Chapter Text
It’s during times like these that Clint wishes his job description was limited to ‘Avenger: of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.’
Tracking down the final trails of HYDRA, cutting off the heads so quickly that they never grow back? Easy work. Facing down cruel aliens that love converging on New York? Psh, old news. Helping Thor control his younger brother when the wayward god decides it’s time to try and rule the world again? That one is getting a little annoying, actually, but it’s more of a formality at this point. Like, hello Loki, no you can’t take over the world Loki, sorry Loki, we’ll have to trap you again and send you home with Thor, see you soon! And can you bring more Asgardian ale this time?
Point is, the Avengers are only required for things that are the “real deal.” The terrifying, world-threatening emergencies. And those only happen like twenty times a year! You show up to smack some big bads for a few hours then go home, absolutely nothing else required. He could be living the dream right now.
But no. His younger self was a world-class idiot that signed both life and soul away to S.H.I.E.L.D. Then his slightly older self was a galaxy-class idiot and renewed the contract, keeping him locked there until he’s 41, whereupon he’ll become a universe-class idiot and probably get himself stuck as an agent until he’s 90. For now, he still has to deal with the repercussions of the galaxy-class idiot, and at the ripe age of 36 – 37? 38? 39? no, probably 37 – he’s limping back to his free suite in Stark’s ego tower, where he’ll order an unholy amount of pizza and fall asleep in the leftover grease. Somehow it’ll get all up in his hair. Nat will be so disgusted with him. He could be kicking back and eating pizza every day, he reminds himself, if only he wasn’t so dumb.
He really needs to actually get inside the building first, though, before he starts fantasizing about the possibly not-so-far-off future.
Honestly, this mission hadn’t been so bad. Tough, sure – he has the severely aching leg to prove it – but he’s one of their top ops. He receives and signs up for tough assignments because both parties know he’s capable of them. It’s his speciality.
No, what’s really killing him is the paperwork.
Contracts. Reports. Amendments to reports. Psych evals. He’s signed more NDAs in a year than he has digits on his hands (still all 10, by the way, because he’s good like that). Somehow they’re always finding more things to shut people up about. S.H.I.E.L.D. is a volcano of paperwork and it has him trapped in its lava flow. Avengers might get to go home, but agents are lucky if they ever see the sky again. He gets jumped as soon as he’s back from whatever corner of the Earth he’d been slinking around in. This latest mission had him filling out reports and any other paperwork they decided to dream up for six hours. Clint mourns the days when he could step off the ramp and go home to collapse.
Hill says that they have to trap him there since he used to leave and never come back, abandoning reports for so long that others would have been fired over it. A blatant lie, by the way. They weren’t blank. There were definitely a couple sentences written on there before he put them through a paper shredder and lit the remains on fire...allegedly.
Anyway, it’s exhausting to the point that his actual bones ache, especially when he’s been awake for over a day and had very little sleep before that. A coffee buzzing around his system is all that’s keeping him on two feet while he waits for the elevator to spit him out at his floor, at which point he can finally launch himself onto the nearest surface, and it’ll be lights out for him. Maybe for forever. It’s extremely likely that he’s about to fall asleep and never wake up again.
The elevator seems to be whirring past floors at a nearly alarming rate, though it’s hard to tell if that’s Jarvis’s doing or if his perception is really that shot. Clint’s really, really hoping that it’s the elevator and not his brain, because getting psyched out by sleep deprivation is so not on his payroll. Banking on the Jarvis theory, he pats the wall panels awkwardly as a weird sort of thanks, buddy.
The doors open in the nick of time. He stumbles inside and narrowly avoids a painful and gross fall into the couch, which is still covered in pizza boxes caught in varying degrees of staleness. He’s not that desperate. Bed it is, then. He manages to make the treacherous journey to his room with grievous injury (yes, please, clap), then narrowly avoids throwing himself atop another Pile of Thing that’s waiting on the bed. This one is a thousand times more suspicious, though, because he didn’t put it there.
Clarity rushes back into him with the force of a semi-truck. His hand twitches for the quiver at his back, but he doesn’t draw yet, not sensing any further danger. The rest of the room seems untouched. Perfectly? Apart from the elephant in the room, it appears so. A fine layer of dust is on the top of the dresser as it should be, and there’s no trail in the carpet where Tony’s bots would once invade his space to clean before he asked him to call it off.
There’s just the package.
The unassuming brown paper bundle is placed in the center of his bed. A good length of twine keeps it folded together, topping the whole thing off in a knotted bow. It’s a good one, honestly. He may need to hunt Nat down so she can help him replicate it later.
“Hey Jarvis,” he calls out, a little uncertain as he hosts a staredown with the bundle, “has anyone broken into the Tower recently?”
A short pause as Jarvis presumably scans the systems. “No, sir.”
“Cool, cool cool. What about my room specifically?”
“No unauthorized personnel have visited any of the living suites.”
Aha. The suspicion he’s been building up like armour sheds off immediately. Most of it, anyway – he keeps a sliver of it tucked close, because the situation is still fragile. When you live in the same building as a god and super soldiers, random boxes that trigger no alarms are always pranks.
Is it a little pathetic that he’s probably going to sleep in whatever goop this thing spews at him? Listen, okay, he’s tired. Showers are going to disappear in the next couple hours.
Clint removes a little of his uniform anyways. May as well limit the damage as much as possible. His bow goes onto the rack on the wall, his quiver to the corner; he undoes his arm bracers and boots to shuck them both across the room. The small utility belt quickly joins them. The suit itself has already been through a few different rounds of hell, so he saves the stripping for after the grand reveal.
“How badly am I going to regret opening this?” he asks the air, only partly rhetorical. With such a simple appearance, it’s hard to tell if this is a revenge plot, one of the harmless ones that help Thor acclimate, or somewhere in-between. He...doesn’t think he’s ticked anyone off recently. But he’s never been very adept at social situations.
It’s hard to tell if the AI wants to sound all-knowing or if his words have just come out that way when he replies, “I believe you’ll come to appreciate the gift, sir.”
Gift? Gift? No, no, no, he is not falling for the cleverly worded trickery today. The last time someone had presented him with a gift, their hands had immediately come swinging for his face.
And landed. But that’s not the point.
Whatever Jarvis wants him to believe, Clint knows better, and he’s going to treat this with the care of disabling a bomb in Iraq (which isn’t actually that carefully, if you’ve watched that one movie, but it’s whatever). It’s a humiliation ritual. A true test of if you’re worthy of the title of Avenger.
As he steps closer to the bomb bundle, he’s not sure that he is.
Deft fingers gently pick up one of the trailing strings of the bow. Squinting his eyes in case it’s about to explode, Clint starts pulling on the string, easing the bow apart. He’s able to completely undo the knot without an issue.
Huh.
The flaps of paper have eased without the pressure of the string. He’s still on his guard as he swipes the twine off the top, waiting for the inevitable flash or explosion or spray of glitter, every part of him tense as he lifts one of the flaps like it’s glass to reveal...
Arrows. A collection of arrows, no more than 15. Two fletchings black, one purple, and a thin ring of glittering silver on the shaft. Trick arrows, for sure.
Double huh.
On top of the arrows is a small, folded card, a simple arrow of gleaming gold pressed into the center. Confusion has taken over his wariness now, and Clint rips the seal with a short fingernail without much thought, though a small part of him still whispers about glitter explosions and hidden cameras. Yet again, nothing happens. It’s just a card. A card with well-penned cursive inside, telling him, Happy birthday, Clint.
Happy birthday? He tries to think about when that is, then gives up. He tries to think about what day it is now and gives up on that too.
“Jarvis, when was my birthday?”
“Two days ago. It appears that you were in an unreachable location when the day arrived.”
A happy accident. Maybe he judged Redacted, El Salvador too harshly. “So how old am I?”
“Is that a question you’d like answered, sir?”
Yeowch, but fair. Clint stares blearily at the little card, thought processes slowing to molasses as he becomes dead on his feet again, the threat gone. There’s something wrong with this scene. He can feel it. It’s right there, if only he could think a little harder.
Instead of figuring it out, Clint grabs the bundle and puts it on the floor as carefully as he can and hopes that he won’t wake up and immediately step on it. Arrows through your foot are 0/10, don’t recommend. He thinks he tells Jarvis to set an alarm as he flops onto the now empty bed, but it’s anyone’s guess, really, and the world immediately disappears when he closes his eyes.
There’s a few things he notices when he wakes up.
One: his bed feels absolutely amazing. Why has he been sleeping on the couch this whole time? Tony got these super high thread count sheets when he first gifted the rooms to everyone, and he’d avoided them like the plague on principle. It was fun to watch Tony’s frown get progressively more genuine, but hol-lee, Clint’s been missing out.
Two: he forgot to take his hearing aids out and rolled onto his side at some point, and now it feels like he stuck a hot poker in his inner ear. His left aid just feels a little gummy, thankfully, but he has to flip onto his back and pull the right one off on the spot. Bleh.
Three: there is a loud emergency alarm blasting through the room and his lights are gently pulsing in and out. It’s made extra disconcerting by the fact that his ears are hearing it at different levels. He can’t tell which one is making his head spin more, or if it’s the combination of the two.
“Belgium?” he tries, and the disruption shuts off.
“France, sir.”
“Damnit.”
Him and Jarvis have been playing a game for a few months, setting his alarms with the EAS of different countries. He’d thought he’d be better at it with all the travelling he does, but so far Clint has only gotten 3 of 12. Jarvis has to be playing dirty somehow.
“How long was I out for?”
“You rested for four hours. I assumed you wouldn’t want to sleep for longer, seeing as you didn’t provide a time.”
Like usual, Jarvis has assumed correctly. Clint definitely likes sleep, but he hates how much time it steals away from him. Too many things can happen in the period that he’s unconscious.
He slides out of the bed slowly, a little more wet noodle than human, and has to roll to the side quickly to avoid landing on the arrows next to his bed. The move has him landing on his tailbone with a thump. “Ow,” he groans. He’s too old to be pulling stunts like that no matter how well he can still fit in the vents. In a couple years, falling like that is not going to be fun.
Moping about his age has him snapping back to reality. He’s on his feet in the same second and picking the “gift” up off the floor, giving it far more consideration this time.
Nobody needs to know him that well to connect him to arrows. The purple accent isn’t that telling either. But the cursive...he studies the card for a moment (and it really is unfair how perfect the letters are). This wipes Thor off the list, at least. It still leaves everyone else.
“Who wrote this card?”
“Your well-wisher asked to remain anonymous.”
“So not Tony, then.”
Jarvis sounds amused when he replies, “An astute observation, sir.” They fade into silence as Clint picks up the arrows one by one, inspecting them to see if they’re all crafted the same, or even if there’s an inscription on one of them. There isn’t.
Thing is, he isn’t sure how to handle this. Gifts. His birthday. Gifts for his birthday. Any sort of acknowledgement of the fact that it exists and he’s survived another rotation of the Earth around the sun. It’s why he’s sure he told Jarvis not to bother when the AI was prodding at everyone’s preferences – having it brought up leaves a strange taste in his mouth, like he’s waited too long to brush his teeth. Even now he’s tense as he fiddles with the arrows, feeling uncomfortable in the room that’s meant to only be his, with the ghostly sensation of ants crawling over his skin.
And at the same time...
This person has studied him enough to realize that archery is more than his profession, but a piece of his identity, woven so tightly into his being that he couldn’t disconnect it if he tried. These arrows have been crafted with care. Made to be perfect. No one else here is an archery fanatic, so it’s quite the feat. On top of that, there’s no explanation of what they do, which means that he’s been given the joy of finding out. He’s no stranger to any of the Avengers by any means, but how was this person able to tailor it so well?
Clint twirls one of the trick arrows around his fingers and decides that he’ll seek out his mysterious benefactor later to thank them, a task that future Clint is probably capable of handling. Current Clint is going to take a nice little trip down to the shooting range and pierce the hell out of some targets.
The range itself takes up an entire floor and is one of his favourite places to spend time in, because there’s just so many sections. Close, long; archery, ammunition, blades; moving, stationary; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It’s a work of art. Ah, to be a billionaire that doesn’t know how to tell his friends that he appreciates them through words. What a wonderful life.
It still feels like there’s a layer of grime coating him while he sets up in front of his usual long-range lane. All sorts of worries are dancing around his head. He doesn’t have to accept the gift, right? He can just see what it does and move on? Or, by taking it down here, has he already accepted it? Or is it only accepted if he uses one of the arrows? Where’s the line? Is it too late, or does he still have time to tuck these in a corner somewhere and act like nothing happened? He takes a deep breath and shakes his hands, trying to push his flying thoughts out through the motion. This isn’t some sort of contract or obligation. He’s just seeing what they do. If he doesn’t like them, he can just move on, and if he does like them, it’s no big deal. They’re only arrows. When he starts believing that a little more, he notches one of the arrows, and lets it fly.
Forget all that mush he was talking about. He LOVES birthdays. Sign him up forever.
Clint’s staring at the target with more awe than he has anything else in his life. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
As soon as the arrow tip collided with the thick canvas, everything became purple. Literally. It exploded in this majestic cloud of purple glitter. The target is completely covered in it – just a giant, round, purple glittery thing. There’s even a large puff of purple smoke to go with it, the last remnants fading as he watches. A solid twenty seconds pass before he can get his brain back online.
It’s glorious. Inspiring. Monumental. These arrows hold a power that a man like him should never have been given.
“Happy birthday, Clint,” he whispers to himself, eyes stuck to the bright purple target as a maniacal grin grows on his face. Happy birthday, indeed.