Chapter Text
Pain hits first, a sharp, ringing crack at the base of his skull, blooming outward like a firework.
Clint’s eyes snap open to a vaguely familiar dark hallway, to an even more familiar green eyes and blood red hair. He knows that expression on Natasha’s face; tight, focused, vaguely apologetic. He knows she’d hit him, for some reason, but couldn’t wrack his mind for why-
His breath catches. His heart stutters. A dream, he realises in the same instance, or a nightmare. No, never a nightmare, not even when he has to watch her fall again and again and again-
“Nat–” her fist connects with his jaw this time, his head snapping back, pain crystallising his wayward thoughts even as the world tilts. Embarrassingly, he loses balance, dropping to his knees, quickly raising a hand in defence when it looks like Natasha’s going to hit him again. “Wait! Whoa, whoa, wait!”
She does, clenched fist pausing for a moment, even as she tracks his every moment with sharp, calculating eyes. “You with me?”
What? He wants to ask, even as he rotates his jaw and winces at the painful clicks. The hallway looks familiar, the catsuit she’s wearing looks familiar, the curly red hair and the length of it looks familiar.
A dream, then. Or one of the dreams. The hellicarier one. The Loki one. The one where he’d been mind-raped and beaten back to consciousness only to realise there was an alien invasion happening at the same time and Phil was dead.
Just one of the dreams, then.
He forces himself upright, blinking past the still smarting pain in his jaw and head, and wonders despairingly why he’s always so good at remembering pain in his dreams. Why couldn’t he ever have just the cliff notes without the technicolour recall? Honestly.
“Clint.” Natasha asks again, words heavy and pointed, demanding he answer her lest she beat him again.
He nods, because what else can he do? He knows how these things go. They’ll just be stuck in this moment if he doesn’t play along, and the only way to wake up is to play the dream through. “Yeah. Yeah, Nat. Just… give me a sec.”
A nightmare by any other name, he knows. But any chance to see Natasha again is a chance he’ll grab onto, even if it’s just in the confines of his own dreams.
He gets up, Natasha carefully eyeing him in case he, what, bolts? He’s not sure, but he doesn’t blame her, never did, for the wariness, wondering if he’s going to flip and shoot her too. She still doesn’t leave him though, she came for him, and Clint will never forget that, never can – it forces him up to his feet again, just like it did the first time ‘round – and she nods once, seriously, once he’s stood.
“We need to go.”
And just like always, in every dream he’s had, Clint follows.
#
It’s all the same. It always is.
The same rooftops, the same chokepoints, the same shouted comms of people that had never fought before quickly learning on the go. The same alien patterns, the same hoverboards, the same arrow he lets loose that Loki catches, only to have it explode on him.
The same moment where he and Natasha land back‑to‑back, breathing hard, grinning like idiots because they’re alive and fighting and together.
(Never a nightmare, he agrees, cheeks hurting from smiling so hard, not when he gets to remember this.)
He knows every beat before it happens. Every explosion. Every arrow he fires feels like déjà vu with muscle memory. He can do this in is sleep, remembering every angle from the first battle, from every subsequent nightmare dream he’s had since, and easily tracks the others across the map that is Manhattan.
He hears the roar of the nuke coming in hot, hears Stark’s jets push harder, faster, quicker, to catch up to it. Hears Cap warn him of it being a one way trip.
He keeps waiting to wake up, expecting the dream to end with Stark failing to get the nuke in quick enough, the blast wiping him out back into reality. It’s either that or Loki finds his way to Clint, usually appearing right behind the archer, stabbing him clean through the chest with his sceptre. Or Natasha, disgusted with him for getting mind controlled, for being the reason Phil is dead, and shooting him dead behind a dusty trash can in an alley, easy to write off as yet another victim of the invasion.
He expects to wake up thanks to a convenient plot device that always signals the ends of his dreams, but it doesn’t happen.
Stark falls back out, just as he had the first time. The portal closes, just as it had the first time. The chitauri fall, just like they had the first time.
Stark continues falling, just like the first time, and the Hulk catches him before Thor can rev up his hammer, just like the first time.
Clint keeps expecting to wake up, any minute now.
He… doesn’t.
Okay, he thinks, watching Cap rip the helmet off Stark’s face. Bit long, but that’s alright. Sometimes his dreams throw up something new, every now and then, a crystal clear piece of something Clint had never realised he’d noticed, a sudden recall of memory. Clint’s fine with that, used to dumb bits of information like just how blue Steve’s eyes are, or the angle of enemy laser beams hitting a coffee shop that he remembers seeing on the news. Longer dreams mean more chance to drink Natasha in, more chance of Phil popping up, even if to sigh in disappointment at Clint, or to shoot him dead.
Stark gasps awake, like had the first time, throws out a useless quip in the next instance, and Clint drones out, focus going fuzzy, expecting to wake up at any moment anyway.
He… doesn’t.
The food tastes like ash in his mouth. He comes back to himself to notice Stark passing a black card to the shawarma owner, a quiet word passing between them that has the man falling over himself in gratitude. He doesn’t remember that, but maybe that’s the bit he’d been too distracted and only noticed peripherally popping up now. Maybe that’s why this dream is still going on, because in retrospect, he’d never stopped to wonder how they’d paid for the boatload of shawarma they’d eaten. Maybe… maybe he’d just thought the owner had fed them out of gratitude? They had saved New York (and the world). Or maybe, he frowns, it’s just dream nonsense, wouldn’t be the first time,
He still doesn’t wake up though when he forces himself to take another bite, forces himself to chew and swallow. He knows Natasha’s watching him, green eyes unblinking in how she stares at him, reading him with far too much focus to be normal. She’s watching to see if he’ll snap, still, if she’ll need to ‘recalibrate’ him, if Loki’s control was still lurking somewhere waiting to attack.
He’d begged her to check his eyes hundreds of times in the aftermath – the real aftermath – so sure he’d still been under control, absolutely incapable of differentiating between what was real and what wasn’t.
Maybe a random explosion will take the entire shop out, harshly shoving him back into the waking world. Or maybe Thor will suddenly turn on them and bludgeon them all with his hammer. Anything to signal the end, to let him gasp awake drenched in sweat, heart hammering in his chest.
But he doesn’t. Nothing happens, and Clinks and finds himself up in the tower (Stark tower, though he’s amused to see the singular A hanging on for dear life), and Loki lies fallen in the penthouse, Thor’s hammer keeping him still. Just like the first time.
“I’d like that drink now,” the god snarks, and Clint feels his eyebrows twitch when he hears Stark bark a laugh in response. Another thing he doesn’t remember, another thing that he must have only noticed while being half out of his mind, running on fumes and desperation, still not even really aware that Phil was dead.
He blinks, and in that way of dreams they’re all outside again, in Central Park, and Thor’s dragging a muffled Loki to the centre with the Tesseract in hand, muttering something about Asgardian justice. Clint winces and squints his eyes as they promptly vanish in a column of light, just like the first time, disappearing from Earth as abruptly as they’d arrived.
And then he squints some more as he turns around at Stark clearing his throat, an obviously awkward attempt to catch their attention, and…
Wow, he thinks absently, he’d forgotten how young Stark had looked.
The man stands straight, for once, posture perfect, with a body language that looks nothing like the defensive man Clint had seen in the past few years. He hasn’t thought of Stark much lately, remembering him fondly at random times, far more consumed with the death of Natasha, the loss of Laura and the kids, how he’d been left at the end of it all as a broken, lone man that has nothing to his name.
Stark… looks alive, he realises. Self-assured. Confident.
Also jittery as hell, eyes darting too fast to be normal even behind the dark shades he’s hiding behind, and he looks like he wants to run from them, despite being the one to catch their attention.
“So!” He announces loudly, forcing their focus. “Now that the wonder gods are gone, time to pack it in and go back home, kids. I’ve, uh, got space. Rooms. Floors, actually. If you need somewhere to crash. Or decompress. Or… whatever.”
It’s awkward. It’s blunt, and frank, and a little too on the nose.
Stark looks like he’s pretending he doesn’t care if they turn him down, but like he really wants them to come. Stark-
-that can’t be right. Stark had only offered out of politeness, the first time round, hadn’t he? Said it through his teeth, wide and on display, smirking over the bridge of his glasses at them and dismissing them the moment they opened their mouths to politely decline, just like he wanted them to.
Natasha had done the declining for them both, saying they needed to return to SHIELD. Steve had said he wanted to check out the world, for a bit, get acquainted with the new time he was in. Clint didn’t remember what Banner had said, though he certainly remembers that out of all of them, Stark had wanted Banner with him most.
He remembers rolling his eyes, even while in the midst of being lost to the voices that still sang to him in his head, thinking god, what an arrogant son of a bitch. Just like every other rich bastard out there.
“Don’t be strangers,” Stark replies after they’ve all made their excuses, sounding flippant and uncaring as he turns away to leave. “Toodles.”
But Clint- Clint looks back, as Natasha leads them away to the nondescript car that’ll take them to SHIELD. Looks back, and sees Stark’s shoulders tense as he tilts his head to the sky. Stark is in sharp profile to him, clearly not realising he’s being observed, and the way he swallows thickly has his Adam’s apple bobbing, crystal clear to Clint’s sharp eyes.
Stark shoves – trembling, Clint notices with a pang of discomfort – hands into finely tailored slacks, rips his eyes away from the blue, cloudless sky, and catches sight of Clint. Clint feels his breath catch as they clock eyes on each other, and he watches, feeling like he’d been caught, as Stark realises he’s been seen and… grow. His spine straightens, his shoulders relax, and the sharp cut of upturned lips graces his face as he nods at Clint in casual greeting. But the way he spins on his feet away is too quick, too hasty, the way he hurries to his own car, where his own nondescript driver opens the door for him, is too rushed.
Any other situation, any other time, if this had been the first time and Clint had never spent years working and fighting with and against the man, Clint wouldn’t have been able to read Stark at all, would have seen the smirk and too cocky confidence and not realised Stark was too good at bullshitting it like he’d just done then.
But now, now it’s easy. He knew Stark. Knows Stark, even after everything. He knows Stark well enough to read the same naked fear he’d seen when ULTRON had announced his arrival during that penultimate party. Knows Stark well enough to know what he’s just seen, to trust his own eyes, for once, even if he doesn’t believe it.
Stark’s terrified.
Clint’s stomach churns uncomfortably.
He lets Natasha shove him into the car, ignores the finality of the door slamming shut behind her. He says nothing, he can’t, because his throat is tight, and dread he can’t really understand is curling cold fingers around his spine.
This dream is going on for too long.
He’d like to wake up now.
#
Embarrassingly enough, Clint’s almost forgotten about this.
The SHIELD hallways are full of agents, all of them keeping a wide berth while making sure he sees their animosity. The thinly veiled distrust, the outright hate, reminds Clint to keep his head down, to remember the still present guilt about the lost lives of colleagues that remain entirely his fault even now, years later.
Natasha does the same she had then, physically silent next to him, but loud in how she prowled at his side, shooting dark glares that had other agents ducking out of her way in fright.
He tells himself it’s fine. It’s a dream. A long, weird, vivid dream. A long, weird, vivid dream featuring extra bits he certainly doesn’t remember. And if his brain wants to give him a few more hours with Nat, then he should be happy, he should grab the opportunity with both hands.
Even if he has to put up with the stares.
He zones out for a moment, blinks back to Natasha staring at him, both of them in her quarters, he realises. Just like the first time, then. She’d forced him to stay in her quarters, fearing that the other agents would take retribution into their own hands and attack him in his.
Clint wouldn’t have fought them off, then. Hell, he probably still wouldn’t.
(And she’d known, he realises. She’d known and forcibly kept him in her quarters.)
He doesn’t remember this bit to be honest. Remembers the debriefing, the psych evals, the constant watch and observation he’d been under. Remember not being allowed to go to Phil’s funeral, remembers not being allowed to go to the farm, either. Remembers Laura’s hushed conversation with Natasha, the Black Widow promising to keep him safe until he was safe enough to return. A ridiculous conversation, when one remembered that the Black Widow had never been trained to protect anything.
He huffs a laugh at the thought, still entertained, years later.
Natasha. Protecting him. Oh, how the tables have turned.
(Protecting him, even on an alien planet, even when it should have been him to jump, not her, never her.)
He does remember this, though. The same room where apparently they’d held the sceptre for a bit, where the team had first met, sans Clint. He remembers all of them seated around the table, hours after Thor and Loki had left, Fury standing at the head with his signature long coat and eyepatch.
He looks younger, Clint muses, fiddling with an arrow head Natasha had for some reason had in her room. He’d never noticed just how much Fury had aged.
Stark, on the other hand, looks worse.
Somehow, even though only a few hours had passed, the man was pale and even twitchier than usual, leg bouncing under the table, hands constantly flicking between being on the table, tapping on the table, or doing something underneath.
Banner looked annoyed, sitting next to him, Steve kept glancing at him in equal irritation, the tap tap tapping against any surface likely driving him up the wall.
Clint vaguely remembers being annoyed himself, back then, when this had first happened. He remembers much more clearly being annoyed every other time they’d have to have a meeting with Stark, the man physically incapable of standing still. They’d gotten used to it, allowed him to do other things at the same time – usually on a tablet, sometimes with a screwdriver and whatever doohickey he was working on at the time – and usually that made it easier to get through a meeting without wanting to strangle the man.
An absolute child, Natasha had huffed, rolling her eyes.
This Stark had nothing to distract him.
“The World Security Council is pissed we’ve let the aliens run off with the Tesseract.” Fury announces, clearly annoyed enough himself to cut his pointed silence short.
“Sounds like it was theirs to begin with,” Banner points out calmly, Steve nodding next to him.
“Regardless,” Fury bulldozes past, “We’ve lost a potential power source, and unknown aliens have it now. The hell we going to do if Asgard decides they want their own go at conquering us?”
Clint remembers this, at least vaguely. They’d gone back and forth about it until the truth that they could do nothing about it had finally ended the conversation. Fury had told them to piss off, congratulating and insulting them in the same breath on working as the initiative he’d known they could be, and grumbled as they’d left.
“It’s not them we should be worried about,” Stark replies instead, and Clint blinks up at the man, the words vaguely familiar though he can’t say why, “It’s whatever the hell was on the other side of that portal.”
Oh. Oh. That’s why it sounded familiar.
Clint’s about to role his eyes at Tony again going on about how he’d been right, how nobody had listened to him, how-
-he freezes.
Next to him, Natasha tenses in response.
Fury sighs, “Stark–”
“–We got lucky,” Stark interrupts, and Clint knows he’s not breathing as Stark continues, “The portal acted as a funnel, keeping the damage and area of entry limited. Next time, if the portal is wider? Or there’s more than one? Then what?”
“So you think we need the Tesseract too?” Steve huffs, rolling his eyes. “Let me guess, make our own weapons out of it?”
Stark’s hand clenches the edge of the table, going bone white as he snarls at Steve, pupils blown behind the darkened shades he always wears. “That won’t help one fucking bit if whatever the hell was on that other side decides to come for us!”
“Stark!” Fury snaps, “You threw a goddamn nuke at them!”
“And it barely touched a third of their forces!”
“They came because Loki led them here,” Natasha adds her own two cents – familiar, Clint realises, god, no, this was familiar – tone calm and soothing, trying to play Stark to her will. “I doubt we were a direct target, nor will we be again.”
Stark opens his mouth, stops, then shuts it with an audible, painful snap. He sits back in his seat – when had he stood up? – and shoves the seat further back, the audible screech of the legs against the floor making Banner and Steve wince in annoyance.
Fury rolls his eyes at the display, dismissing it as a childish tantrum, and turns to the others. “You did somewhat well, for the first deployment of the Avengers. Don’t let it get to your head,” he warns them, “I still think it’s a fucking gamble trying to make anything out of you riffraff. Fuck knows what Coulson saw in you lot.”
He spins on his heels and leaves, the same dramatic exit as always.
Stark mutters something under his breath, throwing himself back up to his feet, and Clint- Clint sees it now, sees it with a knowledge he wishes he didn’t have. Stark’s jaw is tense, his eyes are cataloguing everything behind the shades, snapping from one exit to the other, and he’s twitching to leave, to get away, to go.
“Stark,” Steve tries, but Stark is having none of it.
“Great!” He snaps, cutting right through the Captain’s attempt. “Now that that’s done, gotta go, boys and girls, daylights a-wasting, and unlike the rest of you lot I’m actually a busy man. Ciao!” And with the same flair as Fury, he exits the room, there and gone faster than Steve can get another word in, almost faster than Clint can see.
But he can. He can see.
Hawkeye, he calls himself. Never misses, he claims. Sees everything, Phil had proudly said.
He’d–
He’d been blind. They all had.
Because he remembers Wakanda burning. He remembers the Outriders tearing through the shield. He remembers the sky turning black with ships. He remembers the snap. The dust. The five years of rage and grief and blood. The battle again that had lasted for ages, and only ended with Stark getting his hands on the gauntlet and snapping.
He remembers losing everything, even when everything (but Natasha) had come back.
And Stark was right- Stark is right. He’s right, and they’re all ignoring him again.
They’re all ignoring him right after the immediate battle, from the very first moment Stark had mentioned his fears over what he’d seen at the other side. They’d completely shut him down, rolling their eyes, and then they’d carried on doing so. For- for years. Until a half dead Stark had been dragged out of an alien ship by a blue alien and had shouted himself hoarse telling them how he’d warned them, and look where that had gotten them.
They’re dismissing Stark. They’re brushing off the warning. They’re leaving him alone with the knowledge of what to come. And they’d doing it until the truth would slap them in the face.
Clint feels sick. Clint feels like he’s going to vomit. Grips the edge of the table so hard his knuckles go white. His heart is pounding. His vision tunnels.
He has the sudden, burning feeling that this isn’t a dream. That this isn’t what he’d thought of as just memories, as just a chance to see Natasha again, to reminisce when things had been so simple.
This is a nightmare. This is the worst nightmare. This is his mind’s eyes playing for him things he’d seen but ignored.
Clint swallows hard, bile rising in his throat. He catches sight of the arrow head in his head, the one he’d been fiddling it, and absolute fear grips him as a thought comes to the forefront.
What if it’s not a nightmare? (It has to be a nightmare, please, god, please let it be a nightmare.) What if the dream, or nightmare, was lasting this long because-
-No. He couldn’t entertain that thought. Even if he enjoyed the brief peace of visiting old memories, of seeing Natasha again, he couldn’t-
He hisses, Natasha focus snapping to him at the noise, and stares with growing horror as the blood beads along his palm where he’d cut himself with the arrow head.
This is a nightmare. Except he’s never been able to bleed in a nightmare before.
This has to be a nightmare, except Natasha snatches the arrow head off him with fear in her eyes, as if- as if he’d hurt himself on purpose, and she was worried he’d do it again. She’d never had that fear before, he doesn’t remember seeing that on her face before, but he’d never hurt himself like that before- he’d never-
This is a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare- his hand continues bleeding, and he grabs a tissue and presses it against it, wincing at the stab of pain from the pressure.
“That’s the end game up there,” he remembers hearing, the exhausted but determined voice echoing clearly in his ears. “And we’ll lose.”
They’d lost alright.
And Clint Barton is the only one who knows just how badly they’d lost.
Fuck.
#
“What was that?” Natasha demands harshly, shoving him into her room, locking the door behind herself.
Clint lets himself fall onto her bed, even as he tugs at his hair – a coping mechanism, after Loki, after everything, something that reminds him that he’s alive. “Nat,” he says, starts, tries, even as he has no idea what he’s saying, “Stark-”
“What about him?” Natasha demands again when Clint cuts himself short, tongue suddenly heavy and useless.
He looks at her helplessly, really looks at her, and god, she’s so beautiful. Everything about her is alive, so painfully bright in a way he realises he hadn’t seen of her for years. When did the change happen? When did she quieten down, her brightness dimming, turning her into that muted blonde haired version he vaguely remembered? What the hell had changed her?
What the hell had changed him?
“Natasha,” he tries again, “You saw him.”
Confusion flickers over her face, and Clint wonders, for a moment, why until she asks, “And?”
And? And? “Nat, he’s terrified.”
Natasha looks- looks bewildered- which, what the fuck. “And?” She asks again, and now Clint is the one staring at her wide eyed, staring at her confused, because what the fuck?
Since when the fuck was Tony Stark being terrified not something that should’ve had all of them getting ready to fucking fight or defend? Clint had only ever seen the man terrified, and that had been when Rhodes had gotten hit and paralysed, and when Thanos had finally fucking arrived.
Tony Stark being scared was (is) a goddamn apocalypse.
But then he realises that’s his knowledge of Tony Stark giving him the answers, and at this point, Natasha only has the intel that she’s gleaned herself from being his PA. But- Clint blinks at her owlishly, confusion turning over itself in his head- Natasha had personal experience with Stark before all of them, right? She’d written the psych eval, she’d- she’d had – has – the most interaction with Stark out of all of them in that room.
And she sees him as just a civvie.
The realisation hits him like a brick, and suddenly, he gets it. It wasn’t just her, it was – is – all of them, Clint included. They’d all looked at Tony Stark and just seen a civilian playing at being a superhero getting caught up in the adrenaline of a battle against aliens, a near death experience making him paranoid, and they’d – god, Clint can just see it now – added on the Afghanistan ordeal and neatly summed it up as PTSD.
PTSD.
Fucking PTSD.
And if Clint isn’t careful, he realises, watching Natasha eye him with careful concern, he’ll get labelled the same too. And SHIELD wouldn’t let him just go about his day, unlike Stark, wouldn’t watch in the shadows and pull strings to take advantage of Stark spiralling to make him beholden to them.
Fuck, he thinks morosely. Of fucking course he ends up in this situation.
A mind whammied wash up carnie and a raging alcoholic with untreated PTSD, trying to save the world.
And Clint, for one, has no fucking idea what to do.
Absolutely fucking wonderful.