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There’s a little boy standing over a crib in Waverly. He has dark hair and features, dirty nails and a scrubby nose. He is watching his brother breathe in and out and he thinks about dropping the pillow over his head. He could, it would easy. But his mother is watching and she seems so proud -- of what, the boy isn’t sure. He doesn’t know. He couldn’t know. He will likely never know, because, someday, his brother is going to kill him.
But he doesn’t know. He couldn’t know. Not ever.
There is a baby being born in a hospital in Waverly. His heart is weak, weak, weak. And it will not seem to beat, beat, beat. His mother is drowsy in bed, the side effects of a C-section, drugged out and half-reaching for her son, half on her way to sleep. The doctors don’t think he’ll make it. Someone thinks they should leave him out, let him go, tell his mother he was still born.
Alone in the ward, a nurse with one foot in the door to retirement breathes life into the infant.
She brings him to rest in his mother’s arms, and she calls him Clinton. Francis after his grandfather. Barton for his missing pater. Under her numb fingers, his heart continues to beat, beat, beat.
It is the first story he shares with Natasha, sitting around a barrel fire, stitching up a cut on her leg. She’s going in and out, and so he talks about Barney, about his grandad’s farm and his dad’s shop and his mother’s sunflowers. Her eyes focus on him while the thread goes through and through and he says to her with a cocky grin -- “I was supposed to die when I was born.”
“What happened?”
“Some old nurse brought be back, ‘ccordin’ to my mom. She didn’t tell a lot of stories, but she liked that one. Maybe Barney jealous, he was born all normal like and stuff.” He ties off the suture. “Good as new.”
Natasha inspects his work, impressed. She hands him the salve for burns on his calf. They sit quietly for a while before she nudges him with her elbow. “Maybe you’re good luck.”
“Funny.”
“We’re not dead, are we?”
Clint laughs. “No. We sure as hell aren’t dead.”
On a table in SHIELD medical, they cut off the shredded Kevlar covering his chest and begin compressions. Pump one, two, three and breathe. Pump one, two, three and breath. The paddles heat up. They spark to life. Someone shouts. Clear. He arches off the table, gasping for breath, back from the dead.
Sitting alone in a chair outside the room, Director Fury holds what is left of Barton’s Kevlar in his hands and digs a bullet out, just where it would have pierced his heart.
Standing in a room across from the most beautiful woman he has met in six months -- because Clint will never use words like world and ever and in all my life -- he reaches out his hand and his heart skips a beat. Maybe two.
“Agent Morse,” she says, and slides a pair of glasses over her face, gives him a smile worth a million bucks. “Guess we’re workin’ this together.”
“Yeah,” he says, checking his pulse. “Guess we are.”
He is not supposed to be doing this, not with her, but she is stretched out beautifully under him and she saved his life and he saved hers and there’s really nowhere else to go from here but up up up. He can feel Bobbi’s pulse under his hands and he revels in it, the way it is erratic, the way it speeds up and matches him every time his cock moves inside her, every time she tenses around him, says his name and digs her nails into his scalp.
Clint wants to tell her he loves her, because he does and he doesn’t know why or how, but he seals his lips over hers instead, lets her breathe into him, fill him with the laughter that keeps bubbling up in her throat and escaping into the air around him. He’s never made love to anyone who was so happy about it. She grins, turns him over, and rides him until she comes, until she can stroke him and he spills over her hand and his chest and he can’t stop laughing either while she cleans them up.
“We are in so much trouble,” she mumbles against his mouth. Clint would agree, but he just can’t seem to care.
It’s inevitable that they will send her away. She’s going to London for an undetermined amount of time and she asks him not to wait for her. “We can try again, when I come back, if you’d like.” Bobbi kisses the corner of his mouth and Clint’s heart is drumming against his chest, beating in time to don’t go don’t go don’t go.
“Of course,” he says instead, and he watches her get in the taxi and vanish around the corner.
He is watching this sad, broad man lift with everything he has as the hammer sits resolutely in its spot. “Call it, Coulson.”
Radio silence. Clint grins. His heart beats in time with the rain and this, this is what he signed up for when he was eighteen and stupid and just trying not to be a carnie. He drops his bow. Coulson backs off. Clint falters a little.
His heart, you see, it breaks a little for lost causes.
“You have heart,” Loki says. Everything goes black.
He feels pain, teeth, red hair and skin and technicolor, like coming down from a Nyquil high, like having too much Percocet in your mouth at once while trying to eat a dozen marshmallows. The words don’t quite fit right and he keeps shaking, coming off some kind of ride, like he could be sick any minute.
He’s gotta piss.
His heart is beating too fast. She isn’t make sense but she’s next to him and he needs to feel her. He’s never been so overwhelmed with the need to touch and his hand reaches for hers and she reaches back and he wants to tell her how he feels that he loves her that she is the best friend he has ever had that he knew, somewhere in the recesses of his blue, blue mind, she was going to be there when he woke up because he knew she’d be the one to bring him back.
Clint settles for fighting by her side. It feels right, like nothing has in a long time.
Tony pushes the button for his floor -- “Fifty-five,” he says proudly -- and when the doors open, Clint looks around.
“Which room is mine?”
Tony laughs.
For a long time.
“Sorry, that was just really precious. Jarv, did we get that on tape?”
“We did, sir.” Fucking Skynet. Clint shakes his head.
“Seriously though, feathers.” Tony puts a hand on his shoulder. “The whole thing is your room.”
Clint feels something like a vise clench over his chest and the floor is under his ass real quick. Tony takes a knee. “Sorry.” Clint shakes his head, shakes it off. “Sorry. I--”
“It’s too big.” Tony has a hand on his shoulder still, anchoring them together. Clint looks over. “I got it. Come back tomorrow, same time.” Tony is suddenly gone, pulling holograms out of nowhere and talking to Jarvis. Clint backs into the elevator and spends the entire night on SHIELD’s range, until Sitwell comes in and tells him that he’s maxed out his practice time and go home Barton and let’s get a beer next week and seriously, man, go get something to eat.
Clint hates food, honestly. It’s so inefficient.
He goes back to the tower, heads up to the same floor, but thinks he’s gotten off on the wrong one.
“No, no!” Tony comes running toward him, covered in twenty-four hours of no sleep, coffee, and what is probably plaster. The red-head is behind him. Potts, right. Clint gives her a wave. She smiles. She’s too pretty and too nice and too smart for Stark, but sometimes that sort of thing works. He knows. “What do you think?”
“I think I’m on the wrong floor,” he mutters, shaking his head.
“I halved it, basically. Living space is here.” He jogs the border of the room. “And over here--” He punches a code. “Private range. For those lonely rainy nights when you just can’t get your kicks any other way. Also Natasha may have mentioned you, like, never stop practicing.”
“Tell her to stop giving away my secrets,” Clint says, but there’s no teeth behind it. He steps into the range and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Tony looks pretty proud. “This is too much. I mean...the size is good, I love it, I just. I’ve never had so much, I--”
Tony holds up a hand. “You’re an Avenger.” He pulls Clint back toward the elevator. “We take care of our own.”
Clint’s heart beats a little faster.
“One more dive like that, Hawkeye, and you’re benched.” Steve says it and walks away and Clint knows a challenge when he sees one.
“You’re just pissed because I got it and you didn’t, old man. Fess up. You’re jealous.”
Steve turns around, eyes lit with amusement and flame and Clint can’t stop grinning. “Jealous? Of your circus act?”
“Damn straight.”
“Alright. Sparring. Two hours from now in the gym. You and me. Winner does the next call in regulation SHIELD cadet garb and buys dinner for the team.”
“Done deal.”
He completely deserves the look Natasha gives him when he shows up on the next call in regulation SHIELD blues and shells out a hundred bucks for take out for the team when it’s all said and done.
He double does not deserve the smile and the pat on the back from Steve when he shows up to the table in his civvies. Or the way Steve smiles when he says, “Good work, Barton.” He does not deserve the swell of pride in his chest when everyone is together and happy and laughing for the first time in a long time.
Well. He might deserve that. Just a little.
His heart skips a beat for lost causes.