Chapter Text
This really shouldn’t be Steve's job.
Not the Avenger part, but the whole covert operations part. Ever since the team had agreed to start cleaning up the streets, Steve was typically helping with bank robberies or community clean ups. This should really have been a Natasha or Bucky job, but they were both away, undercover in the Russian mob, which left Steve… and Clint.
Steve had no problem with Clint. It's just that man can never take anything seriously.
Which is why Steve wasn't surprised when he found Clint on top of their stake out roof playing on a Game Boy.
Steve landed on the roof quietly, but Clint still caught the movement and glanced up from the device momentarily to address Steve.
“Hey Cap,” He said in an excited whisper, “Glad you could make it,”
Steve crouched down next to the acher, “Sorry it's me and not Nat,” he said.
”Nah, it's fine.” Clint said, eyes still on the Game Boy, “Besides, we never get to hang out.”
Steve nodded his assent. They really don’t, Steve is constantly in the gym, and while he had never seen it with his own eyes, apparently Clint likes to hang out in the vents. Weird man, this one.
”So,” Steve said, trying to get back on track, “what do we have?”
Clint looked up and smiled, “A Classic English Breakfast.”
Steve blinked.
Clint blinked back. A death sound effect played from the game.
Steve shakes his head, “What?”
“You know,” Clint said, “a Classic English Breakfest?”
”No, no I really don’t know,” Steve said with what felt like the patience of a saint.
Clint’s eyes widened and he finally put down the godforsaken Game Boy, “Wow, okay, do you have any spy training?”
”What makes you think I would?!” Steve whisper-shouted.
”I don’t know!” Clint said all panicky, “I just assumed because of the…” He made a big gesture at Steves… well just Steve.
Steve waved his arms, ”I was a foot soldier in the army, not special ops!”
”Alright alright, sorry!” Clint raised his hands in defeat.
They both re-settled against the wall. Steve leaned his back against the concrete and took a deep breath. He had a job to do.
Steve caved, asking again, “so, what does it mean?”
Clint sat up, grinning, ”It means the group below us is getting a shipment of drugs, money, and guns.”
Steve arched an eyebrow, ”What does that have anything to do with an English breakfast?"
Clint held up a finger, ”I…” he deflated, “don’t know, actually."
Steve sighed. “So the new Spanish mob is getting their hands on their first weapons?”
”First in bulk.” Clint corrected pedantically.
Steve ignored that, asking instead, ”Why the money? Aren't they buying this stuff?”
Clint shook his head, “Not likely. It's probably a loan from a different mob.“
“So we're going to have two mobs here?” Steve asked, and the tinge of panic in his voice didn't escape him, “How many are down there already?”
“Pack and a half.” Clint said simply.
Steve closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair, “Is that more spy lingo I don’t know?” he said.
Clint rubbed at the back of his neck, “Oh, yeah. It means there's 30 people down there. The ‘Pack’ is for 20, you know, like a pack of cigarettes?”
”No, I used to have asthma. Also 30? That's a lot.”
“I think it might be the whole mob actually.” Clint said, “Everyone needs to get a gun, money, and drugs for bribing. It's like, mob law or something.”
Steve shook his head. Mob law. “And how many are going to be delivering the shipment?”
Clint shrugged. “Not sure.”
Steve paused, “Wait, how do you know there’s 30? we’re on the roof.”
Clint smiled, “Ah, I stuck a camera down there before they arrived."
He pulled up a small computer and showed Steve. It had a pretty clear view of the inside of the building. It showed a large group from behind and up high. A tall man in a well tailored white suit stood at the front with two men holding guns, the rest crowded around the back, leaning against walls and playing cards. All around the top of the walls was a service catwalk.
“Alright, so what's the plan?“ Steve said.
“The plan is to wait for the shipment to arrive. After that we slip in during the trade, then… uh… “ Clint paused, thinking. “I think we just drop you on them?”
Steve coughed, “Pardon?”
“Most of them won’t have guns!” Clint insisted, “and the ones that do probably aren't a crack shot like me. I’ll incapacitate a bunch with my flash bang arrow before you go in for some advantage.”
Steve groaned, “I wish we had more back up.”
Clint shrugged, pulling out his arrows, “Well, look at it this way, we get all the glory.”
“I don’t want glory, I want to not get shot!” Steve thought this might be the last time they work together.
This is why they didn’t hang out, Steve remembered.
Clint said, “Alright, alright I get it but-“
Someone started to speak on the screen and Clint stopped talking and looked down.
“¿Falta mucho para que lleguen los rusos?” Said one of the men next to the leader.
“What did he say?” Steve asked, looking at Clint's confused face.
“Uh…” Clint's brow furrowed, “something about Russians.”
“Don’t you speak Spanish?!” Steve asked.
“Yeah, but I learned for a job in Mexico! These guys have the… what's it called…” Clint trailed off.
“A castilian accent?” Steve offered.
Clint looked up, “Yes! How do you know that?”
“I did my research.”
“Ellos mejor sean.” The man in white said. His voice was flatter than Kansas.
“What was that?” Steve asked.
Clint translated, “‘They better be’, I think. Oh! The Russian mob is delivering the CEB.”
“The CE what?” Steve asked. He felt so lost.
“Classic English Breakfast, keep up.” Clint said, focused on the screen.
Steve thumped his head on the wall. If he made it out of there alive, he swore to never get food with a British person.
“Oh shit…” Clint started.
“What?”
“What if Nat and Bucky are there?” Clint said. He sounded worried. The idea made Steve nervous too.
“They’re at the leader meet up, I think.” Steve said. The updates they got from the two were rare.
“What if this is the meet up?” Clint said as he wrung his hands together.
Steve shook his head. He didn’t think that would happen, “With some random mob? not likely, they’re too valuable.”
“God I hope you're right.” Clint muttered.
Steve was about to respond when he heard more talking from the screen.
One of the people playing cards, a young guy with sandy blonde hair, spoke up, “Did you hear what happened in la cocina last night?”
”Quiet.” said an older man at the other end of the room. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, a hat covering his eyes.
”Why?” the kid said.
”No lo invoques con tus palabras...”
Steve glanced at Clint, whose brow was furrowed with confusion.
“What was that about?” Steve asked.
”I don’t know,” Clint said, “the kid asked about a kitchen, I think, and the older guy said, uh it's hard to translate accurately, but its equivalent is…”
”What?”
”It’s the equivalent of the English phrase, ‘speak of the Devil and he will come.’”
“What? Why-“
A voice comes from the screen again.
“Más les vale llegar pronto.” The gunman on the right of the leader said.
The man in white said, “Quizás tengan miedo.”
“¿De qué? ¿Da las ratas?” said the one on the left.
“no, de nosotros, imbécil.” said the man in white, “Los nuevos del barrio. Ya tenemos a los carceleros comiendo de nuestra mano.”
“Es verdad, pero…”
“¡Nada de peros! Les ganaremos en su propio juego.”
“Señor…”
The low rumbling sound of a truck interrupted the conversation. The man in white held up his hand and the rest quieted down, a few rushed to the front to open the bay door.
”Right,” Clint said, suddenly all business, “lets head in-“
“Wait, what were they saying?” Steve asked.
”Hm? Oh, nothing important. Right, we head in, then wait for the right moment.”
Steve grabbed his shield. ”And when will that be?”
Clint stood, ”At some point.”
Steve rolled his eyes, “Why do I work with you?”
”My sparkling personality!” Clint said, twirling an arrow in his hand.
Steve groaned, “Come on.”
Clint scaled down the side of the building and flipped into the nearest window, then stuck his head out and waved for Steve.
As Steve followed behind, he kept his feet silent against the catwalk inside. As he looked around the space, he noticed the angle he saw the room from was a similar perspective as the spy camera. He looked up and noticed a small blinking light. He reminded himself to complement Clint for that.
He followed Clint behind a large concrete beam and settled down beside him. From where they sat crouched above the room, Steve saw a truck had backed into the space, with two men he didn’t recognize in front holding two guns.
The men in the Spanish mob had their backs to Steve and Clint, while the Russians were facing them.
The man in the white had stepped forward and was conversing lowly. The man in front of him stood calmly, hands in his pockets. Steve assumed this was the Russian leader.
Steve leaned closer and listened intently. They were both speaking in English, but would aside to their men in their native language.
“Is everything here?” said the man in white.
”50 of everything, as requested,” said the other.
The man in white nodded, ”You wouldn't mind if my men checked, would you?”
The Russian nodded, but grabbed one of his men and said something in Russian.
“Не позволяйте им держать наше оружие.”
“Да, сэр.”
Steve turned to Clint, who had a hand on his ear piece, likely turning it up to hear. Steve tapped his shoulder and signed ‘WHAT SAY?
Clint signed back ‘NO LET THEM HOLD GUN’
Steve translated in his head. The Russians didn’t want the others to handle the guns? His sign language was rough.
The Russians brought one of the men to the back of the car and let him open each of the boxes. He flipped through the bills, making a ruffling sound, and dabbed a bit of whatever drug they had on his tongue. Both times he nodded back to the man in white. When the man reached for the guns, one of the Russians stopped him with his arm.
”No,” the man said.
The leader continued, “Not until we finish the deal.”
“Why?” The man in white asked.
”Not that we don’t trust you,” said the Russian leader, “but we don’t trust you.”
”All this,” the man in white said, gesturing at the scene in front of him, “makes me not trust you that much.”
”I don’t think you have much of a say in this.” said the Russian. “We are doing this out of the kindness of our hearts,” His men laughed.
Steve shook his head. Bad idea.
The Spaniard stiffened and his gunmen shifted the grip on their guns. The men behind him noticed the movement and started reaching for weapons of their own.
That was a worse idea, Steve thought.
Clint tapped Steve's shoulder and signed ‘GO TIME’. Steve nodded and reached for his shield. He moved around the sides of the cat walk to reach a better drop site. He kept his eyes on Clint as the archer drew back a large arrow. It was one of Clint's flash bang arrows.
The scene below had started getting louder, shouting that neither of them could understand at such speed. Clint pulled his arrow, Steve raised the shield. Clint shut his eyes and Steve did the same. Steve hoped his ears would be okay, but he was sure the healing factor would do its magic.
One second passed, then two, then-
Steve heard the arrow shoot from the bow, piercing the side of the truck and exploding into a bright white light that Steve saw from behind his eyelids. His ears rang, high and deafening. He readied himself to jump but…
When he opened his eyes it was dark. Pitch dark. Like every light had gone out at once.
This was not the plan.
Once his ears stopped ringing he could hear something strange. Something out of place.
Fighting.
Gunfire.
At first he thought it was the two groups taking advantage of the explosion. He heard punches landing and bullets piercing. As his eyes started adjusting to the dark he could start to see people fighting, although in the darkness it looked more like wild attacks.
Then something different.
A crash of a body against the ground.
A man stumbled backwards.
Someone screamed.
Steve couldn’t tell why.
Suddenly something flashed across his vision, a dark shape that flew past. Everywhere the shape was, fighting stopped. Steve tried to focus on it, and realized it wasn’t a shape but a blur of motion from some…. thing.
Steve has seen some scary things in his life, from battle fields to the Red Skull, but something about this feels different. It’s not fear that fills him but terror, something deep-seated, something very old and very slow. The feeling crawled its way up Steve's spine as he watched the scene unfold in front of him.
Barely an impression on his sight, A body moved through the space like water. It took on every person it came across, leaving them breathless. Men went down hard and fast. It threw one man to the ground like a wrestler, then kicked another in the head like a karate master, all at a speed a normal human eye wouldn’t be able to track.
A mobster fires a shot off into the darkness. For the trajectory it should have hit the thing fighting.
It didn’t.
It missed by a mile.
It should have hit, Steve knew it should have.
He never even saw it dodge.
It moved like it could sense everything.
One man went down, then two, three, six, eight, twelve. Each man was incapacitated with brutal blows to the stomach, liver, solar plexes, head. They never seemed to land a hit on the thing and every one of them went down screaming.
Someone from behind threw a punch and the thing grabbed it without looking, shifting weight to throw them against the ground with a sickening smack.
A gun was lifted and shot in its direction and it moved without stuttering, like it knew exactly where the bullet would hit. It stalked across the space, grabbing the gun by the barrel, not reacting to the burning metal. It yanked the gun away and punched the person who was holding it, and then threw the gun away— no, it threw the gun at someone, hitting the person in the forehead. They slumped down.
The room, once full of noise, had started to quiet, men seeming to be falling like bowling ball pins, both from the thing fighting them and the stray bullets.
Steve suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder and he jumped.
”Just me,” Clint whispered in his ear.
”Thank God,” he whispered back, “what is that?”
”I have no clue, I can’t see it.”
Clint’s voice was flat. There was no trace of humor or even panic. Steve’s eyes finally adjusted, and he looked Clint up and down. Clint's hands were white knuckled on his bow and his eyes were unblinking.
Completely unblinking. Steve wasn’t sure Clint had blinked in the last 30 seconds.
He didn’t move.
But Steve saw his chest heaving.
Oh shit.
The thing was still fighting, punching and kicking and leaping. It moved almost silently, the only sound was the contact of flesh on flesh and the resounding screams. The man in white, one of the only people Steve could see easily, had gotten his hands on a gun and was firing it at the thing wildly, so wildly the spray of bullets hit Steve's shield more than once, the bullets bounced off.
The thing was at the man’s throat in a second or less, pushing him into the ground with little effort. The man screamed in its face, “Diablo!”
The thing, the ‘Diablo’, growled low at the man, “Pecador. Te he estado buscando”. Its voice was something terrible, gravelly and unrelenting, like rusty metal gears grinding.
“What did it say?” Steve whispered.
”’Sinner,’” Clint translated, eyes still on the fight, “‘I have been looking for you.’”
”Sinner?!” Steve whispered loudly. Clint shushed him. Steve’s mind started to race. What kind of religious thing were they dealing with?
The Diablo pressed harder on the man's neck, and the man gurgled, “por favor, piedad…”
“‘Please, mercy.’”
“No,” the thing responded, “tu orgullo es repugnante; puedo saborearlo.”
“No, your pride is repulsive, I can taste it.’”
”Taste…?” Steve mumbled.
The man’s head hit the ground. Past out or dead, Steve couldn’t tell.
The Diablo stood up, its head hung low. It stood still, waiting for something. Steve took a breath. Its head turned towards him. Steve’s heart beat hard in his chest. It’s a clawing feeling now. The thing turned towards him fully, but its head was down, eyes scanning the ground.
A hand grabbed its leg.
“Позволите ли вы нам покаяться?” said the man holding his leg. His voice shook.
“‘Will you let us repent?’”
Steve blinked, ”What-“
“Кто-то из вас, возможно,” the Diablo said. It leaned over the man, “Но не ты. Я чувствую на тебе запах всех грехов. Слишком много грехов в одном человеке, чтобы можно было очиститься..”
”’Some of you, perhaps, but not you. I smell every sin on you. Too many sins in one man to be cleansed.’”
Steve's mouth hangs agape. What the actual fuck?
It kicked off the hand, then kicked the man's head.
The thing turned, surveying the carnage. Steve's heart still hadn’t slowed, it beat out a steady, ‘you’re-gonna-die, you’re-gonna-die, you’re-gonna-die’ in staccato time.
Steve finally remembered the flashlight on his belt. He looked back to grab it, fumbling with suddenly clumsy hands. He looked back up and clicked the light on.
The thing was facing him.
Steve nearly dropped the flashlight.
Steve is the first one to admit that he is more willing to believe in ghosts, demons, and the supernatural than most. He would say it’s his number one old man trait. But this thing in front of him didn’t feel like a story. It felt real and tactile and like it could bite through his throat.
The Diablo looked almost like a man.
Almost.
There was something off about it. It didn’t stand like a man, it stood like an animal, hunched and bristling.
It wore all black, with a cloth tied around its face. On its hands were the remains of bloody wrappings, still dripping. It tilted its head.
Steve stood from his crouch shakily, holding onto the railing. He was about to open his mouth, about the ask… something, anything, when it spoke.
“Pride,” it growled, “is one of the worst sins of all.”
Slowly, the Diablo raised its head.
Steve couldn’t see its eyes.
Steve does drop the flashlight this time. The light skittered around the walls and ceiling as Steve scrambled to pick it up.
He lunged for the flash light and turned the beam back to where the thing was standing.
The Diablo was gone, like smoke in the wind.
Clint stood up. His face was ghostly and pale.
”Well, that was scary as all hell.” Clint stared down at the carnage below, “What was that?”
”I don’t know…” Steve said.
Clint shook his head as color slowly returned to his face. “There goes all our glory.”
“I don’t think that was human,” Steve said, staring at Clint.
Clint’s eyes darted to the side, “Oh really? What makes you say that?”
”Did you see the way it moved?” Steve gestured to the now empty space, “It was like it never got hit.”
Clint picked at his bowstring, ”I mean, it was very dark, I doubt a lot of people could see very well…”
Steve waved the flashlight over the pile of bodies, “I’m guessing it could.”
“Yeah, well…” Clint hesitated.
”Clint, what does diablo mean?” Steve asked.
Clint jerked up, finally meeting Steve's eyes, “What?”
”Diablo,” Steve said, “they kept calling it that. What does it mean?”
Clint paused. His eyes roamed over Steve's face.
He took a deep breath.
”Devil.”
~.~.~.~.~
Matt climbed through his apartment window, pulling off his mask as he did.
”Hey Matt!” Foggy called from the couch. His breath smelled like mint. “How was the night life?”
”I think…” Matt said as he fiddled with his mask, “I think the Avengers think I’m the Devil.”