaking I don't think that counts cause I just kinda, well, went with it. I had very little to do with the breaking-out bit. Are we gonna get our stuff back? I— I really need my suit back.”
Seventh. This is his seventh prison break out. Granted it’s only the third that somebody had to come bust him out instead of that one time in Budapest.
The seconds tick by. Clint’s still on his bed, and Scott’s still at the bars. He can’t tell what Sam is doing but he assumes that, like him, he’s just waiting for the inevitable. The alarms are still blaring, and every once in a while they hear thunks of people against metal, or screams, or groans. The usual bust-out, Clint knows.
Hell, if Natasha had been his evac this time the place would probably already be on fire. Or, conversely, not a single person in here would know that she was, too. It depended on the mood she was in.
“Hey, guys,” Rogers says, shoving the double plated door open like it isn’t made of four hundred pounds of reinforced carbon plating.
Suddenly everything is in motion, all three of them are up off the floors or beds of their perspective cells, and Clint’s already firing questions at him. “Maximoff?”
Steve grins. “Already in the chopper, Barton.”
Cap moves towards the cell bars with a concentrated look of somebody that is literally about to rip the bars off the hinges or blow them to smithereens, and it starts a wall of just noise that is three people arguing to be the first person released, all at the same time.
“No, no, no, no,” Clint starts automatically, yelling over Scott and Sam. “You get me out of here first, do you hear me, Cap? Do you know how much I’ve suffered for this, do you know what kinda things they’ve gotten stuck in my head, I’m too good looking for prison—”
“I can’t go back to jail,” Scott interrupts. “My stomach still hasn’t gotten used to prison food, I’m starving.”
“If you don’t get me out of this goddamn cell, Rogers,” Sam starts, hitting against the bars to punctuate every single word he says. “Do you know what happens to black guys in secret military prisons? I will go batshit and I will shoot you in the goddamn leg if you do not get me the fuck out of here.”