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cap_ironman2009-09-19 11:33 pm
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2009-09-19 11:33 pm
Entry tags:
When the Lights Go On Again 20(a)/21
Title: When the Lights Go On Again 20(a)/21
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: Depictions of torture, and general violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
A/N #1:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq.
A/N #2: Sorry for the late update; hopefully the fact that this is really long helps? Also, because we don't know how to shut up, the fic has ballooned from twenty chapters to twenty-one, so look for the final part next week.
Also, this fic owes a great deal totavella, who helped us to shape this into something that didn't have gaping plot holes.
When the Lights Go On Again
Hank had never been so glad to wake up in a hospital bed. It was hard and uncomfortable, and the sheet someone had spread over him was doing next to nothing to combat the chill in the air, but it wasn't the cold, stone floor of Grand Central, or an alien prison cell.
The pain in his leg had been reduced to a dull ache, to be replaced by thirst and exhaustion so heavy that opening his eyes was an effort.
He wasn't in a hospital. The ceiling overhead was metal rather than acoustic tile, and the nurse giving an injection to the man in combat gear lying in the bed to his left was wearing a SHIELD uniform.
SHIELD was here. The others had managed to get the forcefield down after all. Did that mean that Tony was still alive?
He'd been trying to get to the others -- Jan had been there, maybe, at least, he thought he remembered her. Had he made it to the main concourse? Where were--
The world went blurry around when he tried to sit up, and Hank fell back against the bed, closing his eyes again. All right. Sitting up was obviously not going to be his next course of action.
No one around him had looked familiar. Had he only imagined Jan's presence? Everything after the Argonian had stabbed him was vague and disjointed.
His attempt to ask the SHIELD medic if she knew where the rest of the Avengers were turned into a cough as his dry throat rebelled. "Water?" he managed, after a moment.
"Dr. Pym!" The medic sounded bizarrely delighted. "You're awake. Don't try to sit up; you've lost a lot of blood and we don't have enough plasma or whole blood to go around. You ought to have been given a transfusion, but we have to save our blood supplies for critical patients." She adjusted the bed slightly, so that Hank's torso was tiled upwards, and handed him a small cup of water.
The water was lukewarm and tasted like plastic, and was possibly the best thing Hank had ever tasted.
"You're on the Helicarrier," she continued, as he drank. "The aliens have surrendered, but it's going to take days to get the power back on so we've been bringing the wounded from the station up here."
The Argonians had... "Surrendered?" Hank managed. "We-" They hadn't expected a surrender. Not even Steve, not really, or else he would never have agreed to Hank's sodium ascorbate plan. He'd been sure they were going to have to fight them to the last man, or rather, the last prehensile-tailed furry humanoid. "My team?" he asked. "Are they... all right?" There had been gunshots, coming from above him.
"The Resistance took heavy casualties before the forceshield fell and the surrender was announced, but all Avengers members who were present are alive and accounted for."
Hank closed his eyes, relief making him dizzy again. Alive. They were all alive. Nobody had been killed because he hadn’t been able to bring the shield down or get to the ground floor in time. Only after a moment did he realize that "alive" didn’t necessarily mean "all right."
There was silence for a moment, and Hank could hear someone in the infirmary coughing. Then the medic spoke again, her previously brisk voice sounding slightly hesitant.
"You're the one who developed the anti-venom for Argonian tailbarbs, aren't you?"
Hank nodded, frowning faintly. He'd thought before that the dose he'd given himself wasn't working properly, but if that had been true, he would be dead now. He must have lost more blood than he'd realized.
Of course the anti-venom had worked properly -- the principle had been sound, and he'd tested it thoroughly.
"Do you know how many lives we could have saved if we had had access to that on the outside? There are at least three people in this room who would be dead right now without it. I just... I wanted to thank you in person."
Hank blinked at her, unsure how to respond. "It wasn't particularly complex once I had access to blood samples from poison victims and an Argonian body to autopsy," he finally said. It had been time-consuming, yes, but compared to synthesizing explosives out of cleaning products and battery acid, it had been outright fun. That and solving the sodium ascorbate problem had been the only real challenges he'd had in months. "Their venom's a beautiful compound, very efficient. I wasn't able to counter it completely; the argo-serotonin still causes extreme pain on contact."
She shook her head, smiling slightly. "SHIELD scientists spent five months trying to develop an effective anti-venom," she told him dryly, "and you synthesized one completely un-aided in a makeshift lab in a hotel basement."
Well, when you put it that way...
"It was nothing," Hank told her modestly.
His leg was starting to hurt seriously hurt now, whatever painkiller they had given him obviously wearing off. Maybe the severe pain on contact hadn't been the serotonin; maybe it had just been the natural result of having a barbed stinger the size of his hand shoved into the meat of his thigh.
Hank shifted uncomfortably, wondering if he ought to ask for more painkillers, or if that was something else they had a limited supply of. The Resistance had had to strictly ration medication of all kinds after all the pharmacies had finally sold out last month; they wouldn't have had access to prescription medications at all if it weren't for their connections to the Kingpin.
He was reaching under the sheet to poke surreptitiously at the bandage on his thigh when the infirmary door slid open and Clint entered, helping one of the arson and explosive squad men limp into the room.
Clint was spattered with the purplish-brown stains of dried Argonian blood, and there was a dark patch on his sleeve where the cut in his arm had re-opened and bled through the fabric and the bandage underneath, but he seemed otherwise uninjured. Good. At least one of his teammates was--
Jan was standing in the doorway behind Clint. Hank struggled onto one elbow, trying to see over the Fahrenheit squad man's head.
There were bloodstains all over her costume, human blood, and her left sleeve had been torn away, leaving her arm bare.
One of them had hurt her.
Hank shoved himself upright, planting both hands flat against the mattress to brace himself as sound and vision suddenly blurred out.
"I thought I told you not to sit up," the medic was saying.
"Jan," Hank managed, his voice echoing strangely.
"Hank! You're awake." Jan was next to him now, one hand on his arm. Hank wasn't entirely sure how she had gotten there, but he didn't care.
"Your costume - there's blood all over -- are you hurt?"
"Am I-" She was glaring at him. Why was she glaring at him? He had delivered the poison and probably made their entire victory possible.
Then she was hugging him, burying her face in his shoulder. Her hair smelled like ozone and smoke; Hank closed his eyes and rested his face against it, breathing in the smell. It didn't communicate anything in particular -- Jan only gave off pheromones when they were small, a side effect of the biological modifications that had created her wings, but it was comforting anyway.
"It's your blood," she said, her voice muffled by his skin. "You promised you would come back. You could have died, Hank. You never think. You-"
"I didn't actually promise. You just told me to come back," Hank mumbled into her hair.
"And you agreed that you would." Jan didn't actually sound angry, but her fingers were digging into his arm.
"The plan worked," Hank protested. "Did you get Tony out?"
"Yeah. We... found Tony." Clint's voice sounded strained, and Hank winced.
"Is he-"
"He hasn't woken up yet." Clint cleared his throat. "We, uh, found Wanda and, and Pietro. Wanda destroyed their forcefield."
"Good," Hank said quietly. Even with his eyes closed, sitting up was starting to make him feel lightheaded. "I think I should-"
"I think he needs to lie back down," Clint said. "He's gone grey."
Hank would have protested, but since he wasn't sure he'd have been able to stay upright if he hadn't been leaning on Jan, he decided not to. "Sorry," he apologized, as Jan helped him lie back.
"What for?"
Hank stared up at her, seeing the smear of blood on her face and the ragged mess of her costume. Even like this, she was beautiful.
"For making you worry? I should be fine. I just need to rest for a few days." By which point his body would have replaced all the blood he had lost, and he would be fine and able to get back to his lab.
"You're going to be on crutches almost as long as Johnny," Clint pointed out.
Hank grimaced, feeling stupid. He hadn't actually thought of that -- either the blood loss or the half-worn-off painkillers were making him groggy, as if his head were filled with syrup.
"Maybe it will keep you out of trouble." Jan smiled at him, but her eyes were bright and shiny, and she kept blinking.
'Please don't cry.' Hank thought. He didn't know what to do with a crying Jan even when he was healthy and uninjured. "I'm good at staying out of trouble now," he protested. "I've done nothing but stay out of trouble since this started. You’re the ones who've been sneaking in and out of Argonian installations and going under-cover and kissing people." He was rambling, Hank realized. Maybe he should stop talking. People got twitchy when he talked too much or two quickly.
"It's not her fault," Clint said hurriedly. "I was..." he hesitated, staring at something beyond Hank and Jan. "It was pretty rough in there," he said quietly, awkwardly. "I think it kind of screwed with my head, and," he turned to Jan, "and you were there, and you were nice to me, and..." he trailed off, and Hank, looking at him, made himself take in the circles under his eyes, as dark as bruises, and his pale, too-thin face. 'Scurvy,' he reminded himself. 'Excruciating alien venom. Months of isolation. He thought of the scientists he'd seen in the converter room, pale and gaunt and listless, and Dr. Connors telling him "Some of the others can't even walk anymore."
"I know what it was like," he said. "I saw it. Everyone was right; I wouldn't have made it if I'd gone under."
Jan put a hand on his shoulder -- her fingers were warm, soft. "If you had," she said, "who would have figured out how to poison them? Or developed the anti-venom? They said," her voice faltered for a moment, "they said you would have died without it."
"I don't think so," Hank said, trying to remember those hazy minutes after the Argonian had stabbed him. "I think I may have been bleeding enough that most of the venom wouldn't have remained in my system." She had a point, though. No one else could have discovered the Argonians' reaction to salt and vitamin C, and without his discoveries, they would have had no hope of defeating the Argonians. Still, all those months, he'd spent months hiding in the Waldorf-Astoria's basement while the others risked their lives.
Clint made a face. "Trust me," he said, "you'd be dead. And if you're ever sick, don't let Tony take care of you. He's awful at it." He paused, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown. "You know, it's too bad Scott Lang was stuck in California the whole time. We could have sent him under and the two of you could have had your ants take messages out back and forth. Then Jan wouldn't have had to keep sneaking in to meet with me."
"That's..." Jan stared at him. "Brilliant, actually."
Clint shrugged. "I spent months with nobody to talk to but a bunch of scientific geniuses. I guess some of it rubbed off."
Hank shook his head. "I couldn't have done it," he repeated, trying to drag the conversation back on topic. "Couldn't have done what either of you did. I don't have any right to judge you, for-" he couldn't even say it, which made his cowardice even more obvious. Facing down armed and extremely dangerous aliens and supervillains, he could do, but talking to Jan about their relationship was apparently beyond him.
Even when they hadn't been together, he had never so much as looked at another woman -- not that he would have deserved to, considering the circumstances -- but Jan and Clint had been under huge amounts of stress, and she had been Clint's only form of contact with the outside world, and they both swore that it had been a mistake, a single kiss in the heat of the moment, that it hadn't meant anything.
He had no reason to think that they were lying to him. Jan didn't lie, not about things like that; if she had wanted to leave him for Clint, she would have no problem saying so. She wouldn't sneak around behind his back and string him along.
Clint shifted uncomfortably, and looked away. "Can we talk about something else and go back to pretending that the whole kiss thing never happened?"
"Anything that means I never have to think about it again is fine by me," Hank said, and he meant it. He was too tired to get angry or be paranoid or even, really, hurt. He could have died, and Jan could have died, and instead they were both here and safe and Jan's thumb was rubbing small circles against his shoulder, and if he stayed very still, his leg hardly hurt at all.
Jan sighed, her expression speaking volumes about her assessment of both of their maturity levels. "Just as long as you don't let that SHIELD medic who's been making googly eyes at you since she found out that you created the Argonian anti-venom get too carried away. I might not be so forgiving."
"She was making googly eyes at me?" She had congratulated him, yes, but most of their conversation had involved the fact that Hank wasn't supposed to be sitting up yet.
Clint smiled, and the expression almost reached his eyes. "Women appreciate smart men, and wounded heroes. Much as I hate to admit it, you fit the bill for both right now."
"I'll remember that you said that next time you call me a mad scientist." Hank closed his eyes again, and turned his face into Jan's hand, resting his cheek against her wrist. "I thought I imagined you, before, in the station," he told her.
Jan's fingers tightened on his shoulder for a moment. "I thought you were dying," she said, quietly. "I was afraid you would bleed to death right in front of me, and never know how I really felt about you."
"You know what?" Clint voice sounded strained. "I think I'm going to leave now."
"Hmm." Hank said. "All right." Jan was here. No one was dead. They had won. The Waldorf-Astoria's generator probably needed more maintenance, since he'd been keeping it running by willpower alone lately, but someone else could do that. He was tired of playing mechanic, and anyway, Tony had been rescued -- Clint had said that they had rescued him, right? He could do it. And Spiderman was more than capable of handling explosives detail on his own.
"I love you, you know, even after everything." Jan's voice was barely louder than a whisper. "I didn't always want to, but I never stopped."
Hank smiled, feeling warm all the way through, despite knowing he didn't deserve it. "I'll always love you; I'm just not very good..." he yawned, the words tangling over themselves. "Not good at it."
He fell asleep with Jan's slim fingers wrapped around his hand.
***
Clint wasn't in the mood to be alone, but standing there and watching Hank and Jan look at each other like that, listening to Jan talk softly to Hank about how scared she had been for him, he had felt like an intruder. It was something that should have been private, intimate; not something he was meant to see.
Watching the way Jan held Hank's hand, the way he stared up at her with open adoration on his face, Clint had felt weirdly left out, like he was being excluded from something, despite the fact their relationship was something that he'd never had any part in in the first place.
Jan's presence was just... comforting, somehow.
It had been comforting all through the months he had spent undercover, when he had had to stay cool and stoic around Tony; Tony had been falling apart, and it had been Clint's job to be the stable one. With Jan, he didn't have to be; he didn't have to work so hard to hide how scared he'd been, to keep up an act. He still had, of course, because he hadn't wanted to worry her, but if his self-control slipped a little, that had been okay.
His footsteps echoed on the Helicarrier's metal deckplates as he walked away, making a point of not looking back. Neither of them would have noticed if he had, anyway.
It was strange; he'd never been on the Helicarrier before, and in a lot of ways it felt more like a building than a flying aircraft carrier, but the metal deckplates, walls, and ceilings made it obvious, as did the near-total lack of windows. Then again, Clint had never been on an actual aircraft carrier -- maybe they all felt like this.
Maybe he should ask Cap about it. Or Tony -- Tony had helped build the Helicarrier, and he used to sell weapons to the government, so he had to have been on one before.
When Tony woke up.
God, this place was depressing. A long row of people were lying still and pale -- or stiff and pain-wracked -- in beds along each wall, half of them still in mechanikos grey, hooked up to IVs that were probably giving them saline, or painkillers, or maybe intravenous vitamin C, if you could do that. There were at least a dozen black-uniformed human guards in here, too, one or two of them handcuffed to their hospital beds. Some of them had switched sides and turned on the Argonians when the attack had begun, but not all of them had. The Argonians had enlisted a lot of people out of Rikers Island, when they had taken Doc Ock and the other supervillains from there. Some of Clint's fellow guards had had no life to go back to in the outside world, with laundry lists of criminal convictions hanging over their heads, and had seized on their oath to the Empire as a second chance.
The closest guy, a redhead with one arm in a sling, was glaring at Clint balefully.
He looked familiar -- Clint was pretty sure he'd been on the day shift in the main concourse. He probably thought Clint was a traitor.
There were going to have to be some kind of trials for Argonian collaborators, weren't there? It was something else Cap would know about.
Hopefully, Clint wouldn't have to testify at any of them.
There was still more work to do back down in the city -- they were still rounding up Argonian prisoners and probably would be for days -- but Clint had spent the past two hours assisting the wounded up to the Helicarrier and acting as a translator for SHIELD agents dealing with surrendering Argonians. And that was after fighting in a pitched battle, nearly being electrocuted by chaos magic, spending most of last night not sleeping because he'd been so damn worried about Tony and Hank and the attack today, and breaking out of the facility at One Police Plaza just a couple of days ago.
He was so tired that his entire body ached. Plus, he probably still had scurvy. Three days of drinking orange juice nonstop didn't make up for months without any vitamin C at all, and the bruises that were stamped the length of his body from the escape hadn't even had a chance to fade yet.
Let the reinforcements do their jobs for a while. Two different SHIELD nurses had already asked Clint if he required medical attention, in tones that implied that they had already decided the answer was yes. He didn't, but resting somewhere for a while sounded like a good idea.
First, though, he ought to check on Tony. Cap was still busy down in the city, with clean-up, and Jan obviously wasn't going anywhere for a while. The medical staff had said that Tony was still asleep, but who knew when he might wake up? It would suck if, after everything that had happened, he had to wake up alone.
The most seriously injured casualties were on the far side of the infirmary, walled off into their own private "rooms" by those little white medical curtains. Pietro was in one of those, probably with Wanda sitting at his bedside.
Clint's presence would be an intrusion there, too.
Tony looked awful -- not as bad as Pietro had, hanging bloodless and pale in chains, his torso crisscrossed with cuts and burns, but not good, either.
He was still unconscious, an IV line running into his right arm and an oxygen tube up his nose. There was a huge, raw-looking burn in the middle of his chest, covered in some kind of clear ointment and left open and unbandaged, and a long strip of gauze tapped to his side. Clint wasn't sure he wanted to know what was underneath it.
His eyes went to Tony's hands as soon as he'd stepped around the curtain, and he felt a weird kind of relief when he saw that they were unbandaged except for rings of gauze around each wrist. He still had all his fingers.
Only then did he notice the other people in the "room."
A redheaded woman and a big, thuggish-looking guy with a flattened nose were sitting on either side of Tony's bed, in uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs. They looked vaguely familiar.
"Can I help you?" the woman asked, looking up at him with an expression that clearly read, 'Go away.' She had freckles across the bridge of her nose. It was cute.
Once upon a time, Clint thought, that would have meant more to him. Right now, he was too tired to care. "I just came to see how Tony was doing," he said.
"Which Avenger are you?" the big guy asked, in slightly accusing tones, staring at Clint as if Clint had single-handedly murdered his puppy.
"Hawkeye," Clint told him. "Who are you?" He had just as much right to be here as anyone. More than a lot of people, in fact, after the past few months.
"His friends." Said as if Clint wasn't.
"I'm Pepper," the woman said. "He's Happy. Tony might have mentioned us?"
"You're Pepper Potts?" Clint stared at her, trying to match the worn and rumpled-looking woman in front of him, an over-sized SHIELD-issue jacket draped over her shoulders, with the terrifyingly efficient and drop-dead gorgeous secretary Tony had always described. He had always pictured a tall, supermodel-type in stiletto heels.
"The one and only."
"Oh." Clint tried to think of something to say, but Tony, lying there still and pale and bandaged, seemed to suck all the life out of the room. "Rhodes said you guys were in Seattle when it fell," he finally offered. "I'm, um, glad you got away."
Pepper's lips tightened to a thin, unhappy line. "We got away because Tony gave himself up to buy us time to escape. I thought we'd never see him again." She shook her head. "I... there's a reason I wasn't sure about coming back to work for him again. I am so tired of doing this."
Tired just about described it. When this was over, Clint was going to sleep for a month. "Tell me about it," he said. "I spent... for months, I had to keep reminding him to eat. Is he like that all the time?"
Pepper was looking down at Tony now, her face unreadable. "I thought he was dead," she said quietly. "For months. Rhodey was sure that he'd never give his armor away otherwise."
"I told you he wasn't," Happy said. "The boss is tough. And he always has a plan." He, too, was staring down at Tony, a mournful look on his face that didn't quite match the deliberately cheerful tone of his voice.
Pepper looked at him silently, eyebrows arched.
"Some of his plans work better than others," Happy admitted.
"Yeah," Clint agreed. "Giving himself back up to them wasn't one of the successful ones."
Pepper winced, and he immediately felt bad for saying it. He tried a smile instead. "He'll be okay. He's survived worse. He has to be okay. I didn't spend months watching his back and making nice with the Argonians for him to-" Clint shook his head. "He'll be fine."
Unless being tortured had done something to him, screwed him up even worse than he had been already. And Tony hadn't had a chance to get over the vitamin C deficiency, either. You could see the bruises all up and down his body, like Pietro's. Only where Pietro's speeded-up metabolism had had some of the marks already fading to green and yellow, Tony's were all fresh, dark splotches of red and purple and black.
They had really done a number on him.
Clint blinked, his eyes feeling weirdly hot and his throat suddenly thick and tight.
"I killed people to help get you out of there," he told Tony. His voice sounded strange, not right. "People I knew. I cut them up and shot them and smelled them burn-burning, and do you know how much that sucks? So you damn well better wake up and be fine."
Pepper was looking at him funny now. People did that when you announced that you'd just killed people, Clint guessed. Probably he ought to get used to it. Not that he meant to go around broadcasting it, but given that he'd worked for the Argonians, people were going to assume that much and worse.
"If you helped get the boss out of there, then we owe you one." Happy held one massive hand out to Clint. His knuckles were scarred, and one of the fingers on his right hand was slightly bent, not straightening all the way. An ex-boxer, Clint decided. That would explain the hands, and the broken nose.
He stared at Happy's extended hand for a moment, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it. "I didn't do that much," he said. "Mostly I just stood there and watched while the arch-captain knocked him around. And sometimes Jan brought salt packets."
And he'd shot people. That was an important fact he probably shouldn't leave out. He'd already mentioned that part, though. "Hell, he was the one that took care of me when I got poisoned. So really, I didn't do all that much worth thanking me for."
Happy stared at Clint for a moment, then let his hand drop. "If you hadn't been there, he would have been alone. The boss tends to get into trouble when he's by himself."
"When he's by himself?" Clint laughed, the sound bursting out of him. "You mean, when he volunteers to go off by himself to let people who execute political prisoners by cutting them into pieces in public use him as a punching bag? They cut Pietro's fingers off. They tortured one of the physicists to death when they caught him withholding information from them. Not lying, just withholding information. And Tony went back in there after we got out."
Tony had known it was a suicide mission. Hank, too; he'd admitted as much to Clint. Hell, he'd told Clint that he had his blessing with Jan if he didn't come back, which was all kinds of fucked up, and probably about the same as Tony giving up his armor, unless it had just been Hank being bitchy, which Clint wasn't ruling out. Bitchy was more likely, actually. In Hank's world, his brilliant plans never had negative consequences. "And Hank," he went on, aware that his voice was getting louder, but not caring, "who is too damned stupid to stay hidden like he's supposed to." Pepper made a sort of shushing motion with her hands, nodding at Tony. Clint ignored her. Let everyone hear. Maybe some shouting would wake Tony up. Then Clint would have one less unconscious teammate to worry about. "He wouldn't let me go in with him. I should have gone in with him. I shouldn't have let them talk me out of it. You hear that?" he asked Tony. Tony didn't so much as twitch. "I shouldn't have listened to you, because you're a suicidal idiot who thinks blowing Grand Central Station up while you're still inside it is a clever plan!" The last words came out in a snarl, rage flaring up from somewhere inside Clint like it had just been waiting for a chance to be released.
Tony had been a complete mess by the time they'd escaped, all the arrogant confidence Clint usually associated with him gone. He'd been worn down, depressed, barely looking people in the eyes, the way he had been when he'd first come out to the West Coast. And he'd planned to get Clint out of the station before he destroyed it. Clint, but not himself, because it wasn't as if a genius inventor who could build the Iron Man armor out of scrap metal could have built a bomb with a timer instead of repulsor gauntlets and gotten himself out safely before the explosion, too.
Pepper stepped forward and grabbed both his wrists, her fingers digging in hard enough that it almost hurt; Clint hadn't even realized that he'd been waving his hands around.
"If you do not stop shouting," she said, voice low and firm, "they will kick all three of us out of here."
For a moment, Clint felt a wild urge to shout at her -- she hadn't been here, hadn't been trapped in the city with them, she didn't know what it had been like -- but the more rational part of him realized that she had a point, and that she was probably upset, too. She had worked for Tony for years, after all.
He swallowed hard, trying to make himself calm down. God, he was tired. So tired. And there were probably still more wounded to bring up and prisoners to deal with and Fury was going to come grab him any minute now and make him speak Argonian again. He didn't want to know their damn language, didn't want everyone in SHIELD hearing him speak it like a good little collaborator.
Going undercover had seemed like such a good idea, once.
They had tortured and killed his teammates, and he knew their fucking language. He knew how to salute them. He knew what their insignia meant and the proper way to conduct a duel of honor, and how to fight with their weapons, and he had actually liked Isimud. When Sub-Captain Kammani had asked to have him transferred to her command, he had actually been proud. Proud. To be transferred to a counter-insurgency unit that had ambushed and killed three different Resistance teams in the Bronx.
And he'd been worried about Tony going native.
"I can speak their language," he told Pepper, his throat hurting with the effort to keep his voice quiet. "And Justice was only on the team because I gave him my spot; he shouldn't have even been there, and now he's dead. And I felt guilty for killing them."
Pepper and Happy exchanged a long look, and then Happy put one massive hand on Clint's shoulder. "The boss's going to be okay," he said. "He's gotten through worse than this before."
"Yeah," Clint admitted shakily, the anger draining away and taking most of the rest of his energy with it. "I know. I was there for the heart surgery."
"No one's going to blame you for anything, Hawkeye," Pepper said. She stared up at Clint solemnly. "You went undercover with Tony, didn't you? And spent months collecting information, without getting caught. You were in a difficult position and you did the best you could. You're a hero."
"It doesn't feel like it," Clint admitted. "I just did what I had to do to survive." He'd done heroic things before, up to and including helping save the world a couple of times. He hadn't felt exactly heroic after most of those, either, generally just triumphant and relieved not to be dead, but this time was different. He probably ought to at least feel satisfaction that they'd won, but it didn't feel real yet.
He knew the Argonians were defeated, that they would be leaving, that it was over, but he kept having to remind himself that he didn't have to salute the people they were taking prisoner anymore, kept catching himself worrying about how he was going to make his next meeting with Jan when Grand Central was such a mess, sure that the chaos there would finally get her -- and him -- caught. He couldn't even get used to eating real food again.
It wasn't over, he thought, not really. It wouldn't be over until Tony and Pietro woke up.
Pepper wrinkled her nose. "I don't think it ever does. Most heroes are just people doing what they have to do."
He barely even knew these people. Why did it make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside to hear her say that?
'Baby monkeys,' he reminded himself. 'You're so desperate for human contact that you were going around kissing Jan.' Any sympathy was going to make him feel better, even sympathy from strangers.
Strangers he'd just had some kind of near-breakdown in front of.
Clint felt himself flush. "I'm, um, sorry for barging in here and yelling at you."
"That's okay." Pepper smiled at him, and the expression almost looked real, if you ignored the worry in her eyes and the way she kept glancing back at Tony. "I think you needed to yell at someone."
"Yeah." Clint let out a long, shaky breath. He felt better, he realized. Not a lot better, but at least the awful, humiliating desire to scream or cry was gone. He must have needed to get things off his chest.
He had originally been planning to go rest somewhere, he remembered. Clint glanced around the little, fabric-walled room, looking for someplace to sit. "Is there an extra chair in here? I think I'm just going to... sit down for a while."
Happy waved a hand toward the seat he'd been using, the one on Tony's left. "You can have mine."
"Thanks," Clint made himself say.
The chair was much more comfortable than it looked, despite the way the hard plastic pressed against the bruises in his back and ribs. He was just going to sit here for a while, Clint decided. It beat being alone.
***
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonRated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: Depictions of torture, and general violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
A/N #1:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq.
A/N #2: Sorry for the late update; hopefully the fact that this is really long helps? Also, because we don't know how to shut up, the fic has ballooned from twenty chapters to twenty-one, so look for the final part next week.
Also, this fic owes a great deal to
tavella, who helped us to shape this into something that didn't have gaping plot holes.Hank had never been so glad to wake up in a hospital bed. It was hard and uncomfortable, and the sheet someone had spread over him was doing next to nothing to combat the chill in the air, but it wasn't the cold, stone floor of Grand Central, or an alien prison cell.
The pain in his leg had been reduced to a dull ache, to be replaced by thirst and exhaustion so heavy that opening his eyes was an effort.
He wasn't in a hospital. The ceiling overhead was metal rather than acoustic tile, and the nurse giving an injection to the man in combat gear lying in the bed to his left was wearing a SHIELD uniform.
SHIELD was here. The others had managed to get the forcefield down after all. Did that mean that Tony was still alive?
He'd been trying to get to the others -- Jan had been there, maybe, at least, he thought he remembered her. Had he made it to the main concourse? Where were--
The world went blurry around when he tried to sit up, and Hank fell back against the bed, closing his eyes again. All right. Sitting up was obviously not going to be his next course of action.
No one around him had looked familiar. Had he only imagined Jan's presence? Everything after the Argonian had stabbed him was vague and disjointed.
His attempt to ask the SHIELD medic if she knew where the rest of the Avengers were turned into a cough as his dry throat rebelled. "Water?" he managed, after a moment.
"Dr. Pym!" The medic sounded bizarrely delighted. "You're awake. Don't try to sit up; you've lost a lot of blood and we don't have enough plasma or whole blood to go around. You ought to have been given a transfusion, but we have to save our blood supplies for critical patients." She adjusted the bed slightly, so that Hank's torso was tiled upwards, and handed him a small cup of water.
The water was lukewarm and tasted like plastic, and was possibly the best thing Hank had ever tasted.
"You're on the Helicarrier," she continued, as he drank. "The aliens have surrendered, but it's going to take days to get the power back on so we've been bringing the wounded from the station up here."
The Argonians had... "Surrendered?" Hank managed. "We-" They hadn't expected a surrender. Not even Steve, not really, or else he would never have agreed to Hank's sodium ascorbate plan. He'd been sure they were going to have to fight them to the last man, or rather, the last prehensile-tailed furry humanoid. "My team?" he asked. "Are they... all right?" There had been gunshots, coming from above him.
"The Resistance took heavy casualties before the forceshield fell and the surrender was announced, but all Avengers members who were present are alive and accounted for."
Hank closed his eyes, relief making him dizzy again. Alive. They were all alive. Nobody had been killed because he hadn’t been able to bring the shield down or get to the ground floor in time. Only after a moment did he realize that "alive" didn’t necessarily mean "all right."
There was silence for a moment, and Hank could hear someone in the infirmary coughing. Then the medic spoke again, her previously brisk voice sounding slightly hesitant.
"You're the one who developed the anti-venom for Argonian tailbarbs, aren't you?"
Hank nodded, frowning faintly. He'd thought before that the dose he'd given himself wasn't working properly, but if that had been true, he would be dead now. He must have lost more blood than he'd realized.
Of course the anti-venom had worked properly -- the principle had been sound, and he'd tested it thoroughly.
"Do you know how many lives we could have saved if we had had access to that on the outside? There are at least three people in this room who would be dead right now without it. I just... I wanted to thank you in person."
Hank blinked at her, unsure how to respond. "It wasn't particularly complex once I had access to blood samples from poison victims and an Argonian body to autopsy," he finally said. It had been time-consuming, yes, but compared to synthesizing explosives out of cleaning products and battery acid, it had been outright fun. That and solving the sodium ascorbate problem had been the only real challenges he'd had in months. "Their venom's a beautiful compound, very efficient. I wasn't able to counter it completely; the argo-serotonin still causes extreme pain on contact."
She shook her head, smiling slightly. "SHIELD scientists spent five months trying to develop an effective anti-venom," she told him dryly, "and you synthesized one completely un-aided in a makeshift lab in a hotel basement."
Well, when you put it that way...
"It was nothing," Hank told her modestly.
His leg was starting to hurt seriously hurt now, whatever painkiller they had given him obviously wearing off. Maybe the severe pain on contact hadn't been the serotonin; maybe it had just been the natural result of having a barbed stinger the size of his hand shoved into the meat of his thigh.
Hank shifted uncomfortably, wondering if he ought to ask for more painkillers, or if that was something else they had a limited supply of. The Resistance had had to strictly ration medication of all kinds after all the pharmacies had finally sold out last month; they wouldn't have had access to prescription medications at all if it weren't for their connections to the Kingpin.
He was reaching under the sheet to poke surreptitiously at the bandage on his thigh when the infirmary door slid open and Clint entered, helping one of the arson and explosive squad men limp into the room.
Clint was spattered with the purplish-brown stains of dried Argonian blood, and there was a dark patch on his sleeve where the cut in his arm had re-opened and bled through the fabric and the bandage underneath, but he seemed otherwise uninjured. Good. At least one of his teammates was--
Jan was standing in the doorway behind Clint. Hank struggled onto one elbow, trying to see over the Fahrenheit squad man's head.
There were bloodstains all over her costume, human blood, and her left sleeve had been torn away, leaving her arm bare.
One of them had hurt her.
Hank shoved himself upright, planting both hands flat against the mattress to brace himself as sound and vision suddenly blurred out.
"I thought I told you not to sit up," the medic was saying.
"Jan," Hank managed, his voice echoing strangely.
"Hank! You're awake." Jan was next to him now, one hand on his arm. Hank wasn't entirely sure how she had gotten there, but he didn't care.
"Your costume - there's blood all over -- are you hurt?"
"Am I-" She was glaring at him. Why was she glaring at him? He had delivered the poison and probably made their entire victory possible.
Then she was hugging him, burying her face in his shoulder. Her hair smelled like ozone and smoke; Hank closed his eyes and rested his face against it, breathing in the smell. It didn't communicate anything in particular -- Jan only gave off pheromones when they were small, a side effect of the biological modifications that had created her wings, but it was comforting anyway.
"It's your blood," she said, her voice muffled by his skin. "You promised you would come back. You could have died, Hank. You never think. You-"
"I didn't actually promise. You just told me to come back," Hank mumbled into her hair.
"And you agreed that you would." Jan didn't actually sound angry, but her fingers were digging into his arm.
"The plan worked," Hank protested. "Did you get Tony out?"
"Yeah. We... found Tony." Clint's voice sounded strained, and Hank winced.
"Is he-"
"He hasn't woken up yet." Clint cleared his throat. "We, uh, found Wanda and, and Pietro. Wanda destroyed their forcefield."
"Good," Hank said quietly. Even with his eyes closed, sitting up was starting to make him feel lightheaded. "I think I should-"
"I think he needs to lie back down," Clint said. "He's gone grey."
Hank would have protested, but since he wasn't sure he'd have been able to stay upright if he hadn't been leaning on Jan, he decided not to. "Sorry," he apologized, as Jan helped him lie back.
"What for?"
Hank stared up at her, seeing the smear of blood on her face and the ragged mess of her costume. Even like this, she was beautiful.
"For making you worry? I should be fine. I just need to rest for a few days." By which point his body would have replaced all the blood he had lost, and he would be fine and able to get back to his lab.
"You're going to be on crutches almost as long as Johnny," Clint pointed out.
Hank grimaced, feeling stupid. He hadn't actually thought of that -- either the blood loss or the half-worn-off painkillers were making him groggy, as if his head were filled with syrup.
"Maybe it will keep you out of trouble." Jan smiled at him, but her eyes were bright and shiny, and she kept blinking.
'Please don't cry.' Hank thought. He didn't know what to do with a crying Jan even when he was healthy and uninjured. "I'm good at staying out of trouble now," he protested. "I've done nothing but stay out of trouble since this started. You’re the ones who've been sneaking in and out of Argonian installations and going under-cover and kissing people." He was rambling, Hank realized. Maybe he should stop talking. People got twitchy when he talked too much or two quickly.
"It's not her fault," Clint said hurriedly. "I was..." he hesitated, staring at something beyond Hank and Jan. "It was pretty rough in there," he said quietly, awkwardly. "I think it kind of screwed with my head, and," he turned to Jan, "and you were there, and you were nice to me, and..." he trailed off, and Hank, looking at him, made himself take in the circles under his eyes, as dark as bruises, and his pale, too-thin face. 'Scurvy,' he reminded himself. 'Excruciating alien venom. Months of isolation. He thought of the scientists he'd seen in the converter room, pale and gaunt and listless, and Dr. Connors telling him "Some of the others can't even walk anymore."
"I know what it was like," he said. "I saw it. Everyone was right; I wouldn't have made it if I'd gone under."
Jan put a hand on his shoulder -- her fingers were warm, soft. "If you had," she said, "who would have figured out how to poison them? Or developed the anti-venom? They said," her voice faltered for a moment, "they said you would have died without it."
"I don't think so," Hank said, trying to remember those hazy minutes after the Argonian had stabbed him. "I think I may have been bleeding enough that most of the venom wouldn't have remained in my system." She had a point, though. No one else could have discovered the Argonians' reaction to salt and vitamin C, and without his discoveries, they would have had no hope of defeating the Argonians. Still, all those months, he'd spent months hiding in the Waldorf-Astoria's basement while the others risked their lives.
Clint made a face. "Trust me," he said, "you'd be dead. And if you're ever sick, don't let Tony take care of you. He's awful at it." He paused, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown. "You know, it's too bad Scott Lang was stuck in California the whole time. We could have sent him under and the two of you could have had your ants take messages out back and forth. Then Jan wouldn't have had to keep sneaking in to meet with me."
"That's..." Jan stared at him. "Brilliant, actually."
Clint shrugged. "I spent months with nobody to talk to but a bunch of scientific geniuses. I guess some of it rubbed off."
Hank shook his head. "I couldn't have done it," he repeated, trying to drag the conversation back on topic. "Couldn't have done what either of you did. I don't have any right to judge you, for-" he couldn't even say it, which made his cowardice even more obvious. Facing down armed and extremely dangerous aliens and supervillains, he could do, but talking to Jan about their relationship was apparently beyond him.
Even when they hadn't been together, he had never so much as looked at another woman -- not that he would have deserved to, considering the circumstances -- but Jan and Clint had been under huge amounts of stress, and she had been Clint's only form of contact with the outside world, and they both swore that it had been a mistake, a single kiss in the heat of the moment, that it hadn't meant anything.
He had no reason to think that they were lying to him. Jan didn't lie, not about things like that; if she had wanted to leave him for Clint, she would have no problem saying so. She wouldn't sneak around behind his back and string him along.
Clint shifted uncomfortably, and looked away. "Can we talk about something else and go back to pretending that the whole kiss thing never happened?"
"Anything that means I never have to think about it again is fine by me," Hank said, and he meant it. He was too tired to get angry or be paranoid or even, really, hurt. He could have died, and Jan could have died, and instead they were both here and safe and Jan's thumb was rubbing small circles against his shoulder, and if he stayed very still, his leg hardly hurt at all.
Jan sighed, her expression speaking volumes about her assessment of both of their maturity levels. "Just as long as you don't let that SHIELD medic who's been making googly eyes at you since she found out that you created the Argonian anti-venom get too carried away. I might not be so forgiving."
"She was making googly eyes at me?" She had congratulated him, yes, but most of their conversation had involved the fact that Hank wasn't supposed to be sitting up yet.
Clint smiled, and the expression almost reached his eyes. "Women appreciate smart men, and wounded heroes. Much as I hate to admit it, you fit the bill for both right now."
"I'll remember that you said that next time you call me a mad scientist." Hank closed his eyes again, and turned his face into Jan's hand, resting his cheek against her wrist. "I thought I imagined you, before, in the station," he told her.
Jan's fingers tightened on his shoulder for a moment. "I thought you were dying," she said, quietly. "I was afraid you would bleed to death right in front of me, and never know how I really felt about you."
"You know what?" Clint voice sounded strained. "I think I'm going to leave now."
"Hmm." Hank said. "All right." Jan was here. No one was dead. They had won. The Waldorf-Astoria's generator probably needed more maintenance, since he'd been keeping it running by willpower alone lately, but someone else could do that. He was tired of playing mechanic, and anyway, Tony had been rescued -- Clint had said that they had rescued him, right? He could do it. And Spiderman was more than capable of handling explosives detail on his own.
"I love you, you know, even after everything." Jan's voice was barely louder than a whisper. "I didn't always want to, but I never stopped."
Hank smiled, feeling warm all the way through, despite knowing he didn't deserve it. "I'll always love you; I'm just not very good..." he yawned, the words tangling over themselves. "Not good at it."
He fell asleep with Jan's slim fingers wrapped around his hand.
Clint wasn't in the mood to be alone, but standing there and watching Hank and Jan look at each other like that, listening to Jan talk softly to Hank about how scared she had been for him, he had felt like an intruder. It was something that should have been private, intimate; not something he was meant to see.
Watching the way Jan held Hank's hand, the way he stared up at her with open adoration on his face, Clint had felt weirdly left out, like he was being excluded from something, despite the fact their relationship was something that he'd never had any part in in the first place.
Jan's presence was just... comforting, somehow.
It had been comforting all through the months he had spent undercover, when he had had to stay cool and stoic around Tony; Tony had been falling apart, and it had been Clint's job to be the stable one. With Jan, he didn't have to be; he didn't have to work so hard to hide how scared he'd been, to keep up an act. He still had, of course, because he hadn't wanted to worry her, but if his self-control slipped a little, that had been okay.
His footsteps echoed on the Helicarrier's metal deckplates as he walked away, making a point of not looking back. Neither of them would have noticed if he had, anyway.
It was strange; he'd never been on the Helicarrier before, and in a lot of ways it felt more like a building than a flying aircraft carrier, but the metal deckplates, walls, and ceilings made it obvious, as did the near-total lack of windows. Then again, Clint had never been on an actual aircraft carrier -- maybe they all felt like this.
Maybe he should ask Cap about it. Or Tony -- Tony had helped build the Helicarrier, and he used to sell weapons to the government, so he had to have been on one before.
When Tony woke up.
God, this place was depressing. A long row of people were lying still and pale -- or stiff and pain-wracked -- in beds along each wall, half of them still in mechanikos grey, hooked up to IVs that were probably giving them saline, or painkillers, or maybe intravenous vitamin C, if you could do that. There were at least a dozen black-uniformed human guards in here, too, one or two of them handcuffed to their hospital beds. Some of them had switched sides and turned on the Argonians when the attack had begun, but not all of them had. The Argonians had enlisted a lot of people out of Rikers Island, when they had taken Doc Ock and the other supervillains from there. Some of Clint's fellow guards had had no life to go back to in the outside world, with laundry lists of criminal convictions hanging over their heads, and had seized on their oath to the Empire as a second chance.
The closest guy, a redhead with one arm in a sling, was glaring at Clint balefully.
He looked familiar -- Clint was pretty sure he'd been on the day shift in the main concourse. He probably thought Clint was a traitor.
There were going to have to be some kind of trials for Argonian collaborators, weren't there? It was something else Cap would know about.
Hopefully, Clint wouldn't have to testify at any of them.
There was still more work to do back down in the city -- they were still rounding up Argonian prisoners and probably would be for days -- but Clint had spent the past two hours assisting the wounded up to the Helicarrier and acting as a translator for SHIELD agents dealing with surrendering Argonians. And that was after fighting in a pitched battle, nearly being electrocuted by chaos magic, spending most of last night not sleeping because he'd been so damn worried about Tony and Hank and the attack today, and breaking out of the facility at One Police Plaza just a couple of days ago.
He was so tired that his entire body ached. Plus, he probably still had scurvy. Three days of drinking orange juice nonstop didn't make up for months without any vitamin C at all, and the bruises that were stamped the length of his body from the escape hadn't even had a chance to fade yet.
Let the reinforcements do their jobs for a while. Two different SHIELD nurses had already asked Clint if he required medical attention, in tones that implied that they had already decided the answer was yes. He didn't, but resting somewhere for a while sounded like a good idea.
First, though, he ought to check on Tony. Cap was still busy down in the city, with clean-up, and Jan obviously wasn't going anywhere for a while. The medical staff had said that Tony was still asleep, but who knew when he might wake up? It would suck if, after everything that had happened, he had to wake up alone.
The most seriously injured casualties were on the far side of the infirmary, walled off into their own private "rooms" by those little white medical curtains. Pietro was in one of those, probably with Wanda sitting at his bedside.
Clint's presence would be an intrusion there, too.
Tony looked awful -- not as bad as Pietro had, hanging bloodless and pale in chains, his torso crisscrossed with cuts and burns, but not good, either.
He was still unconscious, an IV line running into his right arm and an oxygen tube up his nose. There was a huge, raw-looking burn in the middle of his chest, covered in some kind of clear ointment and left open and unbandaged, and a long strip of gauze tapped to his side. Clint wasn't sure he wanted to know what was underneath it.
His eyes went to Tony's hands as soon as he'd stepped around the curtain, and he felt a weird kind of relief when he saw that they were unbandaged except for rings of gauze around each wrist. He still had all his fingers.
Only then did he notice the other people in the "room."
A redheaded woman and a big, thuggish-looking guy with a flattened nose were sitting on either side of Tony's bed, in uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs. They looked vaguely familiar.
"Can I help you?" the woman asked, looking up at him with an expression that clearly read, 'Go away.' She had freckles across the bridge of her nose. It was cute.
Once upon a time, Clint thought, that would have meant more to him. Right now, he was too tired to care. "I just came to see how Tony was doing," he said.
"Which Avenger are you?" the big guy asked, in slightly accusing tones, staring at Clint as if Clint had single-handedly murdered his puppy.
"Hawkeye," Clint told him. "Who are you?" He had just as much right to be here as anyone. More than a lot of people, in fact, after the past few months.
"His friends." Said as if Clint wasn't.
"I'm Pepper," the woman said. "He's Happy. Tony might have mentioned us?"
"You're Pepper Potts?" Clint stared at her, trying to match the worn and rumpled-looking woman in front of him, an over-sized SHIELD-issue jacket draped over her shoulders, with the terrifyingly efficient and drop-dead gorgeous secretary Tony had always described. He had always pictured a tall, supermodel-type in stiletto heels.
"The one and only."
"Oh." Clint tried to think of something to say, but Tony, lying there still and pale and bandaged, seemed to suck all the life out of the room. "Rhodes said you guys were in Seattle when it fell," he finally offered. "I'm, um, glad you got away."
Pepper's lips tightened to a thin, unhappy line. "We got away because Tony gave himself up to buy us time to escape. I thought we'd never see him again." She shook her head. "I... there's a reason I wasn't sure about coming back to work for him again. I am so tired of doing this."
Tired just about described it. When this was over, Clint was going to sleep for a month. "Tell me about it," he said. "I spent... for months, I had to keep reminding him to eat. Is he like that all the time?"
Pepper was looking down at Tony now, her face unreadable. "I thought he was dead," she said quietly. "For months. Rhodey was sure that he'd never give his armor away otherwise."
"I told you he wasn't," Happy said. "The boss is tough. And he always has a plan." He, too, was staring down at Tony, a mournful look on his face that didn't quite match the deliberately cheerful tone of his voice.
Pepper looked at him silently, eyebrows arched.
"Some of his plans work better than others," Happy admitted.
"Yeah," Clint agreed. "Giving himself back up to them wasn't one of the successful ones."
Pepper winced, and he immediately felt bad for saying it. He tried a smile instead. "He'll be okay. He's survived worse. He has to be okay. I didn't spend months watching his back and making nice with the Argonians for him to-" Clint shook his head. "He'll be fine."
Unless being tortured had done something to him, screwed him up even worse than he had been already. And Tony hadn't had a chance to get over the vitamin C deficiency, either. You could see the bruises all up and down his body, like Pietro's. Only where Pietro's speeded-up metabolism had had some of the marks already fading to green and yellow, Tony's were all fresh, dark splotches of red and purple and black.
They had really done a number on him.
Clint blinked, his eyes feeling weirdly hot and his throat suddenly thick and tight.
"I killed people to help get you out of there," he told Tony. His voice sounded strange, not right. "People I knew. I cut them up and shot them and smelled them burn-burning, and do you know how much that sucks? So you damn well better wake up and be fine."
Pepper was looking at him funny now. People did that when you announced that you'd just killed people, Clint guessed. Probably he ought to get used to it. Not that he meant to go around broadcasting it, but given that he'd worked for the Argonians, people were going to assume that much and worse.
"If you helped get the boss out of there, then we owe you one." Happy held one massive hand out to Clint. His knuckles were scarred, and one of the fingers on his right hand was slightly bent, not straightening all the way. An ex-boxer, Clint decided. That would explain the hands, and the broken nose.
He stared at Happy's extended hand for a moment, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it. "I didn't do that much," he said. "Mostly I just stood there and watched while the arch-captain knocked him around. And sometimes Jan brought salt packets."
And he'd shot people. That was an important fact he probably shouldn't leave out. He'd already mentioned that part, though. "Hell, he was the one that took care of me when I got poisoned. So really, I didn't do all that much worth thanking me for."
Happy stared at Clint for a moment, then let his hand drop. "If you hadn't been there, he would have been alone. The boss tends to get into trouble when he's by himself."
"When he's by himself?" Clint laughed, the sound bursting out of him. "You mean, when he volunteers to go off by himself to let people who execute political prisoners by cutting them into pieces in public use him as a punching bag? They cut Pietro's fingers off. They tortured one of the physicists to death when they caught him withholding information from them. Not lying, just withholding information. And Tony went back in there after we got out."
Tony had known it was a suicide mission. Hank, too; he'd admitted as much to Clint. Hell, he'd told Clint that he had his blessing with Jan if he didn't come back, which was all kinds of fucked up, and probably about the same as Tony giving up his armor, unless it had just been Hank being bitchy, which Clint wasn't ruling out. Bitchy was more likely, actually. In Hank's world, his brilliant plans never had negative consequences. "And Hank," he went on, aware that his voice was getting louder, but not caring, "who is too damned stupid to stay hidden like he's supposed to." Pepper made a sort of shushing motion with her hands, nodding at Tony. Clint ignored her. Let everyone hear. Maybe some shouting would wake Tony up. Then Clint would have one less unconscious teammate to worry about. "He wouldn't let me go in with him. I should have gone in with him. I shouldn't have let them talk me out of it. You hear that?" he asked Tony. Tony didn't so much as twitch. "I shouldn't have listened to you, because you're a suicidal idiot who thinks blowing Grand Central Station up while you're still inside it is a clever plan!" The last words came out in a snarl, rage flaring up from somewhere inside Clint like it had just been waiting for a chance to be released.
Tony had been a complete mess by the time they'd escaped, all the arrogant confidence Clint usually associated with him gone. He'd been worn down, depressed, barely looking people in the eyes, the way he had been when he'd first come out to the West Coast. And he'd planned to get Clint out of the station before he destroyed it. Clint, but not himself, because it wasn't as if a genius inventor who could build the Iron Man armor out of scrap metal could have built a bomb with a timer instead of repulsor gauntlets and gotten himself out safely before the explosion, too.
Pepper stepped forward and grabbed both his wrists, her fingers digging in hard enough that it almost hurt; Clint hadn't even realized that he'd been waving his hands around.
"If you do not stop shouting," she said, voice low and firm, "they will kick all three of us out of here."
For a moment, Clint felt a wild urge to shout at her -- she hadn't been here, hadn't been trapped in the city with them, she didn't know what it had been like -- but the more rational part of him realized that she had a point, and that she was probably upset, too. She had worked for Tony for years, after all.
He swallowed hard, trying to make himself calm down. God, he was tired. So tired. And there were probably still more wounded to bring up and prisoners to deal with and Fury was going to come grab him any minute now and make him speak Argonian again. He didn't want to know their damn language, didn't want everyone in SHIELD hearing him speak it like a good little collaborator.
Going undercover had seemed like such a good idea, once.
They had tortured and killed his teammates, and he knew their fucking language. He knew how to salute them. He knew what their insignia meant and the proper way to conduct a duel of honor, and how to fight with their weapons, and he had actually liked Isimud. When Sub-Captain Kammani had asked to have him transferred to her command, he had actually been proud. Proud. To be transferred to a counter-insurgency unit that had ambushed and killed three different Resistance teams in the Bronx.
And he'd been worried about Tony going native.
"I can speak their language," he told Pepper, his throat hurting with the effort to keep his voice quiet. "And Justice was only on the team because I gave him my spot; he shouldn't have even been there, and now he's dead. And I felt guilty for killing them."
Pepper and Happy exchanged a long look, and then Happy put one massive hand on Clint's shoulder. "The boss's going to be okay," he said. "He's gotten through worse than this before."
"Yeah," Clint admitted shakily, the anger draining away and taking most of the rest of his energy with it. "I know. I was there for the heart surgery."
"No one's going to blame you for anything, Hawkeye," Pepper said. She stared up at Clint solemnly. "You went undercover with Tony, didn't you? And spent months collecting information, without getting caught. You were in a difficult position and you did the best you could. You're a hero."
"It doesn't feel like it," Clint admitted. "I just did what I had to do to survive." He'd done heroic things before, up to and including helping save the world a couple of times. He hadn't felt exactly heroic after most of those, either, generally just triumphant and relieved not to be dead, but this time was different. He probably ought to at least feel satisfaction that they'd won, but it didn't feel real yet.
He knew the Argonians were defeated, that they would be leaving, that it was over, but he kept having to remind himself that he didn't have to salute the people they were taking prisoner anymore, kept catching himself worrying about how he was going to make his next meeting with Jan when Grand Central was such a mess, sure that the chaos there would finally get her -- and him -- caught. He couldn't even get used to eating real food again.
It wasn't over, he thought, not really. It wouldn't be over until Tony and Pietro woke up.
Pepper wrinkled her nose. "I don't think it ever does. Most heroes are just people doing what they have to do."
He barely even knew these people. Why did it make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside to hear her say that?
'Baby monkeys,' he reminded himself. 'You're so desperate for human contact that you were going around kissing Jan.' Any sympathy was going to make him feel better, even sympathy from strangers.
Strangers he'd just had some kind of near-breakdown in front of.
Clint felt himself flush. "I'm, um, sorry for barging in here and yelling at you."
"That's okay." Pepper smiled at him, and the expression almost looked real, if you ignored the worry in her eyes and the way she kept glancing back at Tony. "I think you needed to yell at someone."
"Yeah." Clint let out a long, shaky breath. He felt better, he realized. Not a lot better, but at least the awful, humiliating desire to scream or cry was gone. He must have needed to get things off his chest.
He had originally been planning to go rest somewhere, he remembered. Clint glanced around the little, fabric-walled room, looking for someplace to sit. "Is there an extra chair in here? I think I'm just going to... sit down for a while."
Happy waved a hand toward the seat he'd been using, the one on Tony's left. "You can have mine."
"Thanks," Clint made himself say.
The chair was much more comfortable than it looked, despite the way the hard plastic pressed against the bruises in his back and ribs. He was just going to sit here for a while, Clint decided. It beat being alone.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
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Okay, first I have to say that I love this bit. It's so easy to get caught up in Tony's PoV where it's always necessary to sacrifice himself that I missed that possibility. And of course Clint saw it, because he's sane. (flail)
This entire half-part was just a loooooong example of how messed up everybody is. D: I loved Hank's PoV, and how he just sort of owned up to being bad at relationships. His frustration with himself is wonderful, and seeing all of the ways he writes off his accomplishments was pure Hank. (hugs him)
And Clint! ;~; Poor Clint. I think it's fair to say that he and Tony really had it the hardest here. (That is a tough call to make, though, since everyone had it hard in this one.) Seeing him like this interact with Pepper like this was strange. Pepper's usually so collected and Clint's usually so upbeat and they weren't and it's so wrong. ;-; Did I sense hints of PTSD there? Not being able to shake off the feeling that you're still in the war?
Clint and Tony are both baby monkeys. (Which is now my favorite way to describe emotional deprivation.) I think I should have saved this for reading sometime that wasn't before bed. IT HURTS. ;-;
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Did I sense hints of PTSD there?
He doesn't have Tony's spetacular issues, but it would definately take a while to get used to not being in constant peril anymore and really believe that things are okay after months of being undercover in a war zone. And Clint probably has nightmares about people being burned alive for days after the final battle, given how similar the effects of shooting people with the Argonian's plasma are to Bobbi's death-via-fireball.
Clint and Tony are both baby monkeys. (Which is now my favorite way to describe emotional deprivation.)
*grins* It's how I mentally described it for ages before we ever started writing this fic (Clint's horrified reaction to seeing the documentary about the baby monkey torture experiment was pretty much ripped directly from seanchai and I both having watched or read something about it).